Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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

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

view · edit

Frequently asked questions (see also: Wikipedia:Technical FAQ)

Click "[show]" next to each point to see more details.

If something looks wrong, purge the server's cache, then bypass your browser's cache.
This tends to solve most issues, including improper display of images, user-preferences not loading, and old versions of pages being shown.

No, we will not use JavaScript to set focus on the search box.
This would interfere with usability, accessibility, keyboard navigation and standard forms. See task 3864. There is an `accesskey` property on it (default to `accesskey="f"` in English). Logged-in users can enable the "Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page" gadget in their preferences.

No, we will not add a spell-checker, or spell-checking bot.
You can use a web browser such as Firefox, which has a spell checker.

If you have problems making your fancy signature work, check Help:How to fix your signature.

If you changed to another skin and cannot change back, use this link.
Alternatively, you can press Tab until the "Save" button is highlighted, and press Enter. Using Mozilla Firefox also seems to solve the problem.

If an image thumbnail is not showing, try purging its image description page.
If the image is from Wikimedia Commons, you might have to purge there too. If it doesn't work, try again before doing anything else. Some ad blockers, proxies, or firewalls block URLs containing /ad/ or ending in common executable suffixes. This can cause some images or articles to not appear.

For server or network status, please see Wikimedia Status. If you cannot reach Wikipedia services, see Reporting a connectivity issue.

« Archives, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214

Spam category

Strangely, Category:Happy Anniversary! was put on my user page (see my page), but I did not put it there. And it is not a template, or at lease one used often because I'm the only one to have it. What's going on? Who put me me in this useless category??? MAKE IT STOP!! —Coastergeekperson 04^{'s talk}@12/29/2007 07:09

Resolved on IRC. Thanks weirdan7 and Dihydrogen Monoxide (I think, giggy). The problem was simply the UBX on my page. —Coastergeekperson 04^{'s talk}@12/29/2007 07:37

Ready to archive. Pegasus «C¦T» 11:19, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Tor nodes

An ongoing discussion is in progress regarding adjusting the blocking policy in reference to TOR nodes. The discussion is here. Regards, M-ercury at 13:18, January 8, 2008

Ready to archive. Pegasus «C¦T» 11:19, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Customisation for the unregistered

At Talk:Main_Page#autofocus_the_search_box.2C_please an unregistered user was upset that there was no way for him to auto focus the search box (account holders can achieve this by editing their monobook.js).
There is currently no way for unregistered users to customise Wikipedia. It might be a good idea to make it customisable to some extent (auto focus; namespaces to search by default; thumbnail size; date auto formatting; font colour;) through cookies. This would be good for unregistered users as well as those who don't have javascript enabled. Any thoughts on this? Puchiko (Talk-email) 22:02, 12 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Given that it's almost trivial to register for a user account, and that IP addresses change, and that using a computer in a different location (library, work, home) will always involve different IP addresses, I really doubt that the developers are going to be willing to allocate any effort to this. I certainly wouldn't support it, given other priorities. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:08, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, cookie≠IP. The cookie stays for as long as you're using the same browser on the same computer, and as long as you don't delete it, or until it expires. It's what enables you to stay logged in.
You do have a point however, about there being more urgent tasks. Puchiko (Talk-email) 18:45, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Or there might be a way to implement a little checkbox on the MP (or a little box that can be hidden, with the checkbox inside) that says "click here to make this page load with the focus in the searchbox (uses cookie)" and then leave a cookie on the reader's machine. I know several people who would like to do that without logging in. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 02:55, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hear, hear! 68.101.123.219 (talk) 05:57, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Apart from the main page search box, it could also be useful to allow unregistered users to set their text size, like many news sites do.
Anyways, if I want this implemented, what do I do now? Crosspost to WP:VPR? File a BugZilla request? Stick around waiting for some more discussion? Puchiko (Talk-email) 12:41, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ipblock exempt proposal

A proposal has started to allow established or trusted editors to edit via Tor, or other anon proxy. This discussion is located at

talk page

The proposed policy in its “needs to be worked on” form is located at

project page

Regards, M-ercury at 23:22, January 14, 2008

Ready to archive. Pegasus «C¦T» 11:20, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist

I know admins have a special unwatched pages list they can view. Lets say a person creates ana ccount, watchlists 500 pages, and then never logs in again. Would those pages never go back on the unwatched list? MBisanz ^talk 07:14, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know from experience, but logically the pages would remain off the unwatched pages list, since they are in the watchlist of some user. Even if the user doesn't log in ever again, the pages would still be on a watchlist, and therefore would logically be considered "watched". Of course, logic doesn't always work, but MediaWiki is usually logical (except for a few hard-coded namespace constants... ;-). Tuvok[^T@lk/_Improve] 07:29, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, that's the way it works. The unwatched page list simply tracks all pages that are not watchlist by any user. If one user is watching the page, regardless of that user's activity, it will not appear in the list. AmiDaniel (talk) 08:28, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Would it maybe make sense then for the software to clear out the watchlist of any user who hasn't logged in in the last 180 days? Maybe even copy it to their user talk page in case they return. Is there an existing bugzilla on this or prior discussion? MBisanz ^talk 08:53, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Unwatchedpages is bascially useless anyway, because it only lists the first 1000 pages in alphabetical order (it's impossible to scroll any further through the list and get results). --ais523 14:57, 21 January 2008 (U T C)

It appears not to be working for the first 1000 and now just shows an empty list. Keith D (talk) 00:55, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Edit conflicts because of sig

I keep getting edit conflicts with myself when posting comments on talk pages. The edit conflict seems to happen because ~~~~ turns into my sig — when it shows the diff, "My version" is just the comment I wrote with ~~~~ at the end, while the "stored version" is the same commetn I wrote, with my sig at the end. Why's that?--Phoenix -wiki 20:26, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It probably happens because parallel edits are automatically merged by line, as long as there are no conflicts. So, you can go to a page, edit several parts, save, go back, edit some more, save again, and it won't mind (same for multiple users). If however you added a signature, that line may conflict the next time you try to save it, as the signature has expaded once already (so you're changing a line already changed). The solution is usually to get a newer edit window and newer wpEdittime time. If the wpEdittime is newer than the last edit, then no conflict checking is done.

If you aren't recycling edit forms, then maybe the server times are desynched. ^_^ --Splarka (rant) 08:34, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Are you using some sort of library that checks for edit conflicts by downloading the page again after each edit to check that the edit worked? If so, you won't be able to use signatures or substitute templates. The solution to that problem is to get a better library. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't happen all the time, just some of the time.-Phoenix -wiki 20:19, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Text renders invisible when the line contains a "K"

I've been noticing strange behavior the past couple days on Wikipedia. In at first seemingly random patches or lines, text is rendering invisible (or white?). Then I noticed it seems to have something to do with the letter "k" in upper case (when I try to type it in upper case here, the entire line vanishes!). The text is there, because I can select it and paste it into another application to see it, but I don't see anything on the WP page or in edit mode. I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.11 on XP SP2, I haven't seen the problem using IE6, nor on any other website using Firefox. Here are some examples of where I encounter invisible text:

Under the above section "Suggestion for a new gadget", the entire second line of item 2 is invisible.
In that same section, item 9, 8th line: everything to the left of NF24's signature.
Under the section "Working WYSYWIG?" above, in the 3rd line, all the text to the left of "it's running", and in the next line, everything to the left of the signature "ais523".
Under Wikipedia:Translation/*/Lang/de#Geography, the 8th request in the list (Kaiserslautern), both instances of the word "Kaiserslautern" are invisible. This occurs for any entries on that page that contain a capital "k", and when I look at the page code (in edit mode), the same text is invisible there as well. (In this bullet, on the regular page, I cannot see any text to the right of the wikilink; in the edit window where I'm typing now, I can't see any text at all on the line that contains "kaiserslautern").

