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Village pump (technical) archive

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Signature Issues

All colorful or formatted signatures are messing up talk pages and any other select .html. Will this be fixed soon? --Anonymous editor 23:38, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Is this temporary?--Anonymous editor 23:43, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Presumably it'll disappear once the devs get the HTML tidy extension running again. How long that'll take I have no idea. the wub "?!" 23:51, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

I hope so, this is getting kind of silly, almost very page I visit seems to have messed up formatting around somewhere--Hello'from^'SPACE 00:38, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Ok thanks. If I want to tidy my sig (presently it is changed), do I have to go to each talk page I edited and change it? --Anonymous editor 23:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes. --cesarb 00:40, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Just fixed User:Hello fromSPACE's sig above - there were several improperly nested and unclosed tags there. Vsmith 01:44, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

As others have pointed out, it's not all "fancy" sigs that cause these problems... just the ones that are screwed up due to invalid HTML. This software failure, then, may just be a blessing in disguise, as it encourages everybody to fix their HTML, rather than just throwing lots of excrement at the wiki software and expecting it to follow with a pooper-scooper. *Dan T.* 01:53, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, it appears to have been fixed. Well done, developers! :) --Ixfd64 04:03, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Help... my custom sig which was working for 4 months suddenly broke today. It's just an extra link to my Talk page but it now appears as at the end of this comment. Any has any idea why this would happen? Kimchi.sg | [[User_talk:Kimchi.sg|Talk]] 07:24, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Me too! me too! BL kiss the lizard 08:15, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Fixed! BL kiss the lizard 23:27, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Me three, and unless I'm very wrong, there is no HTML for me to fix. What's going on? Filiocht | [[User talk:Filiocht|The kettle's on]] 08:34, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Me as well (which made me look pretty stupid on AN earlier). I just went to preferences, switched to a raw signature and closed up the outsides manually which seemed to do the trick. the wub "?!" 08:54, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem as everyone else. My sig which was working fine suddenly stopped working properly today. If the requirements have changed for what is to go in the nickname field, we need to know!

This is what's in my nickname field:

Do]]c t or[[User:DoctorW|W

I don't see anything wrong with the html, and, as I said, it was working fine every time until today. Here are my four tildes: '''Do'''[[Special:Contributions/DoctorW|'''c''']][[User_talk:DoctorW|'''t''']][[User:DoctorW|'''or''']][[User:DoctorW|'''''W''''']] 08:59, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

The program seems to be puting my "[[User:DoctorW|" (which is supposedly automatically added at the beginning) in the wrong place. It's being placed in the middle, before my last double-bracketed section.

It should be possible to work round the misnested tag browser bug by adding closing tags to all stored signatures. Susvolans [[User talk:Susvolans|⇔]] 10:46, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

My raw sig lookks like this, and I can't see a problem with it. It uses one single HTML tag, and that is opened and closed correctly.

[[User:Chriscf|Chris]] <small>[http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Chriscf&action=edit&section=new talk back]</small>

Of course, all I'm getting right now is my username. So here goes a manual signature. Chris talk back 12:28, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Hmm... That seems to work. Looks like it's subst'd template time ...

Is this work round something we'll all have to do manually, or is it something that can be fixed automatically? Grutness...wha? 12:31, 15 November 2005 (UTC) (fixed!)

What appears to be happening

If what happened to my signature was anything to go by, the "meaningful" characters after the first ]] were all being converted into numeric HTML entities. I have fixed it as follows (bearing in mind that I use the monobook skin):

go to my preferences
tick the box which makes my signature "raw"
add [[User:your id here| to the start of your "nickname" (which is what the system normally does to non-raw signatures)
add ]] to the end of your nickname (ditto)
click the "Save" button

What has caused the problem I don't know, but this seems to have fixed it for me, at least temporarily… HTH HAND Phil | Talk 13:34, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

I did this a couple of hours ago and it's working for me, too. Does anyone know what changed to cause this? Filiocht | The kettle's on 13:43, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

This solves the problem for me too. However, I still wonder why things broke in the first place. -- Kimchi.sg | Talk 13:48, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

The workaround works even with other skins (I use the Simple skin.) -- Kimchi.sg | Talk 15:11, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

I had my sig messed up because I didn't have quotes around some tag parameters (such as color=#FFFFFF). That may be the problem. Grue 15:15, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

What is happening

I asked the developers, and they said that both wiki markup and html markup are no longer allowed on non-raw signatures. If you want to use both, you need to use raw signatures (which do not automatically link to the user page). --cesarb 15:24, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

So it's going to be a permanent change? :-( -- Kimchi.sg | Talk 15:26, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Er, my signature was set as raw, yet it was listed as invalid. I'd like an explanation of why it was invalid, and what I'd need to do to achieve the same effect with a valid signature. Chris (signature broken) 17:09, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to fix your signature. the wub "?!" 17:15, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

My old sig is shown above. That doesn't answer my question. My signature is set to "raw", and the tags matches up. Chriscf 17:27, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps it's the unclosed entities? Try replacing every & by &. --cesarb 17:53, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

In which case, that's a bug. HTML escapes should not be required for URL links, as they are in essence attribute values. Chris talk back 18:00, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

No, it's not. All uses of & on HTML, XHTML, XML, etc. must be represented as & (or the equivalent decimal/hexadecimal sequences). Just because some software is lenient and tries to guess what was meant when finding an invalid entity reference (which is what would happen when you put a bare & on a page) does not mean MediaWiki has to be. And the new signature thingy is a validator — it's supposed to be very strict. --cesarb 18:06, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm still confused as to what the problem is. My sig is currently set to "Raw", and is in the following form: — [[User:Asbestos|Asbestos]] | [[User talk:Asbestos|Talk ]] [[User:Asbestos/RFC| (RFC) ]]. How should I change it to fix it? It looks to me like all the tags are closed. Asbestos 00:38, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to fix your signature, In your case it's probably the unquoted attributes. --cesarb 00:51, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

This is still not working...I've got

[[User:TShilo12|Tom]][[Wikipedia:Esperanza|e]][[User:TShilo12|r]][[User talk:TShilo12|TALK]]
which I changed to [[User:TShilo12|[[User:TShilo12|Tom]][[Wikipedia:Esperanza|e]][[User:TShilo12|r]][[User talk:TShilo12|TALK]]]] per the recommendation above, and also tried
[[User:TShilo12|Tom]][[Wikipedia:Esperanza|e]][[User:TShilo12|r]][[User talk:TShilo12|TALK]] (despite the fact that it says not to do this elsewhere, and what I get is, respectively:
Tom e r^TALK
[[User:TShilo12|Tom e r^TALK]]
Tom e r ^TALK

This is all well and good, but when I go to save my sig, it says Invalid raw signature; check HTML tags., and when I do ~~~~, this is what I get: TShilo12 07:58, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Whatever font color I choose, the signature always remains blue. My signature used to be <KF>, but <> does not seem to work any longer either. KF 00:44, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to fix your signature, you probably need to change it to <KF>. --cesarb 00:51, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. It's now [[User:KF|<K]][[User talk:KF|F>]], but it's still a drab blue. <K F> 01:18, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Try putting the font changes inside the links: like [[User:KF|<K]][[User talk:KF|F>]] (which gives you "<K F>"). As an added bonus, this allows you to vary the colours (like "<K F>" :-). HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 08:00, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Note, however, that in Wikipedia:How to fix your signature#Unclosed tags, it specifically says not to do this... Tom e r^TALK 08:01, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Does it really? It recommended not putting font tags inside the links if possible, but it didn't say not to do that unless I'm misunderstanding. Also, TShilo, have you considered placing the size attribute in quotes (in general, it's a good idea to quote any attribute that's not wholly numeric, and probably should quote those too). — Knowledge Seeker দ 08:14, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks KS! You're a Godsend!

And yeah, it does say there to not put tags inside wikilinks.

OMG I'm so happy!

See??? Tom e r^TALK 05:16, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Special:Contributions for an IP range?

I have noticed a number of vandal edits from IP addresses 62.171.194.*. Is there a way to check edits from the entire range at a time? (I have so far manually checked and reverted edits from 62.171.194.1 to 62.171.194.40.) - Mike Rosoft 12:49, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Error in article

RE http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Magic_circle_(Wicca) i was look through your article on magic circles (wicca) nd noticed that you said wiccans walk 3 times round the circle going widdershins. we actually rearly go widdershins, we normally go deasil. You also bracketed "clock-wise" after it, widdershins means "counter clock-wise" deasil is "clock-wise." I used the edit this page option to fix this but i dont know if that will work correctly.

a Friendly wiccan, Silver Wixan 22-11-05

Yes, it worked, and thanks for your contribution! If you would like to learn more about editing, please see Help:Editing and Wikipedia:Introduction.--Sean|Bla ck 03:10, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

strange page move/vandalism problem: database glitch?

Earlier today, Sunlight2 (talk · contribs) vandalized the Libertarianism article by redirecting it to Libertarianism on Wheels!! but reverted it. The logs show that "Libertarianism on Wheels!!" was moved back to "Libertarianism". However, according to the logs, Sunlight2 never moved the Libertarianism article, just redirected it. Also, there's another odd thing. RJII (talk · contribs) reverted the article after Sunlight2 reverted his own edit. Since Sunlight2's second edit and RJII's revert had the same content, there was no difference in the comparison. But usually, if two people revert an article at about the same time, only one new edit should show up, unless some revisions were deleted. However, no revisions seem to have been deleted from "Libertarianism".

Could this be a glitch with the database? --Ixfd64 23:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

New variables

There's now a {{FULLPAGENAME}} as well as a uri encoded version, {{FULLPAGENAMEE}}. So you no longer have to write something like:

{{localurl:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}}}

in templates to get /wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_K, you can just use

{{localurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}

which will yield the same result: /wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_K

And there's also an uri encoded version of the NAMESPACE variable now.

—Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:14, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! Information relayed on fr: _R_ 01:12, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Recent spammer tricks

I've noticed quite a few SEO attempts like this over the last few days. Is there a way to stop this through code changes? It's really hit and miss on finding them on RC patrol as they are only small changes and are not usually made to the External links section. Also viewing the article doesn't let you see them as the text is made so small that it doesn't display. --GraemeL ^(talk) 15:08, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Block any attempt to make text smaller than 0.5em, or to insert <a href= links. Susvolans ⇔ 16:26, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Links with SUB tag in them do not work properly

 In the article Glucokinase, there is a link whose code is such:

closing of the [[K<sub>ATP<sub> channel]]s, depolarization..,

This link does not work properly, rendering as the litteral

'[[K<sub>ATP<sub> channel]]s'

instead of as a hyperlink. I suspect this is because of the embedded SUB tag.

I think you're on the right track. Incidentally, the tag was not closed properly (it needs a ), but the real issue is that I don't believe you can have HTML tags in an article name. There is no article named "KATP channel". I suppose you could name an article K-ATP channel or something; for now I directed it to potassium channel. Thanks for pointint this out! — Knowledge Seeker দ 06:28, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Note that you can use pretty much whatever formatting you'd like to change the appearance of the link, for example K_ATP channel, please see Wikipedia:Piped link. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:43, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

This problem started happening at the same time as the "tidying up engine" was shut down (i.e., when all those piped signatures started glitching last week). The problem with a lot of the signatures was the same - coding inside the brackets. Grutness...wha? 00:39, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Section level edit-conflicts

Currently when an edit conflict occurs with two people editing the same section of an article at once, rather than listing the two version of the section so the conflict may be resolved, two versions of the entire article are listed. This makes additional conflicts (with those editing other sections of a huge article) much more likely. Is there any technical reason why the edit conflicts can't be resolved by only editing the section in question ? This is particularly a problem in the Wikipedia:Reference desk articles, which contain hundreds of sections often edited simultaneously by different users, but could also apply to any huge article. StuRat 18:51, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Sections don't actually exist; if you have two different versions of a page you can only _hope_ that the sections in them line up. The software checks the two (complete page) versions to see if it can merge them automatically, and if not presents the edit conflict screen. --Brion 22:01, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Sure, but it could conceivably figure out whether the section that user A has edited is the only thing that differs between his version and the version saved in the meantime by user B, and if so, show only the offending section. It doesn't need to check what user B's changes were. Zocky 15:42, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Category screwup on this page

This page had it's categories removed, accidentally. It happened in two edits: this one and this one. The first was a bot, doing a bit of recatagorzing, and, at the same time, moving the categories down to the bottom of the page. This is normally the way things should be, however, on this page, it is a Bad Thing, as this page has new sections added at the bottom constantly, so nothing stays at the bottom. The categories were then removed in the next archiving sweep(the 2nd edit), as they were right in the middle of the page by that time. I've replaced them, and added a note warning people not to move them to the bottom of the page. BTW, I'm delighted that a bot has now been written to do the archiving here, and I want to thank Steve block for doing it so well for these past few months. JesseW, the juggling janitor 23:35, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Reverts going to wrong version

I've been having trouble reverting recently. If I go to an old version of an article and click "Edit this page", I end up editing the most recent version (and typically I don't notice, save the page, and nothing happens to the page as a result).

