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Hello, I need some help with table. I am trying to create something like {{Round16ext}} for a family tree, and here is my problem: I want the gap between "son" & "daughter" cells be 10px in height, so I specify it. But then I want to draw a thick black border connecting "son" & "daughter." That does not work if the gap is completely empty. So I have to put  . But then the gap becomes very wide. Is there a way to reduce its height and still have the border? Thanks!
Version 1: with thick border, but wide gap
Son
Cell 1
Daughter
Cell 2
Version 2: no border, but the gap is of right height
Sorry, I can see no difference using Firefox, both look good ; with an IE tab, I see no connecting line at all! The Round16ext template looks good in both browsers. Try again! --
DLL .. T20:35, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, never mind. I figured out how to do it where I needed it, but for whatever bizarre reason the above tables do not display properly at all. They display properly only when I am previewing them before submitting this comment... Weird, huh?
Renata00:12, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Instead of using tables for your layouts use CSS DIVs instead.
Under
Rose_Bowl_Game#Background I've used the following code to place a panorama of the 1902 RB game in the article:
<br><center>
[[Image:1st-Rose-Bowl-game-1902.jpg|frame|The very first Rose Bowl Game]]
</center><br>
For some reason it doesn't appear to format correctly and appears in the middle of a sentence and uncentered. Any ideas? --
Bobak19:55, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
It's probably something to do with the fact that
Rose Bowl Game has a caption on it (requiring extra complications of divs being rendered to hold it) whilst the other article does not have a caption.
Tra(Talk)22:44, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
I would like to request support for the SVGZ format. SVGZ is the same as SVG, except it has been compressed using gzip. -
SharkD09:34, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Can someone make the backgrounds "transparent" in the div or table markups (whatever they are) so all the
category pages simply display in the light blue background color? They look pretty unprofessional now. Thanks,
Rfrisbietalk18:54, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
I would also like this fixed for all users as I agree with Rfrisbie. I submitted this as a bug request in Bugzilla and got this reply from
Simetrical:
The background of all pages is white in default Monobook. This issue occurs because the background of most non-mainspace stuff has been changed in the English Wikipedia with custom styles at
MediaWiki:Monobook.css, but tables' backgrounds have not been changed. (Table backgrounds are white rather than transparent by default so that borders and backgrounds of unfloated stuff, especially the rule under headings, don't run into floated tables.)
Adding the following to your Monobook.css should fix it:
Because, as I said, the background of all pages is white in default Monobook, so there's no difference between the table background and page background. —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
01:19, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
I know there are some issues with thumbnailing very big PNG images (see
this mail), your images seem to be right around the "magical" 3500x3500 size limit for the thumbnailing code. So I would guess that's the cause of your problems. --
Sherool(talk)20:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Image displays perfectly well at other sizes, but not on 200 pixels. What happened? --
GunnarRene 19:48, 22 October 2006 (UTC) Feel free to delete the old versions by the way. --
GunnarRene19:50, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
I fixed it by purging the image description page. By the way, I've had to remove the thumbnails you placed above because they're fair use.
Tra(Talk)20:45, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
Intermittently of late I'm getting blue links instead of images. Is upload.wikipedia.org overloaded or something? I can't seem to pinpoint any good reasons for it (I tried taking the nowiki tags off above, and the 200px one worked fine while the 50px didn't show up at all!). Happens all over the place, no particular page to cite. -- nae'
blis19:26, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Weird problem with deletiondebates template
I noticed this awhile ago and posted on
Template talk:Deletiondebates but it's not exactly a high-visibility page. For at least two people, clicking on any of the links in
Template:Deletiondebates first resizes the box (in my case, it gets smaller and narrower) but doesn't actually load the page. Clicking the link again in the now-resized box loads the page as normal. I'm not sure about other user who posted about this, but I'm using Firefox under Windows at 1920x1200. The resolution has caused other odd table-formatting problems with non-obvious causes, but I'm not sure that's the problem in this case. Anyboby else noticing this, or have any ideas on how to fix it?
Opabinia regalis03:30, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Browsing to an article by means of its unique id?
Hello,
I am wondering, if it is possible to navigate to an article by using its unique id. I has examined the XML description of articles and found out, that every article has its own id.
Perfect! The id 2512 refers in the german wikipedia to 'JavaScript'. Thanks, again.
suggestion for easier/quicker reverting
I find it a little time consuming to revert articles, and ATM I don't want to use any of the addons for wiki, as I'm a fairly new user. At the moment I spot vandalisms by going to the recent changes page, looking at the history and comparing the last two versions (or the last two versions by different users), then going back to the last non-vandalised version and saving changs. It would speed up things a lot if there was a link in the 'compare selected versions' screen that read "revert to this version" and added a automatic summary "reverted to last edits by xxxx" (or similar), and maybe a link in the history page to do the same (though I think that may be a little too dangerous).
This could either be implemented as a
greasemonkey script, FF extension or as an actual change to the wiki software.
Please let me know what you think, if I'm missing another simpler way of doing this, and which technology would be prefered. If GM is chosen, I think I can code it, otherwise someone will have to take over the technical side.
--
User2417:52, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
I see you have popups installed. On the recent changes or history page, find the revision containing the vandalism listed and hover over 'diff' or 'last'. You will see a box pop up. Click on 'rv' in the box and then wait. You will see lots of pages flash past and then you will see the article page. Once you see that, you have reverted it.
Tra(Talk)18:03, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for. woot! I can even do it on the compare page. cheers and sorry for asking what now appears to be an obviously n00b question. --
User2418:16, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
All the entries on this page are displaying "0 open / 0 closed / 0 total discussions". I've tried refreshing and the same thing happens. Anyone know what's going on? --
Sam Blanning(talk)10:48, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
Try asking
User:Mathbot about that (or its operator; talking to bots is often slightly pointless); it seems to have put the zeros there. --
ais523 13:22, 23 October 2006 (
UTC)
CydeBot slapping me down
Hi there, I changed c**t to cunt (what's the point, I know, lol) in the Craig David article, in the trivia section, because of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_disclaimer and one of Cyde's bots changed it back or deleted it or something. I was going to tell Cyde but only registered users can post on his talk page, and right now I cannot be arsed. --
207.216.10.7707:21, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
Fixed them. It took me a bit, but some had extra <ref> tags without closing them after the book or website reference with the </ref> tag. Thanks for the heads up.
Gotyear00:52, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
Adding YouTube Video (with Player) to a Wiki Page
Sorry to bother with this question, but I looked around MediaWiki for an answer and couldn't find one. I'm sure it's simple (or impossible). My question is this. I want to add a YouTube video to a Wikipage. I found the code on YouTube, but am not sure how to make the player appear with the video ready to play. Can this be done? How? Thanks.
MarshallPoe21:53, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
No, that's not possible - Wikipedia doesn't support embedded objects (primarily for security reasons). Just link to the video.
Zetawoof(
ζ)22:26, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
Further question: is that Wikipedia policy, or a limitation of Mediawiki? In other words, does Mediawiki support embedded objects on wikipages? I have a personal wiki that runs Mediawiki, and I'd like embed the YouTube video on pages there, if possible. Thanks again.
MarshallPoe23:48, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
MediaWiki does not support embedded objects at this time. Embedded Java will probably happen sooner or later for the benefit of Wikiversity or what have you, but there are no timeframes. —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
01:26, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, Tra. I left a message on your user page. I confess I don't know how to install an extension... I'm I just way over my head, or can I do this? Btw, this request, though related to Wikipedia, is for another wiki project using Mediawiki ([
MemoryArchive]).
MarshallPoe14:35, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
With Tawkerbot2 reverting at Procellariidae
(history) on 20:14 UTC 22 October 2006. Tawkerbot's revert is before the edit it reverted, and
Tawkerbot's diff makes it look as if it did nothing.
Same thing with AntiVandalBot and Texas
(history) on 00:40 UTC 22 October 2006.
Its diff makes it look like it did nothing.
I'll be darned. I thought that because I'd closed my browser since I first noticed the problem that was already covered, but a simple reload does the trick. Thanks!
BanyanTree15:41, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
External Links
How can I put an external link inside a userbox? Whenever I've tried, it just screws up the layout of the userbox.
BeefJeaunt(Talk) 04:56, October 21 2006 (UTC)
Putting <span class="plainlinks">[http://www.example.com link]</span> will give you link without the little external link icon so it shouldn't mess up the userbox so much.
Tra(Talk)14:20, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
Font size increase
Whilst editing today, I have twice done something with the keyboard and the mouse simultaneously (I think) that has enlarged all of the font sizes throughout Wikipedia. The first time I thought it was Wikipedia itself that had changed the font sizes (as happened a week or so ago with table formatting), but now it has happened again and the font size is ridiculously big. Does anyone know how I can return the font size to normal?
--Diniz20:54, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
In Firefox, Ctrl + 0 will get you back to "normal" font size regardless of whether you're currently above or below it. —
Angr21:53, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
I have created line drawings, nothing copied from a book or the internet, with some text, using Excel's drawing tools. The drawings are in an Excel worksheet, but I can copy and paste them to a Word or WordPad document as a picture ("enhanced metafile), or as just a picture. So from either the original Excel worksheet, or from a document, I can select the drawing. I can then put it on the clipboard by using Cntrl C.
I need to know how to upload this drawing to Wikipedia, so can use it for an article that needs editing. I read that a drawing should be saved as a PNG file, but that doesn't appear in my "paste special" list of options. Where do I paste the drawing on my PC so I can list the source link to it on your upload image page?
Regards, Thermbal
Thermbal20:29, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Just paste it into Paint and save it as a PNG, or preferably, save it as an SVG if possible. Drawings should always be saved in vector format (SVG) when possible. —
DarkShikaritalk/contribs03:34, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
Anyone know any good apps for getting vector images out of the windows clipboard into svg format? i tried inkscape but it didn't seem to take the paste
Plugwash20:54, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
Font problem
Hello,
Is there someone could help me in the font problem? I work in the
ko Wiktionary and want to display ancient greek flawlessly. I've collected so many fonts and put in
Monobook.css_ #bodyContent. But it doesn't work (see
here) as I've wished. I don't know if this problem is only in my computer configuration. A obserber in assistance said, he couldn't find any problem. --
아흔(A-heun) 16:45, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Is it just my browser, or did the MediaWiki for the edit button for sections just change? Instead of appearing small to the side of the page, the button appears before the section title! --
GrayPorpoisePhocoenidae, not
Delphinidae16:41, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
It happened to me using Classic skin and Safari browser. I logged out and then back in and the problem went away. --
hydnjotalk20:24, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
This may have been an issue because of some behind-the-scenes mistakes with CSS importing and version numbers and stuff. Just do a forced refresh if it doesn't work for you, or wait and it will go away. —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
02:12, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
Load of different wiki syntaxes
Which method of the following is more efficient in regard to the server load?
Placing {{ Template | {{Subtemplate1|Foobar}} | {{Subtemplate2|Foobar}} }} or {{ Template | {{Subtemplate1|Foobar}} | {{Subtemplate3|Foobar}} | {{Subtemplate7|Foobar}} }}(note 1, 3, 7), etc. into a page/article
Using a template with #if: (#if:Para1|..|.., #if:Para2|..|.., etc.; see
m:ParserFunctions); example: {{ Template | Para1=Foo | Para3=Bar | Para7=Foobar }}(note 1, 3, 7)
I'm not exactly sure I understand the difference you're talking about, but assuming you mean using nested templates vs. using a single template implemented with
m:ParserFunctions the ParserFunctions one is more server-load friendly. Fetching the content of a template requires a database lookup. The amount of time required to do this dwarfs the time required to process the template's contents and consumes a much more precious resource (database time vs. Apache web server time - there's essentially one database, but dozens of Apache web servers). --
Rick Block (
talk)
16:04, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
There are many databases for the purposes of reading. Every slave server has its own database that can be read. Your analysis might be correct regardless, but it doesn't matter. Please
don't worry about performance; just use whatever format is most convenient for you. If it causes load problems, the developers and system administrators (who closely watch profiling data for resource hogs) will deal with it. —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
02:05, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
Infoboxes are a mess
As commented above infoboxes are making a mess of pages. They are appearing on the left with a desert of white space to the right. It looks awful. I am using Firefox.
Sumahoy11:43, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
I have an idea that might help. I had the same problem, and my solution was to fix the common.css stylesheet. I was using some templates from Wikipedia, and so I copied the relevant infobox stylesheet info from the Wikipedia common.css, which you can find here:
Mediawiki Common.css -
cwmcelfresh
Tricky vandalism?
You know when an attempt is made to shrink down an image too far (in an image link), and a little error image is shown in its place? Well I think someone has replaced that error image with an ad:
Here's an example (click on it to see what I mean):
I don't know the name of the original error image, so I can't fix it. Perhaps one of you guys will know what to do.
I don't think i've ever seen a size parameter cause an "error image", it sounds to me like your PC has some scumware on it thats messing with images in your browser (possiblly trying to replace adverts with ones of its own) the example image you posted just looks like a normal image scaled to the size you specified here.
Plugwash20:47, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
Failed to parse - Unknown Error
In my talkpage, I tried to put in <math>x ≠ 0</math> and I get an Failed to parse (unknown error) message in bold red. The error doesn't appear when I try to edit, and it is <math></math> like everything else on my page, I am at a loss and I put a {{helpme}} and they were at a loss to. I was refered her by them, help? btg2290 23:40, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed that as of today, WP looks fine in IE on XP, but on an old version of Opera on a 98 machine, the layout seems to have changed somewhat. The globe logo is gone, the "article/discussion/edit/history" tabs have been replaced by a bulleted list right under where the logo was, the font size of the left hand menus is slightly larger, the boxes around the left hand menus are gone, and at the bottom of the pages there's a note that the articles were "Retrieved from 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[article name],' like you sometimes see on one of those unauthorized mirrors. I've tried reloading and it still looks the same. Was there an update that the older broweser can't deal with?
Dyfsunctional17:57, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Suddenly all the little [edit] links are showing up in large size on the left side of the screen, rather than small and on the right. Can anyone explain what happened? --
Metropolitan9016:41, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Okay, now they're back in the correct position, but larger than usual. I expect that someone will probably correct that also. --
Metropolitan9016:43, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Did I miss some discussion about left-aligned templates? I noticed that between yesterday and today many of the infoboxes (examples:
Lew Allen,
Nissan X-Trail,
Chevrolet TrailBlazer -- which I know used to have it on the right) appear on the left, above the article text, rather than on the right, with the article text starting to the left of the template. Could somebody point me to the reason for the change? I've been trying to avoid wikipolitics as much as possible, and would just like to know why. Thanks, ... aa:
talk15:05, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Maybe it's a browser thing. All three of those examples are displaying on the right for me (Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Windows XP). —
Angr15:09, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
There was something wrong with the thumbnail image generated at Commons. I tried resizing it by a pixel so the software would make a new thumbnail and now it works. I did change the & in the image to its URL-encoded version, maybe thats why it choked on the image? --
QTCaptain03:09, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
I had to do another hard refresh, but it seems to be working for me now too. Thanks for your help! —
Angr10:01, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
List of articles that have been deleted
Is there any way for a WikiProject to keep a list of articles that fell within the scope of their WikiProject and that have at some point been deleted, other than manually maintaining a list? Is there a list anywhere of all pages that have ever been deleted? Anyone have any idea how large the number is?