Anyone else running into this? Anyone have any ideas? I looked on Bugzilla and found nothing. -Eric ^talk 16:00, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Update: The problem seems to be gone, maybe because I restarted my computer. I'd tried restarting Firefox before I posted here, with no effect. Sorry if this is a me-only issue. -Eric ^talk 17:06, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The only thing I can think of is a stylesheet corrupted in a very interesting way. There probably is CSS somewhere for 'turn all text after a capital K in a tag white'; how it ended up being sent in the real stylesheet is another matter, though. I'm curious as to what the code is, now; I might try to find out. --ais523 15:23, 24 January 2008 (U T C)

Looking into it, there doesn't seem to be a selector that does exactly what you describe, so I'm confused again. --ais523 15:29, 24 January 2008 (U T C)

My only guess is a bizarre temporary glitch on my machine, if that's possible. I've never seen anything like it. At first I thought it had something to do with some possible experimentation on the main page code Jan. 20, because it started that day and seemed concurrent with some pages displaying with infinite width, i.e. showing a horizontal scrollbar that was impossible to bring all the way to the right. Haven't seen any more problems since Monday. -Eric ^talk 16:18, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bug in HTML tag: div dir="rtl"

I just read the article Mesha Stele, and there is a problem in the way it displays. The article uses HTML "div dir="rtl" tag for a section of hebrew transcription of the text, here is a copy of part of the article code:

== Text ==

The text, in [[Moabite language|Moabite]], transcribed into modern [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew letters]]:

<div dir="rtl">
<pre>
1. אנכ. משע. בנ. כמש.. . מלכ. מאב. הד
2. יבני | אבי. מלכ. על. מאב. שלשנ. שת. ואנכ. מלכ

... MORE LINES OF HEBREW HERE ...

33. ---------[ויש]בה. כמש. בימי. ועל[...]. משמ. עש
34. -------------- שת. שדק | וא
</pre>
</div>

== Translation ==

''I am Mesha, son of Kemosh[-yatti], the king of Moab, the Dibonite. My father was king over Moab''
...

Notice that only the hebrew text is inside the div tag, the problem is that the "Translation" header of the following section is displayed in my browser justified to the right, as if inside the div tag. The next line after the header is displayed correctly on the left.

I'm using English Windows XP Professional, Interent Explorer 7. I have hebrew support installed.

Here in my sandbox I made a copy of the problematic part of the article, you can see the bug occures. I tried in another sandbox, you can see that adding a line of text "ADDED LINE OF TEXT", just before the "Translation" header, makes the bug silent. Itaj Sherman (talk) 17:22, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, this doesn't occur on my Firefox. Algebraist 17:46, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Kludged. A slightly disconcerting Internet Explorer bug, possibly one up for consideration in the CSS. You put style="width: 100%;" into the <div> tag. I got the idea from here. See my changes. Confirmation for Internet Explorer 6 would be nice. x42bn6 Talk Mess 17:49, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Without doing anything else, my initial reaction is that the code is bad. Try <div style="direction: rtl;"> instead. EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:41, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Turns out either method is valid HTML and XHTML, although may have a slightly different interpretation. dir="rtl" is equivalent to style="direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed;". In either case, except for Internet Explorer bugs, it should revert to the previous direction at the end of the div.

I checked in Internet Explorer 6. It's broken exactly as Itaj Sherman says in the original revision. x42bn6's kludge has fixed it. Absolutely no problems whatsoever in Firefox with either revision ^{(surprise surprise)}. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 20:08, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Does anyone think this could be added to one of the CSS files on Wikipedia as a "fix" for Internet Explorer? x42bn6 Talk Mess 17:15, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How would we get a stylesheet rule to apply to divs with the dir attribute set? Or would it work to simply apply the width:100% to *all* divs? • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 19:57, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know, there might be some advanced CSS I don't know about that might help. The problem lies in the <pre> tag, it seems. I understand it might be awful CSS but putting pre { width: 100%; } might fix it. x42bn6 Talk Mess 21:56, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Tables that feature both sortable columns and merged cells

In making a table, if one is to use the "rowspan" feature to merge multiple cells within the same row, the unfortunate consequence is that the table is no longer able to be sortable. Here is an example of what I mean: if I make the following table using both features, sorting the table makes things go crazy. Try it yourself.

Year	Col 1	Col 2
2007	2	1
2007	4	8
2008	5	8
2009	5	7

Does anyone have any idea of how to implement both? Although I don't know much programming this kind of stuff, this is how I would guess it would have to be done. Instead of specifying in the table code to "rowspan", the table could automatically megre identical cells, only after the table has been sorted. So that each time it is resorted, and the order changes, the cells will rearrange, and any matches within the same row will be displayed as merged. Of course, that could be an option, and not the default. Is that possible? Or is there a better way of doing it? Drewcifer (talk) 20:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Neat! Acts somewhat like a sliding puzzle. Gimmetrow 07:07, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki Search - How does it work?

Hi there,

I'm really sorry if this is the wrong page...but I have nowhere else to turn, so I hope you'll forgive me. LOL.

I am a postgraduate student (and advocate of Wikipedia) doing research for a project at the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University on Wikipedia/Web 2.0. With no technical expertise I am having trouble finding out the answer to the following question, so if anyone could help me it would be much appreciated!

Why, if I search for the string "gdl.cdlr" does this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daldowie

show up in the search results, but not this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Maxton

?

As far as I can see, "gdl.cdlr" is part of what I call 'hidden text' behind the clickable link, and looking at the source code I see little difference; gdl.cdlr is not tagged as metadata; nor is it given as a keyword.

How does the MediaWiki search software work, and why am I am observing this effect?

Yours, Kathleen Menzies (kmenzies@cis.strath.ac.uk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.142.45.46 (talk) 22:01, 21 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well the links were not done in exactly the same way (note: they have been edited on the Daldowie article since this question was posted); on the Daldowie article they were done as [[http://example.com]] and on the James Maxton one they were done as [http://example.com Link description]. I'm guessing that given that it is more likely to be useful to people to search text in the article than obscure links within the article's code, in the second case the MediaWiki software didn't index the URL because it had a nice link description to index instead. In the first case, there wasn't a description, so it had to index the URL as is. Just a guess though. You see it doesn't search the active articles, but uses a search index that is compiled from the articles every so often. If it's useful to you the software that runs Wikipedia is open source, written in the PHP programming language, and available for download from http://www.mediawiki.org/. The MediaWiki site also has a good bit of technical documentation available. If you ask your question on the support desk there they may have a more detailed answer. Hope this helps. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 14:40, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank-you; that is immensely helpful! :)

Kathleen M. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.142.45.46 (talk) 20:06, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

IP user claims checkuser ability:

See here: [1]. Is this techincally possible? How so? If so, what do we do about it. There is a relevent thread at WP:ANI also, but I thought I would ask here to see if this were a bluff, or if this was for real. Any ideas? --Jayron32.talk.contribs 02:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is not possible for them to have access to the CheckUser tool in MediaWiki, but there may be other nefarious ways of gaining such information. Most likely explanations:

bluff/lucky guess
that user has accidentally made a logged out edit in such a way as to link the IP and the account; this user noticed it and grabbed the IP

Do not panic; this is very likely to be a non-issue. – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 03:35, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't edited logged out, I suspect it was a bluff to be honest. I agree that they have no access to the checkuser tool, but could someone create one of their own? Woody (talk) 03:47, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The CheckUser tool is an extension, available here. It reads the recentchanges table in the database and can compare IP addresses in the rc_ip field. Other tools could be made to analyze that data, however, it is access to that data which is relevant (and highly restricted). --MZMcBride (talk) 04:39, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There is no way of accessing that data through the wiki except via CU (so far as I know; I'm not a dev). – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 04:56, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So the information isn't included in Wikimedia database dumps? If it isn't, then most likely, somethings been compromised somewhere. Nwwaew (Talk Page) (Contribs) (E-mail me) 05:08, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There was a bug in the API that leaked autoblocked ips but went live about a month ago. (Does the threatened user have any blocks about that age?) Or there could be a SQL injection somewhere, it's not like our database schema is hidden in an obscure place. If this is genuine, then SQL injection is the most likely cause. MER-C 05:12, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If this is genuine, is this a Bad Thing^TM??? Wouldn't such exploits be open to abuse, and shouldn't they be closed or followed up? --Jayron32.talk.contribs 05:28, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FYI, I have never had any blocks, auto or otherwise against my account. Woody (talk) 10:41, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are no SQL injection vulnerabilities in MediaWiki, I don't know why MER-C would think that such a rare and dangerous type of bug is the most likely cause. The anonymous user could have just posted an external link to a webserver under his control to Woody's talk page and correlated the referrer with the IP when Woody clicked on it. -- Tim Starling (talk) 12:29, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That is the most likely cause, probably sirpeterscott.com if that is the case. That site has the same philosophy as the IP who has been editing the Kingston University page. See Talk:Kingston University#Protected and below for information on the dispute. Woody (talk) 12:37, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was just coming to the same conclusion. It has a JavaScript hit counter on it which logs the referrer and user agent for each visitor. -- Tim Starling (talk) 12:46, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If that is the case, is it a problem worth fixing. Does it pose a threat to users privacy? It could always be blacklisted. Woody (talk) 12:51, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever you visit a website, usually that website logs your IP address anyway or at least the IP address that is currently yours at the time. It's not really an issue if a webpage logs you IP address - you may have seen those viral images that tell you your IP address, browser, location, etc. x42bn6 Talk Mess 12:56, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's just how the Internet works. You give out your IP address to every site you visit. There's no way to find out what those sites will do with that IP address. Use Tor if it's a problem for you. -- Tim Starling (talk) 12:58, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That was why I asked the question, it seems quite normal to me. I don't have anything to hide and the only thing that alarmed me was the possibility of someone having unauthorised access to checkuser tools, which I thought was a very wild possibility. It was just a user who was losing an argument, trying to force his way out. Seems resolved to me. Thanks for your help. Woody (talk) 13:01, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But how is the external site linking the IP address to User:Woody? The site has a list of IP's that connected to it. None of them say Woody, it shouldn't be in the referring URL and there shouldn't be any cookie leaks. So how is it done? Franamax (talk) 00:08, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But if the site doesn't have that many visitors and you have some info about the intended victim such as their location it's possible to put two and two together. Theresa Knott | The otter sank 06:16, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why not ask? I asked in a completely non-threatening way how he does what he claims he can, so don't yell at me for the comment. Prodego ^talk 00:44, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I got a response, and yep, thats how he says he does it, setting a trap link. Prodego ^talk 20:26, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Re: Procaine

hey i'm new to editing, but i found a controversial statement which textbooks indicate is wrong that needs to edited by someone who's completely sure.

