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Shortcut
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.

Frequently Asked Questions:

  • 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.
  • The search index is often out of date, sometimes taking weeks before it's updated. Because of that, recent changes are not immediately reflected on the search.
  • If all the links in the articles suddenly become underlined (or the opposite), it's probably because your browser failed to load one of the stylesheets. Do a forced reload or bypass your cache.
  • If you have problems making your fancy signature work, check Wikipedia:How to fix your signature.
  • If you changed to another skin and cannot change back, use =monobook this link.

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

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.

I don't know how to add things into the info box. Specifically, Capital News Service (MI) and Michigan State University Residence Halls Association need to be added into the following infobox:

~~

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
...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)[reply]
And it'd be a major pain to replace ALL American/Commonwealth spelling with the template. Werdna648T/C\@ 18:58, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

A similar proposal was introduced months ago by PizzaMargherita on the MoS talk page, but it went nowhere (none of the MediaWiki people actually volunteered to implement it). --153.18.105.221 21:28, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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:

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

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)[reply]
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)[reply]

Odd, they worked for me when I changed my preferences to each, and viewed pages such as Detroit and Chicago.

And I never tried with different font sizes. I expect that nothing positioned "absolute" will work when the font size changes.

Nostalgia is supposed to fit between the lines on the left, like CologneBlue, just under "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" avoiding the globe on the right. Now tried it increasing and decreasing font +2, +1, -1, and -2 sizes, and worked like a charm on FireFox!

Standard is supposed to fit on the right, like monobook, under the line. Don't know about the "HTML table", as it doesn't appear in the source, unless you are talking about the search box. There's no conflict there. Now tried it increasing and decreasing font +2, +1, -1, and -2 sizes, and worked like a charm on FireFox, staying right under the search box. Heck, works better than the title line (that moves all over the place).

Oh well, unless somebody steps forward and does some serious testing, looks like those two lose out....

--William Allen Simpson 09:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with the Standard skin is that the coordinates overlap the "In other languages" links. Unfortunately, the way the "topbar" in the skin is set up, it's really hard to find a place for the coordinates that wouldn't overlap something at some font sizes. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 11:16, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
For reasons like this I think the coordinates should be left inline in those skins, out of the way of the article text (i.e., at the bottom), and should never be used in Geo templates or cityboxes. — Saxifrage ✎ 07:08, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

(Corrected times above.) --Brion 01:52, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Bloody hell. Can't you all just follow the UK ;) Rob Church (talk) 01:57, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
As the channel topic stated, and as was announced on a periodic basis; those who required voicing in order to participate in some sort of sensible discussion were free to /msg a channel operator and ask for it. Regular channel users and the odd newcomer were also voiced on sight. 86.140.128.28 21:24, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
IRC links work with colloquy. It's a nice app. ericg ✈ 16:46, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
I agree completely with Ligulem. Omniplex, I think you're missing the point about readability; this 'wrap references in a div' stuff is ridiculous. There's no reason to have hundreds of div style tags scattered around the wikipedia when it could be changed once in monobook.css; once that's done, we can AWB the divs out. ericg ✈ 19:01, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. — ceejayoz talk 20:48, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion continued at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#proposed change to css (.references) --Francis Schonken 12:04, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
{{See also}} looks OK so far, checked 1 to 8 links.
--William Allen Simpson 05:51, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
His new {{#: wh|at|ev|er}} proposal is better, it works also for the then part. -- Omniplex 01:25, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've created a new cat category:Templates using ParserFunctions. This cat might get deleted as soon as m:ParserFunctions moves from "trial" to "released". --Ligulem 10:17, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Topped! Look at my user page at this site: [1]! Linuxerist L/T 23:40, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GFDL_Compliance is the link I do believe! Mike (T C) 03:10, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, I can't believe all of those bad mirrors... Okay thanks. ~Linuxerist L / T 03:16, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Cool user names

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

Examples:

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

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)[reply]
You realy made an ugly example :) →AzaToth 16:08, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
And where is YOUR example. It was better than nothing =) I'm not a designer. Mike (T C) 21:46, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
All right, thanks a lot. That really helps. Jonathan W 00:10, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, but I can't find anything about my signature in my prefs! Jonathan W 00:10, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
DUH my fault, its called nickname sorry!! Mike (T C) 00:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Do note, however, that custom sigs can be considered more silly than cool, and that what's really cool is spending time on improving the encyclopedia, rather than on such frivolous pursuits. —Steve Summit (talk) 22:16, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I only edit wikipedia to look cool. ericg ✈ 22:26, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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

Hello, I too feel the underlined links are kind of a pain. I'm running Firefox 1.5.0.2, and I have unchecked the 'underline links' box. Unfortunately, the links in Wikipedia, and no other sites, are underlined. I did try clearing cache and bypassing cache. Any suggestions are appreciated! --AnthonyA7 08:42, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, by the way, the box 'Allow pages to choose their own colors' is checked, because otherwise I wouldn't get nice backround graphics and such. --AnthonyA7 08:44, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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) :)[reply]

Is this a serious comment or a paranormal experience? ~MDD4696 01:00, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Good one. This bug is causing some problems. Just got hit by it, and this may be caused by a tech glitch. Martial Law 05:47, 15 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]
Maybe you should explain what's happening and give a link or two, because I don't think what you said makes sense to anyone else. –Tifego(t) 06:09, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
My Userpage's history file has two reverts done by Admins to a "anon account".hold on, i'll get the designation of this alien account.Martial Law 06:45, 15 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]
The alien account created by this sockbug is 66.112.107.221. I have cleaned out my browsers everytime I log on here. This thing is a known sock bug. This thing is so bad it'll make Bugzilla puke. Martial Law 06:53, 15 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]
I still don't understand what you mean, a anon made an edit to your userpage and what else? I'[m comfused!Mike (T C) 07:09, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
So am I. I hope this thing does not strike during a heated discussion. Had it before, and was told that if this thing hits, to explain that a bug exists that will cause the user to be a sock of someone else. I clear out my end, then log into this site, and the bug hits 1/5th to 1/4th of the times I, or someone else logs into this site. It causes the designated sig to be knocked offline, the Wikipedian does not relize that happened, he or she makes a edit on a talk page, article page, etc., and instead of the designated sig, this mess appears: 112.123.789.007 in place of the lawful sig, which can lead someone to be accused of being a sockpuppet or worse by one or more other Wikipedians. Martial Law 08:17, 15 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]
May I suggest that that's your IP address, and you weren't logged in at the time? What do the admin reverts have to do with it, 66.112.107.221 isn't your IP address is it? –Tifego(t) 08:20, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That is what I am thinking now, but I am still confused about what he is asking/trying to get across. 112.123.789.007 does not exist either, cant traceroute, cant whois, weird. Mike (T C) 12:06, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
112.123.789.007 is not a valid IP address (789 > 255). Maybe he was just making up a number as an example. —Veyklevar 15:37, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That IP is only an example of what has been going on. Some Admin thought it was a new IP. Before logging in, I clean out the browsers. Recently, something forced Wikipedia to be down, such as a server failure due to a problem with the power supply, then something else forced Wikipedia to be downed for nearly 20-60 min. I was wondering if the software got affected by these glitches. Really do appreciate your patience, assisstance in this matter. I'll be keeping a eye on this in the future.Martial Law 19:08, 15 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]

Martial Law, can you show us a page where this has happened? By that, I mean a page where this "bug" has caused your signature to malfunction? Joyous | Talk 19:27, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My Userpage's History file shows this, twice. The alien account is 66.112.107.221. I don't think that is my correct IP.
Now I have a edit conflict - with myself ?! Martial Law 20:05, 15 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]

Maybe Martial Law is using "signature" a little unclearly? The description makes more sense to me if I read "login" every time he says "signature." On that reading, he's getting involuntarily logged out from time to time, without noticing, so that some of his edits aren't being credited properly. FreplySpang (talk) 20:07, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's what it seems like to me. Martial Law, if you are clearing out your browser every time you visit Wikipedia, you will not stay logged in. You will only stay logged in if you DO NOT clear out your cookies. Go to http://www.whatismyip.com to see what your IP is, and see if it is similar to the anon IP. ~MDD4696 20:35, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Just been there. It is my current IP. Really do appreciate the patience and assisstance. Can the IP location link be placed on my Userpage w/ the rest of the links ? Martial Law 22:06, 15 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
Do templates work as templates within the User namespace (i.e. not in the Template namespace)? Ardric47 01:01, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Thanks everyone; my template is working so far (it's a test version of a replacement for Template:Long). I guess the text "You start a new template in the same way you would start a normal page. The only difference is that its title must start with Template:" in Help:A quick guide to templates is not entirely correct, then? Ardric47 23:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not entirely correct if you think in a technical sense; however, if you think in a policy sense, it's entirely correct (if you do not use the Template namespace, you'll be yelled at). --cesarb 00:38, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Nobody has yelled at me...although I am doing it on my user pages. Ardric47 01:23, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you try to add it to an article without first moving to the template namespace, you'll be yelled at ☺. --cesarb 02:42, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