This just happened to me when I was reverting two-centage on The Game (game). After saving a no-op because I hadn't noticed, I then went back to the old version I wanted to revert to and clicked "edit this page" - and got the new version, with the new content, in the edit window. I went forward one version ("Newer revision") and tried editing the newest version. Same result, of course. I then went back one version again, and this time the edit link did the right thing and gave me the warning that I was editing an out-of-date version. I went forward again, to the newest version, and clicked "edit this page". It had me edit the version from one edit ago and gave me the out-of-date warning.

Is this some sort of caching problem? Is Wikipedia doing it, or is it something wrong with my browser (Firefox 1.0.7 on Debian)? rspeer 05:44, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

The interaction of caching and editing previous revisions is complicated and frustrating. In general, you should not edit old revisions at all unless you're rolling back to a good version after several bad edits. If that's what you were doing, then it's likely there was a caching problem; review Wikipedia:Bypass your cache for some ideas. — Catherine\^talk 01:34, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Okay. But why do you say several bad edits, in particular? This is the only way I know of to roll back even one bad edit, for a non-admin, besides manually making the opposite of the change in the edit box. Is there a different way? rspeer 05:02, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

edit pages are not supposed to be cached at all and in any case the query string is different for editing a previous version. if they are being cached and the cached versions are getting mixed up then it means theres an extremely broken proxy somewhere! Plugwash 05:40, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

response time of servers

I am just swinging through here, but I want to raise an important concern. The recent server response times for wikipedia have been seriously affecting the community. I understand that we are not going to have sub-second response. But the lengthy waits for viewing and editing pages has seriously affected my ability, and the ability of others I believe, to fully participate in the community. I think if these server response times stay this way, or get any worse, the wikipedia community will suffer.

People will leave, people will refrain from making the thousands of minor edits that keep us going, and people will stop communicating with each other on talk pages leading to more confrontation.

I'm sure you guys are "on the case". May I respectfully suggest that you think of some short-to-medium term ways to fight this problem? If it is a question of money, I think it is time to seriously consider having another fundraiser, or soliciting donations of equipment.

Thank you, and thank you for your work. Sdedeo 01:19, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

I see this has been discussed above as well. I don't have any good solutions, and I don't think I see how wikipedia is going to raise millions of dollars by personal donations alone. I am strongly opposed to advertising -- not because I hate ads, but because I think it would compromise the wiki's mission of absolute neutrality. Perhaps the only solution will be for wp to get funding from a major philanthropic institution like the Ford Foundation. Sdedeo 03:00, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

The problem was a configuration error. No amount of extra hardware would have helped. It should be fixed now, sorry it took so long to work out. -- Tim Starling 12:41, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Template if

We have tried to make an improoved version of Template:If, to remove the meta call. But we don't know if the new proposal is better or worse for the servers, could someone with appropriate knowledge comment on Template talk:If#New if? _→AzaToth 22:27, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Image that doesn't exist

The upload of Image:Global Warming Predictions Map.jpg failed is some strange way that it thinks there is a 91k image there, but nothing is displayed. Also, note in the file versions section, there are no direct links to the image. Reuploading the image under a different name does allow it to be displayed correctly, but reuploading under this name fails, and tells me that I have updated the "" (empty string surrounded in quotes) image.

This state was apparently reached when the upload was interrupted in progress. Dragons flight 21:41, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Looks normal to me. --Brion 02:52, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Huh? Whereby normal means there is an image on that page? Dragons flight 03:01, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Um, yes, everything looks within the realm of the ordinary... Tito xd^(?!?) 03:29, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

The image is stored by wikimedia at http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/en/a/ad/Global_Warming_Predictions_Map.jpg, which contains a directory called ad. Some ad-blocking software will block any images loaded from such a directory. Wikimedia uses a more-or-less random two-character directory name. You need to configure your ad-blocker to exclude wikimedia.org. I've been caught by this before, and I use Symantec Client Security (the corporate version of Norton Internet Security).-gadfium 07:50, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Converting Doc files into wiki markup language

Hello,
Is there any macro for Microsoft Word or an external utility which enables converting doc or rtf files into Wikitext wiki markup language?
The only reference if found is here and it was pretty disappointing.
Thanks, David B.

Clearing search history????

How does one go about clearing the search history? THANKS

Check the documentation for your web browser about form edit history. This is something in your web browser, not in our software. --Brion 02:53, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

"Sexually explicit"

While editing the article on Byron, a text box flashed briefly on the screen, with the words "Sexually explicit". I have not been able to reproduce the event, but I am left thinking that it is a tag for a filtering system of some kind. Can someone explain what that is? Thanks, Haiduc 23:43, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

What you describe sounds impossible under mediawiki as it currently exists. It could conceviably be some kind of pop-up/spyware/censorware on your system. Raul654 23:48, 27 November 2005 (UTC)
- Very curious. Thanks. Haiduc 23:57, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Strange box caused by indenting with spaces instead of colon

It seems that typing something like

" Attempt to indent with spaces"

instead of

proper indentation using a colon(:)

 causes a strange dotted grey box to appear.

Is this a feature (I'd like a like to learn what it's called & it's proper usage) or a bug?

Thanks. Curious1i 22:37, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to edit a page (concise)

IF a line of plain text starts with a space THEN
  it will be formatted exactly
    as typed;
  in a fixed-width font;
  lines won't wrap;
ENDIF
this is useful for:
  * pasting preformatted text;
  * algorithm descriptions;
  * program source code
  * ASCII art;
  * chemical structures;

-- Ec5618 22:54, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, I guess it's a feature to "just show what I typed" (I added some details there).

-- Curious1i 23:36, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Http://www.the-quran.org

appears as an article name at Category:Possible copyright violations, but when the link is selected it returns an error. I can't delete it either. --Duk 06:04, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Interesting. Apparently the slashes in the article name of [[1]] make the software choke. I tried escaping them by replacing them with their URL encode equivalent, but got a 404 error instead. Johnleemk | Talk 19:12, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Works now, thanks whoever fixed it. --Duk 05:20, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Stacked section edit

Hi, in case you dont notice, in Alabama for example and other pages using same template were causing the sections edit to be stacked just like in image here. Could you fix that ? (sorry for bad english) Borgx 00:24, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Ok, done. —Mike 03:41, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Image link

I can't figure out how to link this image without having it show up on my question (i.e. I want the link to show up, not the actual picture): Image:FusionintheSun.png Any help would be appreciated! Thanks! Dimblethum 23:11, 29 November 2005 (UTC)Dimblethum

Put a colon at the start of the wikilink, linke this [[:Image:FusionintheSun.png]]. I've done it for you in the image that you linked above. The same thing works if you want to link a category instead of including the page in the category. --GraemeL ^(talk) 23:21, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Or to foreign-language articles, where you'd use [[:fr:Article]] to create a "normal" link rather than an interwiki. Superm401 | Talk 14:30, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Missing/deleted images

I've noticed a number of articles lately that have had broken (red) images. It also seems that the deletion history of these images is not visible either, as if I click on one of the red links it just takes me to the upload form. The latest article with broken images (which were perfectly free and I believe were tagged properly, as I viewed them before) that I've encounted is focal plane shutter. See the edit history on that article to before Nov. 27th. Without images, this particular article is far less educational. I kind of have a feeling, if the images were not overzealously quick deleted because of a lack of source/licensing information, that there may be a bug in MediaWiki that makes it think images are abandoned when they are really used in articles. Not very sure on that but it's the best explanation I can come up with. Ziggur 18:53, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

If you type the URL directly rather than clicking on the red link, you'll see the image description page. The ones that I've seen lately are for images that were deleted due to a lack of source and license info. slambo 20:28, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Cite this article

In response to bug 800 I wrote a citation special page extension that's currently only installed on all Wikipedias. You'll notice a new cite this article link in the sidebar on pages in the main namespace which appears active anywhere the permanent link would.

The citation format currently being used is just something I made up;) It's really easy to customize it at MediaWiki:Cite text though (you could for example use the formats at Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia), One thing about is is that there's a certain magic to the variables on that page, if you write e.g. {{CURRENTTIME}} on that page it won't show up as the current time on Special:Cite but rather as the time of the latest revision of the page being queried. To get the real current time use <citation>{{CURRENTTIME}}</citation> (<citation> doesn't work anywhere else but on that page). Otherwise it's a completely normal wiki page except I disabled the section edit links there since there's not much point in them.

A basic help page for the tool is avalible at meta, one thing to note is that it currently doesn't play nice with Tidy so Tidy won't be run on the output at Special:Cite (but is of course still run on every other page in the wiki).

The reason it's not installed on the other wikis is that I wanted to get some reaction to the tool before wide deployment, also, it might not be appropriate on them all (e.g. meta). —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:10, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

It's a nice feature, but MediaWiki:Cite text is a redlink, so I can't customize it... Tito xd^(?!?) 03:28, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Copy the following there:

* ''{{FULLPAGENAME}}'' (last modified {{CURRENTTIME}}, {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}} UTC). {{SITENAME}}, {{int:sitesubtitle}}. Retrived <cite>{{CURRENTTIME}}, {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}</cite> from {{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|oldid={{REVISIONID}}}}

It's the same as the text that's currently being served, you can then customize it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:33, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

All right, I shall do so now. Tito xd^(?!?) 03:35, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Thank you so much, Ævar, this is brilliant! Why does the text within <cite> display in italics? (Note to others working with it: the {{REVISIONID}} appears as a red template link on preview, but displays correctly on save.) — Catherine\^talk 03:56, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Doh! I forgot that <cite> is also a HTML tag so it displayed as italics in some browsers on MediaWiki:Cite text and you can't use it as such on Special:Cite. Any ideas for an alternate name for it? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 04:05, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Is <citation> an HTML tag too? Tito xd^(?!?) 04:06, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Changed the extension to use <citation> rather than <cite>, you'll have to update the page appropriately because it's displaying wrong information now as result. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 04:12, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Done. Tito xd^(?!?) 04:33, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

A great new feature! Canderson7 04:32, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. The Help desk will always be thankful for this. :) Tito xd^(?!?) 04:41, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Wow, I suggested this like a year ago (maybe more like 6-months, in slightly different words) and people said it couldn't be done/it was not needed. Just goes to show that you should just go out and do it (not that I would know how to anyways). Good work. Broken S 04:58, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Woohoo! It works!! Titoxd and I have prettied it all up, and it looks like it's functioning just as advertised. The Help Desk, the Help mailing list, the Pump and the Reference desk are all going to be excited by this. (Now if only we could teach the word "cite" to everyone who doesn't recognize it as what they're looking for....)

Ævar, could the function be enabled for the "Wikipedia:" namespace as well as the article namespace? — Catherine\^talk 05:21, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Is there a mediawiki page that controls that special page? Raul654 05:26, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Cite text controls Special:Cite. Tito xd^(?!?) 05:29, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Sure, do you want any other namespaces? Maybe the image namespace? You can get citation information for pages in Wikipedia by going to Special:Cite directly b.t.w., you probably knew that though. I'm going to have to add another message (cite this page) since cite this article isn't really appropriate in the project namespace. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 06:07, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Again, great work; I do a little on RD, and even there a lot of questions are about citation. I'll mention this when someone complains about "the developers" never responding to bugs. However, the extension should not be enabled on image namespace, because the attribution and copyright issues there are much more complex(i.e. non-GFDL, created externally, often not sourced (right), etc.). I don't see why we can't have it on all GFDL namespaces, thouh. As for the "cite this page/article" message, I would just have "cite this page" for everything, including articles. No one will notice and it cuts down on bloat. Superm401 | Talk 07:01, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Some suggestions: change {{int:sitesubtitle}} to {{MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle}} since it might not be in English if the user has selected another language then English in hir preferences and change "Permanent URL" to "Permanent link" to go with the toolbox entry. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:21, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Done! — Catherine\^talk 00:05, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Congrats! Great tool. -- User:Docu

Nice work, Ævar, we've sorely needed this for ages. I have a couple of suggested tweaks:

I think it should work for old versions too (so someone can cite a specific version, not just the current one). Right now the "cite this article" link is disabled when looking at an old revision.
Can we make it work for skins other than monobook (and, for that matter, Tim's "permanent link" only works in monobook too)?

Thanks. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 12:19, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

It works for old revisions now and links to the revision you're currently on so you won't cite the wrong one if someone changes it in between you reading the article and following the link. Also, follows redirects no. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:24, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, very nice. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:20, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Possibly add the following "As with any source, especially those of unknown authorship, you should be wary and independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information if possible; see also our General Disclaimer page." --michael180 23:23, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Conditional link display?

Is there a way to show a link only if the page it is linking to actually exists? What I want to do is hide the red "More" link in the anniversaries section of Portal:Trains when the archive page doesn't exist (which right now is the majority, as you can see by looking at the date links on Category:Anniversaries in rail transport), but display the link when the destination page exists (such as on December 1). AdThanksVance. slambo 14:20, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Non-standard interface makes Wikipedia webpages confusing

Puzzled as to why I couldn't access the menu bar of my browser (MS Internet Explorer) when viewing Wikipedia pages, I discovered that they use the HTML accesskey attribute. This attribute is explained, and its use more or less discouraged, at http://www.dmag.org.uk/resources/design_articles/accesskeys.asp and http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskeys/19 .