It's regarding pharmacology of Procaine.

It says Procaine is a vasoconstrictor, but actually it's a vasodilator. If this could be put on a discussion so that relevant people can moderate it, that'd be great.

Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wanderingpistachio (talk • contribs) 06:12, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Copied to article's talk page for someone knowledgeable to deal with (about pharmacology, that is) --Rodhullandemu (Talk) 13:13, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Expandtemplates broken?

When I try to use it it just pastes the entire wikitext (including noinclude and parameters) for a template instead of actually running the template and showing the resulting code. —Random832 15:22, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've noticed that substing templates haven't been working for a while there either (or through the API for that matter). I would have filed a bug, but every time I try to sign up for bugzilla I never get the email and I haven't been bothered to try emailing the appropriate people. Anomie ⚔ 18:29, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've filed bug 12741; if you have an example of the API failing I can add that. —Random832 20:11, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This and this should show the problem adequately. The template should be expanded, much as is done by the non-substed versions ([2] and [3]). That last link also shows the API having the same problem you describe with expanding templates. Anomie ⚔ 20:55, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Expandtemplates works now, your subst version still fails - file another bug? —Random832 16:33, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Template for track listing

User:Juhachi and I have been playing around with the idea of making a template for track listings similar to how Template:Episode list works. (User talk:Ned Scott#A proposition). See Template:Track list and Template:Japanese track list. The basic benefit of this is that it allows parts of the data to be meta tagged, which makes future maintenance easier, and would even allow for the data to be machine readable. I'm not aware of any track listings that contain a large amount of different fields, but if there are then the labeling would also make entering the data easier. The templates also use a hack from the episode list template that makes a table cell pop out if a field is listed, but blank. This is to encourage people to fill in incomplete lists without having to place a placeholder to keep the cell open. Thoughts? -- Ned Scott 22:57, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Albums#Template for track listing for main discussion thread.

Job queue age

Is there a way to see when the oldest entry in the job queue is from? —Random832 16:11, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Password email issue

Good evening, morning, or whatever state of being. I am DantheCowMan, and I am attempting to return following a long time exclusively in the "real" world. However, the "Email New Password" link has, it seems, failed to generate the hopeful document. My email address hasn't changed in, say, 5 physical years, so I know that that's not the issue....

Thoughts? Ideas? Musings? 151.213.92.107 (talk) 19:10, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Try checking any spam folders and/or spam filters on your email account, to see if it's in there. If you're certain it's the right email address, then there's no reason why it shouldn't turn up. Wait a while, in case there are some email servers being slow today or something. Try the Email New Password link again also, but if it eventually doesn't turn up, then I'm very sorry to say afraid you will have to create a new account. There isn't any way to reclaim a lost password without the email. If you create a new account you can put a note on your user page linking to your old account, and/or copy the user page content across, letting people know you used to edit as DantheCowMan. Hope this helps. And hopefully the email will turn up. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 19:22, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Did you confirm your email address? You started contributing before email confirmation was enabled. Unfortunately you need to log in before confirming your email address. However that might be the reason you aren't getting the password email. Graham87 02:12, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Couldn't tell you that specifically, as I've been in and out so much, but we can test it. Someone please hit the email link if exists. In any event documentation seems to suggest that that feature is only for human-human email interaction. Heres what I can tell you.

No email whatsoever from WikiMedia has appeared in my inbox or spam folders. I have no further content filtrers to check.
I have left and returned several times, presumably using the email new pwd' link, including I think twice in 2007.
Before sleeping I created an alternate account for the express purpose of testing the system. Thus far (6+ hours later) no email has appeared from the "Confirm this account" link, or the "Change Password" link after I logged out.
This happened once before, to me actually. The incident was recorded here as "1.4 Email issue", though again, this incident was before confirmation was a mainstream feature. Perhaps the evidence points to something similar?

151.213.92.107 (talk) 15:22, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I checked Special:Emailuser/DantheCowMan and it reported that "This user has not specified a valid e-mail address, or has chosen not to receive e-mail from other users." • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 15:26, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

blockquote

I notice the <blockquote> tag works differently in Wikipedia than it does in html. According to Castro's HTML for the World Wide Web, blockquote should be used to enclose ordinary html markup; in particular, paragraphs tags should be used within blockquote tags.

If I try to indicate a paragraph within a blockquote in Wikipedia markup in the usual way, by leaving a blank line, it is ignored (see my sandbox. So what is the proper way to mark paragraphs within a blockquote? Where is the behavior of the Wikipedia blockquote tag documented? --Gerry Ashton (talk) 20:18, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's a bit ugly, but you can mark paragraphs with <p>, which still works in a blockquote. Algebraist 20:28, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See bugzilla:6200. Sam Korn ^(smoddy) 20:51, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Mostrevisions

Is Special:Mostrevisions ever going to be updated? It's a very interesting page but could really use a new data dump (not updated in over a year). I searched for an alternative but all I found was Wikipedia:Most frequently edited articles, which is even more ancient. It would be nice if there was a script which could regenerate the data once in a while, but otherwise are there any equivalent stats anywhere else? • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 01:19, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well you can find out the number of revisions in any page by finding the diff between the first and the last edit - at the top there will be a number. Add 2 to that and you have the number of revisions in the page. Here's an example from this page. This won't work in rare cases where the revision has the wrong ID. This usually happens when a revision was deleted before MediaWiki 1.5 was installed on Wikipedia and undeleted later. The only article I know of to be effected by this is Air Force Amy - see this diff as an example. There are really no intermediate revisions by date at all. Graham87 02:00, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that's quite useful. I can use the data at Special:Mostrevisions, and get newer numbers from comparing revisions directly. Awkward but it would work. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 13:29, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What links here problem?

At [4], it looks like if an article, such as Joe Krol or Russ Jackson, transcludes a redirect to the template, they appear both as linking to the template AND as linking to the redirect. That's mildly annoying. --B (talk) 05:34, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New preprocessor

The new preprocessor is now live on this wiki and http://test.wikipedia.org/ . Please read m:MNPP if you see any changes to article rendering. -- Tim Starling (talk) 10:54, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Server error when editing PlayStation 3

I get an error when trying to edit PlayStation 3, since the new preprocessor is now live, I first guessed this was the cause, but Special:ParserDiffTest does not return anything suspicious. Anyone got an idea on how to fix it (and who we should bug). -- lucasbfr ^talk 11:27, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you mean 'Unrecognised punctuation character "$"' in the long page warning. It is related to the new preprocessor, I fixed it with this. -- Tim Starling (talk) 11:47, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, there is something worse: I am unable to save the page (Error: ERR_ZERO_SIZE_OBJECT, errno [No Error] at Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:48:54 GMT). But thanks for fixing the long page warning. -- lucasbfr ^talk 12:50, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just to confirm that I am now able to save the page again. -- lucasbfr ^talk 14:05, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This should hopefully be fixed now. We're back on the new preprocessor and I can save the page just fine. The underlying bug is in PHP, I've attempted to work around it. -- Tim Starling (talk) 08:44, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Wales-footy-bio-stub