As of GMT 14:18, it's working fo me. Isopropyl 14:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's back! Thanks! --zanderredux 14:22, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There still seems to be a problem on Conservation of angular momentum, lots of parse errors << Failed to parse (Can't write to or create math output directory): >>? Same seems to be happening with a load of other pages, like Angular velocity. Is this due to the downed server? johnwalton (talk) 20:05, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Same problem here: Green's_function
Use ?action=purge to clear the cache for that page. (Try it again on the actual page if you're on a redirect.) --Brion 22:25, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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>]] <sup><font size="-1"> [[User talk:Jonathan W|talk]] </font></sup> [[Image:Canada flag 300.png|30px]]
I hope this helps! Ian13/talk 18:49, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
Uh...thanks for all the help, but now it says: Invalid raw signature; check HTML tags. Jonathan 18:58, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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>]] <sup><span style="size:-1;"> [[User talk:Jonathan W|talk]] </span></sup> [[Image:Canada flag 300.png|30px]]
Just tested, and it worked for me. Ian13/talk 19:07, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
CSS won't work with some browsers, therefore <small> might be better than <span style="size:-1">. It's also shorter. -- Omniplex 01:45, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Mind you, my new fixed example uses span instead of font which is better. Ian13/talk 21:12, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
All right, it worked! Check it out: Jonathan talk File:Canada flag 300.png 00:31, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, what did the "span style" mean? It seemed to be the problem.
The actuctal issue was color=#00FF00 in your code - it needed to be quoted like: color="#00FF00". Span however is preferable, because it confirms to more recent XHTML markup styles. Ian13/talk 09:51, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As sole member of Category:User css-0 I second this because I won't see it... <gd&r> -- Omniplex 01:50, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The link to your user page doesn't work, by the way. You typed [[User Jonathan|...]] instead of [[User:Jonathan W]]. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 01:49, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Unprotection auto summaries?

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

I'm not sure what you mean by an "auto summary", but the purpose of the reason field in protection or unprotection is to annotate the protection log. -- Tim Starling 03:07, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
He's probably speaking of the new misfeature where all changes of protection status appear on the page history. --cesarb 03:50, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some people are never satisfied.

Need help merging three articles

I have pretty well finished merging three articles: Nozzles, De Laval nozzle and Flow through nozzles. What I need to know is:

  • How to merge the three Talk pages? Or is that necessary?
  • How to merge the three History pages? Or is that necessary?
  • How to merge the listings in the three "What links here" listings?

Please let me spell it out for me in much detail ... I've only been working in Wikipedia for a few months. - mbeychok 23:09, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

  • No. The talk pages are helpful in documenting each article individually.
  • No. They can't usually be merged. In the case that they can, it is usually an admin-only trick. The histories must be non-overlapping for this to be possible.
  • They can't be merged.
  • -Splashtalk 23:18, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Splash, thanks for your response but I'm still not clear. Once the merging is complete, can I then "empty" the three current articles by deleting their contents entirely ... and then redirect the three emptied articles to the single new, merged article? Will that not in effect merge the "What links here" listings? - mbeychok 23:57, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What you'd do is merge any relevant material into the one article, and make the other two into redirects to that article. Explain where the material came from/is going in the edit summaries. Anything which links to those articles will then be automatically redirected (check and fix any double-redirects). The redirects will still show the history of the original articles, so no history is lost, and redirects can still quite happily have talk pages, so there is no merging necessary there. If you want to you can correct the articles listed in "what links here", but that isn't normally done by the merger, ahtough it will probably be gradually fixed by subsequent editors. Grutness...wha? 00:11, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A full merger is impossible but it's recommended to move the Talk contents from any pages that turn into redirects into the Talk page for the main article, if it's relevant (not always true). That way people editing the merged article know what issues have been brought up before and how they were dealt with. Make a note to the effect so people know the Talk conversations were moved, good to go. --Dhartung | Talk 23:21, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Search finds deleted article

The article on shadowwar was deleted on March 26th. A copy of it can be found here. When I search for (say) "In the land of shadowwar" (with or without the double quotes), the deleted article shows up in the search results as a blue link! Is this the right place to report such inconsistencies? If not, where should I go? Cheers, Chris Chittleborough 00:58, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is the right place. It happened because the search index hasn't been updated yet. Just wait for it to be updated. --cesarb 02:40, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for answering my question here and at the top of the page. (Weeks? Sigh.) Sorry to bother you, Chris Chittleborough 05:33, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
These questions are entirely self-inflicted by MediaWiki onto itself. The Special page with search results does not display the date/time of the last refresh on the search index consulted. MaxEnt 22:18, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is it just me or are there lines under the links now... because I'm pretty sure that wasn't there before...American Patriot 1776 02:06, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Try refreshing the page or clearing your cache; underlines appear when the site hasn't loaded the CSS properly. ~MDD4696 02:20, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Frequently Asked Questions

I have noticed that a few questions are repeated all the time on this page. To reduce the repetition, I added them to the header at the top of the page. Let's try to keep the list short, and put only questions that are really repeated all the time on it. --cesarb 02:54, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking of log summaries...

I was reading the above question on protection log summaries, and that spurred me to ask this, which I've been meaning to ask for a while now: why doesn't undeleting (restoring) a page not have a summary field? All the other log actions (protect, unprotect, delete, move) have log summaries already, and it would make sense for undeletions, just like deletions, to have such a summary field. Is there a technical reason for this discrepancy? Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 03:13, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

See Bugzilla:3309. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:59, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the link! Flcelloguy (A note?) 20:03, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

upload problem

Is something wrong with the upload server?

I have tried uploading the file 4 times, and it won't display. It is Image:Big_Biz_Tycoon_box.svg. I have tried jpg and svg files. Is it my computer or Wikimedia?

--Primate#101 03:48, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That SVG image is trying to reference a file on your local filesystem, which obviously cannot work on the Wikipedia servers. --cesarb 03:56, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Considering that the SVG consists of only a JPEG image plus some metadata, may I suggest that uploading the JPEG by itself might be a better idea? -- Tim Starling 04:03, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia Not Rendering Mark-up Code Correctly

I was wondering if some could take a look at this page, which I believe Wikipedia is incorrectly rendering. I had earlier been having some problems with the section edit links loading the incorrect section, and then today this happened. When I edit it, I don't see anything wrong with the way I wrote it, but it's simply not appearing correctly. Is it something I'm doing that I'm not aware of, or did I discover a Wikipedia bug? AmiDaniel (Talk) 04:42, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind, I forgot to close a nowiki tag. Though it would still be nice if someone could figure out why the edit section links aren't working correctly ... probably another of my mistakes. AmiDaniel (Talk) 04:44, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
How's that? — Knowledge Seeker দ 05:22, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ohh you fixed it!!!! Thanks! Why did the shortcut box affect it? (I didn't add it, someone else did) AmiDaniel (Talk) 05:28, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
To be honest, I'm not certain. Since the section header edit links were malfunctioning, and I saw a misplaced template on the same line as the header, I thought it would be a logical thing to try. Maybe someone else knows more precisely what the problem was. — Knowledge Seeker দ 19:49, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rotating Images?

Is it possible to have, say 4 images and every time someone views the page one of them is randomly chosen? I don´t need this for wikipedia, but for a game site using the Mediawiki, and I didn´t know any better place to ask . Thank you in advance for any hints you can give me. Sean Heron 09:00, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Uncyclopedia wiki has this functionality up and running, it works like: 

<choose>
  <option>[[Image:example.png]]</option>
  <option>[[Image:example2.png]]</option>
  <option>[[Image:example3.png]]</option>
  <option>[[Image:example4.png]]</option>
</choose>

Maybe you could ask about it on their forum. –Tifego(t) 09:20, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, I´ll see if they can help me. Are you saying its not possible on the normal MediaWiki (on Wikipedia for example)? Ok found out myself, you need to install the algorithm. Thats all I need to know, great :D 84.164.105.7 10:59, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A commercial link has been added to a page I created long ago (NPSH). I do not know how strictly the No commercials policy is implemented here in en.wiki, so if somebody would take care of that... my page UbUb 12:46, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I deleted the commercial link. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:33, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Numbering figures

Hi,

I'm currently working on an article with many figures (Power MOSFET), and I wonder if there is a way to automatically refer to figure number. At the moment, when I want to refer to a given figure in the text, I have to number it manually. This is not practical because it makes further figure insertion rather painful...

I haven't found anything in the help about figure numbering, but I must admit I'm a bit lost in the help tree... -- CyrilB 13:59, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think there's currently any way of autonumbering figures. If you want to create one, you could try a variant of Wikipedia:Footnote3 (this would conflict with autonumbered links, but they are easy to avoid with Cite.php). --cesarb 14:10, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know about numbering figures, but I must say that the page has many figures more than necessary. There are so many, they continue past the article itself! Please consider removing some, or left-aligning some.
Also, I'm not sure what's up with all the empty subheadings toward the end, but it makes it hard to read, there being a large chunk of unused space and all. --SheeEttin 14:15, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I have inserted a few {{clear}}'s. Now the images are closer to the place in the text where they are discussed. This may make it easier to refer to the pictures without using figure numbers. (Feel free to revert if you don't like it) -- Eugene van der Pijll 14:21, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your help. The {{clear}}'s are a good idea, especially at this early stage of the article. I also agree that there are too many figures for the moment, as I added all at once, but I plan to use every one of them in the text (there is quite a bit of text to add).