Carcharoth13:36, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
To answer one of your questions, there is
Special:Log/delete. That is the deletion log and is a list of all the articles ever deleted. It searchable by title only. I'm not sure how you'd go about finding deleted articles relevent to your WikiProject unless you know the title. Hope this helps some.--
Andrew c15:10, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Boxes on user page
Does anyone know what the syntax for <div> is? I'd like some of the 'boxes' that you see on fancier user pages on my page, but I don't know how to use them.--
CarrotMan09:49, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Div is a very diverse tag, used for divisions between content in pages. You may use
css inside the div tags, and div also has a few other "parameters" as well. You can do a google search for how to use div tags, you'll probably get quite a few results. —Mets501 (
talk)10:59, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
I am editing a page called "Hay, New South Wales". In Australia New South Wales is almost always abbreviated to NSW, so anyone searching would probably use "hay nsw" to search for this particular town. My problem is that a search on "hay nsw" doesn't get the "Hay, New South Wales" page as the top result (or anywhere close to the top result). After some previous advice I added a re-direct on the "Hay, NSW" page to re-direct to the "Hay, New South Wales" page - this works fine. Despite this, however, the problem still remains - anyone searching on "hay nsw" will not get "Hay, New South Wales" (or even "Hay, NSW" for that matter) as the top result. Why is it so? And how do I fix it? --
Ikeshut04:24, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Lately, I am experiencing problems logging into Wikipedia from my PC. I am currently using a web browser called
Crazy Browser and my PC is a Pentium II. Allow me to explain the weird situations that began to arise a few days ago. For example, the main page of the project presents the images in an incoherent manner and it takes me a very long time for the page to upload itself. On top of this, when I click on the Sign in option, the page fails to upload correctly and only shows the navigation toolbar on the left. I have not faced this problem when I am using a different PC from a different location. Can anyone help me with this? I have checked my PC for viruses and spyware and so far, my PC is clear from them. Is the Wikipedia website facing a bug or is it just my PC, which suddenly went bonkers? --Siva1979Talk to me21:17, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
I think that I have solved this problem. I changed my default browser to
Firefox and there were no problems. I feel that there is something which is being updated on Wikipedia that caused the problem. I guess that I have to get used to this new browser as soon as possible! --Siva1979Talk to me03:57, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I've noticed a lot of weird things going on today, most importantly that, but also the random disappearance of the words "the free encyclopedia" from where it says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" at the top of the page, and at one point the text below the edit window that currently reads "Content that violates any copyright will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. You agree to license your contributions under the GFDL." had turned into something completely different.
How do I move a page that is currently in the "Sandbox" to a live page?
Wikipedia:Sandbox isn't really an ideal page for drafting articles, as the only practical way to move them to mainspace is to copy-and-paste the edit windows (do this only if you've written all the text there, so as not to infringe copyright). If you create the page in
a user sandbox, you can use the 'move' link at the top of the page if the article doesn't already exist. --
ais523 15:55, 19 October 2006 (
UTC)
It doesn't have to be the Wikipedia:Sandbox. It could be User:xxx/Sandbox. The answer is: you have to have an account, be at least four days old, and can click on the "Move this page" link.
User:Zoe|
(talk)23:55, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Parts of Wikipedia's computer thinks my article does not exist
HELP! I've emailed people not connected with Wikipedia to review my article
Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr. and for some reason, they cannot pull up the article from the link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Aubrey_Toulmin%2C_Sr . Also, when I enter "Harry Aubrey Toulmin" or "Harry Toulmin" into Wikipedia's search, it says that no such article exists. I thought that it was because my article was missing something, such as de:Harry Toulmin, pl:Harry A. Toulmin, sk:Harry Aubrey Toulmin, sv:Harry Toulmin. I don't even know what these do, but I added them to the bottom of the article because I saw the code on some other article. That didn't change anything. Why can't outsiders pull up my artice
Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr. and why can't I find my article via Wikipedia search? Mosty important, do you have a link that I can provide to those outside Wikipedia to be able to bring up my article,
Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr.? Thanks.
Jreferee12:10, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the help. The title of my article "Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr." ends in a period (".") which apparently is a problem according to this link
[1]. I'll follow up with Bugzilla.
[2] Thanks again.
Jreferee13:35, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Making such redirects is generally a good idea. Recently I wanted to look up
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (not knowing it's actually
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and as I very often do when going to an article, I just typed the expected URL into my URL bar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatever_Happened_to_Baby_Jane? -- but of course the URL interpreted the question mark as an indicator that some parameter was about to come, and dropped it, taking me to
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. At the time, that was a red link, so I made a redirect. It would be good if a bot could be programmed to find all article titles ending with a punctuation mark and make redirects from punctuationless forms. —
Angr14:50, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Aligning ? on taxobox
Hey,
I am currently trying to remove the bevelling on the title of
Template:Taxobox. You can see an example of the taxobox being used
here. Upon removing the bevelling (display:block;), the question mark on the right of the title appears in the top right of the article (where the FA star goes). I was wondering whether anyone knew a solution which involved removing the bevelling, but retaining the position of the question mark. To test, you can use my
test page, it is up to date with the current taxobox (ignore the red link, when you press edit it is up to date). To test, use
this page. Thanks --
liquidGhoul08:09, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
I have created a solution, would people be able to test on my test page above whether it works in their browser/OS. Currently, I know it works on Firefox in XP and Linux. Thanks --
liquidGhoul12:52, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
You can't as long as there is a "local" image with the same name. You need to "move" the image that's blocking the commons image (that is: upload it under a different name and delete the old one). I would suggest moving the "local" flower image to commons with a more descriptive name, copy all the relevant history and then tag the old for deletion. --
Sherool(talk)07:20, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
hi,
i have found the image of
Leinil Francis Yu via a YOUTUBE video which i "printscreen", from
Gerry Alanguilan's blog but i dont know whats the right tag for the image. YOUTUBES can be embeded on anyone's site without a formal permission, so whats the right image tag for it?
†Bloodpack†06:39, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Why does <div style="-moz-column-count:3; column-count:3;">[bulleted list of items]</div> work with Firefox, but not IE? And is there a way to use columns in IE other than using {{col-begin}}...{{col-break}} etc. I'd like to avoid having to hardcode breaks in my series. —
Moondyne06:27, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
"moz" within a property name has an overwhelming aroma of "Mozilla proprietary". Meanwhile, column-count is part of the draft for CSS3; as IE isn't so hot on implementing even CSS1, I think you can forget about CSS3. --
Hoary06:36, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
-moz-column-count is the one which works on Firefox, and (as the -moz prefix shows) it's a
Gecko extension; it works almost the same as column-count, which is on the CSS 3 draft (and AFAIK no browser implements). The use of both is for future-proofing (as other browsers can be expected to implement column-count but not -moz-column-count). So, it's not that it does not work with MSIE; the problem is that it currently works only with Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox (but it can be expected to work with more browsers in the future, because of the future-proofing). --
cesarb17:56, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
If you're using {{Userbox}} to design it, set the id parameter to id=[[Image:Foobar.jpg|45px]] (obviously replacing "Foobar.jpg" with the actual name of the image you want to use). Make sure it's not a
"fair use" image. And although in my example I said to set the width at 45px, actually it's the height that should be 45px so you'll have to do some math to figure out what the width should be to get the height at 45px. —
Angr15:04, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Dictionary Search + Wikipedia
I browse with Firefox and I have an addon called "Dictionary Search" that allows one to search dictionaries and other web sites through highlighted text and a right click. When I use this with Wikipedia it replaces spaces with plus signs. So if I search for "Wikipedia, the free encyclopdia" what is actually search for is "Wikipedia,+the+free+encyclopdia". Would there be a way to fix this on Wikipedia's end? I've posted a request to fix it with Firefox.
Naufana :
talk01:19, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
All sorts of layout just started breaking - infoboxes aren't showing borders or floating, tables aren't showing up properly, all sorts of stuff. I'm using Cologne Blue, FWIW. What changed, and can it be changed back? Nothing different on my side, as far as I know...
Zetawoof(
ζ)00:34, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
As seen in
this diff, the content section of the
Gospel of Mark article used <div style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;"> to create a two column layout. I, however, felt that using a browser specific, CSS3, non-standard bit of code was a bad idea (for obvious reasons, no?). So I
converted the columns over to the {{col-begin|width=95%}}{{Col-break}} etc templates. And everything was fine until
this edit. On my laptop, with a fairly small resolution, the columns run over onto the two floating navigational tempaltes on the right. You can probably see this by simply decreasing your browser window size. Is there something easy that can be done to fix this? Or is using the CSS3 the best solution? You can't clear the float, because then the content won't start until under the templates. What if the columns were floating as well?--
Andrew c23:00, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
Simile Project
MIT has developed an awesome AJAX interface for timelines called
Simile. It's under a free license (BSD) and would be an incredibly useful tool for Wikipedia. We should investigate what technical issue would be involved in integrating their technology with Wikipedia (if it's even possible).
Kaldari17:45, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
"Simile" is the name of the
research group, not of the Web API. The Web API is called "Simile Timeline", or just "Timeline". The research group has published many other tools.
Not automaticaly, there are RRS and Atom feeds for each article's history, but you need to subscribe to each one individualy. There is also a recent changes feed, but that one is not very suitable for human consumption because of the high trafic. --
Sherool(talk)07:12, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
StringFunctions
I think
StringFunctions and
DynamicFunctions should be added to the Wikimedia severs. They would be very useful in templates since they can operate with strings (for instance, I am thinking of a template that could automatically determine whether a particular IP adress is valid (ie. it would find that 72.76.122.155 is a valid adress while 132.277.76.9 is not). I think the developers should immediatly add them, because the code already exists).
Polonium19:09, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Please have a look at the
Monkton Combe article. I put a picture on this article yesterday, but it shows a red cross in the frame and no picture. If I click on the picture, the enlarged version shows completely normally so I know the picture is on the server. CTRL-F5 makes no difference. Is there a temporary fault on WP? (copied over here from the Help Desk at another Users suggestion)-
Adrian Pingstone15:54, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
?action=purge on the article or image description page doesn't help either, and the problem is occuring on several different images, some from Commons, some from enwiki. Entering the image's URL manually gets an error saying that the PHP script exists but not the image. (
CAT:CSD is a striking example of the problem at the moment, but as that category tends to change a lot it may not be by the time you read this). --
ais523 16:03, 17 October 2006 (
UTC)
I'm having the same problem. On several articles, pictures aren't displaying. They were displaying just a few days ago, so I don't know what has changed. Any help would be appreciated. Thx! --
71.37.111.7503:35, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
When I type in two or more words (usually) into the search function, I sometimes get a an special error screen that says "There was a problem with your search. This is probably temporary; try again in a few moments, or you can search Wikipedia through an external search service:"
It doesn't seem to happen with single word searches, though it can be difficult to find exactly what I am looking for with just single word searches. So what is up with this?
SkinnyZan19:43, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
A Yahhoogle search is quite more accurate that our internal search box. It does not care for diacritics and sometimes finds or offers bad spelling info.
I'm not in love with our poor search, too restricted "by technical limitations", which I duly understand, because a good search is costly. A Firefox search add-on : Wikipedia&Google, is something nice to have. --
DLL .. T19:20, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Staying logged on
I've been losing my session login a lot the last few hours. Are others experiencing this? Does anyone know what is happening? -
Jmabel |
Talk18:42, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
This is question comes up quite a lot. My usual answers:
Make sure you have cookies on (unlikely to be the problem this time, unless you've turned them off, as you've stayed logged-in before)
Use the 'remember me' checkbox when logging on
If those don't work, there's a link in the FAQ section at the top of this page that takes you to a slower alternative connection that doesn't have these problems (it uses https, not to hide your edits, but to make the Internet connection behave; you'll have to accept the licence). --
ais523 10:23, 17 October 2006 (
UTC)
My Firefox version was stale, so I turned to InternetExplorer during some days and encountered the problem. Now I use Firefox (glory in heaven). --
DLL .. T19:24, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
The report was met with this reply: RESOLVED INVALID, ask the sysops on the wiki to edit the stylesheet in the MediaWiki namespace appropriately. --
Adam (
Talk)
19:54, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
A user on the
Hindi Wikipedia asked me where the page was to edit the toolbar that shows up on top of the edit window. The one with bold, italic, underline, etc. Recently on en.wiki it had a lot more buttons, but again seems to have less. In any case a search through
Special:Allmessages didn't turn up anything that I could find. Is there a good page explaining where all the Mediawiki space pages are?
Help:MediaWiki namespace and
Wikipedia:MediaWiki namespace weren't terribly helpful in finding the location. Thanks -
TaxmanTalk17:27, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Unfortunately, that Talk page's a db-talk, and now tagged as such... Feel free to detag it if you think it contains information useful in creating an article (presumably on
wikt:). --
ais523 13:34, 17 October 2006 (
UTC)
I am trying to locate the history page of an article that was removed back in March or April 2006. A search for the term reveals no article, and thus no history page. Is there a way to locate history pages of articles that have been deleted?
David
(Cross-posted on Village Pump (assistance) page)
So, I created
Template:Infobox religious building and I'm having trouble getting the template to align properly and for whatever reason it's completely missed up the TOC (table of contents).
You hadn't closed the css { thing, causing the toc to get included there. It should be better now. -
Bobet09:45, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, but I'm having one more problem. The template doesn't line up where it should and while the TOC problem is fixed it pushes multiple images down the page and makes everything look akward. If you'd look at the my sandbox's talk page, scroll down and you should see the problem I'm talking about. Thanks. --
Sapphire15:11, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, that's a problem with every template I've seen, not just this one (I didn't realize you meant that by your first post, since I've gotten so used to it). As far as I know, it's not possible to have an infobox and images that are right-aligned, but to the left of the infobox template (by using wikipedia's markup), same with the moving section edit links. As a workaround, people usually move the images to the left (which only leaves a small strip for the text) or start a gallery. Or just write more text so that the images will fit in neatly. -
Bobet15:41, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I work on Wikitravel most of my time so I normally have a different UI experience, but I realize what the problem was shortly before reading your explanation and I'll just use the work around. Thanks. --
Sapphire15:51, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Top-level TOC template...?
Is there a template that produces a TOC listing only the top-level sections within an article (i.e. sections whose headings are created using the == Heading == syntax)...? There seem to be a fair number of templates that include "TOC" in their names, so apologies in advance if I've missed the one that fits the bill. Thanks,
David Kernow(
talk)23:40, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
There isn't one, it would require css changes or changes to the mediawiki code. However, it wouldn't be hard to create one by adding some css to
MediaWiki:Common.css, such as:
You might convince them to add it to Common.css if you explain it is purely aesthetic and fails gracefully (worst case scenario: it displays all the levels). Alternately, you can remove the TOC via __NOTOC__ and create your own menu with anchor links (will have to be updated manually as sections change). A third option is to remove the section headers and use large text (not advised). --
Splarka (
rant)
07:29, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your various pointers, Sparkla; I'm making a copy of your paragraph for possible future reference. Since the amount of code to be added seems minimal (and non-invasive), I wonder if it might be incorporated by the powers that be sooner rather later – assuming no objections. Which of the various routes (Bugzilla, Wikimedia, ...) do you think stands the best chance...?
