Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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

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

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here.

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

User Page

My user page is a mess, can someone please teach me how to clean it up? Richardkselby 00:06, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Public watch list

Is there any possibility of making a watch list available to the public? If so, how can it be done? MOD 21:19, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Just create a page full of wiki links, then press "Related changes" to see the list of changes. An example of a public watchlist is at WP:MVP.-gadfium 03:29, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

see also meta:Share watchlists and my own (share yours!) at user:here/watchlist. Still looking for a kind sould to write a greasemonkey or user script to automate the process. ∴ here…♠ 06:42, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, these are good ideas, but I was thinking more along the lines of a double entry both in Special and the Main namespace, with the latter being an option. 206.106.97.100 11:34, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

using images or graphs from pdf files

hi, i am trying to find out how to copy/export a graph or picture from a pdf file to put into an article. I've tried to select it, but i just end up selecting the text, which when i paste it in the article, just gets thrown together. Its public matireal, so there are no copyright issues.

Do you need a special program in order to do this?

I'm hoping it can be done with just the Acrobat Reader.

thanks

user talk:Daemion

To select an image in a PDF file, use the Image Select tool. It looks like a camera, and it's usually on the toolbar with the Text Select (I-bar) and Hand tools. If copying an image into Wikipedia, be sure the image is not restricted by copyright, or that your use is fair use. Also, if you want to sign your comments, the best way is to type ~~~~. This adds a link to your Userpage as well as the date & time of your message. Let me know if I can help further. Ssbohio 02:25, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Block ip and existing user accounts

I blocked an IP recently that ended up doing some collateral damage to User:Kyle sb. While I appreciate the need to keep a blocked anon from creating/editing from accounts; is there a way to differentiate an IP block from an established account. Although maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree as Kyle sb mentioned his IP was dynamic. - RoyBoy ⁸⁰⁰ 06:25, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

There is a current proposal for this behaviour at WP:BPP. Werdna648^T/_C\^@ 16:18, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Namespace filter on watchlists

As people scream, whine and get out the pitchforks when things are added, I thought I'd cough now to adding namespace filtering to watchlists. I think it's this sort of comment that makes it all worthwhile. Rob Church (talk) 17:33, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

• I happen to like it. A resounding good job! to whomever added them (now I can remove the filtering in my monobook). — nathanrdotcom ^{(T • C • W)} 22:13, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Agreed. Congrats, Rob. Now, per David Gerard's Law, you have three new jobs to do. :) Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 01:45, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
    • I have been prodding Rob to fix this next Raul654 01:18, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Of course, now I have to leave a post here stating that

• I'm looking into changes to the blocking mechanism
• that isn't the only bug pertaining to blocking

Muwahahahaha. Rob Church (talk) 03:18, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Useless metadata in jpeg files

There are many jpeg files in Wikipedia containing extra and absolutely useless data, generated by image application, e.g. Adobe Photoshop. Here is example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/99/GE007dossier.jpg/250px-GE007dossier.jpg - 35174 bytes, when it is processed with utility like JPGCLN32 - JPG Cleaner v2.6/W32Console Copyright (c) 2002 Rainbow Software (http://rainbow.ht.st), size lowered to 12145 bytes! Is there any policy for such things? Or maybe it worth to organize this image processing for uploaded files? --ONjA 10:21, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Just ignore the ones you don't like. --Brion 23:12, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Size of junk in single file is comparable with size of entire article. Nonsense. I'm sorry if nobody cares. Or maybe here is a wrong place to ask. --ONjA 07:45, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, not a bad idea. Why not remove EXIF data from generated thumbnails? If anyone cares about the EXIF, he or she can always visit the full image and look it up there. ONjA, EXIF data in general is not "junk", but metadata I've found useful quite a few times. However, I agree that it wouldn't be needed on generated thumbnails. Lupo 08:02, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, there probably shouldn't be any exif data in generated thumbs, indeed. In uploaded files, it stays. --Brion 00:49, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Lupo, there are EXIF data and EXIF thumbnail. The first one, of course, can be useful, and itself takes a couple of bytes. But EXIF thumbnail is sometimes bigger than picture itself (as it is generated from big 'real' picture) and transferred for no purpose as two identical pictures in one, doubling traffic of both sides.

Brion, EXIF thumbnail can be stripped independently, leaving EXIF data in place. --ONjA 09:28, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Extra Space

I noticed that in wikihtml, when we edit, formating has extra space, for example, when we edit a comment, there's a space between the $Subject/headline:$ & the content of the message. Another example is $== Extra Space ==$ is also the same as $==Extra Space==$. Does this make comments larging in size as bytewise? Even if not, it could create confusion. So I guess Mediawiki needs to be tweaked/the devlopers\the codes needs a little editing?

Please leave one if you'd like more clarification on this issue. You could also contact me iooiioioo@hotmail.com [since they haven't instituted the option to delete your account, made their own licence, or the GNUL hasn't changed yet, I haven't signed up].

thanks

24.70.95.203 20:22, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

The mediawiki parser, like most parsers, ignores whitespace in many places. What's your point? -- G. Gearloose (?!) 20:47, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Somebody brought this exact point up a few weeks ago. Even if we removed all of the whitespace from the code, the space savings would be extremely minimal. ~MDD4696 21:09, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks but this is better than none.

Sorry you can't contact me [since they haven't instituted the option to delete your account, made their own licence, or the GNUL hasn't changed yet, I haven't signed up].

24.70.95.203 10:23, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

(copy from my talk page at the german WP) I still don't get it. Mediawiki rarely generates wikitext. It parses it. Also... a few spaces eat up a few bytes. But that overhead is completely marginal compared to the vast amount of additional memory used for caching, indexing, etc... The days of the byte-miser are long gone... what are you trying to do, run mediawiki on your cell phone? -- G. Gearloose (?!) 10:56, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Spellings

Some time ago, someone asked if there was a way to toggle spellings in articles, which would reduce the incidence of editors correcting spelling 'errors' that are merely dialectical differences. Doing so could be technically simple, but rather difficult to implement.

Step one:

Create a template:

<span class="spelling_american">{{{1}}}</span><span class="spelling_commonwealth">{{{2}}}</span>

To insert this template into an article, use

{{spelling|color|colour}}

By editing a user's css, you can toggle which spelling is used.

To see American spelling, a user would insert the following in their css (User:USERNAME/monobook.css):

.spelling_american
{ display: inline; }

.spelling_commonwealth
{ display: none; }

Likewise, to see Commonwealth spelling, you insert

.spelling_commonwealth
{ display: inline; }

.spelling_american
{ display: none; }

One of these options would also need to be inserted at the universal css at MediaWiki:Standard.css. Ingoolemo ^talk 22:08, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

This will cause a bunch of illegible crud to display in older browsers, be read in some screen readers, and redistributions of content. Wikipedia is first and foremost a freely redistributable, editable encyclopedia. Damaging the text to make it difficult to use harms both readers and writers. --Brion 23:11, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

And... you then may decide which one is the default. I look forward to this one... Sam Korn ^(smoddy) 23:14, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

...and for countries that use some US and some Commonwealth spellings, like Canada and Australia...? its an axis not a polarity. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 23:27, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

And it'd be a major pain to replace ALL American/Commonwealth spelling with the template. Werdna648^T/_C\^@ 18:58, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I should think most of the spelling change edits are by anonymous users who cannot use a stylesheet, or relatively new users who have no idea what one is. Neither of these groups could/would use the stylesheet properly, and just get confused when trying to "fix" the spelling. In other words, it would only change the visible text for experienced editors who probably don't care. I'm not against something to automatically alter the spelling, but if it involves "user's .css" I don't think it will work. -- stillnotelf is invisible 19:28, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

How about a word or phrase replacement list for each user? This could also be useful for people who don't want to see potentially offensive terms in vandalism or talk page discussions. æle ✆ 2006-04-07t20:02z

That would effectively mean disabling the parser cache. Which, in turn, will melt the servers immediately. Unless you plan to donate several dozens of servers, it's not an option. -- G. Gearloose (?!) 10:58, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

This would create a huge problem unless there were a manual override in the Wikitext; otherwise, one wouldn't be able to accurately quote writing. Ardric47 02:36, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Misleading edit diffs a problem?

Does anybody else think it's a potential problem that edit diffs like this one don't give any indication that other editors were involved in-between the two edits, especially when the later editor isn't just reverting and didn't give much of an edit comment? –T_if_eg_o^(t) _{00:00, 7 April 2006 (UTC)}

You make an interesting point, and I'm suprised it hasn't come up before. When someone links you to a diff, it really should be apparent whether you are looking at a single edit or not. I'll file a bug on MediaZilla. ~MDD4696 02:22, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Theorically, Rollback should only ever be used when all edits being reverted are assimilable to vandalism, and the edit summary itself should never be an issue. I personally do a manual revert in any other case. I think your problem here has to do more with the admin being a bit careless than with the edit summary. Circeus 03:34, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Circeus - I think you're missing the point that this diff is between two manually selected versions. The rollback was reverting vandalism. The diff is between the result of the rollback and a version manually picked from the history not the previous version, but without looking at the history it's not readily apparent this is the case. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:33, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

See MediaZilla:5485: "Diffs over multiple edits versus single edits not easily distinguished"

Redirect template

Is it possible to make a template to put inside a redirect page which redirects the page? For Shi`ah Islam there are about 30 redirects and an ongoing discussion over the page title. I want to be able to change all of the redirects easily, but it's not working correctly. I created this template: Template:Shi`ah, but I'm having a lot of difficulty. Cuñado - Talk 02:05, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

It's not possible. Anything you do will just redirect the template itself. --cesarb 02:19, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

No redlinks on my watchlist?