I'm surprised that nobody uses figure numbering. Maybe it is an academic habit of mine, but I find it really frustrating not to have a way to refer to a figure (or an equation either) from the text. I'll give the footnote trick a try. -- CyrilB 15:11, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm keen on this idea too and would love to see it worked out if there was a way to do it so that it did not conflict with footnotes as outlined above. Please keep us posted (and once a way is sorted, consider updating the helps.. not sure where exactly but it would be goodness...) I too am spoiled by how (for example) MSWord lets you insert figure captions which you can reference in the text and which get automatically renumbered as you add new figures, etc... (the preceding is NOT to be taken as a statement that I actually LIKE *cough* bloatware *cough* MSWord!) ++Lar: t/c 15:39, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've just spent some time on modifying the ref and note templates (I created the Template:RefFigure and Template:LabelFigure, though I don't know if test can be made in the Template namespace), but I think this is a dead end: the number of the reference is generated by the mechanism which builds the external urls, so there is no way to store this number for further use. In the footnote3 system, the text of the footnotes is placed in a numbered list, but this workaround cannot be used for figures as they are spread all across the text, not grouped at the end. Therefore, I can create the label "see figure 1" in the text, but I can't create the corresponding "Fig. 1:" in the figure caption. As far as I can see, the only way would be to build a new "cite.php" for figure numbering (and equations by the way). -- CyrilB 22:04, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just to say that I've made a request on the bugzilla about this. -- CyrilB 16:05, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Padding nested tables

Hello. How may I set the parameters for the distance between a table and a nested table located inside it? I'm trying to emulate for my User Page the outlook of the tables that appear on the Main Page (i.e. Today's featured article and so on), but this Wiki markup can get so difficult to grasp at times... Thanks -- Andres 18:21, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You could try adding cellpadding="5" to the outer table. ~MDD4696 20:38, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks a lot, MDD4696. -- Andres 12:59, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Images from one Wikipedia to another

hey there, I have a question, I am working to improve the Arabic Wikpedia, and I was woundring, is there a way to add a picture that's on the english wikipedia (for example [[image:orange.jpg]]) without having to save it on my computer and then upload it again in the arabic wikipedia? thanks--muhaidib-- (Talk | #info | ) 19:43, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No. You can, however, upload it to Wikimedia Commons, where it can be used by all the language wikis. --cesarb 21:30, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Note however that the license restrictions on Commons are a bit more cautious than on en. So if the image is a fair use image, you may not be able to put it on Commons. I don't know what the licensing restrictions on other language wikis are, but if it can't go on Commons you may need to download the image (rightclick save it) and then upload it to your language wiki. Hope that helps. ++Lar: t/c 01:29, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ok thanks alot guys for the help :D, I guess the best for now is save and re-upload. I wounder how many GBs (or TBs) is Wikipedia taking lol --muhaidib-- (Talk | #info | ) 06:07, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

...delete all the userboxes? ~MDD4696 20:41, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds good to me! ericg ✈ 20:42, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I concur. User:Zoe|(talk) 21:52, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
if you really want to keep them, move all but the most important ones to a subpage, like I did (see User:Grutness/More userboxes) Grutness...wha? 00:37, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Specialpages: RandomStub

It'd be awsome if there was a special page that'd take you to a randomly selected stub. I don't want to crawl through the inordinate amount of interrelated categories to find something to work on. Most users probably have something of value to add to ~20-25% of all stubs, and could just click through the random link generator 4 or 5 times to find one.

Thanks!

Reference: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5589

Mrzaius 21:24, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just click on a stub category and then choose one of the articles at random from the category. Phr 09:43, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

editing an article title

I'm not sure whether I'm posting this in the right place but it's the best place I can find. I apologize if I'm off track.

I just want to let someone know that the article entitled "Edwin Ushiro" has a typo in the title/heading and I can't find a way to fix it.

Thanks.

If you have an account and wait until it is 4 days old, you'll see a "move" button appear at the top of your screen. -Splashtalk 23:12, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist too short

The default setting for the Watchlist now only displays the changes in the last 12 hours. Can the default be changed back to the changes in the last 3 days? Also, when I try to view the changes to all the pages in my Watchlist, it only displays the changes in the last 28 days. ⇒ JarlaxleArtemis 05:03, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist behavior changes automatically when your watchlist grows beyond a certain size. I don't know for certain why this is, but if I had to guess, it might be to limit the impact on the servers of querying very large lists. Dragons flight 05:37, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Correct; there's a little check that happens in the watchlist code to cap the limit for performance.
Might this be the reason for my problems? I can currently only see the last 500 recent changes to the articles I watch, but I'd need more and can't figure out how to change that. ARGH. —Nightstallion (?) Seen this already? 19:24, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Capatchas

I have been helpfully told that the capatch support is an extention but i don't seem to be able to find out what its called or where to get it. Special:Version doesn't seem to list anything relavent and a quick poke trough the extentions dir in svn didn't reveal anything either. Plugwash 15:00, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's ConfirmEdit extension. --cesarb 18:52, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

contributions navigation nomenclature

A while ago, we were talking about the confusing "previous 50" and "next 50" links in the contributions list. I just now noticed that someone has changed these to the sensibly-aligned "newer 50" and "older 50". Thanks much, whoever that was! —Steve Summit (talk) 22:37, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

delete history

Is there any possible way to delete a page's history? Or at least so that no one else on Wikipedia can see it? Jonathan talk File:Canada flag 300.png 03:58, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The only way to hide a page's history is to delete the entire page, and only users with sysop access can delete pages. ~MDD4696 04:02, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
OK, what's sysop? I'm a registered user but not an administrater. Could I sign this page up for deletion somewhere? Jonathan talk File:Canada flag 300.png 14:24, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It is possible to delete only selected parts of the page history. If you have a good reason to have parts of the history deleted (libel, personal information), ask at the administrator's noticeboard or ask any administrator (for example, me). To have a page deleted completely, see Wikipedia:Deletion policy. Kusma (討論) 14:37, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Jonathan talk File:Canada flag 300.png 23:47, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Special Pages

Does anyone who has the ability to edit them actually read the Wikipedia talk:Special: pages? Ardric47 04:50, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, per say, you can't edit a special page. There are, however, associated system messages (MediaWiki:) that get displayed on such pages. You'll probably find a more receptive audience there. If you want something about the special page changed, it's probably a technical thing, go to Bugzilla for that. I'd say... well, I won't say no, but I don't read them. — Edward Z. Yang(Talk) 16:39, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Should I go to Bugzilla even if it's not really a bug? The "problems" that I've been seeing are inconsistencies in the names of the pages. For example, if I clicked on "Long pages" in the list of special pages, I couldn't link to it by putting brackets around the title that shows up, Special:Long pages (don't be fooled by the blue link), because the real name is Special:Longpages. Ardric47 22:06, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can see two bug reports from this behavior: 1) don't make non-existant special pages linked blue and 2) a feature request to allow the specification of aliases/redirects to special pages (something I was unable to find on Bugzilla). — Edward Z. Yang(Talk) 00:46, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The post log-in special page

How come after logging in, it always only offers to return you to the Main Page. I'm sure it used to send you to the article you had just come from...Brendanfox 09:01, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On a different computer now, it's stopped happening - either its been fixed or its a browser thing but thanks, problem solved. Brendanfox 10:46, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Edit toolbar buttons

Quick note: I've changed how the edit toolbar buttons work a little bit. If you find that the buttons don't work in Firefox or Konqueror when clicked, make sure you've reloaded all the JavaScript. (Command+R twice in Safari, or ctrl+shift+R in Firefox.) There was a funky incompatibility with the custom 'redirect' button, now fixed. --Brion 11:13, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, that fixed what I came to the Pump to ask about. This has been annoying me on three computers and two browsers (Firefox and Safari) and a regular cache clear didn't fix it. I wonder if this could be publicized better? --Dhartung | Talk 23:25, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I ask that because I've noticed a huge uptick in the number of unsigned edits to Talk pages. --Dhartung | Talk 23:25, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Categories

I'm sure this has been asked hundreds of times before but... Category:Living People (note the capital P) has got articles in it which shouldn't be the case. Is the only solution to go into each article and change the big P into a little p or is there some fancy technical solution? RicDod 14:39, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You can use one of the category-renaming bots to do it for you. You can find them on WP:CFD. --cesarb 16:22, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

2001 article histories

From Wikipedia:Usemod article histories:

Note that the very last UseMod edit is listed as done by "Conversion script" with comment "Automatic conversion" instead of the actual author.

In the case of Gambeson, this appears to replace the only pre-Conversion-script edit there was; how can I find out the original author of the pre-2002 version of this article? dab (ᛏ) 15:32, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

One way is to look on the Nostalgia wikipedia. It was User:Anders Torlind. -- Eugene van der Pijll 15:44, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Short duration for cookies

Is there any reason the authentication cookies only last a month? If I remember correctly the maximum time for cookies is a year, and it seems a little silly to cut them that short. --Kickstart70-T-C 15:35, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Remember me is a great feature, but it does have security implications. — Edward Z. Yang(Talk) 16:37, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Really, those security implications are extremely overstated then. If the insecurity of being logged in was an issue for a year-long cookie, then the same issue exists for a month-long cookie and the users re-logging in whenever it expires. --Kickstart70-T-C 19:36, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You might try telling that to the developers. — Edward Z. Yang(Talk) 00:48, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
A month sounds fine to me. I usually end up clearing all my cookies anyway in that long a period. If you'd like, you can set the expiration date far in the future using a cookie editor like Firefox's Addneditcookies extension. Superm401 - Talk 18:14, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, Superm401, if you find that you're getting a lot of extra junk cookies added on, you may be interested in the CookieButton. — Edward Z. Yang(Talk) 19:39, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Don't fix links...