Meanwhile, I'm happy to continue constructing the occasional manual TOC for those pages with many sub(sub)sections, but yes, it's not a long-term solution. Thanks again,
David(
talk)01:13, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Best case scenario: This would be a temporary css solution, just to increase demand for it, and possibly have it supported natively (such as adding parameters to exclude headings, like <H4 toc="false">, or having __TOC__ variations like __TOC2__ __TOC3__ etc). In the same way that HiddenStructure was replaced by ParserFunctions. --
Splarka (
rant)
07:20, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I am planning to completely rewrite an article. I figured that the best way to do this would be to create a copy in my personal sandbox, edit that, then copy the content back to the article. I figured I'd do that so that the article doesn't look bad in the meantime. However, I want to encourage people to help me improve the article. I would ask that it be done at my sandbox. But that means that when I copy the content back to the article page, only I get credit for the edits, and not the other authors. Should I move the page to my sandbox, and then immediately revert? Or is there a better way to completely rewrite an article? Thanks, ShardsofmetalTalk •
Contribs22:35, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
If it's something to which you're likely to invite people, I think I'd create a separate userspace article for it (i.e.
User:Shardsofmetal/Article name here), copy the article to it, revise it as far as you'd like / feel able, then invite folk to respond/contribute to your userspace revised version. If/when the moment arrives when you and any collaborators feel the userspace article is ready to replace the mainspace article, post a warning on the mainspace article's talk page, then replace (or not!) the mainspace article sometime later.
Yeah, I was concerned about not giving credit to all contributors. That is why I thought If I moved the page, then immediately reverted, the new page would have the page history in it, while the old page would still have it's content. Then, I could post a message on the talk page pointing to my sandbox (or another subpage, wherever the new page is), recommending that they make any new edits there. Then, when the rewrite was completed, the new page could be moved (after making sure there weren't any new edits that would get overwritten) back to the article page. Would this work? Or would it be a bad idea? Thanks, ShardsofmetalTalk •
Contribs03:22, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Why not copy and paste the current content into your work area, then when you're done, copy and paste it back again? The old history will still be in the article, but the new content will overlay it. This is what I did with
Porto-Novo when I rewrote it. (although it was actually
User:Xed who copied it back in).
User:Zoe|
(talk)19:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
He wants other people to join him at work in his work area, and wants them to retain credit for the work done in his work area when moving the new material over.
Carcharoth12:20, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
If multiple people work on the temporary copy before it is moved back into article space, then a
history merge is required to properly integrate the two versions. As this process takes an administrator to perform, I would suggest placing a note on
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard when the time to merge arrives listing the two files to be merged along with a short explanation of why you are requesting the merge. If only a single person works on the temporary copy then Zoe's recommendation is the better way to handle the reintegration. --Allen3talk12:58, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
No need for a page history merge, just say in the edit summary merging changes from
Talk:Example/Temp and change the temporary article to a redirect (with an edit summary like merged to
Example so it will be known it should not be deleted). Page history merges can get ugly if the article was edited in the meantime (the history gets interleaved, which is very confusing). --
cesarb15:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Perfect. It should also be noted that leaving the edit history of the merged in text at a subpage of the article's talk page is better than leaving it at a subpage of a user's page. So I think the complete answer runs:
(A1) Copy current content to subpage of user page if you want to work on it yourself.
(B1) Copy current content to subpage of article's talk page if you want to run a collaboration on rewriting the article.
(A2) Cut and paste individual rewrite over article, remembering FIRST to check what changes have taken place since you copied the article, and incorporating them into your rewrite.
(B2) Merge subpage and article with edit summary as cesarb says above, remembering to incorporate changes since copying as explained in A2.
I would also add a note to the talk page explaining what has happened, and a note to the subpage explaining why it shouldn't be deleted (contains edit history). Just a blank page called [[Talk:Example/Temp]] might get deleted without anyone checking the final edit summary or even checking the page history at all.
Carcharoth16:46, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
That's why you change it to a redirect: while blank pages might get deleted or reverted without a closer look at the page history, that wouldn't happen with a redirect (and if you include the redirect in
Category:Unprintworthy redirects, it's even neater). --
cesarb23:13, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Moving something from my userpage to my talk page
An IP editor has left a question to me on my userpage, without signing it. I want to move it to my talk page, and somehow show who made it. How do I do this?
DuncanHill13:59, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I was looking through
Category:Band templates and noticed there are some extraneous entries that are listed (mostly due to users creating a template in their sandbox) - but I couldn't understand why
Gerard Way and
Frank Iero are listed as templates. There is nothing in those pages that have:
It's a bit odd they're both in the same band. I know the list of templates is dynamic as I've added items to it and cleaned up other that shouldn't be included.
Further: these Chemical Romance songs are also listed as templates, and there are probably more:
What/how much of the template are you wishing to become hideable – everything from the Cyclone_barnstar image downward...? Regards,
David Kernow(
talk)01:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I'm trying to hide the "Assessment" and "Noticeboard" sections as "inner" divs, then hide everything but the barnstar and name with an outside {{
header}} div. I don't know I made much sense...
Titoxd(
?!?)02:01, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Images, ..., video, and sounds (hints about property rights)
Hello! Every WP help page about images &c. should show both hints and links :
Kind of images than may be uploaded (free license required, &c.)
Places where to search for such.
What to do next ? Listing those pages and those places.
Just a little request. Down the left hand side of pages you have the very useful info on what links here etc. Would it be possible to track the number of page hits for each page and have a statistics page for each article telling you facts on creation date, number of hits, where the hits came from, graphs on hits etc? I would love to see this and it would bring great satisfaction to users to see how much their hard work was being used and referenced. Comments?
Pluke18:47, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, as for hit counters, there's no way that can be done without rewiring the server infrastructure, so it was
disabled a long time ago. Creation date can probably be added, although I think it would be more useful to know the total number of revisions in a page, instead of the earliest revision.
Titoxd(
?!?)19:09, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, I was looking for that clarification. Introducing an official stats page with number of edits, largest contributor etc could be ace.
Pluke19:45, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
There is a "off site" statistics of sort on the toolserver though. Basicaly they set up the global javascript to have a one in 10.000 (or whatver) chance of "pinging" a script on the toolserver. While somewhat random the result is a faily representative statistic over time considering the millions of hits the site gets. It doesn't show exactly how many views an article has but it does give us an idea of what the most populat topics are. Can't remember the adress at the moment though :( --
Sherool(talk)05:20, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Purging CSS?
If e.g.
MediaWiki:Common.css is changed, then the CSS still isn't updated always (or at least usually nothing does on sv-wikt). Is there a way of purging that CSS, so it'll work on all pages. If you don't do anything, will the CSS still be updated within 31 days? (I noticed that it says "&smaxage=2678400" in the source code, and 2678400=60*60*24*31)
Shell-man15:46, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
You could always ask users to purge it manually (reload browser, purge cache, disable caching, whatever), or leave a template "If this page displays incorrectly, purge your cache". Note that for /main.css, the devs have a trick for forcing changes instantly:
...they just change that number, causing the previous browser cached version to be invalidated. I think there is some discussion on doing that for MediaWiki: and User: css sheets in the future. --
Splarka (
rant)
02:56, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Either you didn't understand my question or I didn't understand you answer. I'm not talking about the browser cache, but about the MediaWiki cache. MediaWiki (obviously) creates a cache of the CSS files, and it's a bit strange I think. View
[4] and update it a few times in the browser. For me it changes practically every time (it changes also when I've got cache disabled). Is there a way to do so that it wont change (and be updated)? If you change the URL to e.g.
[5] then only the correct version is shown.
Shell-man08:25, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Your question as it was phrased only seemed to indicate your interest in client cache. The &smaxage= parameter defines the "Cache-Control" header which is sent by the server to the browser, which defines to the browser the maximum age it should allow the cached page to reach before reloading. For example, &smaxage=2678400 generates Cache-Control: public, s-maxage=2678400, max-age=2678400. I don't know Wikimedia's server cache setup enough to answer your rephrased question, but it could probably be a propagation issue (taking a few minutes/hours/days for every cache server to get the latest version). --
Splarka (
rant)
07:43, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Style changes
Did anyone else notice a change in the padding around headings and the titles of pages? The padding increased significantly for me suddenly yesterday, logged in and logged out, so it's not my personal css. Did anyone else notice this? —Mets501 (
talk)00:44, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm also not wowed by it and wonder if/where any consensus for it might be...? As I guess it's something requiring bureaucrat (or higher) level involvement, I've also posted a query
here. Regards,
David Kernow(
talk)03:12, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
This is most likely an unexpected consequence of the
fix to
bug 2013. This is the bug that caused large and small text to inheirit the line-height of parent elements (em should, apparently, never be used for defining line height; only a multiplier (##), a point size (##pt) or percentage (##%)). To verifiy that this is the cause, you can copy the old main.css values (most likely just the one for #content) to your
user css. If this is indeed the cause, please experimentally determine some correct values (not containing em) to replace the existing ones and then relay them to
User:Simetrical.
As to what this bug fixed, compare these oddly sized pieces of text:
An update, after some experimenting, the following values return very close approximations to the previous state for general page layout (although not perfect). Note that I only edit some of the major ones, there were 17 total style changes. Also, here is an
interesting explanation as to why this change had to be. "This is why it’s always strongly recommended that you use unitless numbers if you’re going to set a line-height on something like the html or body elements, or indeed on any element that is going to have descendant elements." ^_^ --
Splarka (
rant)
10:11, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
#content {
line-height: 1.05;
}
.diff {
line-height: 1.46;
}
p {
line-height: 1.46;
}
ul {
line-height: 1.47;
}
ol {
line-height: 1.47;
}
.portlet ul {
line-height: 1.545;
}
Has anyone else noticed that wikitables and such have been completely stripped of their padding? Whenever I look at a table now, the table cells and rows are scrunched together, making the table look extremely ugly. This may only be my computer, but with the recent rash of style changes, I don't believe the problem is limited to my computer. --
TMFLet's Go Mets -
Stats17:58, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, that's been fixed, we just have to wait for the damn css to refresh (I don't think there's a way to do that manually, but I may be wrong) —Mets501 (
talk)18:08, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
OK, it's been refreshed. Everything should be back to normal: instead of implementing the above changes (which weren't ready yet, as you can see by the side effects) I just reverted the global changes locally until we can figure this whole thing out. —Mets501 (
talk)18:14, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I've made some adjustments in
r17038. Give it a day or so to take effect and then have a look at the smaller wikis (which won't have reverted the spacing change to begin with) to see if it works right. It looks correct on my test wiki. —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
01:54, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, I haven't dealt with tables yet, just headers. I'll take a closer look at what's happened to various types of markup and see what I can do. This will take some tweaking, but it's ultimately what we want. —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
04:27, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Never mind, I've temporarily rolled the changes back.
[7] You can remove the manual overrides at the next resync; I won't readd the changes until I'm sure it looks the same as before the change (that is, except for where it's not supposed to, as in the example Splarka posted above). —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
05:32, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
w/index.php
What is with all of these pages which end in w/index.php? They always contain tons of spam. Is there something unique about such a page, or is it just one spammer or group of spammers who keep creating these pages?
User:Zoe|
(talk)03:16, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I am running Internet Explorer V.6.0.2900.2180 and I have a problem ONLY with Wikipedia pages and it used to happen to me with win98se before I changed to winXP so it seems independent of the OP and even maybe the browser version. It does not happen with any other sites that I am aware of.
It has to do with having the IE Security Settings Active Scripting set to "Prompt" (which is how I want to have it). If I set Active Scripting to Enable or to Disable, this problem does not happen. You would think that setting it to "Prompt" and then accepting the prompt would be the same as having it set to "Enable" but that's not how it works. Even setting it to "Disable" makes the pages work fine. But if I set Active Scripting to "Prompt", no matter what I choose when prompted, Wikipedia pages exhibit a strange problem: Then I cannot select and highlight text in the page using the left mouse button. Also, when I go to a box and try to type, like in a search box or when editing a page, it will not "take" and the box will remain as it was. Then I can right-click and "select all" and all the text will be selected and I can type in its place.
It only happens with Wikipedia pages, no other sites. I deduce that there is some script in Wikipedia pages which makes this happen. I can solve the problem by listing Wikipedia as a trusted site because there I have Active Scripting enabled and the problem does not arise but I am quite curious as to the cause of this problem. It seems it may be caused by some malfunction of IE in response to some specific script code in Wikipedia pages.
Can someone look at the scripts in the Wikipedia pages source code and find out where may be the cause of the problem? Any other ideas or workarounds?
I tried using a secure server but the problem remains the same. As I say, I have found workarounds myself but I would think this problem affects many other people. I think the problem probably lies between IE andsome script.
Hidden "Extras" in JPG files costing Wikipedia unnecessary bandwidth
I've recently completed a program called "JPGExtra" that removes hidden "extras" from JPG files (eg. Comments, Thumbnail Images, Exif data, Photoshop data, Adobe XMP data, etc):
http://www.fieggen.com/software/jpgextra.htm
I occasionally scan my own "Temporary Internet Files" folder to see what extras are in typical JPG images on web sites that I've been browsing. After visiting Wikipedia, I found some files with ENORMOUS percentages of "extras". For example, on
Fg2's many photos of Japan, some had as much as 98% waste. In other words, the actual image data comprised only 2% of the JPG file!
My question is three-fold:
1. Does Wikipedia generate small preview images from large, full-sized images, and if so, does the resizing algorithm unnecessarily include these "extras"?
2. Is there any mechanism in place to reduce image overheads, either automatically or manually, thus reducing Wikipedia's bandwidth costs?
3. If I do find glaring examples of such bandwidth-wasting images, what's the best mechanism for correcting them? Contacting the contributor? Fixing the image and overwriting Wikipedia's copy with my corrected copy?
Ian Fieggen06:02, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
1. An Exif segment of 8,530 bytes, including thumbnail image;
2. A HUGE ICC Color Profile spanning Three segments, total size 174,002 bytes;
3. A Photoshop segment of 9,724 bytes, including a second thumbnail image;
4. An Adobe XMP data segment of 6,149 bytes.
Just to be clear, NONE of these "extras" is used by the browser when displaying the image, but they ARE nonetheless downloaded and thus consume bandwidth.
(edit conflict) Wikipedia uses
ImageMagick on the server side to rescale images on the fly. It's
GPL'd software, so you can look to see what it does and what options it has. —
EncMstr06:03, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Okay, that probably explains the "extras" being migrated to the smaller images. In that case, it seems that we need only concentrate on ensuring that users' original full-sized contributions are as free of "extras" as possible. Perhaps I should release a GPL version of my program, with which Wikipedia could encourage users to optimize their photos prior to uploading?
Ian Fieggen06:45, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I think we should leave the originals as-is, but yeah it would make sense to strip out all the meta stuff from the generated thumbnails. --
Sherool(talk)07:12, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
This JPG file was an extreme example, but the full-size image also contained the huge ICC colour profile. The total "Extras" were about 68% of the full-sized image, so even there it makes sense to remove them.
Anyone from Wikipedia wanting to play with a full copy of my JPGExtra program to do their own experimentation, e-mail me (from the web site) and I'll send you a copy.