Where, oh where, have the redlinked articles on my watchlist gone? All I see are blue links. Joyous | Talk 03:05, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Ditto --lightdarkness ^(talk) 03:08, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Me too. I hope my redlinks come back. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 03:19, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, the latest software version seems to "helpfully" hide all redlinked pages from the watchlist editor. It does make the list more tidy, but on the other hand it makes it hard to actualy remove deleted items from the watchlist. It also means that a whole bunch of user talk pages do not show up because the user does not have a userpage. There should be an option to toggle "hide redlinks from watchlist" on or off from the preferences or something. The new filter by namespace option for the watchlist is cool though. --Sherool (talk) 07:06, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I would also like to seem them back. Sometimes, they are there because of pagemove vandalism; in which case the list can be the only way to find them and remove them from the watchlist (other than looking at every edit in the history of every page which has ever been in your watchlist). Sometimes, you are actually watching a redlink (for instance, The weather in London). For people who don't want to see them, something like watchlistredir could be used. --cesarb 18:46, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Will poke. 86.140.128.28 00:29, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

There's a little typo introduced recently with the ability to mark redirects in the list. Rob's fixing it, should be live soonish. --Brion 00:45, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

good - the sooner we can see redlinks on watchlists again, the better. Grutness...wha? 02:55, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Works now. -- stillnotelf is invisible 03:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Fileupload Page

Hi :-)

Since I don't know where to put the question exactly, I'll simply ask here. When browsing through the other Wikipedias & Commons, I noticed the nice drop-down list to choose the licence of the uploaded file. We wanted to do the same on the LB-Wikipedia, but we simply don't know how or where to put this. Maybe someone can help :-)

Please answer on my local page on LB-Wiki & thx => Briséis

Move reversal bug

Admin FireFox recently reversed a move of User:Jimbo Wales/In many languages... to a vandal's talk page, and as a result, the talk pages of FireFox and the vandal (sounds like a new TV series), and maybe others, have been added to my watch list. Not destructive, but weird. Coyoty 20:27, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

When a page you are watching is moved, both the old and the new locations are added to the watchlist. Moving the page back doesn't undo that. --cesarb 21:26, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Page to show if Wikipedia is on-line?

Was Wikipedia down for several hours on 7 April? I have a new computer and an over-zealous protection product that is stopping access to legitimate sites, so this may have been my problem. However, without changing any parameters, Wikipedia later became accessible. Would it be a good idea to have a page to show the status of the site? Obviously it would have to be on another server that would be unaffected by any Wiki-downtime. Apologies if this already exists. JMcC 23:44, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

If you Google "Wikipedia status", you'll be given [1] as the first hit, and [2] within the first few hits. They're usually the first place to look. An even better strategy for those who are familiar with Internet Relay Chat is to go to the #wikipedia channel on undernet freenode. The channel title will tell you if there are any current problems. See Wikipedia:IRC channels.-gadfium 00:01, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Harmonizing the new collapsible footers with class="toccolours"

Is there any issue with changng the Padding for the NavFrame class from 2px to 5px? It would allow these new nifty collapsible templates to follow the style already well-established by class="toccolours". Circeus 00:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Link underlining

For a couple of minutes there, all links in Wikipedia were showing up non-underlined for me, then it returned to underlines. Is somebody tinkering with the stylesheet? *Dan T.* 14:32, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

This is because the CSS didn't load properly. If it happens again, just force a reload or clear your cache. ~MDD4696 14:50, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Automatic Edit Summaries

When editors leave blank edit summaries, would it not be possible to create an automatic summary? I know it has the potential to get messy, but I'm thinking of something simple like "AutoSummary: +(first 30 characters added), -(first 30 characters deleted)." This would keep a lot of us from needlessly checking out some good edits (especially interwiki stuff), and a lot of vandalism would be easier to spot.

Examples:

A user adds "Poop" to an article, with no edit summary, one is created reading

"AutoSummary: +(Poop), -()"

A user changes a large block of text to "poop", the summary would read

"AutoSummary: +(Poop), -(The dating of the Industrial R...)

Granted, if the change is to a scattering of text ([3], e.g.) things get awkward. One possible answer, though, would be to bail out-- not generate a summary in such cases. Or maybe someone can see another approach? TIA, -- Mwanner | Talk 20:57, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

• Kudos for a great idea. Sorry, I don't have a clue on the practicle aspects. FrankB 14:26, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

The new explanation for subcategories is annoying and pointless

It now says in every category with subcategories "There are X subcategories shown below for this category. Categories which include too many pages to list on one page may have additional sub-categories listed alphabetically on subsequent pages." This is really annoying and pointless. It takes up a lot of space and in treats the reader as incurious and slow witted. Anyone who clicks on a few categories will soon find out how the system works, and it is intuitive anyway. I do not want to have to see this useless message every day for the rest of my life. Please remove this awful "feature" asap. Choalbaton 18:59, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Better? -- Rick Block (talk) 20:07, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

The shorter version is good, though I hope eventually that subcategories will all be reported on the first page. -- Beland 02:51, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Categories

Does anyone know how you start a new category? Or can only mods do that? Joziboy 8 April 2006, 19:12 (UTC)

Just add the category to an article and then click on the red link which will be produced. Choalbaton 19:16, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

IRC

Perhaps this is the totally wrong place to ask, but I can't connect to freenode. _→AzaToth 19:59, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Me neither. Is there a system status page anywhere, or anyone who knows more about Freenode who can update this? (ESkog)^(Talk) 20:36, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Have tried every server now I think, gets only this:

* Looking up chat.eu.freenode.net 
* Connecting to chat.eu.freenode.net (195.139.52.134) port 6667...
* Connection failed. Error: Connection refused
 Cycling to next server in FreeNode...
* Disconnected ().

It's up for me just now, but I was getting this error earlier. Shimgray | talk | 20:45, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Same here, it is up now. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 20:46, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

They stopped allowing new connections for a while to allow them to fix a problem with host cloaking. --GraemeL ^(talk) 20:58, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

If freenode has an extended outage it will likely be placed on [4]. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:24, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Coordinates in article heading (more)

Cesarb handled the Monobook.css, and Docu handled the CologneBlue.css, is anybody game for more? On Saturday, I also posted:

• MediaWiki talk:Standard.css#Coordinates in article heading
• MediaWiki talk:Nostalgia.css#Coordinates in article heading

--William Allen Simpson 06:38, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Still begging for these to be transferred from Talk to .CSS, there are many thousands of pages using the templates now!

--William Allen Simpson 04:17, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I'd make the proposed changes if they worked for me. Unfortunately they don't — the coordinates overlap other text on the page. The problem with Nostalgia may be simply insufficient top margins, but with Standard the issue is more diffcult: the CSS puts the coordinates over an HTML table, and the spacing between the table cells can vary significantly depending on font and window sizes and other things. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 13:14, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Templates inside redirects?

Can anyone confirm that there is no way to use templates inside a redirect? I am attempting to do:

 #REDIRECT [[{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY2}}]]  

and it's not working. I checked a lot of the redirect help, the mediawiki bug reports, and even looked a little at the actual source code. Has this been discussed before? Sr.Wombat 04:49, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

12 topics up is similar -- Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Redirect template -- stillnotelf is invisible 05:25, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, thank you. Looks like I'll just have to recode my personal wiki so that it does work and then submit the modifications to the developers. ;-) Sr.Wombat 05:54, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Column alignment

Hi, I have a concern about something outside of the main namespace. The Community Portal is currently in, basically, an edit war and I am designing a new idea in my sandbox. The only issue is that all the columns want to align themselves to the left; the page that I'm modeling it after has two columns (and in one palce, three!). I think it's an issue with the code but I can't figure out what to do. Everything is already color coded (green on the left and blue on the right, just like the Main Page), so can you at least tell me what I need to add to the code and where?--HereToHelp 11:56, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Shooting Blind in the Dark

...and saying a prayer or three hundred thousand!

I just lost a ton of chained edits using Firefox of all browsers. It locked up, and I had to use the winDOZE Task Manager to shut down an arrant help window-- but the whole shooting match closed. The edit pages (previewed, mostly proofed) should be somewhere in my internet temp files.

• Anyone know how I can access them and not loose some really nice expansions just cause I went off checking links?
• At least I have a history of where I was. I frankly went far afield, but was well on working my way back. HELP!!! Three hours at stake or more, perhaps! FrankB 14:19, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I use the Mac version of Firefox (which, NPOV aside, hasn't failed me yet) and I have no idea how to get the files back. I think they're gone for good. Sorry. (trust me, I've hit Command-Q and lost some good edits, too.)--HereToHelp 14:38, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

If you know where your browser cache directory is, you can navigate to this directory and likely open the files directly. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:44, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Uh, good luck. I don't think you can recover them, but if you want to give it a try, the cache should be located in C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\RANDOM.default\Cache. ~MDD4696 02:43, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

In future try the SessionSaver extension, which ought to rescue your tabs (including edits) if Firefox crashes. the wub "?!" 11:48, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Bots

Any documentation on how to make these, software needed, etc. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. --Kha0s 17:59, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

See m:bot. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:02, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Downtime

The site was down from 19:19 UTC on 9th April to around 01:30 on 10th April. The explanation we have at this time is that one of the 800A circuit breakers between the generators/UPS and our servers failed at our Florida colocation facilities causing obvious problems. Staff at the datacentre struggled to resume service as soon as possible, and are now investigating the reason said breaker failed.