(Moved from Wikipedia talk:Redirect)

Ok, I've been said redirects are cheap and fixing them is a strain on the server. I have created a bot (MiszaBot (talk · contribs)) that can automatically fix single-/double-/triple-/whatever- redirects. It can work in two modes:

  1. Doing a general cleanup of a page like here or here (slow and thorough).
  2. Going through multiple pages, bypassing one (or more) specific redirect(s) (fast).

While I understand that the second behavior is a strain on the servers, I'd like to ask for an expert's opinion on the first type. Thank you, Misza13 T C 21:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that many redirects are unprintworthy, though. Ardric47 22:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps, but many unprintworthy redirects don't really need fixing, especially not by bot. In particular, note what it says in bold just below: Most especially, there should never be a need to replace [[redirect]] with [[direct|redirect]]. In fact, I'm almost tempted to remove the reference to Category:Unprintworthy redirects from that paragraph entirely, since it is at best misleading. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 06:24, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

adding html tag to userpage

trying to add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> to my userpage to make Google drop its cache, which contains my real name and email address in an old version, but am unable to do so - it comes through as text. Does anyone know how/whether I can do this? Thanks - the.crazy.russian τ ç ë 21:39, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You're better off asking a sysop to remove the offending revisions from the page history, and then wait for Google to refresh its cache next time. <meta> is one of the HTML tags that the Mediawiki parser is hardcoded to ignore and show as HTML, iirc. Kimchi.sg | talk 01:30, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The appropriate meta tag is automatically inserted by MediaWiki to deleted pages, and only to deleted pages. So the fastest way to remove a Wikipedia page from Google's index is to have it deleted by an admin and then go to [2] and request "removal by meta tags". (I can do both for you if you want.) The process will take up to a week, though it may be faster in some cases. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 06:33, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you don't want it searched, TAKE IT OFF THE PUBLIC WEB. --Brion 07:33, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to all. It's been off the web for months. I moved my userpage to a different page, recreated my userpage in just its present form, and had the moved page CSD'ed. Will this help? - the.crazy.russian τ ç ë 17:58, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

how are my edits broken down?

I ran into a tool a while ago that allowed me to determine what the total # of edits i've made are, what types they were, and i even got a detailed breakdown on how many of each category i had. I'd like to use it again. I wonder, what is this tool? How do i get to it?--Screwball23 talk 00:13, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You were probably using Interiot's Tool. Currently the toolserver is down for some reason, so the stats aren't up to date, but there are tools independent of the toolserver as well. AmiDaniel (Talk) 00:15, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Please see WP:KATE for the original tool and a list of corresponding tools at the bottom. Note that en.wikipedia.org is no longer updating to the toolserver so you may have to use some of the alternatives listed at the bottom of the page; see User talk:Interiot#Toolserver is effectively down for more information. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 00:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yesterday and today I have tried to get the JAR file at Wikipedia:WikiProject edit counters/Flcelloguy's Tool#Quick-start directions, but I haven't even been able to download it. Is this a problem with my security settings, or is the server down? Ardric47 00:53, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm... the JAR file was downloading fine when I last checked it a few days ago, but it seems to time out now. Unfortunately, I'm not the right person to ask - perhaps the site we temporarily hosted the file on is down or overloaded for now. I've left a note on the talk page about this; you should check back there for replies so we don't clog up this village pump. :-) The right person to ask would be AySz88: I believe that he's the person responsible for hosting the JAR file. I'll also give him a heads up to the talk page. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 01:32, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry; please try again, the port had to be changed. --AySz88^-^ 18:17, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist's all messed up

You know how watchlists are supposed to only show the most recent change for each article on the list? Well, now every time an article on my list gets edited, there's an entry on the watchlist page for it. My watchlist is now covered with 50,000 edits (or so it seems =P) to George W. Bush. Is this a bug, a sudden policy change, or what? Matt Yeager ♫ (Talk?) 05:03, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I see the same too. Megapixie 05:07, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think it has to do with the new "hide bot edits" feature. I sort of like the new version but would definitely like the option to switch; the notices on the admin board are clogging up my watchlist. --Mmx1 05:09, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like a bug to me. I clicked Hide Bot Edits, and it still shows every single page, multiple times.ॐ Priyanath 05:11, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's terrible and I hate it. I have an RfC and a contentious talk page on my watchlist; for only 50 on my list there are 125 entries in 3 days! Please I only need to see the most recent change so I can check the history. Please make hiding all but the most recent edit an option again. Thatcher131 05:13, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can see how this new look would be useful. It might be worth asking a dev to make it an option. Raul654 05:13, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Is it a bug or a new feature? I can see that some people might like it this way, but I don't. If it's a new feature, at the very least there should be an option under Preferences to switch it off. Angr (talk • contribs) 05:15, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yikes, me too. Anyway, thatcher, this is probably a bug related to the (much-needed) new 'hide own edits' and 'hide bot edits' permanent options. ericg ✈ 05:20, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I would like the option to not show all the edits. I prefer only the most recent. Regards, ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! 05:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC).[reply]
I saw it too. I think it is annoying, especially when the top ten edits on your watchlist are all to WP:AIV. I see how it can be useful, so perhaps making it an option instead? Titoxd(?!? - help us) 05:17, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm glad I'm not the only one! I thought I found a bug in my program when it took two minutes to load the 1000+ edits being displayed in the watchlist. Change it back!!! AmiDaniel (Talk) 05:21, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
For the record, I don't like it either. Can you not test such things in a test environment first before bringing it to live Wikipedia? I thought that's what test.wikipedia.org was for. Please reverse it. — nathanrdotcom (T • C • W) 05:22, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Even having enabled the new option to only keep the recent change, the list of people who have edited it is rather a clutter. I still prefer the classical option, rather than the new variant or the list-all option.ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! 05:31, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I also much prefer the old version. While I see how the new version could be helpful, the old watchlist form should be preserved as an option. EWS23 | (Leave me a message!) 05:37, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, me too. :( —Khoikhoi 05:41, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Especially as the edit summary is now only displayed if there is one recent edit. With users who I have previously come across many times, I prefer to simply trust and read their edit summary, rather than have to scan every single one.ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! 05:42, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) There's now a note to use ERC (doing which causes WP:VandalProof's RCP to malfunction, and not doing which causes its Watchlist to load ridiculously slow), but even using ERC it looks horrible and unuseable. The upside to using a watchlist was that it only showed the most recent edit--I don't need to see every edit, as even just for one day that's thousands of edits, and I don't feel like waiting for that to load. I also use my Watchlist as a sort-of favorites menu, which I can't do now. Please, oh please, change it back. Make this way the optional way, if you're so inclined. AmiDaniel (Talk) 05:46, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I use it as a favorites too. I much prefer the old. This newer version is horrible for articles that get massive amounts of edits such as some of the administrator articles that I keep on my watchlist - not any better for with the enhanced version either. Too hard to read. I seriously hope they change it back. K1Bond007 05:49, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, this change is incredibly unproductive. Please put back in all the features that were removed. Christopher Parham (talk) 05:53, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The watchlist now contains a notice: "To hide them, disable "Enhanced recent changes" under 'Recent Changes' in your preferences." But I don't even use that option (hence it is already disabled) and I'm still seeing every change. --TheParanoidOne 05:54, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The notice says "to hide them, disable ERC", which doesn't make sense. At the very least it should say "to summarize older edits, enable ERC".  freshgavinΓΛĿЌ  05:56, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What I want is to have it exactly the same as it was yesterday. As it is, neither option to "Recent Changes" in Preferences does that. Would someone with the appropriate privileges (developer? bureaucrat?) please revert this change to the code until it is either (a) fixed and (b) discussed here on VPT? Much thanks. MCB 06:02, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It has to be a developer. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 06:08, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Woa, they seem to have just fixed it. Thank god. AmiDaniel (Talk) 06:11, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks developers. :o) EWS23 | (Leave me a message!) 06:13, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It seems the change was accidental; Tim Starling changed it back. I would like a toggle in the preferences, since I rather liked the new version. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 06:14, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Apologies on behalf of the developers. Someone accidentally removed the one line in SpecialWatchlist.php that makes watchlists stupid and useless. I've reverted it temporarily until someone makes the necessary user interface changes to go along with it, such as an user-specified entry count limit like on RC, "enhanced" display by default, and an option to display only the most recent change if anyone seriously wants that. -- Tim Starling 06:19, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for leaving the perma-hide options in (and for fixing it). I wouldn't use the new one, but I'd support it as an option. ericg ✈ 06:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Dang, that didn't last long. Oh well. --Cyde Weys 06:17, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for restoring the old behavior! MCB 06:20, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would still want the diff and hist options on the LHS of the screen and lined up, as the output is more structured and easier to comprehend that way -ie the old way. Regards, ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! 06:31, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Turn off "Enhance recent changes" under "recent changes" in your preferences. That should do it, I believe. K1Bond007 07:00, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thankyou.ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! 07:44, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A problem I seem to have now which I didn't have before is that it's now impossible to have more than 500 edits show up in my watchlist. Since I want to catch up with the recent changes to the pages I watch from the past three days, I've got a problem. Help!? —Nightstallion (?) Seen this already? 18:22, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any way to alphabetise the list of articles that link to a specific article? Sometimes it looks like an attempt has been made (like so), but then given up halfway through. Would it require a change of my settings, or would specific code need to be written? THe help page states the following, but does not suggest why, or provide a remedy:

When the link tables in the database are rebuilt, the lists are alphabetically ordered. However, adding a link subsequently causes it to be added to the end, and thus these occur in chronological order.