Ian Fieggen07:20, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
(edit confict again) Removing the information wholesale might not be the best solution. For example, if a PNG contains original photoshop layer information, it would be incredibly useful to retain in the stored image in case someone wants to make a derived work from it. Once an image is flattened (the layers lost), it becomes very tedious to, for example, replace the text of a map with another language. Is there any hint that this information is retained in the extra baggage? If so, there needs to be two mechanisms for image retrieval: one for display on a page, the other for downloading the whole nine yards. Image display is obviously a candidate to remove the cruft, unless someone knows better. —
EncMstr07:22, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
One worry is whether images are being used to store anything that we don't know about. For example, child porn can be embedded within a seemingly innocuous image! That concern aside, storing the full JPG file but only displaying the image portion sounds like a good option. From a purely historical point of view, it's interesting to hang on to as much as possible.
Ian Fieggen07:38, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Ian, does your tool do anything that Imagemagick doesn't do? Maybe Imagemagick needs some more options set when displaying an image? —
EncMstr07:22, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm no developer, just a stand-alone software programmer. My program is designed with a Windows user in mind whereas the ImageMagick seems to be something "embedded", or callable by Wikipedia.
Ian Fieggen07:38, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
2) Not bandwidth no, there are a lot of caching and load optimising going on to keep the servers from blowing up under the preasure of all the requests, but I don't think the volume of data piped out is a major concern in the grand scheme of things (we haven't even disabled "hotlinking" to images) 3) Just upload the optimised version on top of the old one (as long as it's free licensed images). If possible I would suggest avoiding stipping away author information and such from the EXIF data though, it should not take up a lot of space compared to the embeded thumbnails and what not anyway. --
Sherool(talk)11:04, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
What are you talking about? We use EXIF data in the image description page, comments are good for storing copyright information, and extra content specific to a certain editor (Photoshop meta-data) can be used to make the images easier for others to edit. Please don't remove this data. Bandwidth is not a concern. Especially compared to ease of editing and maintaining images and image history. —
Omegatron13:27, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm talking about files that are 98% waste! Sure, an Exif data segment of only 200 odd bytes is quite acceptable, but one that contains a thumbnail image that's larger than the main image is just ridiculous, as is having a color profile with 10x the amount of data as the image itself. Even the main image, from which this smaller image was derived, was 2/3 "waste". This excess can surely be stripped back to something more reasonable? Admittedly, my program currently strips everything, but a modified version that strips selected portions would be advisable. As for bandwidth not being a concern, I recently halved a site's bandwidth consumption by optimizing their images. That's not to be sneezed at! Besides the cost saving, it makes the site that much faster. Never forget that Wikipedia is also for poorer people with slow Internet connections.
Ian Fieggen22:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Color is a major deficiency on Wikipedia, I think. At least some people are including profiles in their JPEG files. They should not be stripped under any circumstances unless they are sRGB profiles. I guess the data could be profile-mapped to sRGB, allowing a smaller profile.
Notinasnaid19:55, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
It seems people would rather that I didn't mess with the images, which was my feeling also, so I don't intend to do so. It should be up to the individual. However, shouldn't there also be an advice section for people uploading to ensure that their JPG files aren't overloaded prior to uploading? Also, where such heavily overloaded images are identified, shouldn't there be procedures in place for rectifying them and/or alerting the sender?
Ian Fieggen22:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I'll also reinterate that color and EXIF data are important to files, though adobe proprietary data sectors may not be useful, and may be a result of a file not being properly exported for 'web' by the application. (Macromedia Fireworks, for example, does some awful things to PNG files if you don't export them). --
Kevin_b_er00:33, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
If you want to get something useful done, post a patch on bugzilla and start a conversation on the wikitech-l list. The village pump is not a good place for development planning.
In general, we expect uploaded images to include EXIF metadata: this is both useful and desireable.
Generated thumbnails should, generally speaking, not include a lot of metadata. If and only if you see large metadata chunks being carried over into generated thumbs, then and only then do we need to do something about it. Please limit discussion and work to only this case; the above conversation includes a lot of useless-looking fighting which doesn't seem to address the actual issue.
Rendered thumbs for files other than SVG and DjVu are currently generated using ImageMagick. If you intend to work on this issue, please begin with the necessary basic research: checking the online documentation for ImageMagick for EXIF-related issues and options.
Once you know a) the problem space and b) a recommendation, then you can provide some specific suggestions in the appropriate developer forum. (Eg a patch on bugzilla and a post on wikitech-l to make sure people look it over.) --
brion00:59, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Okay, this sounds too heavy for me. I'd need to determine the extent of the problem (presumably by browsing), learn how ImageMagick works and how Wikipedia implements it, figure out a solution, then familiarise myself with the various forums on Wikipedia and persons to whom to address such suggestions. Whilst I'm someone who likes to help, I don't want to be pushing my own barrow uphill. If Wikipedia couldn't care less about bandwidth and would rather just have all images kept intact, that's fine, I was only making a suggestion.
Ian Fieggen03:58, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Of course we want to keep all images intact -- doing otherwise would destroy data. "Bandwidth", however, is going to be primarily a matter of inline thumbnails, not the original high-resolution files. --
brion19:39, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
I've just
committed a very simple fix for this (use -thumbnail instead of -resize) to SVN. This makes MediaWiki depend on ImageMagick 6, but since that was released in April 2004 I guess most people have upgraded by now. Note that this fix will only affect new thumbnails (unless some server admin is kind enough to locate and delete all the old affected ones), and that it won't have any effect until the fix is deployed to the servers. To purge affected images manually (once the code is deployed), append "?action=purge" to the end of the URL of the image description page and reload. —
Ilmari Karonen (
talk)
15:12, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Even though I don't understand all the technicalities, which will be more familiar to Wiki-techs, it sounds like this will provide a good solution.
Ian Fieggen01:30, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
...aaand it's live! If you see any huge thumbnails, just purge the image. (You may also have to purge your browser cache to see the effect.) —
Ilmari Karonen (
talk)
12:15, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
When I copy and paste that code, replacing for the band name, it doesn't work.
What I've seen in other articles is that people use {{band name}} which inserts the category template. Is the info in my link correct or mangled?
amnesiac02:27, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
You can link to a category with an extra colon: [[:Category:Band templates]] ->
Category:Band templates.
What you pasted above isn't a template, it is just the code to categorize a template into the category "Band templates". What you have to do is create
Template:Band name here (not that one obviously) and utilize that <noinclude></noinclude> to categorize the template as a band template. --
Splarka (
rant)
03:04, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
Thank, Splarka - I see now - I thought that code was what one inserted into an article which would *include* the template, but now I see in fact it's code for the basis of the template being assigned to a category itself. I went ahead and copied an existing template. Thanks for the tip on linking to a category too!
amnesiac03:13, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
I created an article on
Ferozpur but accidently left a period on the end of the word. To enable links to work, I moved "Ferozpur." to "Ferozpur". Now there is the useless page "Ferozpur." which exists solely as a #REDIRECT page.
Unsupported Request Method and Protocol
Squid does not support all request methods for all access protocols. For example, you can not POST a Gopher request.
Your cache administrator is support.
Generated Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:22:57 GMT by mk-accel-2.www.uk.tiscali.com (squid/2.5.STABLE11)
I seem to have lost the ability to use alt-anything after upgrading from Firefox 1.5.0.7 to 2.0 RC. Known bug? (Alt-s is captured by the browser for History, but nothing else). —
Rob(talk)17:05, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
There's some discussion and possible workaround mentioned
here. It sounds like it's just related to Alt-S, and you can either use Shift-Alt+S, or you can fiddle with about:config to choose which modifier key you want to trigger the accesskeys. --
Interiot17:13, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I can definitely confirm Alt-P and Alt-I don't work either. But I can understand not passing alt past the browser. I'll just use alt-shift-? instead. —
Rob(talk)17:22, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Firefox has changed the way they do shortcut keys in 2.0. It's now alt+shift on Windows/Linux instead of alt. --
brion21:07, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
On
this page, I want to get rid of the periods before the office names, but when I do, those whole lines go blank. Do I have to put in a rank for the offices to show up, or can I somehow leave the "order" line blank?
Biruitorul07:00, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
i just made a new page by the name of Store Wars (Star Wars Parody) and it disappeared! I know i saved it, could someone please explain?
Nichlok23:59, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Is there a command to tell the layout software not to leave white space until the end of the current image? (I thought I saw a comment about it but can't remember where. I usually just move the images.)
RJFJR21:10, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
You mean like the caption space? It gives it to the image if you use the "thumb" command. I think you can prevent it by not using it or the "frame" option. You can stil specifiy a smaller size, e.g. |250px|, but it won't give you the caption space. HTH —
Frecklefoot |
Talk21:38, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't think that's what I mean. See
Stony Kill Falls. There's a block of white space after the first heading until the end of the first image. I'd like to have the next piece of text run next to the first image too.
I could shrink the first image (thumb) or rearrange where in the article the images are entered. I was wondering there was a way to do it without having to change the article. Thank you.
RJFJR16:16, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Section Edit links now on left, not right
On many pages, suddenly, (but oddly not this one), section edit links are now appearing on a new line at the left, instead of at the right, where they have been for years. It is not a browser issue, since I exited Netscape 7 and restarted it and the aticle-dependent change is still there. Is this a new technical change that has not been adequately tested?
Hu21:10, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Immediately after entering this item, the links on this page shifted. Seems to be something introduced by the editing process. To clarify, the edit link is on the left on a line on its own, and the section to edit is below it.
Hu21:11, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
It looks like the code is now dropping the following:
style="float:right;margin-left:5px;"
out of the div class = "editsection". Please restore the code! Please test adequately before changes!
Hu21:19, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
The "edit" link used to appear to the right of section headers. Just now it moved two lins above the header. Was this an intentional change? -
Will Beback21:10, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
The style was moved from inline to out of line. The CSS links have been updated now, but you may have to edit something or log in / log out if your particular cached pages show old things. --
brion21:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
All the section edit links -- which used to appear floated right on a level with section headers -- are messed up, displaying left and above the section headers. If this is "the coffeemaker exploded" well, I'd help clean up if I knew how. If this is "bubbling test tube number nine", please put it back in
Pandora's Box. Thank you.
John Reid21:18, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I've logged out, closed all browser windows, purged my local memory and disk cache, quit and restarted the browser, and logged in again. Looks like this works okay in Monobook and Classic but fails in Cologne Blue (the chosen skin of discriminating editors™). I really do wish that editors who make interface changes would please preview these changes in all skins before committing the entire community to them. Okay?
I want my user page to not have the title of User:Clientele, but still retain the same URL. How can I change the page title? I saw this done on Uncyclopedia
here, and I tried to transfer code
here, but it dosen't work. Anyone know how to fix it?
If you mean
Uncyclopedia:Template:Title, then you can copy the wikicode to your user page to tweak with it (do not create it as a template, someone will delete it). Example:
It will look ugly for people using other skins, do not use it anywhere but your user page (and even that is probably not a good idea). --
Splarka (
rant)
07:28, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
My page keeps being deleted
I have made a page today called Bim (1975 film) and sum jackass keeps deleting it sayin its copywritten text when ive wrote the entire thing myself...can sumone explain 2 me who keeps doing this and why!
Infamous_01
I have a quick question. On all of the computers in my house the articles load very quickley but sometimes the Images load very slowly or not at all, what cause the images to sometimes not appear? Please Let me know on my talk page--
Seadog.M.S20:15, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
The slow and infrequent image loading has been an issue for some time now. Another section devoted to this issue can be found near the top of the page. --
TMFLet's Go Mets -
Stats21:25, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I seem to have been having image problems today also. Mostly, the images don't appear. Sometimes reloading fixes the problem, sometimes it doesn't. Earlier today, I wanted to view an archived image, and I got an error page, saying that the image wasn't in the cache, and viewing images that weren't in the cache wasn't allowed. It's the first time it's happened to me. Hope the issue is resolved soon. ShardsofmetalTalk •
Contribs01:37, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Policy question
A third party just wrote me: Please leave Rosencomet and his articles alone. Can this third party enforce this, especially given that the person in question, Rosencomet, has edited hundreds of articles, perhaps more? Any articles involving certain themes are being considered his, even if he did not originate them.
Thank you for your suggestions above. I tried them but none are appropriate for my problem which is becoming more critical. I need actual help and protection. I need access to a source that can give me some real information. A pattern of harassment is being repeated toward me that started a few weeks after I got an account at Wikipedia a month or so ago. That resulted in me being accused of being a sockpuppet. The charge was ruled false but it was a horrible ordeal for me. The same people have started again. Can you direct me to a source, place, or person before something bad happens.
Timmy1212:24, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm an avid opera user and an avid wikipedia editor. Yesterday, as I was submitting my rewrite of the
Graffiti article (trying to get its featured article status back), the page just hung for hours - opera would connect to wikipedia as I wasn't getting timeout errors, but it would just hang indefinitely. Thinking it might be my ISP or wikipedia going down for maintenance, I ignored the issue. Today, I tried to load the wikipedia frontpage, and the same thing happened. Frustrated, I tried it on firefox and the front page loaded in seconds. I then went into my opera site settings for wikipedia and told it to identify itself as mozilla, and that's fixed the problem.
I was just wondering, what's going on? Why can't one load wikipedia pages with opera identifying itself as opera anymore?
I am experiencing a similar issue. Wikipedia pages take minutes to load in Opera, but Opera loads other websites very quickly. Firefox loads Wikipedia pages quickly too. If this issue persists, I will report it on the My Opera Community Forums. --
J.L.W.S. The Special One05:29, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Others who use Opera are reporting no issues. See the Opera thread on the Wikipedia-l
archive. What version of Opera are you using? –
RHolton≡–
12:46, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I use version 9.00 and have noticed major slowdowns, especially after the browser has been active for a long time. I had assumed it was the system until I tried another browser. I've found that restarting Opera fixes the problem. -
Will Beback23:49, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm on 9.2, I've just set it to identify itself as opera again and I'm not experiencing any problems anymore. Perhaps it's the browser working too much, like Will suggests. I just thought it was strange that I should have to set my browser to identify itself as mozilla.
Ultra-LoserTalk |
BT sites00:14, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm using Opera 8.5. Today, Opera is loading Wikipedia pages at its usual speed, and I don't see any other problems. The problems only lasted two days; perhaps it's a temporary bug/glitch that has now been fixed. --
J.L.W.S. The Special One02:25, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm trying to start up a wiki based on asian pop culture and would like to start off using the same exact entries in wikipedia for some pages but im having a problem making the pages look the same as on Wikipedia.
Specifically, I'm having trouble displaying the template "Template:Infobox idol" correctly. Please compare:
Can you see the difference? the infobox version on my website is messed up. I've also copied and created the other templates parsed in the "Template:Infobox idol" but to no avail. I have the parsefunctions extension installed and ive created monobook.css and commons.css
I've been spending alot of time installing other templates that I thought would fix the problem but so far nothing. I've been thinking because of that it has something to do with Javascript or CSS, but I don't really know.
Could somebody please help me out?
Thanks,
Ryan
I took a look and, while I do not know what is causing it, I can say it's not JavaScript or CSS. For some reason, your site seems to be behaving differently when HTML table row markup is used within a wiki table. I'd guess it's the
HTML Tidy setup which is different on your site (AFAIK, the builtin markup sanitizer behaves quite differently when it knows the output will not be fixed up further by tidy). Try enabling the relevant MediaWiki option (after installing whatever it needs) and see if it makes a difference. An alternative workaround would be to use only HTML table markup instead of mixing it with wiki table markup as is currently being done on that infobox. --
cesarb05:43, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks CesarB. What exactly would the relevant MediaWiki option be? I was also wondering if I could be provided the table only in HTML table markup in case there is no other choice.