Following this, Brion Vibber worked to bring up the database servers, apaches and squid caches. Before reporting bugs and errors, please clear both the client (browser) and server-side cache of pages which appear to be broken, and likewise for thumbnails. Rob Church (talk) 01:48, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

(Corrected times above.) --Brion 01:52, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Bloody hell. Can't you all just follow the UK ;) Rob Church (talk) 01:57, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

For anyone who's interested, I've saved the Recent Changes from just before and just after the outage, and copied them to here: User:JesseW/RC_over_the_downtime. Enjoy. JesseW, the juggling janitor 02:02, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Several servers came up with bad clocks. I've corrected the times in the 'revision' database entries for the entries edited from these servers so 'history' and 'contribs' will be correct, but you might see some edits listed in your watchlist etc 8 hours earlier than their actual times. --Brion 04:08, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the hard work getting this back up. When I saw the page was down I went looking for the reason, since the error page had no details and found that about (literally) a thousand others were doing the same by logging in to the IRC channel. May I suggest that the error page be updated with a short, maybe one sentence, blurb about the problem when an outage happens? Thx --Kickstart70-T-C 15:41, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree, this would be quite helpful. 24.12.98.36 21:52, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I also hope that in future (not wishing downtime to happen, but preparing for such things), the error message could be updated (with a time-stamp, to allay worries that "nothing is happening"). If that is technically unfeasible and the IRC channel continues to given out as a go-to address, then i would request that those who have ops standing in the IRC channel understand that there WILL be many people coming through looking for information -- because the error message sends them there -- and that they will treat these newcomers with more courtesy and friendliness than was shown this time. The attitude of the regular users and ops was a little too harshly elitist to my liking, to put it gently. No offense intended; i am just hoping for a smoother method of dealing with the issue if or when it again arises. And a big THANKS to all who got the site back up as soon as possible. Catherineyronwode 00:33, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I have to agree, there was beurocrats threating to devoice all new comers, and couldn't understand why they join to #wikipedia during outages. I found it quite distaseful. Also the comment was made, #wikipedia is not ran by wikiepdia. While it isn't, the ops of the channel are representitives of wikipedia and should follow the rules (such as welcoming, helping, being civil, etc). Mike _{(T C)} 00:54, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

We've had trouble getting the error pages to update properly in the past. Hopefully we'll get it working smoothly before we next need it; in the middle of an outage isn't the best time to experiment. :) --Brion 01:04, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Moderation

Several users queried the reasoning behind placing the #wikimedia-tech IRC channel into moderated state at this time. The response is that, in an outage of this nature, it is vital that

• we don't get floods of people all reporting the same error
• we aren't pestered with the same stupid "what's broken" questions
• system administration and other development staff can communicate

We don't do it to be mean; we do it so we can work as effectively as possible to fix the issues. Thanks to the users who first brought the problem to our attention, and of course, a global thanks to those who worked to fix it. Rob Church (talk) 01:48, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

My thanks to Brion & the other admins who got things back up & running, while simultaneously keeping us informed of the status via IRC. Moderation was the only way to go. With 1000+ users in the #wikipedia channel, to do anything else would have rendered it useless. SteveB 18:06, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

The #wikipedia channel should never have been set +m (IMO), #wikipedia-tech on the other hand was +m and rightfully so. Even users trying to be helpful to the devs are just stepping on toes when it comes to a major downtime such as today. Mike _{(T C)} 03:56, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I set #wikipedia +m because it was scrolling so fast that I couldn't read it. It was an endless stream of "Is it down?" "Wikipedia's down." "Is it dead?" and other such content that made the channel useless as a medium for communication. Setting +m was the virtual equivalent of standing on a table in a crowded meeting room and firing off an airhorn several times to get people to shut up. Kelly Martin (talk) 00:15, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth; I was also opped in #wikipedia at this time, and can state that had Kelly not beaten me to it, I would have taken the channel +m myself. I'm of the opinion that, in cases like these, it's more sensible to provide status information in the topic, and maintain some level of order for regular discussion in the channel.

As noted above, the #wikipedia IRC channel is not an official channel, and is often off-topic as it is. The channel has its own rules and atmosphere, although these do not include biting newbies or people asking reasonable questions, of course. I point people to #wikipedia-en for a quieter time, and for a more on-topic expectation. Rob Church (talk) 00:33, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I think thats why the error message should never point to the irc channel, a third party website should be established to give a error report, as well irc is not for newbies IMO, its a hard thing to jump into and understand for a lot of people. I wasen't there for the start of the +m so i retract my comments, but if your going to +m atleast have a reasonable way for people to get +v. Mike _{(T C)} 00:52, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I might regret this later when the bandwidth bill comes, but i am willing to give a few GB (10?) of bandwidth per month to wikipedia to establish a error message page if this would help. I can't see a few hundred thousand views of a small html file being a huge problem =). Mike _{(T C)} 00:55, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

More visible status link?

There is a discussion on the Main Page talk page here where people are requesting a more visible status link to find out what happened after things are back up and running. Carcharoth 10:50, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Help:Edit summary renders incorrectly

The edit summary help page appears to be blank when viewed in IE6, until scrolling down a considerable distance past the long "editing" box on the right. Oddly, the MediaWiki page it is a copy of does not have this problem; it is specific to the page when on Wikipedia. (This happens even when not logged in.) –Tifego^(t) _{18:41, 9 April 2006 (UTC)}

• Looks like someone changed a template somewhere. It's insisting on being the highest location on the page; I tried to relocate it several different places. The page looks fine (normal) on Mozilla FireFox. You can download from www.Mozilla.org, and they have a wikipedia extension set, and allow multiple page tabbing, which is danged useful.

I use both, and regret very much not doing so sooner. There is no reason not to have both, and the non-IE6 browsers all handle the HTML standard protocols better, so webpages will work better with some of those, and not well for IE6 as MS has their own ideas— which is part of the big lawsuit blitz and anti-trust suits a few years back.

Techies pretty much abhor IE6, so you might take note. Keep IE6 as your default browser for a while, while you get comfortable with FireFox. My son is crazy about the email program too for spam elimination, but I haven't flown that myself. But consider I couldn't get him to use his high speed comcast.net account until he used that, so that commends it quite well.

I don't know enough about templates to help further, but you have identified a real and valid problem; trouble is there may be nesting issues and the change is several layers deep. So not my cup of tea.FrankB 07:18, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

• Looks fine from my POV with an almost ten years old browser, but it's a bit special compared with other help pages: It's a help page (from Meta) and a Wikipedia guideline. For the latter it got the normal guideline template at the top with shortcut and icon. But all help pages have a sidebar floating right needing 20% of the available width. Therefore the guideline template was squeezed into 80% with brute force, see Template:Phh:Edit summary(edit talk links history). Fix it as you see fit, one strategy could be to subst the guideline template and tweak the result. -- Omniplex 09:47, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Newbie to table code, need help

I'm trying to create a template for a series of articles. Right now I have

{| align=center class="toccolours" width=75% ! style="background:#ccccff" align="center" | Traditional [[Liturgy of the Hours|Liturgical Hours]] of the [[Catholic Church]] |- | '''[[Matins]]''' | '''[[Lauds]]''' | '''[[Prime (liturgy)|Prime]] ''' | '''[[Terce]] ''' | '''[[Sext]] ''' | '''[[None (liturgy)|None]] ''' | '''[[Vespers]]''' | '''[[Compline]]''' |}

This renders as:

As you can see, this looks bizarre. How can I get rid of the space between Matins and the others and make the title stretch out normally?

Thanks, --Pyroclastic 02:48, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

(changed "! style="background:#ccccff" align="center" |" to "! style="background:#ccccff" align="center" colspan=8 |") -- grm_wnr Esc 03:00, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Possible reason

Was there any thunderstorms in the area ? If so, I suspect that a direct lightning strike or a high EMP from a nearby lightning strike had blown said breaker. Martial Law 04:56, 10 April 2006 (UTC) :)

Impossible this is how the system is set up:

Dirty outside power --> UPS/Generators --> Servers The breaker between the UPS and Servers tripped not the outside one. Nice theory, but impossible =). Mike _{(T C)} 05:16, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

stray blue bar in {{Emergency-bot-shutoff}} ??

Template:Emergency-bot-shutoff seems to have a stray blueish purple bar rendered some distance down from where it ends (not in preview mode, just . Perhaps it's me? See for example: User:Tawkerbot, the bar renders into the TOC area. This is on FireFox 1.5 on Win XP. I checked on IE6 and it seems OK. Again, could just be me... ++Lar: t/c 06:26, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Working fine here. Luigi30 (Ταλκ το mε) 11:26, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I get the same thing in a few different versions of Firefox / Windows. Didn't realize the blue bar was unintentional. --CBDunkerson 11:49, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Me too in Firefox. The "button" is a big dot character, and the blue line is the link underline. I tried to minimize it a while ago but gave up. — Omegatron 13:12, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I've added class="nounderlines" to the template, that should fix it. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:30, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

OK, that's TOO funny. I never thought that it might be a link underline!!! but ya, it's the right color for it. Thanks for the fix. ++Lar: t/c 16:45, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Missing text

There is a slight problem which has recently come up when I edit. For 2 times now in the past one week, after editing an article, a large chunk of the article at the bottom of the article goes missing. For example see - 1 and 2. Can anyone tell me what is going wrong. I use Firefox (1.5.0.1) with Windows XP. - Aksi_great (talk) 15:52, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Small Project Wiki?