I think the reasons given against the use of the attribute are sound; I therefore propose Wikipedia eliminate use of the attribute.

—Urielw 06:14, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

I personally dislike them, but there may be others who get value from them. Could they be made configurable? Either a collective on/off or the ability to configure what key invokes which short cut?'

Regards, Ben Aveling 06:50, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

You aren’t the first people to complain. See bugzilla:477. Susvolans ⇔ 07:43, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Charis SIL font

I wish to add the new SIL font "Charis SIL" to .IPA and .Unicode CSS declarations (common.css). I propose putting them after Doulos SIL. I will make the edit in 5 days if no‐one minds. Nicholas 20:11, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Internal and external links

Why is the syntax different for external and internal links? This confuses newcomers like whoa, and yet the two different syntaxes do the same function. URLs can't have pipes or spaces, so I don't see why we can't change the syntax to accept anything:

[[Test article|test]]
[Test article|test]
[http://www.example.com test]
[http://www.example.com|test]
[[http://www.example.com test]]
[[http://www.example.com|test]]

Why complicate things unnecessarily? — Omegatron 15:43, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

The syntax for external links predates Wikipedia by a couple years. While we might one day change it, so far we haven't. --Brion 16:16, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that single square brackets around a word or two is a common convention for indicating editorial changes when quoting someone. For example, what the person actually said:

"...he is a blathering idiot..."

where who "he" refers to is specified a couple thousands words of campaign speech earlier. In Wikipedia, this would be quoted as

Joe Bloggs, in his campaign speech, said: "...[President Bush] is a blathering idiot..."

This conflicts with the use of single brackets for internal links. External links don't have this problem, since they always begin with "http://". --Carnildo 20:01, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Good point. So we should just use double brackets for everything. — Omegatron 14:52, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

It's not just newbies. I've been around for years and I still find the external link syntax confusing. We should deprecate this weird syntax, and settle on [[url|text]] where urls starting with explicit protocols would be external. Zocky 15:33, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. — Omegatron 14:52, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Bug 4110 - External link syntax should be the same as internal — Omegatron 15:08, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Search results

I am glad to see search producing article results again. Is there any chance of re-instating the summary text for each result? It was very useful to see context. Thanks. Bobblewik 16:17, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Just found something a bit wierd during a search. Did a search for "Zero day" and the article Zero day was not listed anywhere in the results. Hulleye 11:27, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I am delighted to see the summary text working again. Thanks guys! As far as 'Zero day' is concerned, it went straight to it when I selected the 'Go' button but did not appear in the result list when I used quote characters i.e. "zero day", and selected the 'Search' button. Bobblewik 17:12, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Shortly after I posted here, typing in Zero day into the search bar took me directly to the article. But the search results still don't find either the Zero day article or the Zero Day article. Hulleye 06:22, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

When searching for instances of the misspelling "Hapsburg" the SEARCH says that it found 50 pages, and then displays the first 20 results, with links to pages 2 and 3 of those results (and a NEXT) hyperlink too. But when trying to get to any of those beyond page 1, no results appear. --StanZegel (talk) 03:51, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Need Advanced Search. The search engine in Wikipedia returns a flood of unrelated results on single- and multiple-word searches. It needs an Advanced Search feature such as that in Google, allowing one to specify "exact phrase" and "all of the words" searches. Enclosing multiple words in quotes doesn't seem to help in the Wikipedia search. There should be a way to selectively enable or disable partial-word matches. Quicksilver^{T @} 18:14, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Use google if your results don't need to be bang up to date. Rich Farmbrough 17:39, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Innapropriate search engine links to archived discussions - prevention of

A claim exists that POV pushing by using article talk pages (and other talk pages, and adminstrative pages) to "seed" search engines has occured on Wikipedia.

Be that as it may the Google search for elvis presley gay' yields two Wikipedia Talk archive pages as it's first two hits (out of some 904,000 (only 840,000 if you -wikipedia)).

So I've been bold and ROT13d Talk:Elvis Presley/archive2 and Talk:Elvis Presley/archive1. I use a Template:ROT13 and a Category:ROT13.

Good things about doing this this way

Eventually the hits will work their way out of the search engine caches.
You can still see the extent of the page, and if you have a suitable decoder, view it.
The original is easily still available in history.
- Not true, I just changed a word to vandilsm on June 18th entry, but history changed too.
There is a category of ROT13 pages.
It should be a rare occurrance.

Bad things about doing this

It involves editing pages that are supposed to be static.
Perhaps we want to allow those google hits.
People might use the method inappropriately or too extensively.
It may chew up a lot of disk.
It makes the pages somewhat harder to access.
It is more complexity
Pages take everal days to "age" out of Google. In this case I expect them to be replaced with othe /archive, user talk and Arbcom pages. [2]

Things that could be done differently

Changing robots.txt to exlude non-article space.
Just deleteing the content, and leaving a note to look at previous history.
Having a smarter template that links to previous history (possibly combined with the above).

Open problems

How do we detect this problem happening in the first place?

I offer the above to start a discussion, but I would appreciate it if we could leave the two trial pages ROT13'd for at least a week for "scientific" purposes. Rich Farmbrough 14:48, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I disagree with the use of ROT13 on archive pages; besides all the drawbacks you listed above, it also makes it harder to search for them (both on the internal search engine and on Google — yes, we want Google to index these pages!), and makes it harder to find them via Special:Whatlinkshere.

If there's something really innapropriate on an archived talk page, it can be removed (and only it; not the whole page!), and a comment directing people to look at the history left in place of it.

But is "elvis presley gay" really that innapropriate, when taken in the specific context it's in on these talk pages? Anyone can see it's just a discussion on whether it should be included on the article or not.

I will not revert both for a while, since you asked; however, I believe one week will not be enough for Google to notice the change (since it's a rarely-edited page).

--cesarb 22:32, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I also disagree with the use of ROT13 on archive pages. It also breaks all signatures and links, and would probably be confusing for a first-time user reading the page. The ROT13 version of a page also sounds very strange with screen readers. I recently used a google search to find a page that it cached in November 2004, so a week may not be enough. Graham/pianoman87 talk 12:10, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

This has been reverted now. I don't propose to try it again without some more thinking, and discussion, however I want to expand on one point. We regularly remove "vanity" and "spam" pages and edits from article space, effectively what was happening here was the same in non-article space. I think that poses a problem for us. Rich Farmbrough 17:25, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Renaming a page

I recently created a page from a link, but when I tried to find it again I found it very difficult because of the name the page has from the link.

It is about an architecturally significant building in Chicago called S. R. Crown Hall (named after a person) but the page is called "S.R. Crown Hall" (no space between S. and R.). I think plain old "Crown Hall" is probably the best title.

Can I change the name, and if so can I preserve the links to this page? Can I add tags so that a search for any variant of the name will return the same page?

See Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page. Unfortunately, anonymous users such as yourself do not have the abiliy to do this because of the high risk of vandalism. You can create an account, and see here for the many reasons why this is useful. --Sean|Bla ck 02:51, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Anon user, I have renamed the page Crown Hall and a search for S.R. Crown Hall will redirect you to that page. Many pages linked to it as "Crown Hall" so now those dead links are fixed as well. I also added a picture of the building that was found on another page. I hope you like it. Please do create an account, though! -Parallel or Together ? 03:44, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Strangely confused by edit count

Not being a big one on edit count, I hadn't really checked my edit count tally for a while. When I did, thinking I'd try and figure out when my 5000th edit would have been, I was a little confused, as my edit count had actually seemed to go down. A few weeks later (i.e., today) I just figured out why, thanks to the WP:1000 page. For some reason, as of 29 November, I'm on there twice, at #1099 (with 3990 edits) and at #1340 (with 2119) edits. Can anyone explain this to me? Is there some way of rectifying this? Please let me know on my talk page if possible. I wub yew all. Proto t c 15:15, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

There are two lists on that page. The Notes section explains: "The first list counts edits from the article namespace only. The second list counts edits from all namespaces (including, for example, talk pages).". HTH. Slambo (Speak) 15:56, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

page move problem

The page move problem that I had described recently happened again, this time to the Brown Willy article. --Ixfd64 04:32, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Take a peek at [3] and [4]; it looks like some folks did some funky delete/restore history merging on these pages. --Brion 07:13, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Edit page rearranged

I've separated out MediaWiki:Edittools for the charinsert-type stuff from MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning. The edit tools are also now shown on Special:Upload for use in composing file description pages.

The template list is now down at the bottom, where it can grow without getting in the way.

The copyright / licence / warning is now above the save button; this is necessary to ensure that it actually has a chance of being seen. I strongly recommend that this message be trimmed a bit to keep it short and sweet; it seems to have morphed into something rather long here on en.wikipedia. :) --Brion 03:44, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

redirect not working

ive just turned a short short stub into a redirect to a much bigger article... but the redirect isnt working. can someone have a look at Neithan and see what ive done wrong please? BL kiss the lizard 00:30, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

dont worry - i fixed it. BL kiss the lizard 00:40, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Sig issues...

Anyone know what's going on with my signature? This appears to be a recent development. --Dante Alighieri | [[User talk:Dante Alighieri|Talk]] 21:02, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

It's not just you. Check out Wikipedia:How to fix your signature for a bit of an explanation. FreplySpang (talk) 21:11, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

OK, this seems to have fixed it. This was a recent change though? --Dante Alighieri | Talk 21:58, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Two and a half weeks ago. --Brion 23:15, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

reverting discrepancy on Rosa Parks

This is very wierd. It appeared that 204.140.14.10 (talk · contribs) experimented with Wikipedia and 157.91.109.133 (talk · contribs) then vandalized the article. However, when I tried to revert the changes, the article was only partially reverted. The vandalism by 157.91.109.133 was not reverted, and I had to revert it the second time. Normally, my revert should have an exact match with a previous revision. However, it seems to match no other revisions. I'm absolutely sure that I reverted the right way. Could this be a software glitch? --Ixfd64 20:37, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Raw output on special pages

Is it possible to get 'raw' output on special pages, such as Special:Contributions?

I recently found that you can get a less formatted wiki-markup version of a page by including 'action=raw' in the URL, for example

http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Anthony_Caro&action=raw

But this doesn't appear to work on Special pages such as;

http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=Solipsist&action=raw

or am I constructing the URL incorrectly. -- Solipsist 19:08, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

That's to retrieve the source wiki text of an editable page, and doesn't work with software-generated special pages at this time. --Brion 23:16, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. -- Solipsist 07:59, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Coloured Text

I'm sure there's details somewhere, I jsut can't find them. But it seems to me that list-like articles like Foreign_hostages_in_Iraq could benefit from coloured text denoting which are dead, which are released, which are missing, etc. Just curious about how to create coloured text Sherurcij 11:44, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

You can use the below syntax:

colored text here

It parses as:

colored text here

I don't think there's a pure wiki markup way to do this. Obviously, replace red with your color of choice. Browsers are pretty flexible about what they accept. You can also use hex codes if your familiar with them. A full list of supported colors with associated codes is at HTMLGoodies. Superm401 | Talk 14:09, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Please discuss this on the Talk page for Wikipedia:Manual of Style first. Colored text will almost surely get reverted unless there is consensus to keep it. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:56, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

At the very least, be sure you aren't imparting information solely with color. That is, if you say "dead people are in red" and that's it, that's bad. However, if you make them red AND say they're dead, then that's better. Not everyone has/can see color. --Golbez 18:47, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

would it work if you made them grey? colourblind people and people with b&w monitors would still see the difference. BL kiss the lizard 23:14, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

But not people with text mode browsers on b&w monitors (or text mode browsers configured to ignore colours). Just add a dagger and similar symbols next to them. --cesarb 12:00, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Special characters

(Using IE 6 with Windows XP)

My browser often fails to display special characters correctly on Wikipedia pages. An example is http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Misspelling, where many of the phonetic symbols show up as white boxes. Similarly, at http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet many of the special characters display just fine, but others are white boxes again. Does anyone know the reason for this? Is it a configuration problem with my PC or a problem with the page? Do these pages display correctly for others? Matt 20:45, 25 November 2005 (UTC).

I believe it's a limitation (bug) in IE... I just checked and the problem occurs as described in my computer (also XP/IE6, latest updates), but it works fine with Mozilla and Opera in the same machine (so it's not a lack of appropriate fonts). MCBastos 22:37, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Right thanks. I imagine an awful lot of people use the same setup as me, so even if it is a bug in IE, if there's any way for Wikipedia to work around it, so as to cause IE to display the pages correctly, then that would probably be worth doing. Matt 11:06, 2 December 2005 (UTC).

Development suggestions

Cross posting to VPT, VPM and VPN.