Is it is possible to float the box? I have the float attr. in the code but it is not being executed. Have I got the syntax wrong? Here is the code I have used:
Well, your syntax is wrong ("float: right;" should be in the style string), but there seems to be something about class="messagebox standard-talk" (defined in
wikipedia:common.css) that also keeps it from floating. I'm not seeing what the class definition in common.css does that affects this. --
Rick Block (
talk)
18:16, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict) You want float:right inside the style. However, class messagebox includes "margin:0 auto", which adds extra space to the right of the box. To counter it, you have to include margin-right:0 as well. See the example below. --
Interiot18:19, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
The best method would probably be [[Special:Contributions/127.0.0.1|127.0.0.1]]; I think [[User:127.0.0.1|]] would give enough information for people viewing the history to find the IP's contribs and talk (but I'm not sure, so I'm testing with this edit summary). --
ais523 09:26, 11 October 2006 (
UTC)
The pipe trick seems not to work in edit summaries (
[10]), so it's the first method or just [[User:127.0.0.1]], depending on how much typing you want to do. --
ais523 09:27, 11 October 2006 (
UTC)
I had originally signed up in wikipedia with my traditional nick, but forgot to associate an email to it, and now i can't remember the password, i don't seem to be able to recover it, and mi original nick is lost!.
Is there any possibility of recovering the account?
Gorgonzola15:24, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Is it possible to get the list of all wikipedia articles? Aniceint pages sepecial page is picking up only 1000 articles. Please help me. I have to run it on the ml-IN version of the wikipedia. It have only 1173 articles
A increasing number of people seem to be falling victim to disgrunteled vandals spamming them with new password requests, some even seem to write bots for this task resulting in several hundreds new e-mails for the unlucky victum per day, and there is nothing we admins can do about it since bocked IP's can still initiate a new password request.
I did a little digging on bugzilla and found that a "throttle" feature for this aparently already exist. I dropped a note about this on the wikimedia-tch IRC channel so hopefully it's already dealth with, but I figured I'd post here too to be on the safe side. So please O great and benevolent devs turn this feature on or throttle it way down. There is rely no legitemate reason for the same user to request a new password more than once a day. That should save some users a lot of anoyance, and keep our mail host from getting blacklisted (again). --
Sherool(talk)12:04, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I think that this should be turned on as soon as possible, if a solution exists or could be easily created. It has not happened to me personally, but reports of it turn up frequently and it is a significant problem in severe cases. I think that three requests in 24 hours for each account (to make sure that there are no problems with spam filters and accidental deletions), five in a week (in case of additional forgetting) and seven in a month, if multiple restrictions can be made, would be good limits. A limit of one per ten minutes might be good, too. I think that this would prevent virtually all cases of legitimate requests being blocked while still making it an ineffective tool for harassment. If it is just left to three (or more) per day, then someone could make three quick requests every day that they come to Wikipedia and still be somewhat of a nuisance, especially for those with slow connections and those who are charged for time online and/or per email. If less than three requests are allowed, there is increased danger of legitimate requests being blocked. However, limiting it to three or even six requests per day would be a huge improvement. --
Kjkolb12:57, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I think at the very least, a
captcha should be required to stop bots trying to do this and slow down humans who try to send repeated password requests.
Tra(Talk)20:35, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I agree that this throttling feature should be enabled. In the meantime, the immediate victims can avert the issue by blanking their e-mail - then the software won't allow a password reset at all. Just don't forget your password.
Deco00:36, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Um, Deco, did you think that one through? ;-) If someone is psychotic enough to send you hundreds of password requests, you probably do not want them to have your email address. They could send you threatening emails from a throwaway account or sign you up for spam. --
Kjkolb06:59, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Problems like this are generally cleared by null edits, not by purging the cache. I tried a null edit (edit the article and submit the "change" without making any changes or supplying an edit summary) on
South Australian Legislative Council which removed the reference from this article. --
Rick Block (
talk)
14:15, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
The gallery tag seems to be causing the references to reset.
For instance, see
Anastacia - the gallery in Discography
clears the references, so they start numbering again at [1]
and only the one after the gallery is listed with the references/
tag. This appears to have started happening in the last day
or two.
Gimmetrow17:43, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Ah, so that's what it is! I've been banging my head against the wall to figure out what happened to
Timberline Lodge ski area's references. They were working a few days ago. And yet its <references /> tag looks identical to the functional
Magic Mile. Thanks for figuring out the symptoms. —
EncMstr18:56, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Is anyone working on this? Has anyone submitted this to bugzilla? I have already seen one article where someone just removed the gallery entirely to fix the problem.
Gimmetrow03:14, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I just discovered this problem at a number of pages. I have never submitted a bug request to bugzilla, so I don't know anything about it, but it really should be done. --
RM15:28, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
Case sensitivity sucks and has no payoff. In the few cases where a tiny payoff is imagined (
Enigma,
ENIGMA) this is totally swamped by the need for dab anyway. Editor-hours are flushed into case-rds; readers attempt to outguess non-standard cap conventions.
Please don't give me the long historical political battle answer; done. Time to burn case sensitivity at the stake.
John Reid15:53, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
I know, sometimes the case is corrected for you, sometimes it isn't, sometimes it's done manually by a redirect. It would be good if the software automatically redirected you to the article you want, if you type the case wrong.
Tra(Talk)18:56, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
For the most part, it is corrected when you type in the search box, but not when you type the article name in the URL. For example, if you type wp:vpt into the search box, and it automatically brings you to
WP:VPT, even though the page is all caps. But if you type the same thing in the url after /wiki/, you are brought to
Wp:vpt. ShardsofmetalTalk •
Contribs06:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
I absolutely agree. The case-sensitivity of article lookups (via the search box "Go" feature) is totally stupid and should have been fixed on day 2. Matt 01:05, 11 October 2006 (UTC).
I've noticed it to, especially with thumbnails of newly uploaded images and SVG (though my observations could only by coincidences). Just letting you know you aren't alone. Text loads fine and fast, but then I have to wait quite a while for the thumbnails to load.--
Andrew c02:26, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
The real puzzling thing about this is that only one site (upload.wikimedia.org, which handles the images) is slow; everything else is lightning fast. --
TMFLet's Go Mets -
Stats22:58, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
I wonder if the browser has anything to do with it? I'm getting a lot of hangs in Firefox, but Opera (and wget, for that matter) loaded the thumbnails just fine... There is a delay, but the non-Mozilla software managed to grab the data nonetheless.
Magus Melchior00:51, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
Other image licences
So far I've stuck to USGS images which are public domain. I have a need for Canadian and provincial gov't images which have a long non-commercial use allowance, with small print. We're non-commercial, but can't guarantee that wiki-copies are good things. Is there a way to use these images? --
Zeizmic16:28, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
You'll have to be more specific. USGS is a United States government organization. Anything a US federal governement organization produces (aside from organization logos, which are often still protected) is in the
public domain. Are you sure they're not just images that USGS has on their website which are actually produced by a canadian governmental organizaiton?
Kevin_b_er20:32, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant I wanted to use Canadian gov't pictures that have a complex 'you can use this for non-commercial use' yada yada, type licence. --
Zeizmic21:06, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
hi!, i would like to know the basic templates (links) for comic books box templates, superhero box templates, superhero teams templates, and any templates used in wikicomics project, thanks!
Bloodpack22:24, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Search rating/ranking
Hi all
I'm sure this has been answered before however I have been unable to locate any info on this topic.
How is each pages' relevance ranked for searching ?
I don't know if this has been covered, although it has appered on the main page talk, but occationally the link to wikiversity on the main page turns red, and clicking on it leads to editing the page "V:" in wikipedia. I've found that on the wikiversity side, all links to wikipedia turn red as well when this happens. Anyone know what is going on?--
Rayc05:59, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
My Usertalk page
Hi,
I am new to the community and I received a welcome message from Booksworm with tips and suggestions (which were very helpful, by the way).
My question is how do I remove new messages after receiving them? Do I simply edit the page itself? Will that effect any new messages I receive?
Help:Talk page might be of help. Yes, just edit the page. If any other user edits your talk page (even if it's to remove a comma from their comment to you), that will cause the orange box to appear. That will always happen, regardless of what you do to the page. --
Interiot16:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
WP:ARCHIVE is another good page to check out, by maintaining an archive you can go back and easily find oldmessages without mucking around in the page history. Many editors simply leave their talk page messages up until they have a lot, then archive them. —
xaosfluxTalk12:10, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
My Usertalk page
Hi,
I am new to the community and I received a welcome message from Booksworm with tips and suggestions (which were very helpful, by the way).
My question is how do I remove new messages after receiving them? Do I simply edit the page itself? Will that effect any new messages I receive?
Help:Talk page might be of help. Yes, just edit the page. If any other user edits your talk page (even if it's to remove a comma from their comment to you), that will cause the orange box to appear. That will always happen, regardless of what you do to the page. --
Interiot16:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
WP:ARCHIVE is another good page to check out, by maintaining an archive you can go back and easily find oldmessages without mucking around in the page history. Many editors simply leave their talk page messages up until they have a lot, then archive them. —
xaosfluxTalk12:10, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
My Log in isn't holding either
I see another user is having the same problem I am. I've lost count on how many times I've attempted to stay logged in last night. I edited my personal profile and it promptly got deleted by an admin. because once again I was logged out. My cookies are enabled, my browser cache has been cleared, and Wikipedia still won't keep me logged in. Will someone please address this issue, as I'm not the only one experiencing it? This has never happened to me before. (By the way I'm on Direcway if that helps) Thanks.--
magialuna 02:42 28 September 2006 (UTC)
From what I've read in the past on this page, I believe that being on Direcway causes this problem. I think I also read that there is currently no solution to this problem. I'm sorry I couldn't really help you, ShardsofmetalTalk •
Contribs00:22, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm trying to add an image,
Polyamory.png, to
Polyamory. Usually, when you add a Wikimedia Commons image onto regular Wikipedia, there's no problem. But when I type [[Image:Polyamory.png]], it comes out as
this image, which is (although similar-looking) not the pic I wanted.
The problem is that Polyamory.png is a different image on the different wikis. I can't rename the image on Commons OR Wikipedia, either, because there doesn't seem to be a "move" function for images. I figured I could re-upload my picture on Commons with a different name, and then delete the duplicate, but that's kind of tedious. Is there any other way? Switchercattalkcont20:35, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
I have changed my preferences to try out Croatian & Serbian iekav languages - and noticed a rather odd thingy. While it translates all the buttons, it leaves my preferences in the upper-right in English, instead of "moja podesavanja". Could we do something 'bout it? --
PaxEquilibrium10:23, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
I have been having trouble with creating a project in the sandbox. I understand how to edit it but does anybody know how to create a project like the previous projects,
hangman,
poetry,
and
storytelling
When editing a page, the upper layout looks strange, you can see it by
editing any page. If you have any comment or the answer, please, tell it to
Pasqual (ca), or directly to
Klenje (fur), who asked me about it, but my knowledges don't reach it.
Usually this means there's a missing close tag (</div> or similar) in one of the user interface messages. In particular check
fur:MediaWiki:Edittools, but some of the others on the edit page might be the problem. --
Brion10:36, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Changed a Disambig to Redirect, but Disambig Still Appears
I found an unnecessary disambig page for
Motorhead, and changed it to a redirect page, but going to the page still brings up the disambig, even though the code for that has been deleted... What's going on?
G Rose07:37, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
What is this about? <categorytree>Film</categorytree> As in
this edit? Is this a legitimate use? What are legitimate uses? Seems to me to be a lot of clutter on article pages.
older ≠
wiser13:45, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
It's been reverted already, and no that tag is generally not useful in articles. it can be used in category or project space for organizational assistance. —
xaosfluxTalk18:44, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, yes, I reverted it. I was asking about it here because I had never come across it before. Is there a way to disable it in the main article namespace? Is there at least a way to identify where it is used (similar to what links here for a template)?
older ≠
wiser19:01, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Ahhhh! That's probably a difference among typefaces, especially since you probably have a Texas keyboard. Some typesfaces show a single vertical line, others as two stacked vertical bars with a small space between them. However there are disparate characters available—see The UK keyboard layout at
International keyboard layouts#UK: One is at top left, the other is bottom left (just inboard the shift key). When editing articles, {{!}} can be used (that's a bang or exclamation mark inside double curly braces) which expands to |.
Oh no! Please don't use {{!}} in article text. This is only an ugly template hack needed in rare cases inside complicated template code (mostly done in infoboxes with optional fields where wiki-folks want wiki-table syntax). If you use that in articles, you get shot on sight you will be reverted and disliked. (Just being curious: What are "Texas" keyboards?) --
Ligulem08:36, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
If you're really having problems, type it {{
subst:!}} instead and noone will know... --
ais523 08:48, 2 October 2006 (
UTC)
I've
added a pipe to the wiki-markup section of the edit tools. These are displayed below the edit window. Just klick on the | symbol and a pipe is inserted. (Yes I know: there was already a pipe in the symbols section, but I think an additional pipe should be in the wiki markup). --
Ligulem09:15, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
It is on purpose, and done thoguh the use of __NOGALLERY__ tags. In a nutshell, we can't display a category of non-free (as in speach) images, as it violates the Fair Use rationale. Certain fair use pages have an exemption to allow the display anyway, as authorized under
Fair Use Exemptions. —
xaosfluxTalk18:37, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
If a Wikipedia has all its links underlined (default), then how is it changed so that they aren't for all users and visitors? --
Adam (
Talk)
19:41, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
Is there any way to allow a date to appear according to a users preference (e.g. 2 October or October 2), without putting it as an internal link (
2 October). This might be for example where the same date occurs several times in the same article. —
Tivedshambo (
talk to me/
look at me/
ignore me) —
22:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
How is it possible that items disappear from my watchlist? Nobody else but me works on my PC. Is it technically possible that an administrator or somebody in the technical department does this?
Antiphus19:43, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm noticing watchlist strangeness as well. I have my user page and talk page watchlisted and they both have the "unwatch" tab available. But neither appear in my watchlist depite the fact that there were changes on both today (vandalism). The only way I knew this was the "New messages" banner and then looking at the contributions of the vandaliser. --
TheParanoidOne21:28, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
From my experience, items can disappear from watchlists if they are moved anld no other edits have been made to the article after the move. Try making an edit on the page and see if it returns.
Naconkantari21:31, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
Correct. Certain
log entries now appear in histories, such as moves and protects. If one of these is the top edit, it apparently doesn't appear in your watch list. --
Splarka (
rant)
07:22, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
Hello, my username is Torvik. The reason I'm not posting with the name Torvik is because I cannot remain logged into Wikipedia. I know it's hard to believe me, but I hope you do because this is really getting on my nerves. Whenever I log into Wikipedia using either Firefox or IE, I am instantly logged out again upon visiting a subsequent page within Wikipedia. Help please? I have further info on my
talk page. --
67.142.130.2522:19, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
If you are using a satellite ISP, see the last FAQ at the top of this page. If you aren't, try removing all your wikipedia.org cookies. --
cesarb23:57, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
...and the IP address given belongs to
DirecPC. Guess where that redirects to? DirecWay again. Try the secure server as indicated in the FAQ, it should work. (Should we add a note about that to
MediaWiki:Signupend?) --
cesarb00:02, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
There are special characters at the end of the name: Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/NuclearUmpf%E2%80%8E. I suggest moving.