Seems a good idea to alphabetise instead of leave random, has it been suggested before? - mastodon

I would also like having alphabetical order as an alternative, but is very useful to be able to see what links have recently been added to a particular page. If I have to choose, I prefer the chronological list. For most articles, incoming links aren't that numerous and finding a particular one is not a problem despite tha lack of alphabetical order. Tupsharru 06:38, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Where did the editing buttons go?

Two days ago, the "JavaScript Editing" mode for Wikipedia lost its graphic buttons. Now I just get the text for the buttons; I see "Bold textItalic textInternal linkExternalLink (remember http:// prefix)Level2headline)..." etc. The functions all work; it's as if someone removed the images or changed their location. What changed, and how do I fix it. I'm running Firefox 1.5. --John Nagle 18:02, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

They're still there, and they look fine in Firefox 1.5.0.2 here. --Brion 21:35, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Trouble with .gif image

I recently downloaded an image off the CDC website (in the public domain) and planned on putting it on an article. It was a .gif image, but I've seen them used successfully before. It uploaded onto wikipedia no problem, but I get a red link everytime I try to link to it. The image in question is present in the Category:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention images under Reported I. I've linked to plenty of .jpg images with no problem, am I missing something? The format I'm using is [[Image:Reported I.GIF]] with usual syntax for position and thumbnailing. --Joelmills 18:54, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Are you simply misspelling the filename? It's a lowecase L, not an uppercase I. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 19:02, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Whoops. Thanks. --Joelmills 19:31, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hiding content boxes

I'm trying to figure out if there's a way I can hide the content box from an article (namely, my user page). I did a search and came up with the Dynamic Nav Box script, but I don't think that's what I have in mind... I just don't want the contents to pop up when you look at my page if I keep adding headings. Thanks for any tips. Tijuana Brass 20:57, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Add __NOTOC__ to hide the table of contents, or __TOC__ to force it to show up in a specific location. ericg ✈ 21:07, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Gracias. Tijuana Brass 21:28, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]


New Map Article

(appologies up front if this post is in the wrong location)

I have an old 1946 city planning map for Huntington Township on Long Island, which IMHO is of historical significance as a snapshot in time before modern suburbs exploded. I've already provided a copy of the map to the Long Island historical society but I'd like to share the map with anybody online by creating an article for it and then linking to it from the Huntington article. First of all, is there anything wrong with that from a non-technical level? The article would contain text explanations but the primary feature would be just a big map.

Now if there's nothing wrong with the concept of creating an article for displaying this map, I'll move on to my technical questions. My map is large and has great detail down to street names and such. It's been scanned to an image at a whopping 8,790 x 6,400 pixels. Obviously this would be a ridicuous size to fit on any webpage and scaling it down would eliminate the details that make it important. What I would ideally like to do is to break the map down in to sections and table-it together so that clicking on a section would go to a full-screen version of that section.

  1. Would that be possible? Would that be allowed?
  2. Is it possible to use low-rez thumbnails that link to the full size images? Otherwise using Wikipedia's resizing function would make it display smaller but would still be a file-size problem.

Any other ideas if this doesn't belong or technically can't be part of Wikipedia? If there's another good option out there I suppose that could be done and then an external link added. But I still think this is good encyclopedia-worty content (like original town names, structures and streets that no longer exist, etc.). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Fife Club (talk • contribs) 21:21, 18 April 2006.

I could do it for you.. and yes there is a way to do this. I would create separate page and make the map a maximum of 700 pixels. you yourself will have to break the maps up. It's a simple html table application.. you can patch images together using the image tag and not inserting "thumb" or "frame".. let me know if you want my assistance. drumguy8800 - speak? 22:47, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Firstly: Be sure you upload it with the proper source and licensing information! Without this, we cannot include it on Wikipedia. You can use Cornell's handy copyright table to determine the copyright status. If the image is public domain, upload it to the Commons. You can link to it normally from Wikipedia; it's just that the Commons is meant for media, whereas Wikipedia is for articles.
Now, when you upload it and add it to the appropriate article, add it as a thumbnail with a proper caption, like this: [[ImageName.jpg|thumb|A nice caption.]]. This will make a thumbnail on the article. It is my opinion that the best way to include this image in an article is to link to it as a thumbnail; if readers want to see or use the full map, they will know to click on it.
I would not recommend uploading split tiles or a scaled-down image. If, after you upload it, others feel that making it clickable/zoomable is useful, it will be easy for someone to do. However, it is much more difficult to go from split up or otherwise modified images to the original.
File size (both in px and MB) is not a problem whatsoever. Wikipedia uses ImageMagick to automatically scale the image in both aspects. Hope this helps! You can leave a message on my talk page if you want more help. ~MDD4696 22:54, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks y'all for your help. Much appreciated. If I read correctly, it sounds to me like Drumguy8800 is suggesting a clickable thumbnail links table like I first envisioned. But Mdd4696 seems to advise against this method. I do not have even a fraction of Wiki-experience as either of you but my thoughts were that multi-image would be best because your can "zoom in" to see great detail on the corresponding sub-maps. But like you suggest, perhaps I can start off with the one big map (thumbnail in the article) and break it down later. I'll start the basic article (unlinked until it's finished) and let you see it if you're interested.
And speaking of the copyright, it was definitely produced by a government agency so I figure it should probably go under that license and therefore Public Domain. However there's a story about how I now "own" the map. Basically, my father used to work for the New York State Division of Housing and Urban Development. Sometime around 1980 his office was relocated and rather than move thousands of old city planning documents they were ordered to throw most of them out. My father came across this map during the process and he decided to save it. Now I have it, so should I be the copyright holder? Fife Club 03:38, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No. Copyright only protects original creative expression, thus it only applies to the original creator. The purpose is to encourage creative expression by allowing creators to have a protected period of time when only they can profit from their work. When the creator is a US government employee, the item enters the public domain because the taxpayer paid for it so it should be free to all taxpayers. You can't recapture copyright on something once it has entered public domain. A digital clickable map might be copyrightable (but probably not) by the person who did the conversion, but that would not alter the public domain status of the underlying map. (Copyright protects creativity, not technical know-how. For example if you scanned every pre-1923 issue of National Georgraphic into a keyword-searchable database, you couldn't copyright it because it was a technical task not involving creativity.) Thatcher131 05:22, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry I keep bothering y'all but I need copyright help. I tried to upload to the Commons but I can not find the appropriate copyright tag. The thing is that the copyright I need should be an obvious one that should already exist. There's PD copyright for works of the US Governement but nothing for State governments (except California), County Governments, or City/Town Governments. In all cases they should still be PD because they were created with tax payer money but there are no local-level licenses. Shouldn't there be?
For the record, the document has no copyright information displayed but it does state:
  • Town of Huntington
  • Suffolk County, N.Y.
  • Huntington Town Planning Board
So I'm not 100% sure whether it was the county or town that originally made the map.
The works of most US state, county, and city governments are not public domain, but are copyrighted by that government agency. Ditto for the works of almost all nation-level governments, other than the US (and a very few others, like the soviet union). While morally you're quite correct in thinking "I already paid taxes for this, why isn't it free?", but unfortunately that's not the legal position. If the image was produced by the NY-HUD then NY state owns the copyright, and it can't be used on wikipedia. Bummer, huh ? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:53, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
That just sucks :( Well thanks for your help anyway. I may still try to upload the map to my own website (bandwidth issues) but I wouldn't want to burden Wikipedia with the liability. Thanks again. Fife Club 19:24, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The solution proposed above.. that is just having a thumbnail.. ignores the fact that its an extremely large image. If people want to see a specific area, they should be able to. You should have larger versions of smaller sections and a master file link at the top or bottom (or legend) of the map. The idea here is accessibility... this method is hitting two birds with one stone. And even if imageMajick scales down the size and image, it doesn't mean that viewing a large portion of the image will be any easier for a user.. drumguy8800 - speak? 22:29, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well, actually.. sorry. Didn't see that you had been advised against uploading this by Finlay McWalter.. I believe the idea here is that the US operates as a federal government not confederal and thusly each governmental entity is underneath and thusly "a part" of the U.S. government.. but I of course know none of the specifics like mcwalter seems to know. If anything, contact the Town of Huntington and get permission. Just because someone copyrights something doesn't mean they reserve all the rights to it. drumguy8800 - speak? 22:33, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm just spoiled with my university's internet connection heh. A clickable map is useful as long as we have the original image. ~MDD4696 22:49, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I'm back. I've contacted the town historian who believes that the document would be public domain. Now back to the question of how do I put that license on the image upload. I can explain the details but which image license should I choose at the Commons? Once I get the file uploaded to the commons I can proceed individually, talking to you guys one on one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fife Club (talk • contribs)
There's always the pd-because template, where you can simply leave the explanation that the town historian considers the map to be in the public domain. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 20:04, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If I'm reading the Cornell table right, it was published between 1923 and 1977 in the US and lacks a copyright notice so it's plain-ol' public domain. That suggests a template of {{PD}} or {{pd-because|Published in the US between 1923 and 1977 without a copyright notice.}} would be right. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:09, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I see now that a plain PD template is deprecated on Commons. From list of copyright templates, the best I can see is either the pd-because above, pd-old, or PD-US. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:42, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

absolutely displayed header for large tables

i suggest to implement a feature which allows (screen-) absolute displaying of the header of a large table for better orientation while reading/comparing contents within large tables which do not fit on one screen-site.

technically the table header would simply be a non-ambiguous css-class, which is de/activated via a toggle-button like i.e. the one wikipedia already has to show/hide contents.