Hi there, I'm a MediaWiki developer who amongst other things made the Cite tool and the license selector on the upload page. Since I can't figure out anything to do development wise right now I thought I'd invite people to make suggestions, big or small, for things to work on on my talk page. Note that your idea has a greater likelyhood of being implemented if it isn't taxing on our already overloaded databases. Suggestions might be proposals for new features, improvements of existing ones, fixing of filed bugs or anything else that comes to mind. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 07:55, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Narragansett

I just moved Narragansett to Narragansett (tribe) because we're up to three articles that could lay claim to the title. However, I just realized how many pages link to the original. Any thoughts on what I should do here, before I make myself a really huge mess? :-) Thanks. --SarekOfVulcan 23:01, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Disambig seems correct in this case. Superm401 | Talk 23:47, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! Where do I request bot assistance as soon as I'm sure this isn't getting swapped back?--SarekOfVulcan 23:58, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bot requests is probably what you're after. Grutness...wha? 00:53, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Problems with image margins

In HTML I can adjust the margins around images with something like:

Some text <div style="margin-top:20; margin-bottom:20"><img src="test.jpg"></div>Some more text

When I try to do the same thing with Wikipedia syntax, like this:

Some text <div style="margin-top:40; margin-bottom:40">[[Image:whatever]]</div>Some more text

it doesn't work. The margin around the image seems to be preset and I can't see how to change it. Some div style attributes (like color) DO work, so it seems like the DIV is being recognised, just that the margin attributes are being ignored.

What am I doing wrong?

Matt 14:42, 2 December 2005 (UTC).

You seem to be hitting the sanitizer; if you try that and look at the generated HTML, the output has nothing in the style attribute. It probably is happening because your CSS is invalid; margin-top: 40 doesn't mean anything (what's the unit?). Try using margin-top: 40px for instance. See [5] for details. --cesarb 17:43, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Great, that seems to work. (I always thought that "px" was the default, as does my reference book, but there you go.) Many thanks for your help! Matt 19:10, 2 December 2005 (UTC).

Browsers such as Mozilla, which follow the standards more closely, have problems with pages using invalid syntax such as omitting the units from stylesheet entries. *Dan T.* 23:06, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

You shouldn’t be using pixel sizes anyway because they don’t scale. Susvolans ⇔ 10:28, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Don't understand... "scale" under what circumstances? Most image sizes are specified in pixels anyway aren't they? What would you recommend instead? Matt 12:15, 3 December 2005 (UTC).

Anything sized in pixels is a quarter the size on a 1600×1200 monitor as it is on a 800×600 one. I you use em sizes, they are displayed in proportion to the text size that users can set for their own comfort. Susvolans ⇔ 12:33, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Firefox Wikipedia search box doesn't work

Neither Firefox version 1.0.x or 1.5 is able to find anything in Wikipedia using that Firefox search box. I think it used to work - does anyone know anything about this? It sure used to be a great feature, for me the main reason to use Firefox. Spalding 11:33, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Works for me; Firefox 1.5 final on Mac OS X 10.4. We had some troubles with the search servers being offline for parts of the last day or two, so you may have just hit during that time. (In this case you'd see the Wikipedia search page, with a message about the search having temporary problems, and backup forms for searching Wikipedia through Google or Yahoo.) --Brion 01:52, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

OK, it's back. I have to remember it does the Search function, not the Go function that I usually use within Wikipedia itself, since I like instant gratification in my searching (I guess Go is the same as Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky"). Actually I think Go would be more appropriate when going to Wikipedia from outside. I use search (to find words within all articles) much less often. But that's a small point. Spalding 13:25, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

"Who uses" list

A thought related to the current suggestions about blocking only anons from IPs, rather than blanket blocking IPs: Is there any way of creating an (admin-only?) tool in specialpages so that when an anon IP is blockable, an admin can instantly check which users regularly use that IP (perhaps a list of all registered users who have used an IP within the previous three months, plus number of edits from that IP)? That way they could at least get an opportunity of knowing (a) whether a long-term ban is viable, and (b) know whether any editors need warning before a ban is put in place (I'm posting this to VPProp as well, since I'm not sure which page would be the best place for it). Grutness...wha? 23:38, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

There might be issues with the Privacy policy. A raw total might be possossible though. Susvolans ⇔ 11:13, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

PHPBB (some bulletin board software), has a feature like this. Its really useful. It doesnt mention anything about it having any issues, I think it just mentions in the default terms and conditions that you record IP's and the reason why. --Timmywimmy 20:55, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

images being used for vandalism

A suggestion: Could we create a form of protection that would stop an image being installed in any more articles until the protection is removed? The reason I am suggesting this is because some images (for example images of penises) are constantly being used to vandalise pages. Right now the only way to stop this (and some images are used constantly by vandals to attack articles and talk pages) is to delete the image entirely, and that is something that we should not do if the images are in genuine use elsewhere. If an admin could lock the pages it would mean that they could still remain in genuine usage where they are already are, but not be used elsewhere for vandalism. The protection could be shortlived. Once a vandal strikes the vandalism could be reverted, the image temporarily protected and then unprotected when the vandal has given up and gone away. Among recent examples this where the George W. Bush article was replaced by images of penises. (I know many people worldwide think bush is a dickhead but this is taking it a tad too literally!) FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 00:51, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure we already have such a system, created for this purpose some months ago. I don't have the link onhand though. :P --Brion 03:50, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Bad image list, yes?--Sean|Bla ck 03:52, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Excellent. I've added in the offending image. That's one image that asshole won't be able to use anymore. FearÉIREANN

\^(caint) 03:58, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Image red links

Why are some image links showing up as red links? e.g. Image:ToothSection.jpg. When they're red-linked clicking on them doesn't lead to the image, just to the editing page (and not the correct editing page either). Oddly, the mouse-over preview function still brings up the image. — Asbestos | Talk (RFC) 16:52, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

It's part of a bug fix. [6] Where the image page exists on Commons but not on en, the link is made an edit link. However, if you go to [7] you can actually still see the image. It is only the link behaviour that has changed. I hope it is fixed soon... [[Sam Korn]] 17:05, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Well the thing with commons images need to be fixed. However I for one am very pleased to see links to non-existing images turning red now. Makes it a lot more convenient to work with lists of image links when you can instantly see wich ones are already deleted. I agree that the link should remain blue if there is a commons image at the name though. --Sherool (talk) 17:09, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

This should be working properly now, at least in articles. --Brion 07:46, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

SVG and MediaWiki

I just noticed that Wikipedia has SVG images uploaded, and I was curious just how much we were doing with them, but meta doesn't have any recent information. Where can I find out what can and can't be done with SVG on MediaWiki nowadays? (Related note: shouldn't the MIME-type of the SVG images be "image/svg+xml"? Whereas right now it's only "image/svg".) Phoenix-forgotten 02:53, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

The SVG images are not used directly, instead the thumbnailing engine convert them to PNG, so the actual images as seen in the articles is in PNG format. So I guess the answer is you can't do a whole lot, only static SVG images work, the more fancy stuff like embedding scripts and what not obviuosly doesn't work. The format is still excelent for things like flags and such, a good sized PNG flag uses an order of magnitude more disk space than the same flag in SVG format, even if all the thumbnails are rendered as PNG regardles. Dunno how complete the support for SVG is on the server side though, I've ocationaly seen complaints about glitches in some images, but I haven't seen any "bugged" ones myself so far, so they could be problems in the image themselves rather than the server side renderer. --Sherool (talk) 15:25, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Can you please point out exactly where you're seeing 'image/svg'? Last I looked all .svg files are being served as image/svg+xml. --Brion 03:52, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

On the image description page of SVG images it does say "MIME type: image/svg", see for example Image:Svg.svg, but I can also confirm that raw SVG files are indeed served corecty as image/svg+xml so it's only a display issue on the image page. --Sherool (talk) 04:11, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Poo, well I'll fiddle with that in a bit. --Brion 04:14, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Ah. Good to know. Are details on meta:SVG image support up-to-date? I was never really sure when I tried to read it; some comments are so old. Phoenix-forgotten 04:57, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

I've updated meta:SVG image support#Current implementation. --Brion 07:50, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Suppression of IP address by registered users

Is there any good reason why IP addresses of registered users aren't publicly available? (Other than the observation that the WikiWikiWeb originally worked that way--nowadays, IP addresses are available in c2's edit logs even for logged-in users?) --EngineerScotty 23:40, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Some silly ideas about privacy. ;)

Wikipedia was originally run on UseMod, which *did* show logged-in users' network addresses publicly. For whatever reason when we switched to custom software we went for the privacy angle.

(C2's wiki hides logged-in editors' IPs from the general public so far as I know, though they're logged and visible to Ward and his stewards who help in clean-up.) --Brion 00:00, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

No, it is possible for any user to view the IP address of whoever changes a page on c2. (It used to be the case that use of a username cookie would suppress display of IP addresses; but Ward Cunningham changed this last year after a well-known (and since-banned) vandal started usurping the usernames of other posters. --EngineerScotty 00:18, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, where is that? I don't see it on the regular RecentChanges. --Brion 00:21, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Try Wiki:RecentPosts. --EngineerScotty 00:39, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! --Brion 03:13, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Read tracking

With the Wikimedia software, anyone can track what others write on Wikipedia. Perhaps one solution to the John R. Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy is some level of tracking of reads. No, I wouldn't want others to find out from Wikipedia logs that I had read an article on Satan, for instance--privacy of viewers must be respected. However, some of the following information might be useful:

When, and how often, an article is read by an anonymous user. (Excluding robots who properly identify themselves)
When, and how often, an article is read by a logged-in user.
When, and how often, an article is read by a logged-in admin.

One of the objections in the Seigenthaler incident is that the falsehoods remained on Wikipedia for four months. Nobody objects when someone posts defamatory content which is removed within minutes--it's the lies that persist for a long time which cause Wikipedia's credibility to be questioned. If there were some mechanism for editors to identify pages which are likely to not have been reviewed recently by someone who is trusted (I would consider logged-in users and admins to be trustworthy), so that editors can then review the article and make sure it's quality content, we might be able to catch incidents like this more quickly in the future. --EngineerScotty 21:13, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

there are those who say that has already happened

216.237.179.238 03:29, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

My understanding is that WP used to keep access logs (if you have your own MediaWiki installation you can see that at the bottom of the page, it says how many times it has been viewed), but that the logs got so large the servers were delaying for minutes at a time just writing out the disk cache, and so the feature was turned off. --bainer (talk) 21:32, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Page view counters and access logs are different. The page view counter feature causes a database read and write with every page view - which would be prohibitively expensive for the traffic wikipedia currently serves. Access logs are kept by the Apache web servers (and I presume the squids as well). They just aren't made generally available, and (although I'm not a wikipedia developer, so I don't actually know) I'd bet they're not kept very long either. I strongly suspect finding pages that haven't been viewed in some amount of time by trolling through the logs would be extraordinarily expensive, even if logs were kept for a reasonable amount of time (like several weeks). I think this is a reasonable idea, but I don't think it would be easy to implement. An easier possibility might be to add a database field for articles indicating "unvetted" or something, that is set when an article is created and cleared by explicit action (which might be available only to administrators). "Unvetted" articles could be visibly marked as unvetted and easily listed on a "special:" page. -- Rick Block (talk) 05:21, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Cumulative list with separate sections

Over at the Counter-vandalism unit, an effort is underway to try to get the members page to be sorted alphabetically, as well as be a cumulative numbered list. Right now the issue is that no matter what workaround has been attempted, apparently there's no way to keep the counter from starting over on the list. Is there a way to keep the counter counting up while still providing for some form of separation between letters? Your help is appreciated. Thanks in advance, Mo0[talk] 06:07, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

MediaZilla painful to use

Is there an easier way to report bugs? MediaZilla is so user unfriendly, considering that supposedly I'm doing the developers a favour, it seems more the other way around with all the hoops to jump through! And this from someone who actually knows how to use bugzilla and has used it before...

Anyway I just wanted to report the typo in this line: "Content must not violate any copyright and must be based on verifiable sources. By editing here, you agree to licence your contributions under the GFDL." AFAIK, "licence", when used as a verb, should be spelt "license". Stevage 23:07, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

That can be edited by any admin. I am changing the notice. [[Sam Korn]] 23:10, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Wow. Instant gratification. I'm impressed! Thank you :) Stevage 23:18, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

No problem! [[Sam Korn]] 23:19, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Isn't that a UK/US thing? — Omegatron 23:49, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Sometimes, but it would appear that in the case of a permission to do something that license is correct, even in Proper English. At least, that's what the Cambridge Dictionary seems to say. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:57, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

It is license when a very and licence when a noun. [[Sam Korn]] 00:12, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Way of automatically placing anon new pages into a cat ?