Question Dear wiki-users, Could you suggest an appropriate wiki technology to allow 5-10 people to collaborate in a networked office environment? I'm not interested in distributing over the internet at first, simply allowing wiki-type collaboration between people sharing a LAN. Thank you, Mike --64.251.230.39 17:27, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Updated Question OK, I found a very interesting summary of available wiki's at: http://www.wikimatrix.org/ I'm trying to sort through this list to find a test wiki, in other words, a small easy to install wiki, that doesn't require a dedicated web server like Apache, etc... Thanks, Mike --64.251.230.39 18:34, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Answer Look into Wiki on a stick. It's this very Mediawiki software but all packaged up in one easy to install package. It uses an external webserver and database, true, but they're part of the install. I don't run it myself but have heard lots of good things about it. Hope that helps. ++Lar: t/c 18:45, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Response to Answer Thank you Lar! Wow, that is interesting. I am browsing through the Wiki on a stick installation instructions, and they may suit my purpose very well. I mean, if I can install wiki on a USB drive, why can't I install it on my LAN? Great information, thanks, Mike --64.251.230.39 19:50, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

No problem. You will have to do a little tweaking to allow multiple users and stuff but should be no big deal from what I hear. Glad to have been of help! ++Lar: t/c 20:38, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

InterWiki to multiple pages

The problen arised in Hebrew Wikipedia, but they couldn't answer, so I am trying here.

I was editing he:בוש, which conesponds to Bush, but also Bosh, Bausch etc. due to the nature of Hebrew. If I add (in Hebrew Wiki) en:Bush and en:Bosh, I will get twice "English", on the sidebar. Is there a way to get a different result (such as "English-Bosh" , "English-Bush")? The question is probably also relevent for Arabic and similar languages. Thanks, DGtal 17:59, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia:Interlanguage links says that the interlanguage links should link to the article with the corresponding subject (not necessarily the corresponding word)... since they're not synonyms in English, I'd say try to avoid linking to both. I don't think there's a way in the Mediawiki software to do this. I suppose I'll file this on Bugzilla and see what the devs think. ~MDD4696 23:38, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, at the moment I put a wikilink to Bush for popularity reasons. Could you send me a link to the Bugzilla message after you send it? I've never been there and don't know the technical language needed. Thanks, DGtal 08:47, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Here ya go. ~MDD4696 21:09, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

It looks like he:בוש is a disambiguation page. According to Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Interlanguage links, we usually shouldn't have interlanguage links for those. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:53, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

As the page states you can put an interlanguage if the problem is similar. and it is, since there are many Bushes in any language. DGtal 22:44, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

fullurl, fullurle, and google

Apparently {{fullurl:page }} and {{fullurle:page }} always produce the same result, is that true? It's impossible to produce %20, but for [[google:queries ]] this could be relevant. Apparently Google accepts + instead of %20 in queries, so that's not critical, besides I could try to move the query string into a fullurl: parameter. But I'm still curious where fullurl: and fullurle: actually differ. -- Omniplex 18:48, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

A brief glance at the parser and the title handling code reveals that FULLURL produces the canonical URL to a page, while FULLURLE takes this output and HTML-escapes it for use in links and other HTML elements, etc. Rob Church (talk) 02:07, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay, but that doesn't help me, I'm looking for an example where the output is actually different, for Help:Magic words and Help:Variable. So far I found none. -- Omniplex 12:06, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

IRC on a Mac

The IRC link that is given all over Wikipedia (irc://irc.freenode.net/Wikipedia), doesn't work on my Mac. I downloaded both ircle and Conversation, but I can't get either to work with Freenode. (The former keeps timing out, and the second doesn't show any activity on the channel. I really don't know how to use the second one.) I haven't registered a username, but I didn't think that was necessary. What am I doing wrong? - ElAmericano (dímelo) 19:04, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

OK do this: open ircle and you want to type /server irc.freenode.net then /join #wikipedia, you do not HAVE to use the link that is all over wikipedia. Mike _{(T C)} 19:47, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

It keeps timing out. I'm on a college network; do you think it's because of a firewall? If so, can I get around it? - ElAmericano (dímelo) 01:40, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps, try the servers here http://freenode.net/irc_servers.shtml. Also can you open a terminal and type this traceroute irc.freenode.org and paste the output to MY talk page, not here. Mike _{(T C)} 03:07, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

howto make more gramaticly friendly links to specific topics with general names?

On my internal TWiki at work I can specify a wiki page's direct address and format the link text nicely with this syntax:[[http://yada.yada.yada/bing][[translating]] but I can't seem to find similar syntax here on Wikipedia.

I want to make a link to translation (geometry) in the artical atan, but I'd like it to appear on the word 'translating' in the following part of a sentance: "... by translating both points..."

translating is a very general word with many ambiguous references, but the sentance just doesn't read very well when you say: "... by translation (geometry) both points..."

Thanks in advance,

 - R

[[some article name|link text]] is what you want. This is only for links to other Wikipedia pages though. External links look like this: [http://example.com link text] — Kimchi.sg | Talk 23:50, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Should protected pages be visible in my watchlist?

They aren't. More a question than a concern, it's not like I can change protected pages anyway :) -- stillnotelf is invisible 02:15, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. Changes to protected pages in your watchlist will show up there. Changes in the protection status won't, at this time. Rob Church (talk) 02:01, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

What links here sortable?

Is there a way of filtering the what links here page, like can be done with your watchlist, so as to only display pages in the main space or the wikipedia namespace? Steve block talk 08:37, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

User_talk:Interiot has a tool to do this; I don't remember the URL atm, check his talk page. JesseW, the juggling janitor 08:58, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Jesse. There's a lot of tools listed there, I'll have to have a poke around. Steve block talk 09:18, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I asked this question on the Help Desk just over a week ago, and was told the best thing to do is wait until the database is updated, when the links will display in a logical order. See here and also the guidelines at Help:What_links_here#Order. I know that last page is a copy of the master page at Meta, but if there are such tools to use while waiting for the database to be reindexed, would it be possible to add a note to the Meta page? How can you request updates or changes to a Meta page? Carcharoth 12:28, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

And despite looking around, I can't find a "what links here" page that has any logic to its order. And a filtering tool is still needed, by the looks of it. If anyone finds the tool, could they post a link? Thanks. Carcharoth 12:35, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

There's this, but its on the toolserver and so can suffer from replication lag. the wub "?!" 18:02, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Brilliant! Thanks. Carcharoth 19:39, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

This is also bug 4624.--Commander Keane 14:38, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Minor diff bug?

This diff shows no space between the word "numbers" and "in" in the right-hand panel, even though there is space in the text. Dmharvey 14:13, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Has there been a change made to the contributions list?

Suddenly, things I have edited in the Wikipedia: namespace are not showing up on my contributions. How do I get them back? Will this also happen if I want to keep track of a vandal's edits? Any vandalism made by the vandal to Wikipedia: namespace will also not show up? User:Zoe|^(talk) 15:38, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

The developers recently added a namespace filter for watchlists feature, so perhaps they are tweaking with the contributions list also. You can filter the contributions by namespace (including Wikipedia ns), with the dropdown menu. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 15:48, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I went to my watchlist, and it's set to watch all spaces. This contributions limitation is a major problem. User:Zoe|^(talk) 15:56, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Sure, it's a bug. But, until the bug is fixed, choose "Wikipedia" from the dropdown menu and you can see those. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 16:00, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

When I do that, I get "Fatal error: Call to a member function set_namespace() on a non-object in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/SpecialContributions.php on line 183 (10.0.5.3)" User:Zoe|^(talk) 16:01, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I see... when I look at a vandal's Wikipedia NS contributions (and they have none), I also get that error. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 16:02, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

However, since I did that and got the error, I can now see all edits. User:Zoe|^(talk) 16:03, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Problem is fixed. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 16:10, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick fix. User:Zoe|^(talk) 16:13, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't know what happened, but good to have it fixed so quickly. I guess it's just a matter of some patience. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 16:15, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't know... my watchlist is borked now. I can't view my "user talk" contributions without getting "Fatal error: Call to a member function set_namespace() on a non-object in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/SpecialContributions.php on line 183 (10.0.5.3)." ~MDD4696 16:42, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Huh. I logged out and logged back in, and now it's fixed. ~MDD4696 16:45, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

A developer, who is going to remain nameless, committed a silly typo to the code following some improvements. He fixed it as soon as we were alerted to it, and the fix was taken live. Rob Church (talk) 00:29, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Preferences / Chick Skin

I changed to this skin to see what it would look like. Didn't like it so tried to change back. It appeared that most of the menu titles were not active. Eventually, whilst trying to explain the exact situation on a simialr bugzilla report, I discovered that the links do esist but it is only when you hover the mouse over the very last letter in the menu item that they become active - very easily missed.

Should this skin be removed from use until it works correctly. I was very frustrated with the skin as is.

Johnmarkh 15:54, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Spoke too soon. Still stuck with the Chick skin. The 'Save' button is probably not over where the hyperlink is. Really fed up that I can't either change the skin back or use it it. The Search buttons 'Go and Search' are also free floating in the main text window. Help! Johnmarkh 16:07, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Looked in the source code and helpfully the programmer had written in (alt-s) next to the sasve button and I'm free !

Still I would strongly recommend that the skin is withdrawn Johnmarkh 16:12, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

A simpler way to escape the skin would be to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences?useskin=monobook which opens the preferences while "previewing" the default Monobook skin. --cesarb 14:35, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Cute. The preferences page could offer a link with that effect. Or better a link to reset the initial settings for new users. -- Omniplex 12:16, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Missing edits from "User contributions"?

As can be seen from my talk page history, 84.9.64.210 (talk · contribs) has made two edits to it; one was rolled back using popups, and another one using the administrator's rollback. However, none of the two are showing in his User contributions. Bug? dewet|™ 16:04, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

OK, that's just weird. It has reappeared, but only after 15 minutes of so worth of clicking "refresh". Odd. dewet|™ 16:06, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

See above.  :) User:Zoe|^(talk) 16:14, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

css: Font size for references

m:cite.php emits the references on the Mediawiki reserved tag <references/>. I've seen the html produced for this is <ol class="references">.