Is this due to the new preprocessor? If not could someone try and fix it? Woody (talk) 11:51, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is misuse of {{!}}, one of the expected changes detailed in m:MNPP. They need to be fixed in the article or template where they occur. I can't fix all of them myself. -- Tim Starling (talk) 12:12, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Tell me how and I will... Woody (talk) 12:21, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Writing it out like that hasn't fixed all the other uses of Template:Asbox where they use the icon parameter. Perhaps the Asbox template will need to be changed so that the extra set of {{ and }} around the icon parameter are removed, then in all of its uses it can have the {{ and }} wrapped around the icon argument instead. (??) • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 13:35, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I was wondering how to fix it. Each time I tried to use | | it didn't parse properly. When I then used the {{ }}, it worked but with an extra set of {{. According to Template:Asbox, the use of icon= is deprecated now anyway? (Am I reading that right). Woody (talk) 13:42, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I tried as well. The template's documentation doesn't suggest it's deprecated, but its example clearly gives the syntax that's now broken. I reckon the only thing to do is to remove the extra {{ and }} characters from the Asbox template itself and fix up any uses of the icon parameter in all the templates that use it. But I wouldn't want to mess about with it cluelessly - it could break goodness knows what. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 13:58, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can't pass through bundled lists of parameters to split anymore, because with bug 5678 gone, there is no splitting mechanism. Like you say, the only thing to do is to change the way the template is invoked. This issue has been described on m:MNPP for over a week, and nobody has come up with a better idea. -- Tim Starling (talk) 14:15, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I saw the

 | note      = This stub template is deprecated.

on the template documentation and presumed it was deprecated. On a random check, I couldn't find any others using the icon= parameter. I think we have to remove the forced {{ from the icon bit and then manually change them. I would be happy to go through them now, as long as someone knows how to edit the asbox template. Woody (talk) 14:18, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are only four or five that need updating (out of that group), on a quick run through with popups. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 14:35, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(unindent) Template:Asbox has now been updated, and the stub templates that were using it no longer rely on {{!}}. There are likely to other templates with very similar problems around though. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 16:07, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It seems the templated block reasons are now being expanded within the dropdown at Special:Blockip. I can't see any recent MediaWiki interface changes which would cause this. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 12:30, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the new parser came online today. I've tried two attempts to make it appear as it did before, but it expands the template then inserts the wikitext that results, escaping entity references. I'm stumped as to what to do. Sam Korn ^(smoddy) 12:46, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed for the new preprocessor only. I switched us back over to the new preprocessor as soon as I changed the message. -- Tim Starling (talk) 08:39, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Signature substitution issue

For some reason, this edit replaced a literal four tilde sequence in the source with my signature, though none of the preceding edits had done so. Can someone more MediaWiki-savvy than myself try to fix this? - ∅ (∅), 13:18, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I guess that's due to the new parser. That's probably a bug, since the <includeonly> are not parsed inside a HTML comment. -- lucasbfr ^talk 13:43, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Worryingly, it appears to be happening on all the other pages like that too: [5]. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 13:45, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've reverted back to the old parser for now. -- Tim Starling (talk) 13:54, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Old parser works: [6]. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 14:03, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please consider fixing the 5678s, those will come back as soon as the parser is enabled again. I'm just worried about these new, unknown issues. -- Tim Starling (talk) 14:05, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is fixed now. -- Tim Starling (talk) 08:38, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New preprocessor issue(s)

Ok, here is mine, but if you have broken pages, then you are welcome to add them here as well:

Special:ParserDiffTest/Portal:Current_events Current events has a problem. Seems to be caused by a change in behaviour on {{Start date}}. Special:ParserDiffTest/Template:Start_date There seems to be an extra newline. {{End date}} is also affected. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:48, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
- this would fix the template, but i'm just a tad worried on why the new parser thinks a new paragraph needs to be inserted here at all. It's just one new line, and not 2 newlines... --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:59, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - Report on meta --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:09, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  - How often is onlyinclude used anyway? They were changing the includeonly/noinclude stuff; but I don't think I've ever seen onlyinclude in the wild before. I wouldn't be surprised if nobody had thought to test the new parser with respect to it... --ais523 15:16, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
    - Not only did I test the new parser with <onlyinclude>, I had to completely reimplement the feature, which was quite a bit more complicated in the new parser than it was in the old. I had to drop the capricious newline stripping, it wasn't practical to keep it. You'll have to put the </onlyinclude> on the same line as the end of the desired wikitext in the future, like how you do it already with noinclude/includeonly. -- Tim Starling (talk) 03:01, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      - Thanks for the comments Tim ! --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:25, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Page protection oddity with SVN currentversion of MediaWiki

Anyone noticed that protecting a page has two expiries?? Is this an error??

I noticed it when I used the latest version, 1.43.0-wmf.17 (21482f8), as used here.

Thanks, --Solumeiras (talk) 17:09, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This was an accident in rev:30110, reverted in rev:30121. Mr.Z-man 17:29, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Slow images?

Is anyone else finding images loading very slowly at present, or is the problem at my end? – Tivedshambo (talk) 19:21, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Same problem here. --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 19:32, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently most of the squid cache of images were lost during an update of the configuration; see [7] and [8]. —color probe (talk | contribs) 19:38, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

IE7 not displaying table properly

In Firefox (and I believe Opera), the rectangular title bar atop of this Infobox is rendered as expected: nice and tight with edges where they should be with no border, cellspacing nor cellpadding. It is just a simple table of three rows and two columns, some cells spanning others. However, when I looked at how it appeared in IE7, it having caused me layout frustrations before, it was no real surprise to see it could not render it correctly. I edited the template in IE using <tr>s and <td>s, along with explicit height measurements, and previews showed no change at all. I also tested it with line-height:0px (and 1px in case it didn't recognise 0px) styling, since it appears to be copying the text height (or close to it), but still no change. Being such a simple table, I would have thought that IE7 would be able to do this without a drama, but no. Can anyone see a fix for this? I thank you in advance (again). SEO⁷⁵ ^[talk] 19:52, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikitables and images don't mix very well. I'll see what I can do. — Edokter • Talk • 15:54, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Best I could do... I simplified the table to use styled border instead of images. It still looks the same in Firefox, but get a 1px gap on top of the image in IE, which I can't seem to get rid of. But it is an improvement none-the-less. — Edokter • Talk • 23:12, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

*slaps self* Why didn't I think of that?.. Thank you very much! :) SEO⁷⁵ ^[talk] 15:27, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-automated tagging of Shared IP Addresses

Betacommand has requested that I post for community discussion about a bot that I just proposed, called IPTaggerBot. If you are interested in commenting on the subject, please review the bot approval request at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/IPTaggerBot as well as the bot's userpage at User:IPTaggerBot. Thank you. Ioeth _{(talk contribs friendly)} 20:40, 24 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Set of autoblocks on already blocked IPs

If a registered user vandalizes Wikipedia using an IP that is currently blocked with AO and ACB enabled (let's assume the account was created before the IP block was set or on another IP), and the account gets blocked itself now with ACB and autoblock enabled. Will this A) set an autoblock on that IP which would show up in the Special:Ipblocklist and B) disallow sleeper accounts to edit? As far as I know, write prohibition and block options are utilized in the following priority: account, IP address, IP range, autoblock, what would answer question B with 'no' and probably an autoblock isn't set by the software in such a case. Not sure if my imagination is correct. Thanks in advance --Oxymoron⁸³ 06:20, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

CategoryTree broken

C:CSD no longer renders in CategoryTree view. Instead, it renders as a mess of unparsed HTML. See the right column of my user page for how it looks like. I don't believe this is due to the new preprocessor... :) Pegasus «C¦T» 09:31, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Most likely the new parser that has gone online again over an hour ago. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:00, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Do you still have the problem? Everything seems fine to me atm. A purge must have taken care of it i think. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:03, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Still having the problem. :( Pegasus «C¦T» 10:23, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Should be fixed now. (r30148 synced 10:45) -- Tim Starling (talk) 10:48, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's fixed, and no purging was required. :D Pegasus «C¦T» 10:49, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Does anybody know how to create a footer with a lot of columns?

I was trying to create a template with 18 columns. Each column would only contain one letter so I think it wouldn't be too wide, but I don't seem to be able to figure out how to do this with the template coding. Remember (talk) 14:19, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R	S	T

--MZMcBride (talk) 15:19, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please provide the necessary context when you ask a question. It appears from [9] that your question is not about templates, tables or columns in general. It is about one specific already existing template and giving a useful answer without knowing that is impossible. If you view the source of Template:Navbox with columns then you can see it contains code for each column and stops at col10. You can only get 18 columns in a use of that template if the template code is extended to 18 columns. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:00, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

extracting/mergine info from Wikipedia tables

I'd like to be able to manipulate info in tables in wiki pages, similarly to using a database system. For example, in the Comparison of file managers page, filter the Comparison_of_file_managers#Manager_views table according to the Comparison_of_file_managers#Operating_system_support table, such that, say, only linux file managers are displayed.