I posted this over in the new section, though I think it might get answered over here quicker: Is there a way of making up a category of new pages created by anons besides the Speical:Newpages function? That way it could be like cleanup, with Category:Anonnewpages-Monday, Category:Anonnewpages-Tuesday, etc.. That way the newpage patrol wouldn't duplicate effort, and know when a page sliped passed them. Does any of the programers here know if you can automatically add a cat like Category:Anonnewpages to any new pages created by anons?--Rayc 19:43, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Special:DoubleRedirects

This seems to be entirely broken, with many of the entries on the list claiming to point to themselves as the first step, or often as chains pointing entirely to themselves (e.g. # American terrorism (Edit) → American terrorism → American terrorism). Also, instead of listing 500, is it listing around 450 (456 and then 446 on the twice I tried it) and still offers to go to the "next 500, starting at 501". Chris talk back 19:20, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Can't edit image description

Hello. There is this image, Image:Swiss_army_knife_open_20050612.jpg. I'm trying to edit the image description, to add the knife's model name, but when I click the "edit this page" link, I get a blank edit page as if the image did not exist. What is going on?? -- NIC1138 17:27, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Simple! The image is actually on Commons so you must click the words Description page there. I remember how much this apparent fault puzzled me when I first met it - 17:33, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

(edit conflict written at same time as above)its an image from commons with the description automatically transcluded. follow the supplied link and make your edit there. Plugwash 17:34, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

There should be something in the software for this. If you edit a blank image description and the image is on commons you should get a message explaining and asking if you really want to do it. — Omegatron 23:52, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

subst expansions

If I have in a template the code <nowiki>~~~~</nowiki>, and then call it by subst it ({{subst:template}}), then the tildes get expanded.
When a template have a default value for a paramter, and the parmaeter in question is not given, then on subst, it should expand to the default value. _→AzaToth 14:43, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Try using the markup ~~~~, which produces ~~~~, but works in subst: templates. -Mys e ku rity 22:41, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, ofcourse you can use ~ all the time, I was just pointing to why it's expands inside <nowiki>, does subst ignore <nowiki>? _→AzaToth 22:47, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Looks like it does. Templates that contain a substed invocation of another template inside nowiki tags (like, <nowiki>{{subst:SomeOtherTemplate}}</nowiki>) also expand the inner template when the outer one is substed. (Try {{subst:deletiontools}}, for example.) While this seems to be unintentional behavior, it does let us create templates that, when substed, contain the date and/or time that the template was added (something which has been long-requested). —Cryptic (talk) 18:21, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Can confim that, using {{subst:User:AzaToth/X6}} gives <nowiki>18:40 1 December 2005 (UTC)</nowiki> _→AzaToth 18:40, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Comment: But, perhaps this is a better way to do it: In the template, you have the code {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>switch|1|case: 1=foo|case: 2=bar|default=biz}}, and if called as {{sbust:template}}, the result is foo, that way you dont get extra nowiki-tags _→AzaToth 20:17, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Further experimentation shows that {{switch}} is unnecessary, ie {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>template}} results in foo. It breaks if the outer template is transcluded instead of being substed, though, which is a big drawback. :( We could really use some tags that specifically change what happens to a template when it's substed or transcluded. —Cryptic (talk) 04:04, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

The switch I used was just an example, I was merly refering to using includeonly in encapsulate the subst. one template that uses this technique now is {{doctl}} _→AzaToth 04:09, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

As I where checking, code in <pre></pre> also gets expanded, probably all codes gets expanded, but only calls with "subst:" gets replaced. _→AzaToth 21:00, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Missing image

I'm wondering what happened to this image: Image:Gradndfilter.jpg, which I both took and uploaded to Wikipedia. It worked when I uploaded it, and now it says there's no image there, yet my description and license information is still on the page. Ziggur 02:51, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

There is no record of you uploading it [8]...odd. Maybe you made the page before you uploaded the image and then didn't upload it? Or you thought you uploaded it and then made the page? I don't know. Broken S 02:59, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I just remembered when I uploaded it, Wikipedia was being rather slow and the page basically timed out. The image actually did get uploaded fully somehow, but the accompanying text wasn't submitted. I edited that in afterwards. The image worked fine in an article and by itself, so I don't know why it doesn't anymore. I guess I'll just reupload. Ziggur 03:16, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

How to find someone's talk page

I sometimes see someones signature without a talk page. How can I find their talk page since their signature only links to a blank page? BB69BB69 (talk) 17:28, 8 December 2005 (UTC)BB69

First click the user name, then click the "discussion" tab in that person's blank user page. --D e ath phoenix 18:12, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Thank you BB69 (talk) 18:25, 8 December 2005 (UTC)BB69

Adding Talk page to signature

How do I add my talk page to my signature?. I know that doing squigilies adds a link to my page, but I sometimes see talk pages linked as well. Thanks bb69 19:05, 7 December 2005 (UTC))BB69

You can change your signature from the “My preferences” link, which is at the top right hand corner of the page in the Monobook skin. Some things you need to watch out for are described at Help:Preferences#Raw signature. Susvolans ⇔ 21:22, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

I went to "My Preferences", and "Monobook skin" and still didn't find out how to link my talk page. Can you help? thanks bb69 16:28, 8 December 2005 (UTC)BB69

Go to "My Preferences" and in the box labelled Nickname put something like [[User:BB69|bb69]] [[User talk:BB69|(talk)]] Make sure the Raw signatures box is checked. You can change (talk) to whatever you want, and even put in fancy formatting. Take a look at some other users signatures by editing pages they have signed for some good ideas. the wub "?!" 17:06, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Thank you BB69BB69 (talk) 17:25, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Did they change how things work again? My signature's broken... -[[User:Rhymeless|Tim Rhymeless [[User talk:Rhymeless| (Er...let's shimmy)]]]] 05:45, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Are you using raw signatures, Mr. Rhymeless? You will need to for the style of signature you have. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, or see WP:SIGHELP. — Knowledge Seeker দ 05:49, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Changing IP to User Name

I made a couple of edits to an article before I had my user name. Now that I have my user name, is it possible to change the attribution on those edits from my IP to my user name? Sam* 17:57, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Changing attribution for an edit but it does not seem to be in operation for a year. --Alvin-cs ✉ 23:05, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Underlined links

A while ago, I noticed that when I was logged off or using a different user account, the links were not underlined. I was annoyed at first, but then I came to prefer links that were not underlined. Now that I'm back to using my JarlaxleArtemis account, I noticed that the links are underlined only on this account. What's up with that? ⇒ JarlaxleArtemis 04:52, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

They seem to go off and on, actually, but I noticed, when I was logged out today, the same problem Jaraxle mentions. I don;t really care, but I wish that they would remain consistent.--Sean|Bla ck 05:04, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

I have no idea why they would go on and off, or why they would not be underlined when you are logged off (unless you have so configured your browser). While you are logged in, you can set Wikipedia to always underline links, never underline them, or follow your browser settings by adjusting your preferences (miscellaneous tab). — Knowledge Seeker দ 05:18, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

I've seen the same thing. It seems pretty random, it sometimes seems to coincide with times when there is a heavy load (i.e., occasional Wikimedia server busy messages), so I figured there was some connection. Never seemed to cause any serious problem, so I never bothered about it. older≠wiser 12:38, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

I would guess it's just a little (slow paced) edit war going on at the global monobok.css file or something like that. --Sherool (talk) 17:12, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Ah. I didn't realize you could change it in the user preferences. Thanks. ⇒ JarlaxleArtemis 00:44, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

I have set "Underline links Always" and yet they are no longer underlined. Has that changed today? Or does it have something to do with the {{speculative fiction}} tag on the Speculative fiction page I was visiting when I first noticed it? It held even though I exited the browser and restarted it. I would like the option of underlining back, please. Hu 18:21, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Try this: on your preferences page, use the dropdown list to select Always for the option to underline links (yes, I know it's set there already, use the dropdown to select it again) and then hit Save and reload the article. I noticed my preference wasn't being honored this morning, so I told it to underline Always again, even though it was already set that way, then reloading the article made the underlines reappear. It worked for me, YMMV. HTH. Slambo (Speak) 19:02, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I didn't do anything, and now underlines are back. My guess is that somebody is screwing around at the system level. I wish there were an announcement or something. I looked for one, I'll try looking again. Hu 21:42, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Mirror time lag

A user sent an e-mail to the Wikimedia Help Desk asking why the articles he had been creating weren't available yet on Answers.com. I advised him that there is a timelag before mirrors pick up our content and that the delay was approximately three weeks based on the time it took incorrect information to be removed from the John Siegenthaler article on Answers.com and Reference.com after it had been removed from Wikipedia. Could anyone advise what the timelag is for information to start getting onto our mirrors in general? Thanks for your help. Capitalistroadster 04:52, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

They aren't "our" mirrors, we don't know when they update, ask the mirrors in question. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:10, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

lag?

Wikipedia loads normally for me, but I often get lag when I try to save a page. Anyone else experiencing this problem? --Ixfd64 20:50, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Can you describe this in more detail? Does it just take a few extra seconds to save, or do you mean something else? --Brion 00:57, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Sometimes, when I try to save, nothing happens for several minutes, until I get an error message. It's the typical "the page cannot be displayed" message. I don't know if it's still happening right now. --Ixfd64 01:57, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

How do I find out if an IP is from an open proxy?

Hi, how do I find out if an IP is coming from an open proxy? E.g. 211.48.24.230

-- nyenyec ☎ 15:51, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Our official proxy checker, I think, is http://www.au.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml. But googling the IP in quotes can work too. Broken S 21:14, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

[9]

I've been wondering about this page for a while. How long until you're taken off? Is it edit count-based, age of account-based, or percentage-based? Do we have a help file for it? etc.... basically, how does this work and what does it do, exactly? Thanks to anyone with any info. Blackcap (talk) 08:14, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

It shows the contributions of the newest 1% of users. —Cryptic (talk) 10:19, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Brilliant, thanks. Blackcap (talk) 20:27, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Access to APIs

The help desk has received a question from Harman regarding access to APIs.

He asked: Just like Google API’s, are Wikipedia web service API’s available to be integrated in other products? We would like use them in our product.

I advised of the Wikipedia:Copyrights but I could not find any reference to API's. If you can assist, I would greatly appreciate it. Capitalistroadster 07:43, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I didn't think we had any web service APIs... a better place to ask this might be wikitech-l. Shimgray | talk | 11:49, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

We don't have any at this time. --Brion 20:56, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

How to transfer watchlists

Hi. I just changed my username from Hottentot to Khoikhoi. Is there any way to transfer my watchlist from my old account to my new one? Thanks. --Khoikhoi 02:44, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Never mind. I just did the whole thing manually. --Khoikhoi 05:08, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Anon page creation restriction

Jimmy's had me disable creation of new pages by anonymous users on en.wikipedia as an experiment. Any logged-in user can still create articles, and any anon can still create talk pages. Anons can still edit existing pages, but to create a new article page will require first logging in.

This is one in a series of experiments on cutting vandalism without cutting too much into the ability of people to get things done; with a hojillion articles already, creating new ones is less of a priority than it was two or three years ago, while tuning up existing articles is quite important.

The message shown can be edited at MediaWiki:Nocreatetext and MediaWiki:Nocreatetitle. -- Brion 19:07, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Interesting. It should probably say "by users who are not logged in" on that page, though - if someone wants to create a page, they can log in and do it.

I don't entirely see the motivation. Someone else said -- and I agree -- that new pages really aren't as much of a problem as vandalism to existing pages. People just get more upset at new pages because they have such a high profile on AfD. If page creation could be "reverted" without five days of discussion, like vandalism can be, this kind of option wouldn't be necessary. rspeer 19:49, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

One minor detail: creation of talk pages for referenced-but-as-yet-uncreated articles (e.g. Homer Simpson, This is Your Wife) produces confusing results (see Talk:Homer Simpson, This is Your Wife). You are able to create the new talk page, and in the default skin the discussion tab (for the article) reflects its existence, but clicking on that tab produces the 'We don't have an article called "Homer Simpson, This is Your Wife"' message. You are still given the Start this article option, but when you start it, you discover that the talk page had been created after all. 66.167.253.134 20:48, 5 December 2005 (UTC).

As a matter of interest, is there a reason you don't create an account? I'm trying to badger you into doing so, I'm just curious as to what your reasoning is.Leithp (talk) 21:07, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

I've answered this on your talk page in case people feel this is off-topic. 66.167.253.134 22:48, 5 December 2005 (UTC).

How about allowing unregistered editors to create an account right from that page? I also think it might be a good idea to allow unregistered editors to create an account right from the standard edit page, so they can create an account and submit any edits in one click. I think it will encourage more unregistered editors to get accounts. Sortan 23:36, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

That would fail to prevent and deter vandalism, while hiding vandals' identities behind CheckUser. — Phil Welch Katefan's ridiculous poll 20:09, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

An EXXXXCELENT idea Sortan! Now let's hear why it is not..(unworkable...must not change sacred Wikiware etc). Oh and Leithp, bro, you meant NOT badger of course, right :) Badger Badger Badger! --R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 23:10, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Some enterprising fellow started WP:AFC. Also, the wording isn't great. Anonymous users? Lots of people who are well known in the community value their anonymity. *Unregistered* users cannot create articles. Big difference. Nach0king 23:15, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

You are correct, of course. Editing by ip is in fact probably less anonymous, and I've changed my wording accordingly.