Tizio,
Caio,
Sempronio16:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I figured it out by hovering over the link in your contribs and looking at the destination (but Tizio beat me to it).
User:NuclearUmpf has no special characters. I think that particular special character sequence is a direction mark (used to mix left-to-right and right-to-left text); people sometimes catch them inside a copy-and-paste range without realising (because they're invisible). --
ais523 16:38, 3 October 2006 (
UTC)
I've just moved it for you (by going to the end of the new name with the End key and then backspacing one character). --
ais523 16:45, 3 October 2006 (
UTC)
You just reverted my move (presumably due to the same problems)... Do you want me to revert it back to the title without the characters again? --
ais523 16:47, 3 October 2006 (
UTC)
Your most recent move has now put it back in the right place. --
ais523 16:48, 3 October 2006 (
UTC)
I figured out that move was possible by editing a local copy of the move page, but removed the extra char from the old name instead of the new one. Everything should be fixed now.
Tizio,
Caio,
Sempronio16:52, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
This appears to be finally fixed now. The page is at the proper location, and the wierd character(s) aren't on the
WP:RFCU page anymore since I just removed them. --
Kevin_b_er21:09, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
No way to express "Placed in public domain by creator other than oneself" for images
There's no way to express, during image upload, that an image was explicitly placed in the public domain by the creator, when the person uploading it was not the creator. I ran into this when uploading
Image:Grandinheadrestraint.gif. The source of the picture says "This headholding device is in the public domain and can NOT be patented. Diagrams are published in T. Grandin 1993, Livestock Handling and Transport, CABI Publishing, p. 306. This was done to make this device readily available and to improve animal welfare." There's no way I can express that via the menu options, and since there are 'bots that read image uploads and delete them if they don't approve, this matters. I had to classify the image as a "political poster", which is the closest option available in the menus. --
John Nagle19:19, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I see recent articles which duplicate existing articles under a different title.
Justice of the victors is the same as the existing
Victor's justice, and the new
Electricity vampire is the same as the existing
standby power. I expect that the editor/creator of the new article did not find the existing article and saw the need for an article on the topic, but their time would be better spent improving the existing article. I do not see a criterion for speedy deleting due to duplication. How should this be handled?
Edison20:18, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
No real speedy deletion criteria, per say, but they can just be deleted if they're just a sentence or two and are obviously complete copies. Otherwise a merge,
prod, or
AFD is in order. —Mets501 (
talk)20:30, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
No need to prod. Changing the duplicate to a
Redirect is the usually better solution in cases of duplicates that provide no new information. --
JLaTondre20:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
I just noticed that the image that used to be part of the taxobox on
Cyclamen is now a redlink. It seems that someone recently deleted the image from EN:WP because the image appears under the same name on WP:Commons - so the image itself is legit, but for some technical reason it's not showing up in the taxobox. What to do? Thanks. --
woggly09:28, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
The image never seems to have been deleted (it's got an empty deletion log). Are you sure that the image name in the taxobox is correct? --
ais523 09:38, 4 October 2006 (
UTC)
Since the site design is standards-compliant and generally well-structured, and the images have ALT attributes, the site should work decently well with speech browsers and screen readers.
*Dan T.*16:54, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
It's
Wikipedia:User versions, for an idea on a way to deal with edit creep, and better enable expert editors to monitor content in their subject area. Among other things. It's an extension/generalization to the "stable versions" system. And it's completely democratic, and in the wiki spirit. I'm mentioning it on both VP:POL and VP:TECH as it has implications for both.
It is very rough at this point, so please don't consider it a proposed policy, yet.
I added a subcategory "Libraries in Nebraska" to the category "Libraries in the United States." It filed under "L" for "Libraries." How do I make it file under "N" for "Nebraska"? For example, "Libraries in New Jersey" is under "N" and "Libraries in Vermont" is under "V." What did I do wrong?
Angela Kroeger19:20, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Nothing, those just have a sort key added to them. You can it to yours by typing [[Category:Libraries in the United States|Nebraska]], in the
Libraries in Nebraska page, and the extra text will sort it properly.
Titoxd(
?!?)19:36, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
If all the links in the articles suddenly become underlined (or the opposite), or red links instead end with a red question mark (or the opposite), or paragraphs are fully justified instead of left justified (or the opposite), it's probably because your browser failed to load one of the stylesheets (or the server sent you a wrong one). Do a forced reload or bypass your cache.
Are you using
popups? This happened often to my friend in IE6 when he used popups. If you click the back button right after it happens, that should load the page correctly. My friend switched to
Firefox, which fixed the problem. Also, when I went to the page, it displayed correctly, and I also use Firefox. ShardsofmetalTalk •
Contribs21:30, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
I don't think I'm using popups - I must admit I didn't understand a thing on the link you gave though. I've tried hitting the back button, the page loads again and displays briefly, and again I get the IE 'Page cannot be displayed' thing.
DuncanHill00:13, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm still having the same problem, have noticed it on a couple of other pages. Often, not always, it is accompanied by a warning from my Norton that an attempt has been made to attack my computer.
DuncanHill09:05, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Autoshow hidden in print view
Hi. Would it be a good idea to auto-show hidden text and boxes (like some country infoboxes, and some information inside infoboxes) when choosing the print view of an article? For example: "Other networks" in
Rurouni Kenshin. It looks strange in the printout to have a header and [Show] button without the possibility of showing. Is this a problem that is very minor for the regular priting of one or two articles, and can be solved by automation when printing out larger selections from the encyclopeida? --
GunnarRene11:43, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Single license
This one is very minor:
When choosing a license on the "upload file", there is no single cover license. But if you choose the album cover license, it gives you an "album/single cover" template on the image page.
Michaelas1012:36, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
How hard is it to make titles of articles display correctly? In a day or so, I could probably write a javascript to re-format the titles of articles correctly, as specified by the presence of {{lowercase}} or {{bracketed}} or {{wrongtitle}} or whatever templates, and I am quite the amateur programmer. How hard is it to specify the correct title with a special code inside the article and have it displayed correctly by Mediawiki? These templates are embarassing. —
Omegatron02:30, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
There was already a template that used CSS that would fix what you describe, but it was
deleted. Short of software modifications, it may be harder than you like to get it to work properly, though I'd love to see a solution that isn't abusable. --
Kevin_b_er05:09, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Got a link to the old template name or the deletion discussion? Was it incredibly hacky, or why was it deleted? --
Interiot05:13, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Take note taht {{Title}} is now a redirect, but the
deletion discussion I linked before. It was some really hacky CSS overlay. Its still around, as
user:1ne/Title, and there's issues with it working between anonymous and logged-in users as of not too long ago, so even as a userfication its still buggy.
Kevin_b_er07:03, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Doing it with CSS is probably inadvisable (I have many of the recent edits to
User:1ne/Title, trying to adjust it for various sitenotice changes; now that anons and registered users have different messages, it's impossible to keep it correct for both). However, it would probably be quite possible to change in
MediaWiki:monobook.js (the userfication doesn't work in non-Monobook skins anyway); I'll work out the code and post on its talk to see if this is considered a good idea. And yes, it was horribly hacky. --
ais523 08:54, 27 September 2006 (
UTC)
OK, here's some title-changing JavaScript for monobook.js (works on IE, and should be reasonably portable (I hope)):
//Title override
addOnloadHook(function() {
if(document.getElementById('titleOverride')!=null)
{
var h1s=document.body.getElementsByTagName("h1");
var i;
for(i in h1s)
if(h1s[i].className=="firstHeading")
h1s[i].replaceChild(document.getElementById('titleOverride').firstChild,
h1s[i].firstChild);
}
});
It replaces the original title with the contents of an element with the ID titleOverride (which should presumably be a display:none-hidden <DIV>, or even better a visible <SPAN> within a wrong-title template); see
User:ais523/Sandbox as an example. I'd appreciate users checking this on other browsers. --
ais523 09:17, 27 September 2006 (
UTC)
There is a magic word to fix this in MediaWiki called {{DISPLAYTITLE|}}. It's turned off by default and doesen't work when it is on. The screenshot shows what it looks like when it does work.
Gerard Foley16:42, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
I said it could be done with javascript just as an example of how easy it would be to implement, but I'm saying this because it should be part of Mediawiki. It's a trivial thing to implement that would solve a very old problem that makes our software look bad. —
Omegatron17:23, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
Seeing as the magic word doesn't work, why don't we use a JavaScript solution? --
ais523 13:40, 3 October 2006 (
UTC)
Because it's kludgy and there's no way to implement it site-wide and because articles will appear different to people who don't use javascript, etc. etc. The magic word needs to be fixed.
Apparently Brion doesn't like it. —
Omegatron13:50, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
How do I tag a page so that a banner appears at the top, like "It has been requested that this page be moved," or "This page requires cleanup?"
Lord GS-4123:58, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Finding articles, images, templates, redirects, etc I created
I know in the My Watchlist view, new pages have a little N next to them, but in the My Contributions view, the N is gone and there isn't an option in the drop down menu to show only page creation edits. So is there any way to figure out what articles I (or another user) created?--
Andrew c02:24, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
For your editing convenience, the "
pipe trick" has been extended to work with page titles containing commas (see
bugzilla:6826). In layman's terms, what this means is that you may now type "[[Boston, Massachusetts|]]" (note the trailing "|") to get a link that displays simply as "
Boston". Similarly, if you were editing the Boston, Massachusetts article, you could simply type "[[|Springfield]]" (note the leading "|") to produce the link "
Springfield" (note link target). This should be a nice little feature for those of you working with geographical articles a lot.
For a detailed explanation of what the "pipe trick" is and what it does, read the help page(s) linked to above. Note that some of the pages may not yet properly document the new usage described above. All the previously supported usages should still work pretty much as before. The handling of some page titles containing both commas and parentheses, as well as some other odd cases, may have changed as a side effect, but mostly even those cases should work "as one would expect". For those who are interested, there's a pretty comprehensive set of test cases
here. —
Ilmari Karonen (
talk)
13:43, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
I expect someone has suggested this in the past, but what are the chances of getting a "regular expression" article search? EG search for articles which contain lines matching /^=[^=]/ for articles including headings at level 1 which are generally not used. --
SGBailey18:48, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
Someone may have suggested that before, but I know it's not going to happen anytime soon. Let's work on getting the search running all the time and maybe spellcheck, then we'll worry about regexes. I also don't see on Lucene's
feature list (Lucene is the seach engine Wikipedia uses). It would be a good feature though. —Mets501 (
talk) 23:23, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
It's probably better to search a database dump for that sort of thing. --
ais523 17:30, 6 October 2006 (
UTC)
Reference/endnote how-to
Hi. I've been contributing to Wikipedia for a long time — mainly through writing stubs, adding researched information, expanding articles, copyediting, etc. I want to learn how to add material and put an endnote to it and have a numbered reference show up in the "References" section of the article. I'm pretty confused as to how to do this. Can someone help me?
Directing me to contributors' instructions within the Wikipedia would be great. I'd be even more gratedful if some kind Wikipedian were willing to walk me through the process for my first go at it.
Is there a tool for automatically columnizing lists that appear on a page or set of pages? There are hundreds of lists which need column-formatting, but it is extremely tedious to do by hand. The current list I need to columnize is the
List of academic fields. Here is a sample section with markup code to show you wnat I need to do:
This is the same style used in the two-column references you might have seen in some articles (usually when the references list is too long). It does nothing on other browsers, but since it's part of the CSS3 draft, you can expect it to work in all browsers in the future. --
cesarb16:16, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Logo?
Has anyone else noticed the Wikipedia logo disappear from the top-left corner of the screen? I've done a hard refresh, and it's still gone. --
ais523 16:18, 6 October 2006 (
UTC)
Look at
this edit. The long infobox fills the whole page, and the thumbnails for the gallery get pushed under the template. I tried to fix it by clearing the float right above the gallery, and this works, only it pushes the gallery down under the infobox. Would floating the gallery to the right work better? or is there a better fix that I don't know of?--
Andrew c22:56, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
Redirecting to article sections
OK so a redirect to lets say
Star Trek#Cultural impact will simply redirect to the
Star Trek Article. Can someone explain why this idea won't work:
This doesn't work because MediaWiki redirects don't actually HTTP redirect, they just transclude the page contents to the current location, so the URL cannot magically have a # appended to it, for the browser to notice. In order for it to work, fundamental things would have to be changed in MediaWiki. Some methods that might do it:
Links to redirects containing # would have the # and target appeneded. But, the redirects would then have to invalidate the cache of any page linked to them when they were edited (nasty, something for the job queue maybe).
Real HTTP redirects (302, meta refresh, etc) could be used, but I believe there are security issues with this (or were, last time I asked about this).
Javascript.
A # link added to contentSub (which shows a standard "Redirected from" message). Example: If [[Foo]] is a redirect to #REDIRECT:[[Bar#Foo]], then clicking a link to [[Foo]] could generate something like: Redirected from Foo. The Section you want is probably [[#Foo]]
The best thing to do at the moment, is replace all the links to [[Cultural impact of Star Trek]] with [[Star Trek#Cultural impact|Cultural impact of Star Trek]] as it is unlikely to require a stand alone article anytime soon. --
Splarka (
rant)
07:23, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
I've noted the major problem with your proposal (MediaWiki doesn't see the anchor in the URL) above. That said, it could probably be made to work by encoding the relevant information ("this URL already has an anchor, don't try to add one") in some other way, such as by appending a query parameter to the URL, or by doing the redirection with JavaScript, which does see the anchor part. Both approaches have their disadvantages: the first makes for ugly URLs, while the second needs a fallback mechanism for browsers that can't or won't run JavaScript (but we could perhaps just retain the current behavior for those). Still, it's been on my "to do" "think about trying some day" list for some time. —
Ilmari Karonen (
talk)
08:53, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
The firefox main page,
http://en-us.start.mozilla.com/, is now censored in the UAE as far as I can see. The browser still works if you put something else in the address bar. It could be some sort of error, but can anyone possibly see a reason for offence on that page?
Marskell08:44, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
I cannot for the life of me understand why I cannot search for a category that I know exists. For example, from the home page, entering "British science fiction films" and hitting "Go" does not prominently list the page "Category:British_science_fiction_films". Even if I go to the bottom of that match page, and check the box that says "Category" to explicitly search that space, the search still fails. I am forced to enter the URL by hand to get to that category page. Can someone please fix category searching?
Instead of entering "British science fiction films", enter "Category:British science fiction films". --
Hoary04:16, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Anon: That's a good point since currently users need to know that the category exists to search under "Category:whatever" or they stumble upon the category by clicking on the category link below one of it's members. Since categories neatly organize a variety of content, bumping them up to the top of the results would make sense to me since they have the highest signal-to-noise ratio. I suggest making a formal proposal for this if it hasn't been done and this isn't listed as a wikipedia bug.
Antonrojo14:00, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
re downloading an earlier version of an article
To anyone who can help me I would be gladly appreciate and would even pay you or make a donation to Wikipedia if that is more appropriate.