I know this is a lot to ask, but is there a technology available that would make this possible right from within Wikipedia? What's another simple way to do it? How about being able to extract the the info into a spreadsheet so I can do that manually? Sailor.nir (talk) 17:02, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For a manual method, you can just copy and paste the contents of the table into Excel (if you have Windows & Excel) - it already knows how turn an HTML table into a spreadsheet. The contents of the tables aren't too amenable to filtering though, too many footnotes and stuff. Franamax (talk) 19:02, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Need help with JavaScript

Resolved

I could use some help with JavaScript here. I've been trying to set up a system where I can enable and disable individual scripts without making an edit each time. To accomplish this, I set up a local JavaScript file with a variable for each script I use, and then made each script in my monobook.js page check that variable for whether it should run or not.

Links:

The problem is, when I saved the page and bypassed my browser cache after setting up the scripts to check the local variables, my entire monobook.js page stopped working; something caused all the JavaScript to break. I checked very carefully that the local JavaScript file was indeed running, so it must be a problem with my second edit that had the scripts check that local file.

Here's the source of the local file:

var local_all_scripts    =     true;    // turn all scripts on or off

var local_navpops        =     true;    // Lupin's navigation popups
var local_shortcuts      =     true;    // User:Jsimlo/shortcuts.js - customized sidebar links
var local_user_watchlist =     true;    // User watchlist from [[User:Tra/userwatchlist.js]]
var local_logs_link      =     true;    // Logs link in toolbox
var local_compare_link   =     true;    // Reformats compare button in history as a link
var local_formatting     =     true;    // Performs basic formatting changes from a tab while editing
var local_metadata       =     true;    // Metadata assessment script
var local_sixtabs        =     true;    // Adds extra edit/hist tabs for both discussion page and article page (6 tabs)
var local_history_format =     true;    // Improves formatting of history pages
var local_searchbox      =     true;    // [[User:GeorgeMoney]] script improves search box functionality
var local_edittop        =     true;    // Edit top link by [[User:Alex Smotrov]]
var local_unwatch        =     true;    // Unwatch links next to page names in watchlist from [[User:Alex Smotrov/wlunwatch.js]]
var local_S_tags         =     true;    // User:S tagging script
var local_newpagebox     =     false;    // Box with newest pages in sidebar, disabled by default
var local_recentbox      =     false;    // Box with recent changes in sidebar, disabled by default
var local_logtable       =     true;    // Nice table formatting for [[Special:Log]]
var local_twinkle        =     true;    // Twinkle script (reverting, warning, reporting, csd, xfd, prod, rpp)
var local_tw_rollback    =     true;    // Rollback integration with Twinkle
var local_wikEd          =     true;    // [[User:Cacycle/wikEd]] in-browser text editor
var local_friendly       =     true;    // [[WP:FRIENDLY]] script similar to Twinkle
var local_VoA_helper     =     true;    // [[User:Voice of All]]'s helper JavaScript
var local_UTC_clock      =     true;    // UTC time clock with double-click purge function
var local_VoA_history    =     true;    // Some history-related script from VoA
var local_Lupin          =     true;    // [[User:Lupin/recent2.js]] anti-vandalism script
var local_changelinks    =     true;    // Modified version of [[User:Voyagerfan5761/changelinks.js]]
var local_GeorgeMoney    =     false;    //[[User:GeorgeMoney]]'s helper scripts (Cookies, AddLinks, and Include)
var local_rollback       =     true;    // Rollback with summary
var local_scriptcontrol  =     false;    // ScriptControl, currently in early stages of writing it

As you can see, the local file is just a series of variables, so it can't be the problem. Could someone more experienced with JavaScript explain why this would cause my scripts to break and how to get this to work? Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 18:25, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"Something caused all the JavaScript to break" is not good enough: get Opera or Firefox and then use "Error console" to track down the exact error message.
Insted of using variables, you can simply move all importScript statements into this local file, and then comment/uncomment them.
If you do use variables, your code should also work when variables are not defined (e.g. local script file is missing): use something like if (window.local_navpops) ...

∴ AlexSm 21:36, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'll check the error console in a minute. I'd prefer to use variables because that way, I still have the scripts when I use a different computer. What I do in case the variables are undefined is this: if I want it enabled when the variable is undefined, I run it if the variable !=false, and if I want it disabled when the variable is undefined, I check for ==true instead. Since it's neither true nor false when undefined, this should give a default setting for use on other computers. Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 21:57, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I just checked the error console, the error was "local_all_scripts is not defined". But that's the first variable I set in the local file, so it certainly seems to be defined. What's up with that? Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 22:04, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like there is no consistency whether the browser waits for a new linked script to load (like Opera 9) or simply continues with the next statement (like Firefox 2) ∴ AlexSm 01:56, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Using undefined variable triggers a JavaScript error. That's why you either check for (typeof your_var == 'undefined') or simplyt use window.your_var : every global variable is also a property of a window object, and empty properties return null without errors ∴ AlexSm 01:56, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the help with that. I've converted the variables into properties of the window object as you suggested, and my scripts are no longer broken. However, editing the local file and saving it appears to have no effect on my scripts; it's as though it is reading all the variables set in the local file as null instead of the proper boolean value I assign them. Any idea why? Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 02:18, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Because you are using document.write() to set the local_ variables, the local script will be injected into the input stream after the current (monobook) script finishes executing. You need to either put the local_ variable settings into monobook or else move all the importScripts into a file that gets executed after your local variable script, so try creating a User:Pyrospirit/setscript.js file and in monobook.js add a document.write() just after localhost/scripts.js to run pyrospirit/setscript.js. It's the execution order that's killing you. Put some alert()'s in so you can check the order everything is happening.

You could also try using importScript("h-t-t-p://localhost/scripts.js") instead of document.write(), that might get scripts.js executed in the right place (no idea if that will work, throw in some more alert()'s). Franamax (talk) 02:44, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I already stated this above: only Opera 9 seems to wait for a new external script to load and execute, while Firefox and IE6 continue the current script and then the localhost/scripts.js is simply executed too late ∴ AlexSm 03:29, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes you did say that Alex, I was just trying to give Pyro some more hints on tracing the execution sequence and watching when variables get instanced. FWIW Opera 9 should maybe not immediately load and execute a script called in a document.write(), logically it should be written at the end of the incoming byte stream, shouldn't it?

Would you agree that my advice to Pyro was roughly correct as far as changing the execution locations for testing logical variables, and using alert()'s for tracing? I'm certainly not a .js expert, I'm just trying to push across some very well-worn experience, and I'm always very happy to learn more. :) Franamax (talk) 06:47, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bit of a tangent but: it often is advantageous to wait for document load before execution of anything besides scriptloads or variables (via addOnloadHook), although even this is not 100% -> bugzilla:12773. --Splarka (rant) 08:03, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

O-w-www my brain hurts :) Splarka, for Pyro's benefit (maybe), do you have any code-specific suggestions as to how to "wait for document load" before executing another script? More suggestions for how Pyro can accomplish the desired selective-enabling of .js functions? I'm interested in the answers also.

And I would be most pleased to follow up with you at one or other user talk page on pretty much everything you just said so I could understand just what the hell you're getting at. :) Not understanding a word has always been my gateway to knowledge, but it's probably not appropriate to this thread. I will chase you later. Franamax (talk) 08:39, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I did the thing with alerts as you suggested, and apparently by the time the local script variables start loading, all the other scripts have finished loading, making the variables meaningless. So, all we need to do is figure out a way to make the local variables load before anything else even starts loading, and then it should all work. I'll try the importScript suggestion, but if that doesn't work, the solution might be more complicated. Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 16:35, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I tried switching to the same code used by the importScript function, but that didn't work either. It's still loading the local variables after the rest of the scripts are finished. Anyone know how to fix this so that the local variables load before anything else? Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 01:23, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Did you try my other suggestion, using two document.write()'s in a row, one to execute local/scripts.js and the second to execute pyrospirit/setscript.js? If you move all the importScript code from monobook to setscript.js, that should execute in the right sequence. Franamax (talk) 02:17, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to be working as it should now. Thanks everyone for helping me get this right! Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 04:41, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure that's the most elegant solution, but hey, if it gets the job done! My quibbles would be using the same name for a script on two different platforms, shouldn't one be called "local_script.js" and the other be called "server_script.js" or words to that effect? And should you be relying on a local httpd server running, or instead using a "file:///C:/..."-type address to get the local script directly from the file system (your choice there)? Anyway, thanks for the directions to all the useful scripts spread over wiki and now I can watch your .js pages to learn the latest cool stuff, helping works both ways! Franamax (talk) 11:56, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another questions