The idea is to "hook" people by getting them invested in their edits... little bit like those websites that allow you to take a quiz, but you have to register to see the results. Once people have taken the time to edit/create a page, they will usually want to see the fruits of their labor, even if it means registering an account. Sortan 23:36, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Anonymous users can't create their own user page. Can this be fixed? -- SCZenz 02:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Erm... IP users rarely, if ever, create userpages.--Sean|Bla ck 02:13, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

There's one requested on the page creation page, albeit likely as a joke, so I thought it was worth asking about. -- SCZenz 02:18, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

The anon is quite angry about it [10], though... Tito xd^{(?!? - did you read this?)} 02:21, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

LOL... Did someone create his page? He's right that he should get it if he wants it. -- SCZenz 02:25, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I see Splash disagrees with me; I'll ask him about it. -- SCZenz 02:31, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Who's angry? Splash, you impute emotions to me that I'm not actually exhibiting (that thing about irritating you over on User_talk:Titoxd is another). Turn down the troll-voice in your head when reading people's comments to you. You've got it turned up to 11. As I said, I saw all of this coming. No need for me to get worked up over the inevitable. 216.237.179.238 03:06, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

What a horrible idea without some major discussion. To just implement this as a fait accompli is just simply wrong. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:58, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree. And yet, it seems to be working. Ben Aveling 07:01, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I think so too. This is just a mild form of disabling anonymous edits all together, with milder forms of the negative consequences that would have. Most users start out anonymous, and the less appealing we make their experience, the less likeley it is that they will add information to wikipedia, or even become registered users. Wikipedia has grown quickly so far because of its open policy, so let us keep it that way. Pages are corrected at a rate corresponding to their visibility, so any page many people actually see should be able to maintain a certain quality. A couple of problematic but highly invisible pages should not be enough for a major change like this. Amaurea 11:11, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I think it is a good idea. Deleting crap pages is much more difficult then crap content in an otherwise worty artucle. It should be logical then that to creat crap pages you should go to a little more trouble then with crap content.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 15:52, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Some anonymous users may take exception to this new rule, and simply start using http://www.bugmenot.com to bypass it... 68.220.219.232 04:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Sigh. Shared accounts are blockable on sight, and if it comes to it, we can blacklist the entire site and block all the traffic coming from it. Tito xd^{(?!? - did you read this?)} 04:14, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I once used bugmenot on one particularly clueless wikimedia site. "If you don't respect me, I don't respect you". Why do we think that stopping anons from creating new pages is a good idea? Kim Bruning 04:35, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't know that we do. There has been no real discussion, so there is no way of knowing what the community thinks. It is, however, a done deal, at least for a few months. It is interesting to look at Special:Newpages and see the number of redlink user accounts there. Filiocht | The kettle's on 14:04, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

By my count, over 2500 new user accounts created today so far. Filiocht | The kettle's on 14:47, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

So were there over 2500 new articles created today so far? (SEWilco 15:42, 6 December 2005 (UTC))

987 just now, which is a bit strange. 1400 people creating accounts to edit existing pages? Maybe a Chinese whispers effect? Filiocht | The kettle's on 15:51, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

It seems that creating accounts is much more popular than asking on WP:AFC (while busy, the page isn't exactly swamped with requests). But the frequency of account creations was astounding even when anons could create pages - I count 2826 new accounts for December 4. -- grm_wnr Esc 17:45, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Not a few months, but only a day, I think - see Jimbo post, he writes "Today, as an experiment". I think it's a worthy experiment and the results which I am sure we will be discussing over the next week or so will lead to the estabilishment of this rule as a policy. Actually I'd recommend running this experiment for several days, a week perhaps, for more data - and for the people of the RC patrol to develop a 'feel' how this affects their work.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 15:56, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Se here, where the period mentioned is a few months. Filiocht | The kettle's on 09:02, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

IMO this serves no good. Before, pages created by anons could easily be spotted and reviewed; now, we can't tell if the page has been created by a long-time contributor or newly registered anon. --tyomitch 19:51, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes we can. Click the username and click on contribs. Also, if the username is a redlink, he might be a newly registered anon. — Phil Welch Katefan's ridiculous poll 20:12, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Doing all of that takes extra time. When patrolling new pages/RC, it is helpful to be able to scan for IPs, as they are easy to differentiate from logged in users. IMO most of the vandalism/CSD/AFD candidates come from IPs. I realize that this shows inherent bias against IPs and resembles a lack of assumption of good faith but many new page/RC patrollers use it. That said, using redlinked usernames will work as well; it's just extra to wade through. --WAvegetarian ^(talk) (email) ^(contribs) 22:55, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

(man that's a lot of :'s...) the true correlation is, "edits from users who have done very few edits are more likely to be grot". I'll admit that I myself started out (a long long time ago; longer ago than most here) playing around rather than contributing. If there were a mechanism in the recent changes page to show the number of contribs in an editor's history, that would probably be the best "profiling" key. 216.237.179.238 23:44, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Doubtless THIS was a decisive factor in Jimbo's mind also. Wierd situation we have here- a founder of a First Amendment protection center and retired newspaper editor, is looking for his pound of flesh and berating the Communications Decency Act, not for violating the 1st amen, which it has done, but for protecting his online defamer who was merely exercising his 1st amen rights, albeit in an obviously WRONG way. If we are going to use this as a test case, the Tabloids should shut down now. Personally I'm divided on this issue. IP's do a lot of good and we all pretty much started out and fell in Wiki-love thusly. At the sametime they are also responsible for the vast majority of vandalism and a significant proportion of crap edits/new artys. Most of the ones who really matter end up registering eventually anyways. I'm not part of the "Cult Of Jimbo", but I can see where he's coming from on this. And I don't blame him...I blame the mainstream, old guard media-ocracy and of course lawyers (cherche les avocats :). If they have their way, I can imagine a future where these pages will be chock full o Google ads, or worse pop-ups and spyware. Our project must be protected from this...so something has to give. "Experiment" or no, Jimbo made a reasonable decision this time.--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) 03:23, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

I can't get your point... THIS regards anons editing pages, not creating them, right? --tyomitch 16:24, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

No. That page was created by an anon, with its wrong content. It was not vandalism on an existing article, simply vandalism from scratch. -- user:zanimum

Is the any special reason why User space pages are also restricted? 132.205.44.134 01:38, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

What's a user space page? Whatever it is, it doesn't sound good. Why would anybody want to ban anonymous users? They shouldn't because:

1)Some anonymous users contribute greatly.

2)Wikipedia is supposed to be the free encyclopedia.

3)There are many good articles started by anonymous users that may have not be created at all without them.

4)Logged in users vandalize just as much as anonymous users.

5)It is not a good first experience and would not encourage people to log in and use Wikipedia regularly.

6)People should have the right to choose whether to get a username or not. Wikipedia shouldn't force people to get a username to make articles.

7)When you ban out the anonymous users, you ban the good ones as well.

8)It doesn't take much work just to erase vandalized info.

Therefore, this policy should end! Or you could:

1) Whenever an anonymous user wants to make an article, they have to go here (or some other place) to debate whether they want it or not.

2)If an anonymous user vandalizes more than five times, ban that person from making articles.

These are better, but I rather have no policies at all. So, if you can, please get rid of the policies. If not, please do either number 1 or number 2. --anon

Blocking

The block user function is not currently operational. David | Talk 10:37, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Should be working again. One of our folks made an ill-considered change in the middle of a code formatting edit and it got missed before going live. --Brion 10:47, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks - the block log is showing new entries now so I guess it's back up working. David | Talk 10:59, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Article creations, deletions and undeletions

I made a chart of article creations, deletions and undeletions per hour, enjoy. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:40, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Just FYI: From closer inspection it appears the horizontal scale of the above is from the 9th of November to the 9th of December. The two spikes are around "420" (creations per hour?) on the 30th of November. Stevage 02:08, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Unused accounts

Comparison of Special:Listusers and the Wikipedia Statistics show that we have 136000 accounts that have been used to make at least one edit but 630000 registered accounts. This implies there are ~500,000 accounts that have been created but never used to edit anything.

Assuming there was some easy way to write a query to the effect of "Delete all accounts with 0 contributions registered more than 60 days ago", would that be a bad thing to ask the devs to do?

It seems silly to have Special:Listusers full of unused accounts like User:! ! ! ! !. I'll admit "silly" is not a great reason for doing anything, but 500,000 is a lot of name real estate that someone might want to use someday.

Dragons flight 01:36, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

there are legitimate reasons to have an account, but no edits. Broken S 01:46, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Such as? Dragons flight 01:49, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Doppelganger account comes to mind. --Allen3 ^talk 01:52, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Such as being able to customize preferences (date style, skin), to modify one's monobook.css, to not get alerted to messages left for others sharing one's IP address, to e-mail users, to watch articles you like for updates, and so on. — Knowledge Seeker দ 01:59, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

That's a good point. Of course, it would better if they decided to edit, but it's nice to think that we have such dedicated readers.--Sean|Bla ck 02:04, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Just a small pedantic point: it's not technically (in more ways than one) possible to modify a page without, well, editing it. [[Sam Korn]] 17:08, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

OK, so it should technically be possible (via a database query or whatever means) to identify user accounts with:

no edits
no watchlist
no talk page (i.e. never been edited, rather than possibly deleted)

Would these conditions be sufficient to justify deleting such an account which was created some considerable time ago? —Phil | Talk 12:31, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

I would suggest leaving a message on the talk page saying that unless they make at least one edit within the next (30? 60?) days that the account will be deleted. Perhaps set up a {{reader account}} tempalte that basically says "the owner of this account primarily uses it for reading rather than editing" and encourage people who want to keep their account but don't want to edit the encylopaedia to add this template to their user page. I suspect that it would be best to combine this project with the rollout of the single user login system. Thryduulf 13:34, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Sigh, this frequently comes up and I have *no idea* why, unused accounts are a non-issue and there's no need to mess with them in any way. No really!, find some real problems to worry about;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 13:33, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, here's one possible reason. Suppose someone wants to create a new account with a relatively short (i.e less than 8 characters) user name. It's more likely that such a name has already been taken (as I frequently find with my own preferred name at high-profile sites). If it hasn't been used since its creation and the creation date was more than 9 months (or some other acceptable gestation period) in the past, why not close that account and make it available to a new user? Slambo (Speak) 20:08, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Existence of the account makes it impossible for a user to register the name they'd like, which is frustrating, since noone seems to use the name - and apparently some people would like to be able to actually use Listusers to find active people.. (perhaps there should be a Special:ListusersRecentlyactive). The result? Suggestions for a method of deleting such accounts get posted -- I think the reason for implementing expiration of accounts with 0 edits has little to do with load on Wikipedia, I think. :-) --Mysidia (talk) 09:37, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

It absolutely is NOT a "non-issue" to people who want to use account names that have been wasted in this manner. I wanted "Waterboy", but that was registered long ago, but has never been used. I definately feel there should be some (automatic) mechanism to free-up unused usernames--EG something like if it hasn't been used to make an edit, and no one even signs into the account for six months, it should automatically be flushed and returned to the pool of available names. Waterguy 03:10, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Currently there is a mad rush for new accounts too, for some strange reason. <innocent look>, some of those will remain unused as well I figure. Kim Bruning 05:18, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

blue background

I would like to know, why your articles are written on a lihgt blue background. If I want to copy them, what goes freely, I have to print them with this background, too. May be, I am not fluent with computering, but I have tried to eraze that background with not any success. My email adress is jasibart@poczta.onet.pl Please let me know about the reason and if it can be changed in a way. Bartek

Your easiest bet is simply to use your Internet browser to copy and paste the information into a notepad document, and print it. You'll also notice each article has a link (usually at the top, depending on your skin) that says Printable version which will do exactly what you want. You can get to manually by simply adding "&printable=yes" to the end of the article's url and hitting Enter or Go. Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 15:53, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

What browser/operating system do you use? The printing style-sheet should be applied automatically. [[Sam Korn]] 22:20, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

New edit conflict problem?

See the history of Dimebag Darrell. Basically there was a minor act of vandlism, which myself and Novacatz both tried to revert at the same time. My revert went in first, but then Novacatz's revert ended up duplicating the article, with his edit summary as a subheading between the two copies of the text. We both then tried to fix the problem, and conflicted again, this time with Novacatz's edit winning, and mine causing the same duplication again! Has anyone seen this before? sjorford (talk) 13:40, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

I have not seen this before today. We have had similar problems in the past hour over at WP:CVU. Fire Fox 13:41, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps this have to do with the fix made three sections up? _→AzaToth 14:12, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

We're having this problems on Wikipedia NL too. It seems to appear when normally an edit conflict would appear, and also sometimes when subsections are edited. Does someone know what's causing it, and if when it's going to be fixed? --Tuvic 15:04, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

For reference, this is not an isolated incident. Has happened a few times tonight to me now. Going to sleep and hopefully problem will go away ..... novacatz 15:14, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

This is fixed now, thanks to Gpvos -- Tim Starling 15:22, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. --Tuvic 15:43, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Good work all round :) sjorford (talk) 22:16, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Yeah sorry, that was my fault. I committed a bug fix at 4am and it had a typo in it. --Brion 07:09, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Cannot revert, is this a bug?