PutzfetzenORG 22:06, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Can you give an example? I don't quite see what you're proposing.. i guess the table is too wide and scrolling is inefficient for comparing data? Before getting into something terribly technical, you might just consider making the font size a bit smaller.. drumguy8800 - speak? 22:36, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think he means a "frozen" header which remains on screen when a long table is scrolled, so that you can always see the column titles, even when looking at data at the bottom of a table. I don't know whether it's possible with CSS or not, or whether it might have undesirable side effects, however. — Catherine\talk 17:17, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It's possible with CSS, but you'd need a way (probably javascript) to toggle it on and off. ericg ✈ 17:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The necessary CSS is unsupported in IE6. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:12, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

formatting designed for high-resolution users

On high-resolution monitors, it takes far fewer lines to display a section of an article than it does on the more common, narrow monitors. I for instance use 1680x1050, and most contributors probably use 800x600 or 1024x768. When an editor puts a lot of images in a section, oftentimes it formats correctly on their monitors, but when high-resolution monitor users see the page, all the images stack up because there isn't enough vertical text buffering. A proposal to fix this would be to modify software so that each ==section== is contained within a <div style="clear:both;"></div>. This makes it so that images put into one section of an article do not transfer into the next article.

This may have serious reprocussions though.. for special formatting and such where people have meticulously designed pages to display correctly with multiple sections lining up with a single image or something. But, its just a proposal. I frequently use the Sectionbreak template but often if I'm not the main contributor to the page, the changes get reverted by people who can't see the benefits... drumguy8800 - speak? 22:45, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You should limit the use of {{Sectionbreak}} as much as possible. As with any web development, the current situation is a compromise. The sectionbreak template might make an article look better on some pages, and worse on others, just as you mentioned with many images. I think that the current solution works pretty well--alternating images on the left and right. The less formatting tweaks we add, the more consistent the pages look across platforms, and the less work we need to do when browsers change. ~MDD4696 23:00, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AFD problems

The last two AFDs I made have not show up on the main AFD page. Can anyone tell me what is going on? Is it some glicth in the bot or something? It usually adds itself to the page. The Republican 01:50, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Which articles? I'll take a look. I haven't seen anything wrong. Thatcher131 02:07, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm, Republican, are you talking about AfD or WP:PROD? AfDs do not involve a bot or any automatic process; after adding the AfD tag to the article (with {{subst:afd ...}} and manually creating the actual discussion page with {{subst:afd2 ...}}, you have to add the listing to the AfD daily log manually, following the link in the now-rendered AfD block in the article, and then using {{subst:afd3 ...}} to transclude the AfD discussion into the daily page. To my knowledge, that process has never been automatic. With PROD, on the other hand, all you have to do is add the {{prod|reason}} tag, and an automatic process lists it in a log. However, that process is currently not operating as intended, because of the toolserver outage for enwiki. So PRODs made now will not show up in the log, but will be in Category:Proposed deletion. MCB 02:19, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Combined category searches?

Is there a way to find articles that are in two categories? For example, articles that are disease stubs that also have cleanup or wikify tags? Thatcher131 02:09, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if something like this is possible, but if it was implmented, it would solve alot of problems in regards to Wikipedia:Cleanup process/Cleanup sorting proposal. Pepsidrinka 03:09, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There's a tool called CatScan that can do this (it uses an offline copy of the database, so the results are not strictly current). Please see http://tools.wikimedia.de/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:26, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Just a little clarification: CatScan uses an "online" copy (normally at most a few hours behind the real database). The problem is that replication on the Toolserver (where CatScan is hosted) has broken down for the English Wikipedia, so the information is now several days old. It's not clear when this will be resolved. —da Pete (ノート) 08:19, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The "References Converter" and Cite.php

User:Cyde has developed a References converter to revise article using the older methods of referencing such as {{reference label}} and {{note label}} to the new Cite. php method using <ref> and <references/>.

The older method using {{reference label}} and {{note label}} placed a caret (^) in front of each cited reference in the reference list which was quite clear and easy-to-read. The new Cite.php method places an anaemic, washed-out and hard-to-read vertical arrow in front of each cited reference.

I asked Cyde if we could somehow get to use that much better looking caret (rather than the washed out arrow) with the new Cite php.method and he agreed that the caret looked better. He also said "I think you're onto a good thing here and the change you're suggesting would be REALLY simple to make (a single character substitution to the code, actually)." Although Cyde is an administrator, this is out of his bailiwick and he suggested that I broach this suggested change here. If anyone knows how to bring this to the attention of whatever group developed the new Cite.php referencing methd, PLEASE do so! Thanks, - mbeychok 03:48, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I remember that the caret was abandoned after a request to make it an arrow, but I don't remember where that discussion was held. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 03:58, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Here's the link, to the Manual of Style's talk page. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 04:00, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The arrow's look depends on the fonts your browser is using, so you might get a nicer arrow by changing your fonts. Carets are considered bad because Cite.php is deployed multi-lingually and the caret is an accent mark in most languages and so doesn't look like an arrow at all to those language-speakers. — Saxifrage ✎ 20:37, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Buttons

Sometimes, the radio buttons don't show up. Is this an issue that has been brought up? Will this be worked on?

68.148.165.213 08:36, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Which radio buttons, where?
Brion 18:26, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've seen this happen on edit pages (like where I'm typing right now). The alt text shows instead of the graphics, so you see "Horizontal line (use sparingly)" as a button to click on. I think it's related to slow graphics elsewhere in the system, but maybe it's part of the revision of the javascript (see several questions back, where I replied). Ctrl-Alt-R refreshes the javascript cache in Firefox, and fixed it for me.
Dhartung | Talk 23:32, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, I'm sorry, Dahrtung, that's not where I'm talking about; I'm talking about the history pages.
68.148.165.213 01:49, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Images not shown in galleries

Hi

Several users from the LB-Wiki have a problem with the galleries. Some of the horizontal images are not shown when inside a gallery-tag. Apparently, according to rumours on DE-wiki, this has to do with a specific version of Norton Antivirus who reacts to images having a certain size. However, after some testing, some of the images, even after resizing, cropping etc. still wouldn't show. So there might also be a problem with the image itself, maybe depending on the camera ?

Is this problem known ? Thx in advance :-)

Briséis, LB-Wiki

Thumbnail/Performance problems

Image thumbnails are displaying error messages. This has happened from different machines on different LAN's, so the problem seems to be Wikipedia's. Also, response time has gotten very slow: five minutes to load a page.208.20.251.27 15:29, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I edit conflicted with you to say the same thing--User:Rayc
I think it's away now. Kilo-Lima|(talk) 17:12, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No, it's not. The messages look something like this: Error creating thumbnail: convert: unable to open image `/mnt/upload3/wikipedia/en/b/b4/Tjlogo.png': No such file or directory. convert: unable to open file `/mnt/upload3/wikipedia/en/b/b4/Tjlogo.png'. convert: missing an image filename `/mnt/upload3/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b4/Tjlogo.png/150px-Tjlogo.png'. --RabidMonkeysEatGrass 18:16, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've also been encountering this problem, eg << Error creating thumbnail: Error saving to file /mnt/upload3/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/Green_Arrow_Up.svg/10px-Green_Arrow_Up.svg.png >> in Template:Time Warner. Problem is, it seems to be happening sporadically. At present, if I access the Template directly it works, but if I view it on a page such as Turner Classic Movies I get the above error instead of a green up arrow! johnwalton (talk) 19:56, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is a HUGE problem. Thumbnails are not appearing on dozens of pages.

Use ?action=purge. --Brion 22:44, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Outage

We had another power failure at our Florida hosting facility a few hours ago. They're blaming the equipment, and it's being replaced.

Hopefully pretty much everything's working correctly by now. Note that the data dumps on download.wikimedia.org are currently offline; if we don't get that server back up soon I'll move them to another machine. --Brion 18:25, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Still getting some Wiki-lag. Martial Law 19:48, 19 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]
http://download.wikimedia.org/ is back online. I'll start the dump processes up again in a bit; I'm also adding back checksum generation. --Brion 07:14, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have made a request for this feature at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5653. Please discuss there. Ingoolemo talk 18:33, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thumbnails not appearing

I notice that thumbnails are, all of a sudden, not appearing on many, many pages. See, for instance, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I've seen dozens of these in the last 30 minutes. Can anyone help??