I need some help and have been trying to solve this problem for several months and that is the following:
Is there anyone out there that could could give me step by step instruction on how to
download a fairly current version of Wikipedia with images that will fit onto a 2GB memory stick leaving about 100 mg free for other applications, but the exception being
in that download I must have an earlier March 2002 edit version of a specific article.
In other words a current version or close to it with images but with this specific article showing the earlier March 2002 edit version and not the cuurent version.
I have a SONY CLIE PEG TH 55 with a 2 GB memory stick and it uses the Palm OS 5.2 system. of course It would be viewed by TomeRaider 3.
Looking forward to hearing from someone om this.
Best
David
Wikipedia, completely compressed, with no edit history (i.e. not a March 2002 version of a page) is about a gigabyte, all 7zipped at extremely high compression. With edit histories, its more like 6 gigabytes. With images, you'll probably need a few hundred gigabytes. —
Dark Shikaritalk/contribs17:17, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
David, it sounds like you're asking two questions. 1) How to download an edit history for an article (as stated in the title) and 2) downloading a mirror of wikipedia. Since the body of your question concerns the latter it sounds like Dark_Shikari has pointed you in the right direction. Two other resources you might check out if you're flexible regarding the media to store wikipedia on:
Wikipedia:Wikipedia-CD/Download,
Wikipedia:Database_downloadAntonrojo13:49, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
WP usage statistics
I'm looking for WP usage statistics. Are the logfiles public? Is a statistical analysis available - e.g. for selected articles or a range of the most popular ones? --
tickleme01:58, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
...for something that apparently has no copyright?! I realize I should totally know this by now, but I don't want to screw anything up. The pictures I'm looking for are on www.hungary1956.com and it seems to me (and other editors) like they have no copyright, but it's really hard to tell and I have no clue what to do. Please help.
K. Lastochka01:34, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
The site seems to have a copyright notice on the bottom of every page, and they apparently take "donated" photos. You could try sending them an email asking about the copyright status of their images, but it looks to me like the copyright status of the images on this site is murky (at best). Wikipedia must have clear copyright status, so unless you can get something definitive from the folks at this site (like they add a copyright page declaring "all images on this site are public domain" or something) I'd recommend you not upload any of them. --
Rick Block (
talk)
03:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, OK, that's what I figured. Rats. I've tried e-mailing them twice, no response. :( Thanks for clearing up the issue.
K. Lastochka20:39, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Stalling, breaking up & downloads
Very sluggish performance the past few days, has anyone else noticed? As I'm writing this, I'm still waiting for the small icons above the text window, will have to put in the four tildes myself...
Janke |
Talk07:49, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
Maybe a donation to
Wikimedia Foundation would be in order? The user base for wikipedia has shot up quickly and I suspect that the server infrastructure hasn't quite kept up with some of the heavier loads this creates. Considering the budget they operate under and that they only have five fulltime employees, it's pretty amazing that the site functions as well as it does.
Antonrojo13:38, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
I recently created the article about "Sativa Hybridz", but the contents box seems to be working incorrectly. Can someone help me out?--
Dreamm15:00, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
I fixed the table of contents on
Sativa Hybridz, but the article got deleted. It's best not to write about yourself and try to stick to things that are more notable.
Tra(Talk)15:16, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
I was curious if there was any way for wikipedia to use similar spelling suggestions that google does. There are many times that I'll have to first type in the spelling of something just to get google to suggest the correct spelling so I can type it in here. Otherwise wikipedia just comes up with no entries. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Excalibur313 (
talk •
contribs) 15:20, October 8, 2006 (UTC)
I have seen references set up in two ways: <references/> and <div><references/></div>. What is the difference, please?
TerriersFan02:01, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Well, hopefully the div situations you see are like, for example, <div class="references-small"> ... </div>. A div without any attributes is a no op. That could arise from successive not-fully-understood edits. —
EncMstr04:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
A <div> tag is just HTML-speak for 'insert a line break' and it also be formatted as EncMstr alludes to. I'm not sure what the code that user lists does. HTML formatting is rarely used in wiki pages so I'd just delete it.
Antonrojo13:33, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
What to do about spammer?
I found a link to a poor quality website added to C++ by 219.95.167.99 today. I try to keep the links on that article under control, else it quickly spirals out of control. The user added back the link straight away without discussion, and by looking at
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Contributions&target=219.95.167.99 I can see they have been adding the site to a number of articles, most of which are not approriate at all, unlike C++ where the link was I feel just not of a high quality. I don't want to get into a revert war with this user, and also don't want to start watching the other pages they edit, but feel their changes should be reverted. What is the best course of action?
Mrjeff10:58, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
If it's a big enought problem you can request adding the link to
m:Spam blacklist wich will prevent it from beeing inserted again. Not quite sure what the inclution criterea is though, might be easier to just sprotect the page for a little while. --
Sherool(talk)11:22, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
Mr. Jeff, the advice by Sherool is the way to go if normal vandal action fails. First, I'd try reverting the changes as vandalism and adding the proper
WP:UTM templates...and if appropriate requesting a block at
WP:AIV.
Antonrojo13:29, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
wikipedia and wiki quote....
Is wiki pedia and wiki quote are the Same ...??
I just want to put my website link to wiki Quote...
How can I do that....
math symbols & pictures problem
Pix may be blocked - will recheck. Recent problem. I have RH9, Mozilla.
Math symbols in text, sometimes in LaTex etc often are distorted into what looks like random hashmarks or bird scratch. Many formulae can't be read because symbols in Greek, or special math symbols (like Intercept symbol, logical Not-, etc) are dropped. - I can read generic PDFs with same symbols etc.
MARKUP CRISIS: NEW
http://wikipedia.org/ INTIAL PAGE MISSING SEARCH BUTTON IN SOME BROWSERS
The initial
http://wikipedia.org/ page (puzzle globe) as viewed in Netscape 7 and Safari 1 now lacks a submit button next to the search field and language pulldown.
There is also a spacing problemm with the logos (Wiktionary, etc.) at the bottom of the page.
It is a true scandal in Wikidom that this most prominent of pages could go live without excruciatingly thoroughQA testing!
Image:WIMap-doton-Chippewa_Falls.png won't seem to display 200px or 250px, but will display 150px. Seems like I've seen this before, but I don't remember the fix. Is this a server issue, or an image issue. I've tried two different browsers and I get the same thing. --
Dual Freq21:50, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
I tried the purge and cache thing earlier and multiple times. It now appears to be working, maybe the purge took time to work. I tried it maybe 15 min before I posted this. Sorry for the bother. --
Dual Freq22:30, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
Laaaag!
Ok, for the last week or so, Wikipedia has been lagging like crazy for me. Is anyone else getting it? All other websites are perfectly fine, no lag whatsoever. But on here, I have to make several attempts to make a page start to load, more often than not it just sits there for five minutes before timing out. I'm using monobook, just the godmode light rollback tool (nothing else), I have WinXP, P4 3GHz, 1Gb RAM and 2Mbit ADSL over a net connection sharing WLAN. I am getting entries in my system event log from 'Browser', 'NetBT' and 'MrxSmb' which seem relevant:
Browser
The browser was unable to promote itself to master browser. The computer that currently believes it is the master browser is [NAME].
NetBT
The name "MSHOME :1d" could not be registered on the Interface with IP address 192.168.1.65. The machine with the IP address 192.168.1.66 did not allow the name to be claimed by this machine.
MrxSmb
The master browser has received a server announcement from the computer [NAME] that believes that it is the master browser for the domain on transport NetBT_Tcpip_{E0BD5EB2-992D-43D9-A3. The master browser is stopping or an election is being forced.
([NAME] refers to one other computer on the network, which has the IP 192.168.1.66. My machine is 192.168.1.65.)
These errors have been occuring to no apparent ill effect for longer than a week, but they haven't caused any perceptible problem and MSHelp just says not to worry about it. Then again, no other websites I happen to try do this. I've tested the computer on the network i'm calling [NAME] for lag - no problems with it, so it's just restricted to my PC. I've also pinged rr.knams.wikimedia.org; average time was 35ms - the other machine took an average 33ms. Sorry if everyone already knows about this, or if should be posting at
WP:RD/COMP, but it's getting really annoying now. Thanks,
CaptainVindalootce17:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
Those event log messages are related to Windows local-area networking and the "Network Places" network browser, not your web browser.
Zetawoof(
ζ)21:27, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
Saving index.php problem?
What is the problem if a user gets messages like these:
You have choosen to open Special:Recentchanges
which is a: application/octet-stream
from:
http://sv.wikipedia.org
Would you like to save this file?
when trying to read Wikipedia in Firefox? Not every time but about one time out of ten. Is it a problem with Firefox or is it an error in Wikipedia? /
81.229.40.21211:38, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
I've been seeing the same sporadic problem in IE, and have been assuming it is some sort of problem at Wikipedia's end. (PS. In reply to Lost, I do not use an external editor.)
Dragons flight11:50, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
For all you people getting 'download file' messages with Firefox or IE
It's happening to me on Firefox 2.0 too.
It come up once every 3 or 4 times I go on a web page on Wikipedia however, I have some idea what's going wrong.
For me, a message pops up on Firefox's (FF) new 'Save file' screen, under the name of a MIME plugin, 'application/octet-stream'. MIME plugins are content types which tell your browser what to do with a file, in this case, Wikipedia. Usually with web pages, the class is text/html. With Wikipedia I think also uses text/html. Basically, this appears as .htm or .html file extensions.
List of MIME types. This application/octet-stream appearing for users of IE and FF can be caused by the following file types: .*, .bin, .class, .dms, .exe, .lha and .lzh. Now, you may be familiar with .exe files. This could mean that a (possibly malicious) code has been put on the site, trying to launch itself, however I do not think this has happened.
What may have happened it that the general 'class' file has had something changed, or a file has been given a .* extension or something else. It could be the browser, changes in the MediaWiki versions not spotted by test.wikipedia - endless number of things even a virus. The fact it is appearing on multiple people's browsers means it isn't a one off situation. --
TheTallOne21:26, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
Messed up <ref> citations in
Hiralal Sen - help needed
Help. I was editing
Hiralal Sen, noticed that most of the inline ref code was duplicated lots of times
[14], and then removed most of it
[15]. Now reference number 2's text is missing and I can't figure out what went wrong. I reinserted the accidentally removed template, emptied my cache but to no avail. Can anyone double check I did things correctly?
Kavadi carrier11:37, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
Are all images on USA government web sites in public domain?
Are all images on any USA government Internet web site in the public domain? For example, on USA Environmental Protection Agency sites, or Department of Energy sites? If they are, what license should I select when uploading them into Wikipedia? Thanks for your help. -
mbeychok00:14, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
Most are, but some are not. Some are licensed works that the government site uses. You need to check out the licensing listed on the page or on the home page of the site.
User:Zoe|
(talk)02:00, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
Does anyone have a clue what to write in your personal .js or .css code to make it display the text, similar to the one in the top of the
contributions page, when clicking on a user name, e.g. in some discussion? I mean, I would like to see this text: (Talk|Contribs|Block|Block log|Logs).
MoRsE21:13, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
To see these links when someone else links to a user page, you could use
popups where you will be able to hover over the link to the user page to get a list of accociated links.
Tra(Talk)21:31, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
According to the edit summaries, those reverts were to the correct versions. But checking the diffs between those revisions, there got another vandal edit inbetween. The article content that was ultimately saved is not the content that was (presumably) supposed to get saved by the revert edit.
Technically, if I save an old version (assuming I don't do a section edit) while another edit was done (section edit or not), this should either completely overwrite those previous edits, or raise an edit conflict, not integrate that edit into mine, right? The users above use different editing tools so it's likely not a bug in only one of those tools. Any ideas how to prevent this? That's two cases of missing sections I've come across in two days now.
Femto14:35, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
What I think it might be is that, taking taking the JoeSmack example, the last vandal edit (changing the Hatting section) was actually made after the revert (which is why JoeSmack's edit summery says he reverted 2 edits). Because the two edits were made so close together, MediaWiki for some reason made an error with the timing and put them in the wrong order. I've seen this happen with bots such as
User:AntiVandalBot as well, which also reverts pages very quickly after the vandal edit.
Tra(Talk)18:04, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
For reference, the exact timestamps (with seconds included) can be found
here and
here. I don't think the revisions are just in the wrong order: every revision is attached the editor name, so
this would imply that JoeSmack has saved a page with vandalism on it.
Tizio,
Caio,
Sempronio21:05, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
Sucrose Solubility in Propylene Glycol
Where can I find Sucrose solubility data in Propylene Glycol (10-100C)?
I was recently in correspondence with the Version 1.0 team in their CORE subjects threads discussing the need for an adjustment to be made for a current Bot organizing/updating WikiProject Assessments (Quality/Importance). I was directed to identify the BOT discussion bard. Is there a general BOT page that I can be directed to so I can continue this thread in the appropriate location?
Internazionale21:13, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
the pages in Nepali Language that wikipedia covers are erroneous and completely incomprehensible. The grammatical errors are so numerous that I cannot find a single word spelled correctly. Sentence syntax, punctuation and cohesiveness are all missing. Is it the fault of fonts, softwares or writers. Can't we(including me) do something for getting it right.
Binod Keshari Poudel
Imadole-5, lalitpur
Nepal
Could you list some pages? There is a procedure to tag an article as needing work but we need to first realize which page needs work. Thank you.
RJFJR16:06, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
I think he's talking about pages in the Nepali language. There aren't exactly a lot of people who speak Nepali here on the English wiki. Suggest recruiting those who speak it and are interested in wikis to fix the Nepali wiki pages.
Rlevse
Since we can make profiles on the site, wouldn't it be a nice add on for us so have favorites? For example, I found the page about the real Dracula and I'd like to share it with my friends.
I add them to my watchlist, so that some time later they appear for me and I am reminded of why I searched for them in the first place. This also solves my habit of adding things to a favourites list and then never looking at them again. —
Daniel(‽)20:44, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
As with most operations, MediaWiki works via a combination of sweat, blood and tears, and the enslavement, torture and forced labour of thousands of magical creatures, including but not limited to, pixies, fairies, gnomes, cute little squirrels and decapitated trout. The trout have the most important job; they are responsible for rendering the edit buttons.
164.11.204.5604:28, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
It doesn't create a description metatag AFAICT. The keyword metatag is simply a collection of all outbound internal links from the page. (I don't know this for certain; this is a guess based on the HTML source code for this page now and other HTML sources I remember.) --
ais523 17:34, 30 October 2006 (
UTC)
Actually, I think it does. For example, take a look at the Google result for
jew (it's the first thing I thought of). Under the Wikipedia link result is the text "Discussion of the difference between Jewish religion and ethnicity, with notes on the Jews' history, beliefs, and culture.". I assume that this is created by the MediaWiki software. —
Daniel(‽)20:53, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
In case you think this is only for popular articles, if you look up
lemur the text reads "Encyclopedia gives a brief description of the physical traits of this animal.". It does sound computer-generated, but I'm interested in how the software does it. —
Daniel(‽)20:57, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
When you get redirected to another article, there is a small link to the original article under the topic name. Click that, which will take you to the original page. From there, you can see the history.
EVula01:49, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, well that is what I was talking about. When did you write it? It seems like it was deleted (and then the redirect was created), but it doesn't look like there was an AfD; you'd need an admin to check to see if there's a deleted version sitting around in the history somewhere.