I've tried clearing my cache, using Firefox and IE, nothing helps. If I go back into a page's history (And I've tried half a dozen pages), I can view the old version of the page...but then when I click "Edit" to revert to that older version, the edit box comes up with all the new vandalized text in it. (Or blank, when articles have been blanked by a vandal). Help? Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 15:31, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Please provide links to the particular pages and revisions you've tried, and if you're not using the standard preferences let us know what options you're using (eg a different skin, custom JS, etc). --Brion 20:53, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I've been unable to revert Charles Whitman, Kent State shootings, Talk:Charles Whitman (was blanked) and User talk:68.187.194.251 (was blanked to hide repeated warnings). The only thing I'm using non-standard is my signature which I just updated yesterday. Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 21:01, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I just reverted User talk:68.187.194.251 with no problem. On the other pages I see no current need for reverts, but I am able to edit old versions with no obvious problem. DES ^(talk) 21:11, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Technically he's gone back and blanked it since you fixed it...but that's unrelated to the fact it's still very annoying for me that I can't do anything when I see this stuff happen. Anybody able to help? Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 21:55, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I definitely see different text at, for instance, [11] and [12]. I definitely do not encounter the problem described above. Are you clicking something other than the regular "edit this page" link? --Brion 00:59, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I'm going to Charles Whitman, clicking page history (500), and going back to the very first edit (which is only 3 paragraphs), and clicking edit this page, but unfortunately it brings me to http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Charles_Whitman&action=edit which is the current revision's edit page. *frowns* Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 01:33, 10 December 2005 (UTC) (Yeah, I've been more than a year, and done hundreds of reverts perfectly before, I just noticed this bug up yesterday)

Try going to history, click the version you want to revert to, click edit, put in an edit summary and save --A dam1213 Talk + 12:35, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

It just saves the current revision. As I said, the problem seems to be that any "Old Version" I'm on, when I click "Edit this page" to revert it, it takes me to action=edit, not action=edit&oldid=######## Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 15:50, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Even when I just hover the mouse over the link, and check the status bar, it tells me the link leads to action=edit Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 15:51, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, this is also exactly my experience. Using oldid=XXXXX&action=edit will edit the old version. However, the "edit" link on an old version does not link to the oldid=XXXXX part, only the action=edit part. A problem in the skin PHP file? [[Sam Korn]] 16:16, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm not alone, a soulmate! We'll be bestest friends forever! Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 16:33, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

what skins are you guys using? Plugwash 16:52, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Monobook. [[Sam Korn]] 16:54, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Nostalgia Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 17:08, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

It looks fine to me in every skin except Nostalgia. I'll fix Nostalgia in a moment. If you're still seeing this problem on any skin other than Nostalgia, I need you to:

Go to http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Charles_Whitman&oldid=427674 for an old version view
Click the "edit this page" link in the tab bar at the top, which should have the URL http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Charles_Whitman&action=edit&oldid=427674
Everything looks fine for me so far: "WARNING: You are editing an out-of-date revision of this page. If you save it, any changes made since this revision will be removed" bla bla

If you're *not* seeing that happy stuff, I need you to:

Log out and check again.
Try a different user account if you've got one, check again.
Try a different skin, check again.
Save the exact HTML that appears in your browser here and attach it to a bug report at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/

--Brion 09:47, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Nostalgia now fixed. (Incidentally, I did ask if you were using a non-default skin above. :) --Brion 10:03, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Working now. Thanks, Brion. [[Sam Korn]] 12:32, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Looks great, much thanks! Sherurcij ^{(talk) (bounties)} 13:26, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Some folks spotted another one of these that was specific to editing CSS/JS pages, on any skin. That's fixed now too. --Brion 02:38, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Watchlist problem?

When a page is moved, what is supposed to happen to the watchlists which have that page on it? In some cases, talk pages are sometimes not added to my watchlist when a page is moved. For example, asperger syndrome was moved from aspergers syndrome on October 12, and changes in the article continued to show in my watchlist. However, changes in the talk page did not, and today I discovered that the talk page had been unwatched all that time. A similar thing had happened with the article War of the Worlds (TV series).

However, when Andreas Grassl had been moved from Piano Man (person), and the talk page continued to be marked as "watched", but no changes had happened since the move.

Has anyone else noticed this, and can it be fixed? It's just odd that it happens for some pages and not others. Graham/pianoman87 talk 12:45, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm guessing that one of the talk pages was moved to the new location while the other one wasn't. When you move, there's a check box that allows you to move the corresponding talk page; that could be the reason. Flcelloguy (A note?) 23:17, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

This was an old bug, and should no longer happen since some weeks ago. --Brion 23:24, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I couldn't reproduce it in a test I did a couple of days ago. Those pages I mentioned were all moved a while ago, so they would have had that problem. Graham/pianoman87 talk 12:09, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

New user

Since almost 3 new users are created every minutes and it is impossible to figure who is a vandal and who is not plus it is getting impossible to keep track of as many ppl as 600k user. Could there be a cleanup in the list Special:Listusers, meaning some removal of unused names and blocking indefinitely of others. Thank you

There should also be a zero tolerance policy, you vandalize once and your out of here (blocked) to fight the insurgents that come to our door on a day-to-day basis. Lincher 12:44, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

You're a loose canon McLincher, you're off the case. Hand in your badge and gun. 65.27.76.238 00:14, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Geesh Lincher, your page has only ten or fifteen minutes worth! --hydnjo talk 00:22, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Seriously, though, it is impossible to remove user names from the list of users for GFDL reasons. Also, we don't have a zero-tolerance policy - such a policy would do much more harm than good; we have four {{test}} templates for a reason. However, I'm not saying that some people don't deserve immediate blocking - it's all administrator discretion. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 23:16, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Category not working properly

I have created several navigational templates - Template:MOS CPU, Template:MOS Video/Sound, and Template:MOS Interface - that all include Category:MOS Integrated Circuits. This is done using the <includeonly> tag so that the category won't actually contain the templates, just the underlying articles. For some reason, though, only the Template:MOS CPU articles are actually showing up in Category:MOS Integrated Circuits. I can't figure out why; the same category code was copied and pasted. Can anyone help? Crotalus horridus 20:52, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

It's because you added the template to the articles and then later added the category to the template. Categories are only updated when you edit the article in the category, not when you change one of the templates. Basically you have to go to every article which should be in the category and do a null edit -- just click save, don't change anything. -- Tim Starling 22:29, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

That seems to work. Thanks! Crotalus horridus 00:37, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Multiple saves

when you post using "action=edit&section=new", and there is a lag, you sometimes accidentally press "Save page" twice, two secions are created. There should be a protection against that _→AzaToth 00:47, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

What do you have to push to get a "new section" like that? Stevage 02:10, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

its the + icon that appears in the talk namespaces only. Plugwash

This is bugzilla:1600; I think I've got it mostly fixed now. A dupe submission should now trigger an edit conflict, which will either resolve itself silently or toss up a conflict screen. It's still possible perhaps for something else to come in between the first and second submissions which would break the detection, but that should be pretty rare I hope. --Brion 12:17, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

On a related note, I often just hit save instead of preview, and immediately correct any mistakes if there are any. I'm sure I'm not alone here. A good feature would be just to merge all edits made on a single article by a single person in less than five minutes into a single edit, assuming there is only one edit summary and no one else has made any changes in that period. Alex Krupp 18:39, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Modifying Corporate Logos?

I am working on the article for GAMEY, and a friend of mine (and fellow Wikipedian) suggested that he and I take the first letter of each company, and paste it together to spell GAMEY (such has G from Google, A from AOL {or maybe the AOL Triangle}, etc. etc.) I told him this might violate the fair use policy, since we are modifiying the logos, and putting them together with their (sort of) competitors. What is the the ruling on this? CaptainAmerica 00:35, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Redlinks

Okay, where did my redlinks go? Bring them back! android 79 22:34, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Nevermind. android 79 23:27, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

lc, uc modifiers etc...

Was looking in the code and found this, works here:

{{lc:{{CURRENTDAYNAME}}}}	saturday
{{uc:{{CURRENTDAYNAME}}}}	SATURDAY
{{uc:{{main\|Article}}}}	MAIN ARTICLE: ARTICLE
{{lc:{{main\|Article}}}}	main article: article

lcfirst and ucfirst is also defined, as are grammar and plural.

_→AzaToth 22:23, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Templates in edit summaries

Is it possible to use simple templates (eg {{test}}) in edit summaries? I realise that it can't be done for tables, but small ones it ought to be available?--TheDoctor10 (talk|email) 17:31, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Help with Unicode

I am having a lot of trouble with Unicode in a project on Wikipedia. I encounter a lot this kind of text: " MÃ¶bius strip" which should be instead "Möbius strip". Anybody knows at all how to convert the former to the latter? That would be really appreciated. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:45, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Is this text in existing articles? If so, can you please provide examples? The incorrect form looks like UTF-8 data displayed (incorrectly) as ISO-8859-1 characters. The "conversion" is to display them as UTF-8 characters. If the characters are now labeled as UTF-8 characters an actual conversion is necessary. I've looked a bit and haven't found a program that will do this. I strongly suspect there is one, since this must be a fairly common problem (logically, it boils down to reading the bytes as 8859 characters and then "casting" them to utf-8). -- Rick Block (talk) 15:29, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

First check you haven’t forced your browser’s character encoding; it should be UTF-8. Susvolans ⇔ 14:40, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. The issue was not with the browser. The issue was indeed with the encoding. If you have ISO-8859-1 data, you can encode it to unicode with the Perl "encode" function. However, if your data is already unicode and apply to that the "encode to unicode" function, you get garbage, like above. So I was doing overencoding.

You may think that applying the "encode to unicode" function to unicode data will not change the data, it turns out it does. The moral: always know what encoding your data is in. Thanks guys. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:19, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Problem - unable to edit

A fellow Wikipedian is having a major editing problem. As he reports on my user talk page:

Since at least yesterday, I have been completely unable to edit pages on either Wikipedia or Wiktionary from the computer I've been using for the past two months. I can create new entries in Wiktionary, but cannot edit pages or sections on either site...even my User page! I have successfully logged in each time, so all I can figure is that the IP I'm using (128.32.154.69) must be blocked for some reason, though I can't think why. Each time I pull up an edit page and try to save the changes, the clock runs out and the "connection is closed by foreign host". Since I can't edit pages, I can't post to any page about the problem, though I have sent an e-mail to the help desk. I am using a friend's computer to try to get this message through. Without the ability to edit, I can't contribute. --EncycloPetey 08:23, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

The IP isn't blocked... so can anyone work out what's going on and help encyclopetey out? Grutness...wha? 09:33, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks to Grutness for posting my concern. I'm currently posting from a different location. It seems to be working from here, but I'm geeting an odd error message when I post:

ERROR

The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?

The following error was encountered:

Read Error

The system returned:

(54) Connection reset by peer

An error condition occurred while reading data from the network. Please retry your request.

10.34.6.6

Generated 14/Dec/2005:01:08:21 +0000 by 10.34.6.6 (iPrism)

I do know that the computer I'm sending from is running a different OS (Win 2000 instead of Win 98), but the really odd thing is that from my usual location (on the UC Berkeley campus), I have the same problem whether I'm using the browser Opera on a Win 98 PC (2 different machines) or using the Netscape browser on a Mac OSX. Either way, the connection times out waiting for the Wikimedia servers to respond. I've also noticed that someone has posted regarding a very similar problem on the Help pages. He is unable to edit pages longer than a few lines, even sections, and his problem began almost exactly at the same time mine. It sounds as though whatever the problem is, it's the result of some specific change at Wikimedia rather than at our ends. --EncycloPetey 01:19, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

It sounds like a networking issue, but I think it's likely to be your end (trust me: the vandals the last few days have had no problems at all connecting to wikipedia). You need to figure out what you have in common with your friend, and what the rest of us don't have. Some ideas:

It's a whole UCB thing. Try another campus computer. Also I think User:Jiang is (or was) at UCB. Perhaps some part of the network is behind a bad firewall; perhaps a common network segment is saturated by others downloading pr0n.
It's some piece of software you both run (some p2p thing, or chat client, campus-vpn thing, or, local firewall program (like zonealarm)
Can you access other websites that require posting - can you post to slashdot or flickr okay?

-- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:40, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

The problem seems to have gone away (at least for the time being). I don't know what caused it, but it can't be specific to the computer I was using, since I tried three different ones (2 PCS and a Mac) and tried three different OS's and 3 different browsers. If the problem was a UCB thing, then I have no idea what it could have been. The MIS for our little corner of the campus hadn't changed anything at the time the problem began, and I hadn't had any problems at all for the previous 2 months. If the problem returns, I'll try some of your suggestions, though. Thanks, --EncycloPetey 13:25, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Editing welcome template

Can the subst: anon template be edited to reflect the fact that anons can't create articles? I'd do it myself, but I'm unsure how. Thanks. Natgoo 12:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

It's there by implication - starting new pages is listed as a benefit of getting a login. The page is at Template:Anon if you think it needs rewording. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:55, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. The template I saw that prompted the question was different though - must have been user created. I'll leave a note on their talk page. Natgoo 15:10, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

AFD Help!