On a lot of articles, editors put the <references/> inside a <div style="font-size:85%"> (or 90%) which causes me having trouble reading that small font. But it seems like I'm a negligible old man and thus fail to convince the majority of youngsters with perfect sight to use a larger font for the references :-(.

Luckily, I can set a larger font in my own monobook.css. I have specified .references { font-size:111%; } there (to compensate for 90%).

Instead of specifying in each and every article <div style="font-size:85%"> before the <references/>, couldn't we agree to set that in Mediawiki:common.css or at least in Mediawiki:monobook.css as .references { font-size:85%; }?

This would also make it easier for me to set a larger font for myself by overriding that setting in my monobook.css.

As a side note, someone even created Template:Footnotes... (mentioned in Wikipedia:Footnotes).

Thanks for any comments and tips. I hope this is the right place to ask. --Ligulem 17:49, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Start with a font size where you can read small without effort. No joke, I got my glasses this year, and just spent some hours with rewriting a colour scheme I've used for more than a decade, because I couldn't read it anymore. With a W2K box you've somewhere the option to change all fonts to 150%. It has some minor side effects, you'll have to resize many folders, but otherwise it works. -- Omniplex 12:25, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Automatic resizing of images

We are currently trying to set standards for chemical structure images, see our discussion. I would like to permanently resolve an issue that often comes up but which no one really knows the answer to. If I have an image 2000px wide and 400 k in size, and it appears in an article at 200 px wide, how much bandwidth does this use compared to an image already at 200 px/4k? Is it the same? Is it 2 or 3 times as much, or does it require the full 400k to download (i.e., 100x as much as the 4k image)? Thanks, Walkerma 18:17, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

If you have a 400k file and put it in an article setting the size smaler it will be 400k to download. Mike _{(T C)} 18:41, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

No it won't: the image is scaled down on the server side. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 18:45, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Thumbnail size.

If you have a 1600x1200 image (that's 1920000 pixels total) and it's resized to 320x240 (76800 pixels), then it's 4% the size of the original. So, if the original was 400KB, then the resized one would be 16KB. This is just a rough estimate for JPEGs though, because the amount of detail that is visible greatly impacts how well the compression works. For GIFs and PNGs it should be more accurate.

My advice here is that you should disregard file sizes. This is a technical matter, and the devs have said multiple times that policy should not be based on such things. If bandwidth or other technical issues become a problem, the devs will come up with a technical solution. ~MDD4696 21:18, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, it can be a lot less accurate for GIFs and PNGs because the compression algorithm still has a tendancy to do interesting things with color depth. For example, converting a 1600x1200 four color image into a 320x480 with 24 bit color. Still, the "don't worry about it" principle basically holds. Stick with whatever size is reasonable for the article. A complicated 250px image is going to run you ~15k or so, and even a 52kpbs modem will swallow that fine. Dragons flight 22:26, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for comments so far. My concern is not for the poor overloaded servers, but for the poor folks trying to download the files. I used to live in rural Vermont, where my 56k modem used to download at around 2k per second, so one 400k image would take over 3 minutes to download. I presume this is also why we recommend pages be 32k or less. Many of our users are using old computers on old telephone lines, I want them to be able to load a typical chemistry page in 10 seconds, not 10 minutes. Walkerma 21:37, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

A thumbnail like the one on the right is no more than 20KB. ~MDD4696 22:05, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Reactions of alpha-pinene

What about this picture? The original is 65 kB, that is 678px by 546px? If I show it at half size (339px wide, as here), does it take up 16 kB while downloading, or does it take up 65 kB, or something in between? A long chemistry page might have 8 or more pictures like this, (i.e., perhaps up to 5 minutes downloading) so it is important, especially since we are setting the policy for about 10,000 pages. Thanks, Walkerma 04:14, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

The article size "limit" is to allow older browsers to be able to open the page for editing, which isn't an issue concerning images as they each require only a line of text in teh article. Rmhermen 04:20, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

You really shouldn't be setting policy based on how long a page takes to download; article quality should be the first concern. Download speeds vary so much computer to computer, and they're always increasing. To answer your question about downloading size--the file size of the original image does not matter when using thumbnails. An entirely new image is generated, which will be of a smaller file size since the thumbnail's physical dimenstions are smaller than the original. ~MDD4696 04:27, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, these points are both useful clarifications. I'm still unclear on one thing, though. The reason some are arguing for large images is in effect, "What if a user wants to use this image in a poster, where the image is blown up to be 50 cm across?" One of my pictures was used recently by the History Channel in a TV program, but they had to request I send a bigger image - you never know what these images may be used for! Many of our images need to be bigger than thumbnails on the page to be readable (see the example on the right). So should we be making humungous images, or not? Walkerma 04:49, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes we should. You wanted a clear answer, so I'll give you one: The size (in bytes) of a thumbnail image does not depend on the size (in bytes, or in pixels) of the original full-size image. Period. The only exceptions are if

1. the thumbnail would be bigger (in pixels) or the same size as the original, or
2. the original image is so huge (something like over 10000 pixels across) that the MediaWiki image resizing code can't handle it.

In those cases the original full-size image is sent to the browser as is. Also, it should be noted that, as a corollary to the rule above, thumbnails can be larger in bytes than the original image they are generated from. This is not, however, something one should usually worry about. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:44, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

You could try a vector format (MediaWiki has support for SVG). They can be scaled indefinitely, and for diagrams like these you are using as an example here, they are ideal. --cesarb 14:27, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

And don't worry about browser support for SVG, since MediaWiki automatically converts all the vector images to PNG when displaying on the pages. --cesarb 14:29, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

THANK YOU ILMARI! I particularly like the "period." That's exactly the specific answer I was looking for - I have found that even experienced Wikipedians aren't sure on this, they "think" it does what you say. Now we can lay down standards for chemistry images with confidence. For the sake of our own sanity we probably won't have images wider than about 3000 pixels, and probably most will be more like 1-2000. The SVG thing is interesting too, once this is supported on the major chem drawing software that people use we might recommend a switch to that. Walkerma 18:11, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

"dB SPL" is an invalid unit

Numerous articles in Wikipedia are using an invalid acoustic "unit", variously specified as "dB SPL", "dBSPL", and "dB(SPL)". There may be other variants. Affected articles include decibel, sound pressure, sound pressure level, and audiogram. But the full range of articles with the problem can best be seen by search for each specific variant. Such a search on "dB SPL" returns 21 Wikipedia articles.

The guidelines given for the US National Standards clearly excludes the use of "dB SPL". See the ASACOS Rules for Preparation of American National Standards in ACOUSTICS, MECHANICAL VIBRATION AND SHOCK, BIOACOUSTICS, and NOISE, which states:

3.16 Unit symbols

3.16.1 When to use unit symbols

In the text of the standard, the unit symbol for a quantity shall be used only when the unit is preceded by a numeral. When the unit is not preceded by a numeral, spell out the name of the unit. In text, even when a numerical value is given, it is desirable to spell out the name of the unit. Moreover, the name shall be spelled out when it first appears in the text, and more often if the text is lengthy.

Thus, in text write "...a sound pressure level of 73 dB; or "...a sound pressure level of 73 decibels." Do not write "sound pressure level in dB"; the correct form is "sound pressure level in decibels." Do not write "dB levels", "dB readings", or "dB SPL."

Levels or readings are not of decibels; they are of sound pressure levels or some other acoustical quantity. Write out the word "decibel" for such applications, and be sure that the word 'decibel' follows, not precedes the description of the relevant acoustical quantity.

The use of "dB SPL", as shown above by an authoritative source, is wrong. The incorrect use is common in Wikipedia articles, and it is a problem. I've been leaving a message in the talk sections of various articles that need to have this fixed. An attempted edit to begin correction of the decibel article was reverted to the incorrect usage.

The treatment of sound pressure level is inconsistent with standard reference works across Wikipedia. Both Kinsler and Frey's "Fundamentals of Acoustics" (2nd edition) and Robert Urick's "Principles of Underwater Sound" (3rd edition) indicate that a measured intensity is a level (Urick p.15) or sound pressure level (K&F) relative to a reference effective pressure (K&F pp.125-126). Both of these sources recommend reporting decibels with an explicit listing of the reference effective pressure, like so: "74 dB re 20 micropascals", where the number and units following re is the reference effective pressure. Level or sound pressure level in both these standard texts simply refer to a measurement in the sound field and are not indications of a specific reference pressure upon which the decibel is based. In other words, "dB SPL" is an invalid means of attempting to refer to the in-air reference effective pressure. In no article thus far have I seen the "dB SPL" usage tied to an authoritative source. By contrast, the "dB re" formalism is common to both standard reference works that I have cited, and is explicitly excluded in the work laying out the format for the national standards.

Other sites using the "dB re" formalism: Oceans of Noise (explicit in defining SPL and SIL in terms of "dB re"), SURTASS LFA, NIST listing SPL in terms of "dB re", and Acoustic Impacts on Marine Mammals.

On the decibel page, an edit lists having entered a better reference for use of "dB SPL". This "better reference" for use of "dB SPL" added to the decibel article ends up being a document that merely includes "dB SPL" in a list of terms. The glossary within the same document does not even list this supposed unit, even though weighted decibel terms are defined. The glossary in the file does have an entry for "sound pressure level", which is

Sound pressure level: (1) Ten times the logarithm to the base ten of the ratio of the time-mean-square pressure of a sound, in a stated frequency band, to the square of the reference sound pressure in gases of 20 micropascals (µPa). Unit, dB; symbol, Lp. (2) For sound in media other than gases, unless otherwise specified, reference sound pressure in 1 µPa (ANSI S1.1-1994: sound pressure level).