I just created this compact template below. Anyone know how to make the default version of this hide instead of show?Remember (talk) 20:07, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Try using the template {{hidden}}. AmiDaniel (talk) 20:32, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This seems to do it. Anomie ⚔ 20:33, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Imho it was a terrible idea to use style="display:none" in navigation boxes: users with JavaScript disabled will not be able to see the content at all. Until this is fixed, it's better to use collapsible tables with extra collapsed class ∴ AlexSm 21:39, 25 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's the way the NavFrame code in MediaWiki:common.js works, look at line 275. Anomie ⚔ 02:49, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So? That's exactly my point: this was a bad thing to do. I did it properly in ru:MediaWiki:Common.js by introducing collapsed class for NavFrame (just like for collapsible tables), but nobody was interested in fixing it in English Eikipedia: see MediaWiki talk:Common.js/Archive Nov 2007#CSS hidden NavFrame ∴ AlexSm 03:21, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd support you Alex... If you would ever consider proposing it again. I think you are right and your technique should be implemented. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 01:53, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Page moves for watched pages

Is there any way to make it so that a page you are watching appears on your watchlist when it is moved. Quite often, I discover that a page I am watching has been moved, but I don't find out about it unless someone updates links to the page, or until someone subsequently edits the page. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 00:00, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No. Unfortunately, page moves do not appear on watchlists. - FISDOF 9 01:31, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Number of users watching a page

Is there any way to find out how many users are watching a particular page? I ask because sometimes I go to add comments to the talk page of a template or (especially) a category, and I wonder to myself "Will anyone see this?" Note that I don't necessarily want to identify the users watching the page, just to find out if there are any. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 00:02, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The rationale for not having this function is that it would be an invitation for spamming and other forms of vandalism. However, I think that an admin-restricted version of this is long overdue. I do not know if a feature request has been filed. Сасусlе 00:30, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Admins do have Special:Unwatchedpages. I agree it would be useful to see how many people are watching a page. Woody (talk) 00:33, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with Special:Unwatchedpages is it only shows the first 1000 pages and currently appears not to be working. Keith D (talk) 00:59, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

WP:PEREN#Create a counter of people watching a page. It would be nice if someone fixed Special:Unwatchedpages so it actually worked though. Hut 8.5 18:56, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The original poster asked how to get a response on a Talk page that may get little attention. Usually it's possible to figure out a 'parent' project that is somewhere in the vicinity, even if none has been formally assigned. Few people mind if you post on a related, but more centralized page to try to get a response. I'd suggest asking a question at WP:VPP or WP:EAR if all else fails. EdJohnston (talk) 18:11, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I normally do: If I don't get any response on the dedicated talk page after a couple of days, I usually transfer the question/comment to the relevant WikiProject (or sometimes I just go straight to the WikiProject). Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 01:59, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

An odd username breaking the "user" template

User:-=CHAINSAW GRINGO=-'s user name doesn't work in the {{user}} template. When I type {{user|-=CHAINSAW GRINGO=-}}, it comes out as User-multi error: no username detected (help).. Corvus cornix_talk 00:40, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If you use {{User|1=THE USERNAME}}, it should work. Let's give it a try, -=CHAINSAW GRINGO=- (talk · contribs). Ryan Postlethwaite 00:45, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, it worked - so just put 1= before it. Ryan Postlethwaite 00:46, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Kewl, I never knew about that. Corvus cornix_talk 00:47, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is a general method to use template parameters containing the '=' sign without the software thinking '=' means parameter assignment. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:03, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Triple image broken

Template:Triple image seems to have broken, it doesn't like the px apparently. See Prairie Avenue for a good example. I can't see any changes using the Special:Parserdifftest. Is it related to the change? Woody (talk) 01:12, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind, user can't read template documentation. Knew it wasn't related to the change. Woody (talk) 01:16, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

GreaseMonkey focus script

I've created a script that Firefox users with Greasemonkey can install, so that Wikipedia:Main Page FAQ#Why doesn't the cursor appear in the search box, like with Google? can suggest an alternative for users who do not want to create an account but happen to have the extension. The script is located at Wikipedia:Main Page/searchfocus.js, and the link to follow to install it is (sans line break):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Main_
Page/searchfocus.js&action=raw&gmname=searchfocus.user.js

(clickable) The fake parameter at the end causes Greasemonkey to prompt to install the script when the link is clicked. For security reasons, the page should be protected. Does anyone have any suggestions before it goes "live"? Is it a bad idea? Should the script be in the MediaWiki namespace? Gracenotes^T § 01:30, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I've added the link. Please comment if you have any suggestions whatsoever ^_^ Gracenotes^T § 01:12, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New parser function

<imagemap> and other tags can now accept m:Help:Magic words and other fun things using the new parser function #tag. Example below.

{{#tag:imagemap|
Image:Foo.jpg{{!}}200px{{!}}picture of a foo
default [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}]
desc none
}}

produces:

Enjoy! --MZMcBride (talk) 06:09, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Should also note that this is (hopefully) only going to be a temporary fix. The long-term goal is to get things like <ref>{{ #ifexists: Bob | [[Bob]] | Bob }}</ref> to work on their own. AmiDaniel (talk) 01:51, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank goodness for that, too. I wish I could help develop that capability, too, but I have a lot to learn before I'll be able to do it. Good luck to the devs, though! Tuvok[^T@lk/_Improve] 06:00, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Though this is only a temporary fix, I just used it to convert {{WikimediaForPortals}} to ImageMap format from the deprecated {{click}} format ({{click}} can cause usability problems). This is great! Free hugs for willing devs, because this made my day. :D Nihiltres^{t.l} 00:08, 30 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Move page "links" function broken

When one has successfully moved a page, one now (since the preprocessor upgrade) gets a message like this:

The page "old blah" (links) has been moved to "new blah" (links, revert).

Please check whether...

Note the destinations of several of the links which appear to be untranslated programming code. Is this a known issue? Orderinchaos 07:03, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ilmari Karonen fixed this a bit ago. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:23, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

http://browsershots.org/

According to this site, the site is blocked by [10]. However, I don't see it listed anywhere. If it is listed, I was wondering if the site could be removed, as I would like to use it to test whether templates work in different browsers. Thanks. SharkD (talk) 07:36, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, lol, I just posted a duplicate of this below, but it's a little more detailed as to how to fix the problem. :P Cheers =) --slakr^\ talk / 20:19, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Monobook.js not loading

I have no idea why my monobook.js is not loading since this afternoon. Firefox refuses to load it even after repeatedly Shift-Ctrl-Reloading any Wikipedia page.

System configuration is Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10, with Firefox 2.0.0.11. I have NoScript installed but it's set to allow scripts for wikipedia.org and wikimedia.org. Lastly, when I view source of this page, I see the following which should load monobook, but now doesn't.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/w/index.php?title=User:Pegasus/monobook.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s"></script>

(Note that the & thing is escaped in the original page source so you've to see my comment in the edit window to see what the line actually is.) Pegasus «C¦T» 11:10, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's likely your browser is, or our squids are, caching the result; so, you'll need to navigate directly to that URL and hard refresh the page. --slakr^\ talk / 20:17, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have the exact same problem (and mostly same setup: ubuntu 7.04, firefox 2.0.0.11). Nothing in my monobook.js file is working (tried multiple hard-refreshes/cache-clears). Any other suggestions? -- Quiddity (talk) 21:19, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Most browsers have error consoles .... hint hint. :D --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 01:58, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Now the problem is gone. And perhaps not unexpectedly, there's nothing untoward logged in the error console. Pegasus «C¦T» 09:44, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ditto. Sorry I couldn't diagnose it before it went away.. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:33, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

References and notes

Is there any way in which to have separate references and notes sections within an article, without resorting to cumbersome hand coding? Specifically I'm editing this article: List of West Midlands railway stations. TicketMan - Talk - contribs 18:07, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You could use {{ref}} and {{note}} for the alphabetical notes. –Pomte 18:08, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fantastic - many thanks for the speedy reply, Pomte. TicketMan - Talk - contribs 18:16, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

robots.txt / browsershots

Out of curiosity, would it be okay if I politely asked one of the techs/developers if we could whitelist browsershots.org? I've frequently wanted to run tests from there on various templates and interfaces to make sure they'll be accessible across all platforms but since we disallow several different pages on our robots.txt it doesn't necessarily work correctly.