Same problem here 24.224.158.166 20:41, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Use ?action=purge. --Brion 22:44, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of redirect to make way for move

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to post but here goes. I've been doing lots of renaming recently after putting through two naming conventions (companies and TV shows). One thing that I regularly run into is deleting a redirect to make way for the main article. Sometimes the redirect has a useful edit history that can only be preserved by moving it to another name, deleting the redirect to the new temporary redirect then moving the existing article to the correct name, then moving the original redirect back - typically to where the correctly named article was. That was confusing so hopefully this will help

  • Incorrectly named article --> Correctly named article (redirect with useful history).
  • The redirect has to be deleted along with the useful history to make way for the move
  • It would be helpful it the Incorrectly named article could be transposed with Incorrectly named article

Example - "HCA Inc." needs to be moved to "Hospital Corporation of America", but there is a useful history at "Hospital Corporation of America". The only way to save "Hospital Corporation of America" is to do multiple holding moves then moving the edit history at "Hospital Corporation of America" to "HCA Inc." which is now a redirect to "Hospital Corporation of America". It would be very helpful if the two articles can be transposed at the time of the move with both edit histories retained and the new destination redirected by the source article rather than a new redirect with no edit history HCA Inc. <--> Hospital Corporation of America

Thanks! --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 21:14, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Way to find out the longest protections outstanding?

Is there a way to find out what pages have been protected for the longest amount of time running, similar to the was UuU was found out the be the earliest edited page? I know some pages are protected forever, but some other ones get protected and then forgotten about for ages, see for example Tom Swift III which was protected for about 9 months (Give or take...). Thanx. 68.39.174.238 21:58, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Site Javascript

The file http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js has javascript that transforms the Article tab for the Main Page to say "main page". It should really be changed to "Main Page", as all the other tabs are capitalised with the lower-casing done by CSS. This causes the Main Page to look horrible and inconsistant in browsers that don't support text-transform: lowercase; (or for anyone browsing with CSS off). — Ian Moody (talk) 23:23, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Archiving

Does anyone know how to archive stuff? My talk page is getting pretty long! Joziboy 19 April 2006, 23:25 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page. --Dhartung | Talk 23:37, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is email permission to use a photo enough?

I want to add another cooling tower photo to Cooling tower. The one already in that article is of a hyperbolic tower, and I want to add a photo of a non-hyperbolic tower (as widely used in heavy industries). I found a photo that I liked on the website of the Marley Company ... one of the leading companies designing and erecting such cooling towers. I emailed their webmaster and asked permission to use the photo in Wikipedia. Here is a copy of the email request I sent him:

Dear Mr. Tevis:
I am working on an article about cooling towers in the online Wikipedia and would very much like to include the small photo of a Marley Class 800, 8 cell mechanical draft tower that is displayed on your website at http://www.marleyct.com/wet/ . If you are not the correct person to grant me permission to use the photo, please let me know to whom I should address my request.
The Wikipedia article in which I would like to use your photo can be seen at http://www.marleyct.com/wet/ .
Thanking you in advance and awaiting your response,

And here is the answer that I received by email:

Hi
We're big fans of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has permission to use any photos found on our public website.
Good luck and let me know if we can be of further assistance.
Sean Tevis
SPX Cooling Technologies
7401 W. 129 Street
Overland Park, KS 66213 USA
(913) 664-7710
Fax: (913) 664-7872

Is that good enough for me to go ahead and use the photo in Cooling tower? If so, when I upload it and have to supply information on the photo and where it came from, exactly what should I say? - mbeychok 00:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, it is not enough to get permission to use the image on Wikipedia alone. We would like images to be freely licensed. You can check out Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission for ideas on how to ask for permission. ~MDD4696 02:53, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I partially misunderstood your question--when you upload the image, include a summary of what the image is, a link to the web page that you got it from, a note describing the permission to use the image (could even be the actual email response from them), and a license tag. Also, if you receive permission, post it at Wikipedia:Successful requests for permission and send a copy of the permission email to "permissions at wikimedia dot org" where it will be permanently archived. ~MDD4696 02:57, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sig check

Would someone mind taking a look at my sig and letting me know if I can cut out any of the HTML code without changing its appearance or function? Thanks. TIJUANA BRASS¡Épa!-E@ 02:32, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So you won't have to "edit" to see it:
<b>[[User:Tijuana_Brass|<font face="Times New Roman" size="2" color="#ff4500">T</font><font face="Times New Roman" size="1" color="#ff4500">IJUANA</font> <font face="Times New Roman" size="2" color="#ff4500">B</font><font face="Times New Roman" size="1" color="#ff4500">RASS</font>]]<sup>[[User_talk:Tijuana_Brass|<font color="#228b22">¡Épa!</font>]]-[[Wikipedia:Esperanza|<font color="#228b22">E@</font>]]</sup></b>
-- stillnotelf is invisible 03:13, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I was able to cut it down somewhat, by a little more than 100 characters: Tijuana Brass¡Épa!-E@. The code is <b>[[User:Tijuana Brass|<span style="color: #FF4500; font-family: Times New Roman; font-variant: small-caps;">Tijuana Brass</span>]]<sup>[[User talk:Tijuana Brass|<span style="color: #228B22;">¡Épa!</span>]]-[[Wikipedia:Esperanza|<span style="color: #228B22;">E@</span>]]</sup></b>. ~MDD4696 03:16, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
You can further cut it down by changing Wikipedia:Esperanza to WP:ESP or WP:EA. Good luck! -160.39.139.21 03:58, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks guys, y'all are great. I appreciate it. Tijuana Brass¡Épa!-E@ 04:16, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Move/rename

I think the name "move", while technically correct, is not the exact right choice to use. From what I get, the page history is moved to the other page, but it is basically renaming—and would be a simpler concept for new users to grasp, no? Would people be opposed to calling it "rename", or something along those lines? -Mysekurity [m!] 03:55, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

It's how you think about the main article space. I view the mainspace as a bunch of slots, some are filled with articles, others are empty. Calling it "rename" suggests that it is a collection of articles in space. I think the former is more accurate, because each article title must be unique; there is a finite number of slots. From a spatial viewpoint, we could have any number of distinct articles with the same name. ~MDD4696 04:03, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
As I said, I know the former is technically correct, but I think for the lay editor looking at the shiny "move" button, "rename" is a lot more intuitive for new users, no? I guess there are technically a finite number of spaces, but for all practical purposes, there really aren't. It's much like a computer's "rename" function, which requires less explaination than "move". -Mysekurity [m!] 04:10, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Searching for a new user name

I'm looking for a new user name. Is there a way to search the special page User list using wildcards so it brings back similar names? It seems to only return exact matches. Thanks. Thatcher131 11:46, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

List of people whose Living status is unknown

It used to be possible to get a list of articles which seemed from their categories to be biographies but there was no category to show whether they were still alive. Can we get that list back please? - Runcorn 12:20, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That should be a category, not a list. As a a category, it will be maintained as people die. --John Nagle 17:34, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I believe he's refering to a toolserver script which found biography articles with no year of death category and no Living people category. I recall finding it recently, but can't seem to locate it again. — Ian Moody (talk) 17:47, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I believe he is talking about Interiot's undead report. With the toolserver's replication of enwiki down, I don't know how useful the list is. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 20:17, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How do I fix my wikipedia skins?

I hope this is the right place to post this but, my defult skin has changed and it is really awful now and doesn't even work right anymore (i.e. I cannot click on a link when there are other links on the left of the screen.) It was hard and slow to change it to one that works (others are broken too). I'm now using classic mode but I dont like it. Please send for help. Greasysteve13 13:38, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Access //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Preferences&useskin=monobook, which will force the Monobook skin to be loaded. This should allow a skin change. Rob Church (talk) 10:36, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Image in World War II

There seems to be a problem with one of the images in World War II. If you go down to the section "Aftermath" and look down the images on the right there is one with the caption "Zones of occupation of Germany in 1946" obviously intending to be a map. However it's actually a picture of a (modern) tank. If you follow the link then it goes to an image showing the map I would expect. My technical knowledge has reached its limits - would someone else mind looking at it? DJ Clayworth 15:45, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is this image behaviour a bug?

Image at 200 pixels
Image at 100 pixels
Image at 40 pixels

I know this isn't the place to report bugs, but I'm not sure if this is a bug or if something else is going on. I'd like to know if anyone has seen this before or if they know anything about it.

I recently noticed the icon image in {{game-stub}} was showing nasty jaggies because it was being scaled down and GIF images don't scale down well at all (see the version in question). I downloaded the GIF from Commons, converted it to PNG with The Gimp, reuploaded it to Commons, and then changed the stub template to use it instead.