Notice that the unit specified is "dB", not "dB SPL". The inclusion of "dB SPL" in the list of terms does not establish that that usage is correct, and even their own reference of the ANSI standard indicates that their usage is incorrect. SPL refers to a measurement, and is not an indication of the reference effective pressure. The ANSI standard referenced makes this clear, as SPL is defined as being used for other reference effective pressures, too. (Note: The ANSI standard itself is not something I have on hand; I am relying on the quoted glossary in the referenced link. I did check and found another page that claims to have extracted that text without modification from the ANSI standard, and it matches. To get the PDF of the ANSI standard, one would have to pay $150.)

A reasonable question to ask is why, if the term is incorrect, does Wikipedia have so many articles that use it? Since SPL is a useful concept, people do report measurements of various SPLs. I think that the shorthand way that this may commonly be done (and which the writing guideline above warns against and the ANSI standard contradicts) would be to say, "We recorded a 74 dB SPL at 10 meters from the sound source," rather than, "We recorded a sound pressure level of 74 dB at 10 meters from the sound source," or the complete, "We recorded a sound pressure level of 74 decibels re 20 micropascals at 10 meters from the sound source," which is unambiguous. If one uses the shortcut of the first example a lot, one may become erroneously convinced that the actual unit of measurement is a "dB SPL". This may be more common among people who do all their acoustic work using only one assumed reference effective pressure. Within a particular community, actually writing out each measurement with the reference effective pressure indicated may appear to be redundant and a waste of space and time. Because reference effective pressures have changed in the past, published reports that failed to specify which one corresponded to a particular measurement has made comparison to modern measurements ambiguous, and thus unreliable.

If the "dB SPL" problem is going to be fixed, we must have some agreement among those who regularly contribute to the acoustics articles on Wikipedia that there really is a problem here. The incorrect usage is otherwise too pervasive in existing Wikipedia articles to risk starting edit wars that will simply waste people's time.

Wesley R. Elsberry 21:05, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Templates for Suit (cards)

I raised this before... sometimes... somewhere... can't find it anymore. Basically, the default font symbols for card suits (I'll use hearts throughout) are a) all black b) too small c) thus, difficult to distinguish. Compare:

♥K
<font color="red" size="4">&hearts;</font>K

resulting in

♥K
♥K

Since they're used in many pages on many places (I'm mainly interested in Category:Bridge, it is a real pain to type full text every time. To ensure consistency, I meant to make a template out of it ({{Hsuit}} or {{hearts}}), but at the time I was told that it would significantly increase server load. Is it still the case? – wikisoftware has undergone many improvements since. I'd pretty like the answer that I have a free way to go here. Duja 22:23, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

You could create a template as a subpage in your userspace and then just subst it everywhere, i.e. {{subst:User:Duja/Hearts}}. ~MDD4696 02:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

But that a) almost doesn't save typing b) beats purpose of the template. A wikifriend even suggested editing monobook.js so that clicking on the symbol inserts the entire sequence instead of just symbol. At least, if possible, that would save typing. I'd still prefer the pure templates though. Duja 15:05, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Random thoughts, there's a template for chess positions on Help:Template, it uses inline PNGs. You could create 52 PNGs - I'd prefer GIF or JPG because my browser doesn't support inline PNG, but let's ignore this oddity :-) Or four templates as you said, IMO better than the picture idea. Something like {{coeur|K}} or {{coeur|A D 10}}. This won't hurt the servers more than other templates we already use everywhere. For hardcore backwards compatibility you could use red h+d, and black s+c. If backwards compatibility isn't important you could use <span style="color: red"> instead of <font color="red">. In theory you could get away with a pure colour solution c: red on white, d: white on red, etc., but that's the point where it would break for text browsers (unless you add some media CSS tricks - also a good idea for speech browsers). -- Omniplex 12:51, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the ideas. Once I get the template and its associations working, it wouldn't be a problem to get the template to work "in the best way". The bottom line for my question was, though:

Is it OK (from the server load point of view) to have templates which will be used in average 10 times per page, on cca. 200-400 pages?

If it is, I'll go on to define the templates and perform replacement where necessary (btw, what would be the right tool for the job?). Duja 21:39, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Search update frequency?

How often does the search update itself. Adventures of Mottel the Cantor's Son was created back on the 20th, but it's not showing up. -- Zanimum 02:09, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

There is no schedule at this time. It depends on when I have time to poke it between other data-dump-related thingies. With luck we can turn back on the automated updates some time soon, this depends on server fixes. --Brion 07:19, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Musical Album Sidebars

Due to wikipedia's extensive help section, i can't seem to find anything relating to the sidebars located under most music album pages. Can someone help me figure out how to insert one? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Meddling (talk • contribs) 03:31, 12 April 2006.

These are called infoboxes. There is a category for infoboxes as well--you may be looking for {{Album infobox}}. Don't forget to sign your posts with four tildes (~~~~). ~MDD4696 04:32, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

What happened with class="toccolours"??

Apparently, someone just reduced the padding for it, but I can't find *where*. It doesn't seem to be on either MediaWiki:Common.css or MediaWiki:Monobook.css... Circeus 15:35, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

nevermind... Looks like an issue of display between IE and Fx... Circeus 16:08, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Builtin conditionals and mathematical expressions enabled

From http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034892.html:

The extension for mathematical expressions and conditional constructs has been enabled on all
Wikimedia wikis, on a trial basis. Documentation is at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions

See the talk page for discussion.

-- Tim Starling

--cesarb 15:35, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Great to hear! Are these usages automagically recorded in a way that we can search for pages utilizing them? — xaosflux ^Talk 20:15, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Since this is currently on a 'trial basis' I suggest we hold off on wholesale conversion of hundreds of templates. I've been implementing the changes on 'high profile' pages such as Wikipedia:Featured content, Template:Tomorrow, Template:Babel-X, et cetera as a proof of concept. If there is a problem and these new features have to be rolled back then we only have to restore a few pages to their old forms. On the other hand, if the new features hold up without problems in heavy use on these high traffic pages then they'll presumably be kept in permanently and we can start the process of converting every little infobox over to use the new capabilities. --CBDunkerson 22:45, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

{{See also}} looks OK so far, checked 1 to 8 links.

--William Allen Simpson 05:51, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I'll copy my response about it being a trial from wikitech-l to here:

The main reason I'm calling it a trial is to avoid appearing to have made a unilateral decision to enable it permanently. The critics of this concept now have one final chance to turn community opinion against it, before it becomes ingrained. However the reception has generally been positive. I've received a number of private compliments on it, in addition to what can be seen publically.

There's also the possibility of bugs and syntax changes. We've already had one syntax change: I changed the whitespace handling in #if to mirror the behaviour in template parameters, to allow for easier conversion and neater multi-line syntax. There's also a pending suggestion to allow whitespace between the #if and the colon, and a suggestion to make #if treat "0" as true, both of which may well be implemented.

One of Gangleri's syntax suggestions sounded quite reasonable and I may well implement it. The idea if I understand it correctly was to treat pipe characters beyond the specified maximum number of arguments literally, e.g. {{#if: 1 || literal pipe: | }}.

-- Tim Starling 04:27, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

How to format A-Z internal links within a page?

I want to create a line of characters from A to Z. It's to appear at the head of a page. Each character needs to be an internal link within the page. The idea is that users click on, say letter H, and they're taken to the entries for H on that page.

Lots of list-type pages have this style of page navigation, but i can't find the code for it.

You'll see the page I want to modify if you search for: "Children's Non-Fiction / Nonfiction Authors".

The current A to Z listing appears in a vertical numbered column -- I'd like it to be horizontal and unnumbered!

Thanks for your help.

So like this: A B C D etc? Mike _{(T C)} 22:20, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, exactly like this -- but [[ ]] style seems to direct users to pages about letters of the alphabet (A, B, C, etc), which takes them away from the page I want them to stay on. My page will have an alphabetical list of authors, with an A B C D at the top. When you click on D, I want them to be taken to the entries for D on the same page -- not off to the entry for the history of the letter D. Hope you can see what I'm trying to do. Many thanks, John

You want {{compactTOC2}} template, but then all the headings must be in form ==A==, ==B== etc. It's used mostly for glossaries – see List of glossaries. I myself just stole the design from somewhere to create Contract bridge glossary – you can steal it yourself from there :-). HTH, Duja 23:19, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

P.S.: If you want to do it yourself rather than to use {{compactTOC2}}, The form [[#HeadingTitle]] is an "internal link". For example, [[#Spellings]] will get you to #Spellings heading above. Duja 23:23, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Yea I understand what you want, I was just using the above example to see if that is the format you wanted them in. Duja's answer is exactly what you wanted though! Mike _{(T C)} 03:06, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Page icon

Has the little image that appears next to the URL and in the tabs in Firefox been changed to the Wikimedia logo? It looks ugly. Dmn € Դմն 00:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I saw it earlier, though it appears to have been changed. Try clearing your cache. ~Linuxerist L / T 02:32, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

New template + category

Hello! I've recently created Template:User LEO contributor with [[:Category:LEO contributors|PAGENAME]], and I have also created the relevant category. Now I have the userbox on my user page, but I am not listed in the category. Could anyone help (explain), please? Thank you in advance. Daniel Šebesta (talk • contribs) 00:13, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I did a null edit on your user page and purged (by appending "?action=purge" to the URL) the category. One of the things did the trick. Kusma (討論) 00:22, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Perfect! Thank you. Daniel Šebesta (talk • contribs) 06:22, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Article Violation

Sorry, I am uncertain where to put this, what to do with it. If it belongs elsewhere, move ot, but let me know on my talk so I can keep up. Anyways, I found http://www.worldhistory.com/, which uses Wikipedia articles. I found the site, and knew they were Wikpedia articles, yet http://www.worldhistory.com/legal.php was the only mention I could find to Wikipedia. ~Linuxerist L / T 02:29, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

That could be the worst website I have ever seen, their ads are HALF the page vertically. They do seem to be lifting wikipedia content with following the GFDL licence. There is a certain area of wikipedia to report this, i will find it and post your answer there. Mike _{(T C)} 03:07, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay thanks, could you give me the link, as I might be able to find some more with some Clustering. ~Linuxerist L / T 03:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GFDL_Compliance is the link I do believe! Mike _{(T C)} 03:10, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Wow, I can't believe all of those bad mirrors... Okay thanks. ~Linuxerist L / T 03:16, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Can I delete myself as a user?