I'd propose adding the following to explicitly allow their crawls:

User-agent: Browsershots
Disallow:

They, themselves, have a robots.txt to prevent search engine caching of results. Cheers. =) --slakr^\ talk / 20:12, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. Maybe you should move this topic to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). It might get more responses there. SharkD (talk) 19:33, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Flags messing up articles using Template:Infobox Wrestler

Flags seem to be messing up articles using Template:Infobox Wrestler. For instance, with the Japanese flag it displays like this for some reason. This is happening for many flags. Removing the flag will get it back proper for instance like this, but this only started occuring last night. None of the templates have been changed, so I'm struggling to see what the problem is. Please also see this discussion at WT:PW. Cheers, D.M.N. (talk) 20:55, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The problem seemingly have been fixed. D.M.N. (talk) 21:45, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The problem was that Template:Infobox Wrestler had a line of html in the <table> header:

summary = "Wrestler's personal file: {{{name}}}"

I had updated the flag templates yesterday to wrap the image rendering in a CSS class, so when a {{flagicon}} was part of the {{{name}}} parameter in this template, it expanded with a class="flagicon" as part of the flagicon markup, and the quote character fouled up the summary line. I'm not sure why the summary markup was actually needed, so I just commented it out. — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 22:19, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Template contradict-other

~~As I understand it, if article A contradicts article B, the right way to report this is to add the template {{contradict-other|B}} to A and {{contradict-other|A}} to B.~~

However, when these templates are expanded, the first one asks people to see the discussion at [[Talk:A]] while the second one says to look at [[Talk:B]]. For any particular alleged contradiction it seems obvious to me that there should be only one talk page where it is to be discussed. Is it be possible for the template to choose one arbitrarily, for example, whichever of the two articles has the first title alphabetically?

Or if not, could there be two different templates so you would add something like {{contradict-other|B}} to A and {{contradicted-by-other|A}} to B, and discussion would be directed to [[Talk:A]] in both cases?

Still another possible solution: have a parameter where one value means "discuss on this article's talk page" and another value means "discuss on the other article's talk page". (One of these values could be null.) For example, {{contradict-other|B|here}} could go on A and {{contradict-other|A|}} on B.

I have another idea, which is prompted by the fact that the template apparently no longer provides any way to tell people what the contradiction is; but I'll put it in a separate section, below, because it pertains to other templates too.

--208.76.104.133 (talk) 08:42, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See the documentation for {{Contradict-other}}. There is already a parameter to say "discuss on this article's talk page" or "discuss on the other article's talk page". PrimeHunter (talk) 11:35, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Dang, how'd I miss that? I did read that page. Sorry about that, folks. --208.76.104.133 (talk) 23:05, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please see the talk page

In general, when a template points to a discussion presumed to exist on an article's talk page, I think it would be highly desirable if it could point at the specific section discussing the subject. This applies to a number of templates such as NPOV and contradict. There is already at least one template, mergemulti, that takes a "discuss=" parameter. I think this parameter or something like it should be provided in other templates as appropriate, and people should use it to point at a specific talk section, not just a talk page.

Thus in my example in the previous item, people would use {{contradict-other|B|discuss=Talk:A#Chocolate or vanilla?}} on A, and {{contradict-other|A|discuss=Talk:A#Chocolate or vanilla?}} on B.

This would imply that people using these tags should create the talk section first... but that's a reasonable requirement anyway. However, I don't know if there's any way to tell people who have used the template before that it's been improved in this way, in order to promote this clearer use.

--208.76.104.133 (talk) 08:42, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I found a missing entry in the logs

I was looking over the user rights change log since 9 January (when rollback was introduced) and seem to have found an entry that's missing. I've checked it and I'm absolutely certain - it's just not there - somebody received rollback without leaving a line in the rights change log. It was then removed about ten minutes later following more discussion at WP:RFR (that line is in the log), then that person got it back again about an hour after that (also in the log). But the first change is missing. I'm just wondering is it a sign of anything serious?

It sounds very trivial and it could be a fluke, but what if there was, I dunno, some funny character in the change summary, and that didn't get escaped properly before being sent to the database, so the database skipped the insert query. If some administrator could discover the trick they could make changes without leaving any record of it. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 12:41, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to check the user rights log on Meta; if the rollback permission was granted by a steward it would be recorded there rather than in our user rights log. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:30, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's interesting, but nope, not listed there either. The user is Santa on Sleigh, when he requested rollback on January 14. There was a short discussion at Wikipedia:Requests for rollback?oldid=18436555, where a couple of admins were disagreed on whether to grant it. Viridae posted a Done at 21:43. Mr.Z-man posted a Not done at 21:52. Misza13 posted a final Done, and settled, at 22:44.

But look at Special:Log?type=rights&limit=1000, or even the logs for just Santa on Sleigh. Only the last two changes by Mr.Z-man and Misza13 are there. Viridae's change, somehow, is missing. It should be at about 21:41 to 21:43. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 14:58, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yup, I can't see it either. Could it of been a minor glitch in the system or something? He was definitely granted rollback, then had it removed, because it clearly states here: 22:51, 14 January 2008 Mr.Z-man (Talk | contribs) changed rights for User:Santa on Sleigh from rollbacker to (none) ‎ (user has no reverting expereince and only 2 minor article edits). So he was granted rollbacker, but its not in the log. Weird. D.M.N. (talk) 15:23, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There was a bug, where if a lowercased name (santa on Sleigh) was blocked, it would not be logged in that users log, only in the user who did the blocking's log. That could be what happened here, except on the rights log. The bug has been fixed. Prodego ^talk 00:27, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This doesn't seem to be visible in any log though, Santa on Sleigh's or Viridae's, or even without specifying a name. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 17:05, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I <3 modern skin, except for three things

I tried the new Modern skin (Prefs/Skins/Modern) and I like it a lot, I really like it, except for three things:

All the links are underlined by default. That looks terrible on link-rich content like a wiki. I had to go to Prefs/Misc to turn off underlining. How to I change my modern.css and/or .js to underline links on mouse-hover only, like monobook?

Visited links don't turn color. This disrupts my watchlist behavior. Surely there is a simple change to modern.css which can make visited links a different color, right?

The left-hand nav bar is about 100px too wide at my font size. How do I put it on a diet?

Thanks to whoever made this skin. MilesAgain (talk) 13:13, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The output from the anti-vandal tool also appears in the upper-left corner (rather than in the centre of the page), therefore being garbled by the sidebar. NF24^{(radio me!)} 14:11, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

~~The yellow highlighting on Special:Newpages also doesn't work. NF24^{(radio me!)} 14:18, 27 January 2008 (UTC)~~[reply]

links underlined by default: i think this was fixed yesterday. can you try a force-reload?
visited link colour: this is fixed as of about 5 minutes ago
to make the nav bar narrower, put something like this in your modern.css:

#mw_portlets { width: 12em; }
#mw_content { margin-left: 12em; }

kate. —Preceding comment was added at 08:57, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

THANK YOU KATE!!! 11em is the perfect width at my font size. MilesAgain (talk) 19:08, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Template:User transcluded a lot

When I was looking at a request to edit Template:User, I looked at the backlinks. It seems there are 33187 pages that transclude this template. Is there any reason not to go through and substitute a bunch of these, particularly ones on archived pages? — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:58, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think substituting them would be effective. One of Wikipedia's guidelines is don't worry about performance. Besides which, editing and saving a new revision of a page requires *far* more work on the part of the server than having a transcluded template on an old page. There are lots of templates used on hundreds of thousands of articles. I think it's essentially fairly harmless to leave them. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 19:45, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My main concern is whether this is the type of template (like unsigned) that should always be substituted. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:01, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's not like unsigned. When a particular template should always be substituted, it's often because it contains a message directed at a specific editor who may be confused if the message changes. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:18, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Like unsigned, there's no reason that the use of this template on old pages needs to be kept in sync with use on new pages (compare the fact tag, which should look the same on all pages). — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:35, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But there's no reason for it NOT to, whereas, as PrimeHunter said, there's a reason not to do so with unsigned. —Random832 15:37, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What reason is there for unsigned to change on newer pages? I think it's somewhat shortsighted to accumulate these massively-used templates. We should transclude templates that will need to be updated, and substitute the rest. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:22, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

database?

Did the database just crash or something? Wikipedia was down for several minutes for me.--172.168.50.11 (talk) 23:47, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There were problems for a few minutes; they seem to have subsided. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:03, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Few minutse?! I thought it was at least an hour. --Coppertwig (talk) 12:56, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Viewing new articles created by people

Is it possible to look at someone's (e.g. your own) contributions only in terms of new articles (preferable even just non-redirects)? It seems impossible to find the new pages you've made among the jungle of edits.

A second question: is Wikipedia's number of articles (~2.2 million) exclusive of disambiguation pages? Richard001 (talk) 01:56, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe so.
See Special:Statistics for what it includes, it probably does include disambig pages.