EVula05:23, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
There doesn't appear to be any article history for
Parchman Farm before it was a redirect, there are no deletes or moves for the article that I can see, nor can I find any previously deleted revisions to view, however browsing your editing history I note that you've edited
Parchman (which you created
here, and there are links there to legal cases. Is there any chance you were thinking of the wrong article? Hopefully that's of some help to you. ~Kylu (
u|
t) 05:28, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
Underlined links
There's probably some CSS hack for this? When I'm logged in, all links are underlined; when I'm logged out, they're simply blue. I'd prefer the latter behavior even when I'm logged in.
>Radiant<15:23, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Hello, I'm posting here because this article has content about someone called "Richard Davis", yet nothing like that is visible in the edit history or in the edit window. Could this be a database error, or maybe a hack? --
Kyoko13:56, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
I checked the history and I don't see references to Richard Davis. The only explanation is some kind of cache error. If that is what happened, it has cleared up.
RJFJR16:09, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
I went through the history myself, and saw no sign of the mysterious edits, yet it was in the version that I saw earlier. I refreshed my own cache, so it must have been on the server side, or at least, not on my end. In any case, it's gone now. Thanks for looking into it. --
Kyoko17:11, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
All tex on Wikipedia seems to have gotten a lot bigger on my computer. It doesnt happen on any other sites, and it's really annoying. Can someone help me?--
Andy mci18:04, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
I once had the same. Check out your preferences. Try also to click View, find the font size option and change it. --
Brandспойт20:39, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
How do you remove the "+" tab at the top of a talk page?
I have a makeshift footer at the bottom of my talk page. But people keep clicking on the "plus" tab at the top of the page which creates a new subheading below my footer! How can I fix this problem? The Transhumanist 10:48, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Rather than remove the "+", there's a way using CSS to create a footer that is not physically at the bottom (which I first saw on a version of
user:Interiot's talk page). I've done this with your footer. --
Rick Block (
talk)
14:17, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
It looks like the majority of the
151 links can remain the same because they are on article talk pages, user talk pages and archived pages of various types, where it is not that important that the links won't work. I am kind of puzzled why many of the links were made in the first place. Does Wikipedia have some kind of connection with SourceForge? Also, has it become common knowledge amongst
open source software writers that a good way to promote your software is to create a Wikipedia article on it, do we just have an incredible amount of open source software enthusiasts at Wikipedia or is there another explanation for the enormous number of SourceForge software articles? --
Kjkolb11:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't know if im at the perfectly right place, but i will try :-) The Image
Image:F11-tiger.jpg was first uploaded to en.wiki and then moved to commons, unfortuneatly without any source information. Since it was deleted
6 Aug 2006 for an sysop it should be possible to have a look if the local description page contained any information. if not, would you be so kind to ask the uploader. IMO, it looks like selftaken photo. Thanks --
schlendrian•λ•10:16, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Moved here from
Template talk:Navigation: The hide tab resides snugly to the left of the header text, turning it into "[hide]Nordic Council", whatever that might be (Nordic Council in hiding?). Also, the v·d·e navbar, already problematic as it dislocates the header to off-center, unnecessarily takes up its own line. Can anyone fix this? This template is rolled out all over the place. Thanks,
trialsanderrors06:20, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
Inline citations – software?
I recognize the value of providing inline citations, but what a pain in the ass to edit by hand. Any recommendations for software which can automate the process? Even better, Macintosh-based software?
Peter G Werner02:33, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree that at first they seem tedious and unproductive. However, after doing 4-5 articles, it stopped seeming so difficult. Now a minimal citation of <ref> {{cite web | url = URL | title = TITLE }} rolls off finger tips with ease. One thing which helps me to keep track of things is to format the wikitext for readability:
Some long statement of fact needing a citation.<ref name="deis"> {{cite web
| url = http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/mthood/projects/timberline-express/Appendices/Appendix%20G%20-%20Timberline%20Mountain%20Specifications%20Summary/Appendix%20G%20-%20Timberline%20Mountain%20Specifications%20Summary.pdf
| title = Appendix G: Timberline Mountain Specifications Summary of Draft Environmental Impact Statement for The Timberline Express Proposal
| format = pdf
| pages = 2, 8
| publisher = [[United States Forest Service|USFS]]
| date = March 2005
| accessdate = 2006-09-18
}} </ref> Next statement of fact, probably needing citations as well....
When one goes to a big category (having more than 197 pages e.g. [[Category:Cities and towns in Uttar Pradesh]]) one can see only first 197 individual pages list and to see other pages in this category one have to navigate further but since typically number of subcategories are quite small they should be shown on first view/page itself. Vjdchauhan 11:32, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree. At the moment, to force this, you have to find all the subcategories and pipe sort them to the front by using '*' or ' ' or something similar. In some of the larger catgories, it is quite possible that some subcategories are genuinely lost.
Carcharoth01:25, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
I agree as well, and since so many of the categories already use the piping "workaround", I wonder if this wouldn't be something that would be a valued change to the software. Who would we ask? -
jc3701:31, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
I hope someone can give me a clear explanation on some of the problems I have been facing surfing
Wikipedia recently. Firstly, allow me to present the technical aspects of my PC. I am using a Pentium II PC (512MB) with a
Firefox browser (Version 2.0) to surf and edit this website. In some of the webpages, I am unable to load the pages correctly. For example, the article on
Leicester City F.C. shows up a completely blank page after taking quite a long time to load up the page. I have experienced similar problems with some of the article and other namespace pages as well. Thankfully, the problem seems to be relatively rare but it still causes me a considerable amount of frustration as I am unable to do any editing on these pages. I am using a broadband connection speed of 1 500kbps presently. Does anyone know the cause and solution to this problem? Any help here would be greatly appreciated. --Siva1979Talk to me04:32, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
Which OS is it? Which wikipedia skin? Assuming you're using monobook, that article uses some fractionally sized fonts (1.3 em, and 90%) and, curiously, xx-small, whatever that is. Perhaps your machine is unable to do font scaling, or doesn't have. Another possibility is that somehow it is being rendered white on white. After it finishes rendering a blank page, can you select anything? Can you paste it? —
EncMstr21:07, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
My OS is Windows ME and I am using the default skin, MonoBook. Yes, after it finishes rendering a blank page, I can go back to the previous page or my home page. --Siva1979Talk to me01:09, 3 November 2006 (UTC)
SVG help
What do I need to include in LocalSettings.php to ensure SVGs are rendered to PNG with Inkscape?? I've got ImageMagick as well installed. Thanks, --
SunStar Net11:41, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
The thumbnails successfully show up when first referenced. After an hour or so, not sure exactly how long, they disappear and I get a red X. Not all of them are disappearing though, as shown on the talk page. Any help GREATLY appreciated. Purge does nothing to clear this up.
Fourdee10:31, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed the same thing happening with several images. Take a look at the gallery on my user page for example, one of the images there does that. The other day I was in the article on
halloween and one of the images was like that. I don't know what's causing it, but you aren't the only one experiencing it. ~
ONUnicorn (
Talk /
Contribs)
16:40, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Headline as edit summary
I have enabled the prompt for edit summaries in my preferences. However when I start a new section by clicking on the + at the top of the page, the headline I put at the top, also acts as the edit summary. The problem is, when I forget to put a headline, there is no prompt either for the edit summary or for the headline itself. As a result, the edit ends up as a continuation of another thread plus there is no edit summary. Won't it be easy to turn on a feature that prompts me just like it does for an edit summary. Or is it already there and I have missed it? --
Lost(talk)10:05, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Something has happened to the way pages with characters with
umlauts are rendered. The Scandinavian characters
Å,
Ä, and
Ö are included in the
ISO/IEC 8859-1 or Latin-1 characted set, and should be represented as normal 8 bit characters. The characters are now replaced by
unicode values. An example is
Väinämöinen_(ship)#V.C3.A4in.C3.A4m.C3.B6inen.27s_operational_history. Note the difference in the ways the name of the ship Väinämöinen is presented. It seems to me that this is a result of a change in the software sometime this or last week.
The change has negative effects:
Links to anchors get a weird form.
On
IE the characters are rendered in a different font, making them look like bold in subtitles. (Note the ü in the subtitle above; it is not bold though it may look like it.)
Wikipedia has been UTF-8 based with links using UTF-8 values for some time so that shouldn't be related to any recent changes. Looking at the source of that page i can't find anything unusual about the characters in that subtitle nor do they render oddly in IE for me.
Plugwash08:08, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Links to anchors that you manually add can be typed normally. For instance,
#Rendering of character with ümlaut works: it's autoconverted to point to "#Rendering_of_character_with_.C3.BCmlaut". It's illegal to put anything other than a subset of ASCII into anchor names at present, and we can't even use normal percent encoding, so we made up something using periods. Wikimedia sites haven't used any encoding other than UTF-8 in text for at least a year now, I believe. —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
06:13, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
The subtitle text appears four times in the HTML source text
Twice in the <a ... > anchor
name=".C3.BCmlaut"
id=".C3.BCmlaut"
Twice in the <h2> header
<span class="mw-headline">ümlaut</span>
title="Edit section: ümlaut"
There is no reason why the <h2> header text should be anything but 8-bit
ISO/IEC 8859-1. Using
UTF-8 is of course a good reason :-)
Anyway, something has changed since yesterday, the Ü in the subtitle no longer looks bold. Today, the source for the ü is ü". I am not quite sure what it was yesterday, as I may have just looked at the 2 first ones, and missed the <h2> text.
The issue may have something to do with the rendering of ;Uuml and ;Auml on some browsers. On IE they sometimes use a different font from Ü and Ä, making their appearence bold. It may of course also be a temporary problem in my browser. --
Petri Krohn06:53, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
P.S. "ümlaut" is naturally what you see when viewing the HTML source text in a 8-bit text editor. I guess it would look like ü on an
UTF-8 text editor. --
Petri Krohn07:07, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
Image Positioning (complex)
Hate to be a bother again so soon, but I can't figure out how to position the images on
Topsyturveydom where I'd like them. As you can see, there's a long, blue text box (actually a table) on the right containing the poem Gilbert based the play on. The images Gilbert used to illustrate the poem are in the main text, but left aligned. I'd LIKE them to be between the main text and the text box that is, right-aligned with the text box right of them, but just telling them to float right sends them down to under the text box. Any advice?Adam Cuerdentalk23:37, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
I have created a Collaboration of the Month box for the
Wikipedia:WikiProject Nursing see
Wikipedia:WikiProject Nursing/cotm & I would like it to have a direct link to the "edit" function of the page of the month as can be see on
Wikipedia:WikiProject UK geography/cotm when I copy the code "If you see ways in which this article can be improved please [http://en.wikipedia.org/?title={{UK geo article}}&action=edit edit it]" & replace {{UK geo article}} with {{nursing article}} is gives a very funny appearance like "assessment&action=edit edit it" Is this because our article of the month is two words & the UK geo usage is only 1 word - or am I doing something wrong? Any ideas about how to fix this would be gratefully appreciated.—
Rodtalk22:51, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Okay. It's quite simple: "Nursing assessment" is two words. That means the text is seeing: [http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Nursing assessment&action=edit edit it] Since a link to a website is broken off at the first space, it thinks the link is "
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Nursing". Don't worry! this shouldn't be too hard to fix. Let me just check the help files.
Adam Cuerdentalk23:21, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
thanks for the help it actually shows as the second word ie "assessment&action=edit edit it" so it's picking up the second word—
Rodtalk23:24, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
For future reference, {{fullurl: }} only escapes the spaces in the first parameter (always title=). If the parameter is not the title (what links here, related changes), you can use the {{urlencode:}}magic word.
Example, say you want to create a link in a template to the block log for blocked usernames -> "{{fullurl:Special:Log/block|user=User:{{{1}}} }}". This won't work with spaces in the name like "Willy on Wheels" (unless they are manually underlined) as you'd get: "//en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Log/block&user=User:Willy on Wheels", so what you can do is escape it with: "{{fullurl:Special:Log/block|user=User:{{urlencode:{{{1}}}}} }}", giving you "//en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Log/block&user=User:Willy+on+Wheels"
Also, the magic words for page name like {{PAGENAME}} {{FULLPAGENAME}} etc all have 'escaped' versions: {{PAGENAMEE}} {{FULLPAGENAMEE}} etc. These are useful to know when constructing external URLs. --
Splarka (
rant)
08:32, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
The links to the Wikipedia:Sandbox aren't working properly or have been redirected to another page containing:
"Miyavi composes, arranges, and produces his own music. He has been playing guitar for 11 years. As far as guitarists go, he says he respects Toshiya (Dir en Grey) and Kazuki (Raphael (Japanese Rock group))"
I can log in fine, but as soon as I move to another page my login evaporates. I have set my cookies to accept cookies. What is wrong??
It appears to deal with my satellite connection. The secure server appears to work.
Jeff Dean, 10-31-2006
It's probably a problem with the network somewhere that prevents you logging in. If the secure server works, use that instead since it was designed for these kinds of problems.
Tra(Talk)22:52, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
It's some kind of glitch affecting only the Main Page for me--it says sign in there but I'm logged in at every other page.
A Runyon05:34, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I sometimes see an extra space between an external link and the next word or punctuation mark in the article's body while editing and previewing. Is it because of viewing in IE (I also noticed it puts an extra space to my user page, while it doesn't exist in Mozilla)? --
Brandспойт17:38, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
If you would like to change the logo to something else for your personal viewing, adding #p-logo a { background-image: url(whatever) !important } to
Special:Myprofile/monobook.css will do what you want. If you mean sitewide, similar methods could be used, or someone with shell access could be asked to set up a specific on-wiki image as the logo. —
Simetrical (
talk •
contribs)
06:00, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
As far as I can see, it's not: the variable wgImportSources seems to regulate this, and is an empty array in DefaultSettings.php. I don't have mediawiki installed so I cannot be sure, but I think you have first to be sure that wikipedia is in the interwiki map you use, and then you have to add its interwiki prefix as an element of the array wgImportSources in LocalSettings.php.
Tizio,
Caio,
Sempronio11:28, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
This image will not show up as a thumbnail on its own description page no matter what I do. It will sometimes show up on other pages if the thumbnail size is specified (it "likes" some sizes more than others), but the infobox at
Yonkers, New York, which should auto-generate the thumbnail, won't. I've purged the image cache about a dozen times and even uploaded a smaller version of the image, thinking that it was a bit big for the software to handle. Any ideas?
Dyfsunctional14:34, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
<h1>File not found</h1>
<p>Although this PHP script (/w/thumb.php) exists, the file requested for output
(/mnt/upload3/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b5/Ella_in_Yonkers.jpg/800px-Ella_in_Yonkers.jpg) does not.</p>
Change the special page names
For some reason our special page names have
allthewordssmashedtogether, apparently whoever wrote that part of the software felt that they were easier to type that way or something. I've introduced a software change which means this no longer needs to be the case -- we can change the default name, and leave a redirect in place for the old name. You can suggest changes to the special page names at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special_page_names . For more information, see my
wikitech-l post. --
Tim Starling13:43, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Incorporating babel language without header/footer
Hi.
How can I incorporate the "en" babel/userbox into my userbox top/bottom template without the babel header/footer?
Thanks
Peppery02:21, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Not quite sure what you mean, but just {{user en}} by itself will produce