I wish to delete myself as a user. Is that possible?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Eduardo.oyanedel (talk • contribs) 21:36, 12 April 2006.

Hi! You can blank your own user page, and talk page, but because the GFDL requires attribution information to be retained, it is not typically possible to entirely delete a user. Remember that all your contributions are licensed once you make them so if you blank things, others may revert (and thus restore) what you blanked. What most people do is just stop using their account going forward. Hope that helps. ++Lar: t/c 03:27, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

You can place {{db-owner}} on your user page to have it deleted. This won't affect your account, though. -- stillnotelf is invisible 03:38, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Nevermind, I now see that you don't have a user page. -- stillnotelf is invisible 03:39, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Is there a way to cancel all passwords or something like that, thus preventing further use of an account? Ardric47 03:53, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not as sure of the answer to this one but I don't think there is. A user has one password at a time. What one could do would be set it to a really long string of gibberish that you did not even think about as you typed and then deliberately not remember what it was. Not sure if you could also set your email account to gibberish so effectively, no new password could be obtained... ++Lar: t/c 04:08, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

How long until wikipedia runs out of hard drive space from storing every edit? DyslexicEditor 06:43, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Never. Hard drives keep getting bigger. --Brion 09:23, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Toolserver?

Is the "en.wikipedia.org is no longer updated" notice at tools.wikimedia.de a permanent situation? If so we'll never get out of the orphaned fairuse/untagged images backlog - gmaxwell's tool was our only hope. Is discussion of this taking place somewhere else? (ESkog)^(Talk) 03:22, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe there is some discussion as to how to bring it back on the toolserver mailing list. --lightdarkness ^(talk) 03:23, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

It's being worked out. --Brion 07:55, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Problem: Outdated WP always loads instead of the updated one (Part 2).

After much work done, I discovered that it's not a time zone problem since I always browse WP in the evening and at night (UTC +8). It's something else. The WP with the old layout doesn't load anymore but whenever I load up WP, the Main Page shows up yesterdays page! I don't know, but when I refreshed the page using the ordinary F5 technique, it became worse! It loaded up the Main Page that shows April 8! Only through the Ctrl+F5 technique will the up-to-date WP load up. What's wrong here?!? Before you answer my comments, remember that I'm using MS Internet Explorer and that I might never clear the IE cache since my internet connection is horrible at night. --Bruin rrss23 (talk) 09:43, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Try appending ?action=purge to the URL. æle ✆ 2006-04-13t20:16z

Note that if the main page is based on use of {{CURRENTDAY}} etc to select templates, it won't automatically clear from caches properly. --Brion 22:15, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Cool user names

How can some users sign their names and it comes out with cool font color and everything?

Examples:

•  -- Run! 
• --lightdarkness ^(talk)
• stillnotelf is invisible

Jonathan W 15:30, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Goto "My Preferences" and there is a box called signature there. Check raw siganture then use wikicode to make a signature for yourself. View the source to this question to look at what makes up the signature examples you have provided. ie paste this into your signature box[[User:Jonathan W|<font size="-2" color="red" style="background:blue"> Jonathan W</font>]] to get this  Jonathan W Mike _{(T C)} 16:06, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

You realy made an ugly example :) _→AzaToth 16:08, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

And where is YOUR example. It was better than nothing =) I'm not a designer. Mike _{(T C)} 21:46, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Azatoth had colors in his sig! (so do I...) just not QUITE as loudly instructive as your example! Smile.++Lar: t/c 22:26, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

All right, thanks a lot. That really helps. Jonathan W 00:10, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Hey, but I can't find anything about my signature in my prefs! Jonathan W 00:10, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

DUH my fault, its called nickname sorry!! Mike _{(T C)} 00:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Highlighted links

I'm getting fed up with the inability of 'experts' on here to provide an answer as to how to switch off and on the highlighted links on a page. It is poor design to default to highlighting links as they are 99% irrelevant to the article in question. If this isn't already available then somebody should have it done by the end of the week.

Thanks for volunteering to improve the Wikimedia software. However, this is the wrong forum to submit patches; they should all go to http://bugs.wikimedia.org/. Thanks for your interest and constructive feedback, though! dewet|™ 16:31, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

"Highlighted links"? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that terminology. æle ✆ 2006-04-13t20:13z

I don't know how those sarcastic comments (?) are supposed to help, but in "my preferences", go to the "Misc" tab and there should be a drop-down menu for "Underline links:". Ardric47 00:50, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, I had no idea what the original commenter what referring to either. Also, by default links are not underlined, so I have a feeling this is not what he was talking about. ~MDD4696 00:53, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

They were for me... Ardric47 01:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Ah, the default is "Browser default". In Firefox and IE6, with the Monobook skin, this renders as not underlined. You created your account quite some time ago, so something probably changed. ~MDD4696 01:31, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Just been Attacked

I've been attacked by a bug that is causing the sig to malfunction. Someone will think it is a sockpuppet, or some such nonsense. Cleared out everything on my end to kill it. Martial Law 20:47, 13 April 2006 (UTC) :)

Is this a serious comment or a paranormal experience? ~MDD4696 01:00, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Network problem

Just a note: we're currently experiencing a problem with an upstream network provider (Level3) which has blocked access to Wikipedia for various people for the last 20 minutes or so. It's in process of being fixed, and should be all fine in a few more minutes. --Brion 22:17, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Should be working for most people by now. --Brion 22:31, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

No. It is NOT. I'm getting S...........................................l........................o.............................

w................................................. response time of 30 sec. to 1 min time, then "Operation has Tmed out." signals. I have a watch with a stopwatch function. Martial Law 23:05, 13 April 2006 (UTC) :)

This is functioning a LOT better now. Martial Law 23:07, 13 April 2006 (UTC) :)

Appreciate the assisstance. Martial Law 23:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC) :)

Not sure if I'm thinking of the same thing you are, but for the past hour or so, I haven't been able to access any of Wikipedia. It seems to be resolved now, though. (Specifically, the problem was the pages not loading. Domain resolved and all, just no page.) --SheeEttin 23:22, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm wondering why Level3 would've blocked Wikipedia... is that some sort of routine thing they do to high traffic sites? Kind of disruptive. ~MDD4696 00:55, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

When you have a temporary power failure, do you wonder why the power company "blocked" you? --Brion 09:22, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes because I vandalized their transmission lines! Mike _{(T C)} 15:26, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Template Sandbox

If I want to experiment with templates, in the way that the Sandbox is used to experiment with articles, how would I do that? Ardric47 00:54, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

You can create userspace subpages. For example, I have a sandbox and a playground for this purpose; I create the template in the sandbox, and preview it on the playground. ~MDD4696 00:57, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Do templates work as templates within the User namespace (i.e. not in the Template namespace)? Ardric47 01:01, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I ask because I'm not sure that I can answer that based on your pages, because I don't understand the complicated features that you are using. Ardric47 01:03, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, you can transclude or subst any user page or subpage; it doesn't have to be in the Template namespace. –Tifego^(t) _{02:19, 14 April 2006 (UTC)}

You can also use one of the various Template:Sandbox. There is a difference between transcluding from template space and other pages: you have to purge a page if you modify an included page that is not in the template space (I don't know if this has changed lately, however) - Liberatore(T) 15:34, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't think this has ever been the case. The only difference is that the software prepends the template namespace if a namespace is not specified. --cesarb 20:34, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Font color

When I type in: <font color = "#668535">SAMPLE TEXT</font>, it comes out looking like this: SAMPLE TEXT. What does that strange number mean? And how can I edit it to make a different font color? Jonathan 01:29, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and one more thing: When I type in <font color = "grey">SAMPLE TEXT</font>, it looks like this: SAMPLE TEXT. That font color looks more like GREEN than GREY to me! Jonathan 01:34, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

The number is the hexadecimal representation of a color. Colors in CSS can be defined by their "number" (#FF0000 or #F00) or by name (red). The number is in the format #RRGGBB, where R is the amount of red, G green and so on. Black is #000000 and white is #FFFFFF. ~MDD4696 01:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, use <span style="color: #669966;">SPAN</span> instead of FONT. ~MDD4696 01:38, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

In case it wasn't obvious from the post above, a higher number (FF = 255) corropsonds to more of that color; a lower number (00 = 0) corrosponds to less. So 000000 is the absence of all color (black). FFFFFF is the maxmium presense of all colors (white). FF0000 is maximum red, no green, and no blue, so it would be pure red; 00FF00 is maximum green with no red and no blue; 0000FF is maximum blue, with no red and no green. Raul654 01:40, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