Prodego ^talk 02:06, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Actually I think there is. http://tools.wikimedia.de/~escaladix/larticles/ This was fine the other day when it was pointed out to me, but doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Suggest trying it again in a day or so. Good luck. —Moondyne 04:26, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have a tool that looks through user contribs to report on link add/removes. It currently spots new articles as "warnings" (and only runs on Windows and takes a while). Tweaking it to scan for new articles only and report them properly is on my list. If you don't get satisfaction elsewhere, watchlist my sub-page, I will announce there when I get that task done. Franamax (talk) 04:55, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

My tabs

The new features have messed up the tabs on my userpage. See them for yourself. And new code that I can use? —Coastergeekperson 04^{'s talk}@01/28/2008 04:13

Fixed. –Pomte 04:19, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Modern skin

I was trying to update Wikipedia:Customisation, and noticed that MediaWiki:Modern.css is empty. Is there any reason it is only stored at http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/modern/main.css ?

Also, where is the main discussion/development history for this new skin? I couldn't see anything in the various mailing list archives, at meta, or via google searches. Thanks. -- Quiddity (talk) 06:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Although MediaWiki:Modern.css doesn't exist by default, you can create it and it'll work the same as MediaWiki:Monobook.css. Most of the discussion (of which there was actually very little) took place on IRC. mediawiki-l is probably the best place to discuss it. kate. —Preceding comment was added at 08:48, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not an admin, so can't edit that page. Someone else has created it though, and seems to be bugfixing it. Hopefully people who know about skins will watchlist it, and continue to bugfix and improve it. Thanks. -- Quiddity (talk) 07:19, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bad diffs?

For me, the diff [11] shows a difference between the two versions ("{{Expand|date=December 2007}}" is replaced with "December"), but there is no actual difference. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with Wikipedia? I don't want to go around reverting phantom vandalism. --Carnildo (talk) 10:47, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I see the same false diff. I don't know what causes the problem. A diff to an earlier identical version [12] is right. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:21, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Could it have something to do with the new preprocessor? Arthena^(talk) 16:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

All morning and afternoon I have been seeing things like this, which is supposedly showing the creation of the section below this one, but is empty. MilesAgain (talk) 22:43, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I swear it was an empty diff that I got from my (enhanced mode) watchlist, but it now shows my own edit with it. How weird is that? MilesAgain (talk) 22:46, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Substituting #switch

I have been asked to clarify the dates on my sig, so I made this. It uses the #switch function, so I can't find a way to substitute the month without substituting the whole thing. Any ideas? —Coastergeekperson 04^{'s talk}@01/28/2008 22:14

{{subst:#time: M d Y|}} -> Jan 28 2008 ? Gimmetrow 22:48, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That certainly save a whole lot of time. —Coastergeekperson 04^{'s talk}@Jan/28/08 23:56

Note, however, that some anti-vandalism software, such as ClueBot, does check for the "MM:HH day month year (UTC)" format; you might want to include that somewhere if you go vandal-fighting (e.g., in ). Gracenotes^T § 00:11, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's generally requested to use the correct time format when signing, there are many bots and stuff that relies on that. _→AzaToth 00:41, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Second that. Threads left on a Talk page archived by MiszaBot may never be archived if the bot doesn't see the expected time stamp on the signature. EdJohnston (talk) 01:24, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Export Parameters... Not working? Resumed with answers

The original discussion is now archived Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 15#Special:Export Parameters... Not working?.

Special:Export does not appear to work correctly with GET requests, but does work as expected with POSTs. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but it was discovered and is now documented here and here on the MediaWiki Manuel. --Falcorian ^(talk) 23:42, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Huggle?

I know that Gurch is gone, so I don't know who runs Huggle or if it's just him. On the page there is no download link. How can I download Huggle? —Coastergeekperson 04^{'s talk}@Jan/29/08 00:10

Gurch is still here. :) See Special:Contributions/Gurch and feel free to ask him at User talk:Gurch. --Iamunknown 01:35, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The avalibility to watch Special Pages

It would be nice if we could watchlist specialpages, such as:

User contributions

Good for tracking the edits of problematic users

whatlinkshere

Tracking pages created regarding a template

and etc. The benefits would be huge-- penubag 01:00, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interwiki redirects

Currently, these don't work. Why? It is quite a good idea. -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 08:07, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Soft redirect. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:21, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I know of them. They just provide links. I am requesting proper redirection. -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 14:01, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I really don't think we want vandals to be able to redirect readers into a foreign language page, particularly one with a graphic image. And, as noted on the page cited by PrimeHunter, there would be no "Redirected from [foo]" message on the page when you get to the destination, if the redirect was automatic. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:11, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There's also a lot of obscure non-Wikimedia web sites on the interwiki list. I don't think we should have automatic redirects to those. I think it's more sensible if people get told when they're leaving the site. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 16:40, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please help our wp

I want apply toclimit class to our Korean Wikipedia. For test, I copied English Wikipedia's class (in MediaWiki:Common.css) into my own css ko:User:피첼/monobook.css, and I tested in Sandbox.[13] But it doesn't work! What should I do? --Ficell (talk) 13:16, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Question on redirection templates

I've been writing a few redirection templates to help with fictional characters and tv episodes (eg {{ER to list entry}}, and a user noticed that, when using the template, the text that is in the template that is not within the "noinclude" markup but also not contained in the "includeonly" markup does not show up on the page with the redirection; it is present when you preview it, but it is also very obvious there is a difference in how the preview is shown, and then how the actual resulting page looks (which contains the down/right 90deg arrow and large text with the redirect page name).

Is this by design, or a possible bug in rendering of such pages? I note I spot checked a few other redirection templates that seemed to have the same effect. --MASEM 16:34, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Move the template inclusion to a newline and it will start working. Not really sure what the exact desired/expected behaviour is --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:29, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's not the issue. The template doesn't need to be on a newline. –Pomte 20:36, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Error on Page, according to IE6

Pretty much all Wikipedia pages I pull up in IE6 (at work, grrr) report an error on page (bottom left of the app), the details of which are specified as Line 74 Character 5: expected identifier, string or number. By my count, that would be the following markup: <h3 id="siteSub">From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</h3>. Is this just IE being crap, or what? --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:17, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It was doing it to me when I pulled up Wikipedia in IE a few days ago too. Every page. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 17:36, 29 January 2008 (UTC). Correction: It's only happening when I'm logged in. Fine otherwise. • Anakin ^{(contribs • complaints)} 17:45, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

IE7 reports the same issue. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:12, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can you provoke any errors or warnings in an HTML validator? I can't with this one, but I may not be trying the same pages as you. Bovlb (talk) 19:34, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Any Internet Explorer error you encounter almost never lists the correct line number. I believe it expands <script> tags first then uses line numbers there. Firefox does not cite any problems, so it's probably one of the Internet Explorer fix scripts. x42bn6 Talk Mess 20:21, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have the same issue in IE7 except line 16. Check the source of your page when it loads for MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js, looking at that file on-wiki, I strongly suspect there is an error setting var localtitles, one too many commas. When I modify it on a local version, it seems to work just fine. Franamax (talk) 23:53, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Algerian district maps

- - Dear Sir/Madame, - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%AFn_Abid_District - and - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zighoud_Youcef_District - Should colour different areas? - Although named differently, it shows the same area under different names. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 168.202.75.120 (talk) 18:34, 29 January 2008 (UTC) (restored question by Pete St.John (talk) 20:25, 29 January 2008 (UTC))[reply]

So, yes, both maps show the same region, but by different names. I'd ask at the talk pages; but I'm not familiar at all with Algerian geography, perhaps these names are of the same place over different periods. I'd guess though that one of the maps is mislabelled. Pete St.John (talk) 20:28, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Movepage $1 issue

Perhaps this has been reported elsewhere, but I just went to go move a page over a multiple edit redirect. The resulting page that notes deletion is required (with sysop tools) links to the page about to be deleted, but appears to be a piped link to $1. Such as:

"Caution: The destination article "Foobar" already exists. Do you want to delete it to make way for the move? (Check the edit history.)"

Not a big problem, but I hadn't noticed it before. Rkitko ^(talk) 20:54, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed it a couple of days ago. Just means a little bit more work. You have to delete it manually. Does someone know how to fix it? Woody (talk) 20:59, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Rollback link in watchlists

Is it possible to add a rollback link to each edit seen on Special:Watchlist? This would be especially useful given the existence of tabs and popups. John Reaves 22:43, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

~~When I was granted the rollback privilege, it began appearing exactly like that. See Wikipedia:Rollback feature. —EncMstr 22:55, 29 January 2008 (UTC~~ Never mind. I confused it with page history. —EncMstr 22:56, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]