The trouble is that it shows completely blank. The image itself seems fine, and it shows up as a 200px thumbnail at right just fine. The 100px and 40px versions (40px being what the template uses) both show a blank image for some reason. Does anyone know why this is? Should I report this as a bug? Is it something wrong with the file? Is there a better place to ask this? — Saxifrage ✎ 18:30, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably a bug, perhaps in ImageMagick, which MediaWiki uses for resising images. You may want to report is somewhere, possibly at the Wikimedia bugzilla. Meanwhile, I've reuploaded the image with full alpha transparency, and that seems to have fixed the thumbnails as a side effect. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:46, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Linux Firefox

All of a sudden, the little automatic editing boxes don't work (bold, signature, etc). Is this some security option? Or do I just have to wait for this annoyance to get flushed out the system? --Zeizmic 20:05, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Clear your cache. --Brion 22:22, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah! Thanks. Everything works great now. --Zeizmic 01:46, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Repeated paragraph in a wiki

Say I have a wiki article AAAAA. Article AAAAA includes section aa, section aaa, and section aaaa. For some reason, I want to include section aaa of article AAAAA in article BBBBB as section bbb. Can I do this and maintain the link to aaa? So that if aaa was edited in AAAAA, then the edits would show up in BBBBB? Thanks, Mike --MikeShelton 21:06, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If for some reason you must do this, you could write the paragraph as a template and include it in both pages. --Brion 21:08, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think I found my own answer at [[3]]

Watchlist enhancements

In Special:Preferences, on the Watchlist tab, there are two new options. By selecting Enhanced watchlist, the watchlist will change behaviour, to be more like Recent changes. That means that instead of just seeing the lates edit to each article on the watchlist, the most recent edits to all the articles are shown. In order not to overwhelm editors with thousands of articles on their watchlist, there is one other new configuration on the watchlist tab, Number of edits to show in expanded watchlist, with a default value of 250. If this value is set higher than that, it is recommeded also to check the Enhanced recent changes (JavaScript) option on the tab for Recent changes. -- Wegge 22:09, 20 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Search numbers / hidden search results?

What does it mean when a Wikipedia search says "Results 1-4 of 4" but only shows 1 result? For instance, this search. Are there 3 other articles hiding out there that match the search but aren't being displayed, or is it just some counting bug in the search engine? –Tifego(t) 00:18, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, never mind, I found the hidden results (user talk), so it's simply a mediawiki bug or oddity that counts filtered-out results in the displayed number of results. –Tifego(t) 00:23, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Could someone take a look at WP:TIP? The next tip link in all the tips has stopped working and I'm unsure what caused it or how how to fix it. --Hetar 01:24, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think there's something wrong with {{day+1}}; it appears to be returning
MONTH DAY,
instead of
MONTH DAY, YEAR
Someone should probably fix it, because I don't know how. Isopropyl 04:51, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
This appears to be due to the template being recently converted from {{qif}} to {{#if}} and is probably a bug. — Saxifrage ✎ 06:39, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Search Engine

I notice that everytime I typed in a search, there pops are a list of pages > that closely resemble what I looked for. > > However, whenever I typed in a search that is "not 100% technical as it > should be", I usually see 0 resemblance pop up, and said "try searching > again." So I may suggest that it could be improved if somebody set up a "do > you mean ____________(link)" and then searcher can click on the link instead > of retype.

Like if you don't spell something correctly? I am sure the devs have thought of this, but wish to have a life since I assume it would take a pretty complex algorathem to accomplish this. Mike (T C) 02:17, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, would be a nice feature, but not only does it take time of developers to implement, but I think also a good deal of server resources. Instead, try http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org&hl=en&lr=&safe=off. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 02:20, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
or http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced?ei=UTF-8. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 02:24, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]


hi

i have some doubts in communication

What is modulation and demodulation ? why we go for modulation ? can v transmit signal without modulation if not why ?

Have you tried the reference desk? Isopropyl 04:36, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ampersand Operator to Show Diff Without Preview

I've spent quite a bit of time searching for this without luck, and then I decided to make it easier on myself and simply ask if such a thing exists. Is there an ampersand operator (i.e. "&action=edit") that will allow me to load a diff while hiding the preview? I was thinking something along the lines of "&showpreview=false" but have had no success with any of my guesses. I believe such an operator would add a serious boost to the speed of my app and could result in a great deal more vandalism being reverted, as I would no longer need to wait for images, etc., to load--simply seeing the change is usually enough to determine whether or not an edit is vandalism. Essentially what I would like to do would be to load a diff exactly as it does when you click "Show Changes" when editing a page (without the editform of course). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. AmiDaniel (Talk) 05:17, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also, is there anywhere that these things are listed? I figured out all that I know of them primarily by glancing through html sources, but it would have saved me a lot of time if there was somewhere that all of the ampersand operators were explained. AmiDaniel (Talk) 05:19, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think there is one for what you want to do, but I could be wrong. As for where they're listed, I think the only place they can be found is in the PHP source code of MediaWiki. If you can read that even a little it would be a good place to start.
A suggestion to speed loading: when viewing a diff, you could have the app not retrieve any images. If you wanted to get fancy, you could set it up that clicking on a placeholder image causes the app to fetch and display that image so that the user doesn't have to wait for them by default but can choose to see them if they need to check for image vandalism. — Saxifrage ✎ 06:36, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like something we could add, though. Rob Church (talk) 10:34, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think it was supposed to come with the external API also planned, but that seems to be still under development. — Edward Z. Yang(Talk) 20:26, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A technical request for information

I will like to find out what IPs in the range 61.95.147.0 to 61.95.147.255 have made contributions to Wikipedia. Is there some tool I can use/someone I can request to find out this information? Simply the list of IPs that have at least one contribution will suffice. Thank you. Loom91 07:23, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Internet Explorer cannot open the page

Periodically, when I open a Wikipedia page I get an error that "Internet Explorer cannot open the page"; this appears in a window superimposed over the properly opened page! Clicking OK goes to the IE error page; if I click on IE's Back button, the proper page reappears. Does anyone know a fix for this problem? Hgilbert 07:52, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Renaming links after an article is moved

I have moved the article on Country rock to Country rock (music) and made Country rock a disambiguation page (due to the term's use in geology as well). The 400 or so links to the old Country rock page should be revised to link to the new page (Country rock (music)). Is there an automated way to revise all Wiki links to a page? Thanks: Hgilbert 08:17, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There's a few bots that do that (can't remember who off the top of my head), or you could try AWB. Titoxd(?!? - help us) 08:27, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Search results

I have created an article on Freezywater which is a place in London Borough of Enfield, but when you type Freezywater into Search, only the London Borough of Enfield appears in the results, you then need to click on this and then select Freezywater within the article. How do I make Freezywater appear as a result? Rogwan 12:55, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Updates to the search index are currently about a week behind. It'll show up after a while. — Saxifrage ✎ 13:03, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
(ec)The search engine is updated off of the database dumps and the dumps are only produced periodically. It might take say, a few days to a week (or more) for the engine to pick it up. However, if you type Freezywater into the search box and press Go, it should pick it up more or less immediately, up to perhaps a few minutes of delay (it has picked it up now for me). I am delighted to learn that such a place exists, btw! -Splashtalk 13:04, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why are all these sponsored links (in green) showing up everywhere? They're kind of annoying. Are they here to stay? —Akrabbim 14:46, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You should check your computer with a spyware (actually malware or whatever ware this would be called) removal tool. I get no such links, so I believe they are inserted on your end. -- grm_wnr Esc 14:55, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Never mind, it's just the stupid Yahoo! toolbar that the school computers have. —Akrabbim 14:57, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Using the wiki math generator...

I want to use the wiki math gen to create some equations for work i'm doing. Is it possible to

a) download a gen applet so i dont waste wikimedia image space for non wiki equations; and more importantly

b) get a vector/adjustable resolution image to the equations aren't pixelly in my word processor?

I know the system is based on LaTeX (correct me if i'm wrong here), so do i have to buy a version of LaTeX to make this happen, or is it free and usable? Thanks in advance for any help!

Cheers - LozDunn (at) gmail.com

LaTeX is free software, available on many platforms. It is not only a software to write equation, but also a complete word processor. As LaTeX can generate pdf or postscript files, it is possible through conversions tools like pstoedit to get a vectorized image of the equations, though latex is powerful enough to replace your word processor. -- CyrilB 16:26, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
texvc is the program which convertes latex to images. You may also be interested in meta:Blahtex which is a tex to MathML converter. --Salix alba (talk) 18:27, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If you're on Windows, I would recommend MiKTeX. Very good package that works like a charm — Edward Z. Yang(Talk) 20:25, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Category background

Would it be possible to add an ID to the table that contains the category listing so the background color can be overridden with CSS? Right now it has a white background which looks weird against the light blue used in Monobook for the main article section. —Locke Cole • t • c 22:39, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Psssssssssssssssssssssst!!!!!

Thats me spraying a sock-bug - AGAIN. I've done what I could on my end, and it still comes back. Martial Law 23:51, 21 April 2006 (UTC) :)[reply]

'Crats, bots and new pages

Couple of updates. Thought I'd announce one here while I'm at it; the other has to be announced.

New pages

Special:Newpages now offers namespace filtering. Go nuts.

Bot status

Bureaucrats can now grant and revoke bot status for users on the local project. This is in response to a long-standing request from the stewards, both to cut down their workload, and to allow local projects to have more control over what happens there.

Bureaucrats

Now's the time to clean up the bot approval pages and get that process kicking. The new page is available at Special:Makebot. It should be obvious enough how to use it, but I'll put up some documentation post-haste, for the curious.

Logs

An audit trail for use of the MakeBot extension is available at Special:Log/makebot.

Interface

For the curious and 'crat-flag-devoid; a nice screenshot can be found at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/c/c0/Makebot.png.

Cheers. Rob Church (talk) 23:53, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nice screenshot! Jude (talk,contribs,email) 23:55, 21 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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