OK, but why "FF"? Why not "99"? Jonathan 01:56, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Jonathan - Most human number systems are based around the number ten (e.g, the decimal system). In a decimal system, numbers like 1, 10, 100, 1000, (and for similiar reasons, one less than each value - 9, 99, 999, 'etc)) are important. However, the easiest way to answer your question is to say that the binary nature of computers makes exponents of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 'etc) very important numbers (as a computer engineer, I have these memorized up to about 65,556 or so). Corrospondingly, one less than each of those values (0, 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, 63, 127, 255, 'etc) are also fairly important. To a computer, 99 is a meaingless unimportant number. Most computers use 8 bits (true/false values) to store color information for each of the three primary colors (red, green, and blue). You've probably heard of "24 bit color" when setting your monitor - that's eight bits per color times three colors. Thus, the most they can count is 2 raised to the 8th power, or 256 (actually, it's not 1 to 256, but 0 to 255) Raul654 02:19, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Because it is expressed in hex not in decimal (follow the link you were given for hexadecimal), by convention (and to be easier to calculate believe it or not. FF is 255 decimal in hex (base 16), the largest unsigned 8 bit number. 24bit color values use 3 pairs of hex digits. If they were expressed as decimal numbers it would be very confusing. As for knowing what #669966 means, there are a number of tools out there that let you convert between RGB, CSV, HSV, etc etc, and even let you grab the color of something you like. I like Pixie for this, but there are others. Hope that helps. ++Lar: t/c 02:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and can you tell me how to get a border for my sig? Jonathan 02:05, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Getting a border is a formatting question. Read the helps on how to format things, and read about raw signatures, they should help you out. ++Lar: t/c 02:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

See web colors for a tutorial on how to choose and set colors.-gadfium 02:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Nobody directly answered why "grey" displayed as green, I think. Here's the answer: Because the "e" in "grey" is in the slot for green in the hex. "grey" isn't a recognized color, so it expands it to the hex string "grey00", but because "g", "r", and "y" aren't valid hex characters, they're replaced with 0's, and the string is treated as "00e000" which is a green color. If you use "gray" instead of "grey", then it will actually show up as the color you meant, although hex is usually better because it gives you more control over the color and its brightness. –Tifego^(t) _{02:37, 14 April 2006 (UTC)}

Ha ha! Funny bug in Internet Explorer! I didn't even know what he was talking about until I checked... Firefox interprets the name properly. A browser really shouldn't interpret that as hex unless there is a pound sign. ~MDD4696 02:59, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I though the mediawiki software was responsible for converting recognized colors to hex for the browser, I guess not (never checked). –Tifego^(t) _{03:19, 14 April 2006 (UTC)}

Don't worry, my ten years old mozilla 3 also displays "grey" as "green". Try "gray" (A), or lightgrey (E), all other gray like darkgray insist on (A) with my browser, e.g. darkgrey is pink. -- Omniplex 13:19, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Safari displays them all as gray. æle ✆ 2006-04-14t15:34z

OK, thanks for explaining it to me. Jonathan 7:32 PM April 14 2006

Wikimedia Toolserver

A series of tools are hosted on the Wikimedia Toolserver (at http://tools.wikimedia.de ). The server used to receive regular updates from the wikipedia database. Since 2 days, it appears that these updates are no longer available (see User_talk:Interiot#Toolserver_is_effectively_down).

Personally, I used some of the tools, such as CategoryIntersect.php (which makes use of the numerous categories) or suspected_living_people.py (which is used to expand Category:Living people).

In the past, we could run queries directly on Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Database_queries). The toolserver made available a series of standardized queries to everyone.

In the future, will the "Toolserver" be updated again? -- User:Docu

Scroll up. --Brion 09:21, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Images

All the images appear broken at the moment. Does anyone else have this problem? --GW_Simulations 12:43, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

 ** They are working again now. --GW_Simulations 13:10, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm still noticing this problem while accessing WP from two different ISPs. -- Gridlock Joe 15:33, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Probably a DNS dissemination slowdown -- getting "unable to resolve" error for upload.wikimedia.org. -- Gridlock Joe 18:03, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Formula rendering broken?

At Apr 14, 2006, 11:14 AM (GMT-3), it seems that formula rendering in PNG is not working. Can anyone check that? --zanderredux 14:15, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

As of GMT 14:18, it's working fo me. Isopropyl 14:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

It's back! Thanks! --zanderredux 14:22, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Signature

I'm STILL having problems with my signature!!!

I designed my signature like this:

<font size="2" color=#00FF00 style="background:#884400"> Jonathan</font>

so it's supposed to look like this:

Jonathan

But when I type in four tildes ~~~~ for my sig. it looks like this:

<font size="2" color=#00FF00 style="background:#884400"> Jonathan</font> 18:44, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Appearantly that's about Wikipedia turns "<" into "& l t ;". Why don't other users like --lightdarkness have this problem?

After I fix this problem, I aslo want a link to my talk page and an image of the Canadian flag next to my signature: Jonathan ^talk File:Canada flag 300.png (See my talk page). But I'm gonna try to fix this problem first.

Jonathan 7:40 PM Apr 14 2006

Right, what you need to do is tick the box next to "Raw signature (no auto link; don't use templates or external links in this)", and then manually append the link code around the signature, so for example type:

[[User Jonathan|<font size="2" color=#00FF00 style="background:#884400"> Jonathan</font>]]

for your initial example, and the latter can be produced with:

[[User Jonathan|<font size="2" color=#00FF00 style="background:#884400"> Jonathan</font>]] ^{<font size="-1"> [[User talk:Jonathan W|talk]] </font>} [[Image:Canada flag 300.png|30px]]

I hope this helps! Ian13/talk 18:49, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Just as a note though - many users object to images in signatures, due to extra server strain and load time. Ian13/talk 18:51, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Uh...thanks for all the help, but now it says: Invalid raw signature; check HTML tags. Jonathan 18:58, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Right, well that means some of your code is wrong. I'm no expert but try this:

[[User Jonathan|<span style="background:#884400; size:2; color:#00FF00;"> Jonathan</span>]] ^{<span style="size:-1;"> [[User talk:Jonathan W|talk]] </span>} [[Image:Canada flag 300.png|30px]]

Just tested, and it worked for me. Ian13/talk 19:07, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to fix your signature. In your case, it's missing a couple of double quotes. --cesarb 20:31, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Mind you, my new fixed example uses span instead of font which is better. Ian13/talk 21:12, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Image not showing in Unit_operation

What am I doing wrong here? Is the image size too big? It shows as a thin gray line (which appears to be the correct number of pixels wide as specified in the image markup ( [[Image:LOC MI0086 QuincyMine TIF 00027aS.png|right|thumb|400px|Ore Extraction unit operations at [[Quincy Mine]], [[Hancock, MI]] ca. 1900]] ) in Firefox rather than the thumb I expected. Clicking the line takes you to the image page correctly... thanks! ++Lar: t/c 19:31, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Think I got the problem. It wasn't really a PNG, it was still in TIF formatt. Should all be fixed now (new png version uploading). Ian13/talk 19:42, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Ah, maybe not - unless it's Wiki cache working its magic. Ian13/talk 19:44, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Also - whats the images licence - since the image description seems untagged. Tagged as USGOV-PD as per note in description. Ian13/talk 19:47, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into this. It's from HAER so, the license maybe should be {{PD-USGov}}, as you surmised (I set it correctly on the crop I took, Image:LOC MI0086 QuincyMine TIF 00027a cropStampMill.png but apparently not on this one, oops!). It was a tif when I got it from HAER but I thought I had converted it to png correctly before uploading. Perhaps Paint Shop Pro (what I use first, although I have ImageMagick and know about GIMP) didn't really convert it?? I'm still hazy about whether these should go on Commons or here, pd-gov confuses me. (different topic) It doesn't look like the problem is fixed yet though. For me, in fact, you no longer can click through to the image page from unit operation++Lar: t/c 20:01, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Weird, I can still click through. Well, I manually opened the origional file in my text editor (how primitave of me!), and it mentioned TIF on the first couple of lines, which is usually an indicator of file format. So I converted it over, and reuploaded. I am not sure if it is a cache thats still giving the scaling renderer the old one, or another problem. But I will take another look tomorow morning if someone doesn't beat me to it. Ian13/talk 20:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I can click through too, it was user error, my old fingers didn't put the cursor in the right place, sorry for the bum steer on that one. I will try using some of my other tools to convert the image if I can, that's the biggest image I ever tried to convert with Paint Shop Plus... I may end up trying to find another image for the article as, the image is neat but may not look good at 400 px anyway because it has so much writing on it. ++Lar: t/c 20:16, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

This is very odd - for me now there is no image at all (even on image description). Ian13/talk 21:02, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Yey! Fixed! It seems to all work now I have lowered the resolution - maybe the rendering software couldn't cope with it. It is also now a valid PNG (rather than still in TIF). Ian13/talk 21:08, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Well done, sir. It really does liven up the article, I feel... If someone needs the original for whatever reason (like snipping other machines out of it as I did for Stamp mill) the link is there to go fetch the original. In downsizing it you seem to have made it easier on the eye too, well played. Cheers for your efforts. 21:25, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Glad to be of service. Ian13/talk 21:36, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Unprotection auto summaries?

Are these useful? They don't remove the tag for me, so I still have to go write an edit summary. -Splash^talk 21:47, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

One page that causes a Wikimedia error...

I have been trying to get Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies to load, and for some reason, the page gives me the Wikimedia error message, whereas no other page does this. I can work my way to the discussion and the history page, but am unable to reach the above page. Does anyone know how to fix this error?

Indiana Fats 22:31, 14 April 2006 (UTC)