I am trying to put into the AFD list this page

http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/GEN%40

but for some reason the list isn't accepting my change... can someone have a look and let me know how I can fix this? novacatz 03:26, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

IMDb Interwikis broken

I just updated Wikipedia:IMDb. Currently the interwiki links produce broken links, e.g. IMDbName:Jack Nicolson and IMDbTitle:Beetle Juice. Please fix them. -- User:Docu

Looking at how they're defined, it would seem the interwiki links are meant to take the IMDB name or title number, not the text name. For example IMDbName:0000197 links to Jack Nicholson and IMDbTitle:0094721 links to Beetle Juice. I don't know if there's a way to link to IMDB pages using text strings. Did this used to work? -- Rick Block (talk) 17:45, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

No, there aren't any direct name-based links on the IMDb site (only search result pages). —Slicing (talk) 00:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Rick, thank you for your response. Indeed that's the way it's to work (I must have been a bit tired). BTW there used to be IMDB:Beetle Juice linking as http://us.imdb.com/Title?$1 , but there used to be a problem with the way spaces (" ") were converted. -- User:Docu

"Featured articles star"

Why is that that on the Foreign language Wikipedias featured articles have a small star on the top right corner of the Article (don't confuse with talk page), (for example see http://is.wiki.x.io/wiki/K%C3%B6rfuknattleikur ), yet English featured articles don't have this star? On the other hand, links to FOREIGN feature articles on the English wikipedia (bottom left list of other languages) do have stars for corresponding articles, yet foreign articles don't have stars near featured English counterparts.

Is it due to different versions of the Wiki software, or is it made on purpose? (for example to encourage visits to lesser known languages)?Elvarg 21:22, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Because tht would be a self-reference. I don't like those featured article starts in the sidebar either, they're almost worthless because different projects have such drastically different standards on what qualifies as a feature article. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:35, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't think a star on an english featured article (as already present on nonenglish articles) is self reference, rather it symbolises the featured status, distinguishes the article as exceptionally good, and reminds editors the article they may want to change is considered good as is, so large changes should reflect consensus).

My question however is not whether we should have them or not, rather why SOME wikipedias HAVE them and others DON'T.Elvarg 21:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

It's put there using a special template - [13] - which uses CSS positioning to put the star there. Personally I think it's a really good idea, in fact I was recently wondering if such a thing was possible and hadn't seen this template before. After all we put up big notices when we know there is something wrong with an article (e.g. it needs cleanup or there is an NPOV dispute), so why not highlight featured articles? Although I get the impression that Raul654, who is unofficially in charge of featured articles on en is strongly against including such stars. the wub "?!" 21:46, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

The stars missing from interwiki links on non-en wikis is probably just because the users there don't know or don't read English well enough to find out. I've added the stars on the en links on de for a couple rail transport articles that I know are featured here. Slambo (Speak) 21:53, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Personally I'm more concerned about the top-right starts currently present on other wikipedias but not english ones. I think we should do a community discussion to decide once and for all whether we want to include this kind of style (refer to the Arvalsgrein article I gave link to earlier to see how it looks). Personally I support it, as it would be another step forward in an article appraisal and community validation process. Elvarg 22:08, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, a blank page but with a featured star in the corner; since the history doesn't show evidence of vandalism, I'm guessing that Snið means Template (following What links here to Matarprjónar [boy, am I glad that all the languages put the site usage and navigation links in the same place!] seems to confirm this). The German wiki does it differently with a green star at the bottom of the article, as can be seen on John Bull (Lokomotive) (a translation of an article that I wrote and took to featured status here on en). Interestingly, someone deleted Vorlage:Link FA; I haven't found another template on de that would do the star on the interwiki link, and I don't know enough German to decipher the whole story there. I think I prefer having the star at the top of the article rather than the bottom. Slambo (Speak) 14:21, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Can't post

I've been trying to add an entry to Wikipedia:Copyright violations, using the boilerplate text from Template:Copyvio. However, every time I hit the submit button, I get a connection error. I believe the error results from something in the syntax. I've been able to edit several pages in different namespaces normally (including this one). At the same time, I've been unable to add that text to several pages in different namespaces. What's going on here? (Also, could someone please take care of the copyvio posting for me? It's for Shell sort.) --Smack (talk) 18:18, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Monobook

Why is it that in certain foreign Wikipedias (French, Italian, and Spanish), the default theme has rounded tabs at the top (for Edit, Talk, and History pages)? No particular reason for asking, just curious. --Mark Yen 05:23, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Because people there made it so. --Brion 18:47, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

List is somewhat broken

A lot of the examples in Help:List does not work. For example:

#list item A1 ##list item B1 ##list item B2 :continuing list item A1 #list item A2	list item A1 list item B1 list item B2 continuing list item A1 list item A2

_→AzaToth 09:51, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

It works fine if you don't have the ": continuing..." line in there. Or if you have it as "#: continuing...". it's because there's no hash-character on that line that the trouble arises. Grutness...wha? 12:33, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
- My point in this case was that because it was specified so in the help, then I assume that once in a time it worked as specified _→AzaToth 21:06, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
  - No, that would never have worked. Possibly '#:' is what was intended, however. --Brion 21:53, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, as stated above, you need an extra #. See example:

#list item A1 ##list item B1 ##list item B2 #:continuing list item A1 #list item A2	list item A1 list item B1 list item B2 continuing list item A1 list item A2

Globalization

From the Wikimedia Help Desk:

When i try to view the article on 'globalization' on Firefox (ver 1.5), i get a bad layout in my browser where the containers 'Content' and 'Trade Series' overlap. Vik Nuckchady

WAvegetarian ^(talk) (email) ^(contribs) 01:40, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Using the same version of firefox, I don't see any actual overlaps, either in the Classic or Monobook skins. The article does feature rather an unfortunate number of floaty boxes which pile up horizontally in an ugly manner (something that also happens in IE and Opera). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:47, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

If it's the pileup that is the problem, it's easy to fix with {{clearright}}. Fixed. --cesarb 02:50, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Current events "link to day of month"

These do not work for me. I have date preferences set to yyyy-mm-dd. Looking at the HTML "view source" I see the link is to

<td><b><a href="#10_December_2005_.28Saturday.29" title="">11</a></b></td>

where the date is in dd_monthname_2005 format.

At the destination end, I see

<p><a name="2005-12-10_.28Saturday.29"></a></p>

where the date is in yyyy-mm-dd format.

Thus the link doesn't work. -- SGBailey 00:02, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Linking to headers with wikified dates is simply not a good idea. I've made an experimental fix, adding an explicit anchor defined with an id attribute attached to blank lines before each header. I'll bring this up at Talk:Current events. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:04, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Exteded syntax

Because if the reecent war against/for the usage of logical templates, I made a simpple extended syntax that could be used, the code is located at m:User:AzaToth/Logic, and if incoorperated into wikipedia it could make a lot of people happy _→AzaToth 23:45, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Fundraiser's progress bar is wrong

The Fundraiser's objective is something around 500'000$ - the green line suggests 100'000$. The reasoning: there are 10 little grey vertical lines, 20'000$ has been raised until now which is 2 grey lines, that means that 10*10'000=100'000$ is the goal. This is wrong. Please, correct it. I will try to contact User:Brion for this, but anyone with the correct permission, please do something. Thx, Msoos 22:26, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Seems like its not a bug (according to Brion), but is like that on purpose. I do not see the idea behind it, but if others agreed, than let it be! Msoos 22:32, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

There actually isn't a formal target amount for this fundraiser, which makes it a little confusing. In further tweaks to the bar, the scale has been upped to show a $500k scale by default though. The small ticks are at $25k intervals, with larger milestone ticks every $100k. --Brion 23:35, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Category:Long words

Is there any way to force Category:Long words to display in one column instead of three? Melchoir 01:42, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Nope, but it sounds like a great software suggestion. Deco 04:28, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

You might try a workaround using the category indexing function. Try forcing the longest words to the bottom with something like [[Category:Long words|z]]; the entries should alphabetize after being forced to the bottom, i.e. all in column three, which might change the column widths. I've not tried this myself, so this is a hypothesis rather than speaking from experience, and it's far away from a perfect solution. Courtland 01:16, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that would work. Large letter sections get split over multiple columns, see Category:User warning templates's "T" section, for example. And anyway, having everything in Category:Long words categorised under "Z" would just be confusing. -- AJR | Talk 12:13, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I was suggesting that only the longest be categorized under "Z" so that there would effectively be two alphabetical schemes, one for shorter words and one for longer -- sacrificing clarity for format. Courtland 03:11, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Need a dev to clear a revision on a long page

This diff contains a great deal of personal information which probably doesn't belong here - I asked on #wikipedia and they tell me the page is too long for an admin to delete the revision without freezing the database, but a dev can just wipe that one revision. Any help would be appreciated... (ESkog)^(Talk) 21:38, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

That's either been done, or something's screwed up which makes the revision unviewable. Either way, I guess it's the desired result. Rob Church ^Talk 03:54, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Template:Click

I've shamelessly stolen from the Dutch and Vietnamese Wikipedias to create a new template, allowing an image to link somewhere other than its image description page. More info is on the talk page.

The main place this can be used is on the Main Page sister projects template, and there is a test version at Template:WikipediaSister/temp if anyone wants to check it before it goes up. the wub "?!" 12:02, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Why is the template protected? It's not used anywhere yet, perhaps you should not protect it until after it's used on the main page. _→AzaToth 17:02, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I protected it since I was going to be bold and put it on the Main Page straight away, but decided to do a test run first just to make sure. It's unprotected for now. the wub "?!" 23:11, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

This is a great idea. The featured article pic in particular should link directly to the featured article. God knows how many users make that mistake everyday. Deco 04:30, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

See also BugZilla #539 - Allow images that link somewhere other than the image page for the feature request which would make this template hack redundant. Rob Church ^Talk 03:47, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Complaints of spam

Ernie has e-mailed the Wikimedia Help Mail list complaining of spam coming from Wikipedia IP addresses.

"I keep getting spam from what looks to be aol addresses, but the IP addresses are coming from you. I want this stopped, NOW. They range from 63.80.24.00 and up as well as63.80.31.00 and up. I would be glad to forward some to you. I recieve about 6 per day. AOL seems to not care, although they are probably phoney AOL accounts, I would like to forward these to you as I get them so you can shut these bastards DOWN.

I haven't heard anything about this. Is anyone else aware of such incidents?Capitalistroadster 09:51, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

I suspect that Ernie may be confused. CIDR range 63.80.24.0/21 (IP addresses 63.80.24.0 - 63.80.31.255) are, according to ARIN's whois, part of a UUNet range which UUNet have assigned to a company called Lightspeed. These IP addresses do not have anything to do with AOL, nor do they appear to have anything to do with Wikipedia. Has Ernie shown any copies of the spam he says is coming from Wikipedia, or said which specific IP addresses assoicated with Wikipedia are the problem? -- AJR | Talk 02:27, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

If they just have "wikipedia.org" in the *From: address* there's nothing we can do about it, as it has nothing to do with us. The way e-mail works, the contents of the 'From' address can be completely forged at will; they are not verified in any way at all. If he's actually got some reason to believe they're coming from our servers, please email me an example of the full headers to brion at wikimedia.org and I'll check it out. --Brion 18:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

You could try using SPF. It might help. --cesarb 02:54, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

SPF deals only with the envelope sender address, not the 'From:' line. --Brion 23:37, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

"Whatlinkshere" link on page you get after moving a page

I noticed that on the page you get after successfully moving a page, you get a link to check if anything links to the old name of the article, but this link instead points to the "Whatlinkshere" for the new name of the article. Shouldn't it point to the old name, instead? --Spring Rubber 01:09, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

The short answer is no. The point is to fix any double redirects (redirects to redirects) caused by the move, not every direct link to the old name. From "Whatlinkshere" for the new name, you can see which links are redirects (including the old name), and whether any redirects links to that name. Double redirects are a problem because the software only follows redirects "1-deep". If you click on a redirect, and it sends you to another redirect, you end up on the second redirect (not where it, in turn, redirects). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:33, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I understand now. I never realized there was a "tree" system to indicate redirects before. Thanks for the help. --Spring Rubber 02:52, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Incidentally, why don't redirects send you straight to the final article at the end of the redirect chain? This has been broken so long I can only imagine there must be some reasonable explanation. Deco 04:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

There isn't necessarily an end (redirects might loop), but arbitrarily cutting off the number of redirects that are traversed at a number a little larger than 1 seems reasonable to me. Do you know how to use bugzilla? -- Rick Block (talk) 05:01, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes yes, I'm just lazy. :-) Circular redirects really aren't a problem, as it's trivial to detect these. I searched now and couldn't find anything. There seems to be a running assumption that this is just the wrong thing to do, but I can't figure out why. Perhaps because it would necessitate database operations that are inefficient in the current relational schema. Perhaps I'll enter a bug and see how it gets resolved. Deco 05:14, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I think it comes down to, if the limit is 1, a whole class of problems just disappears. If you increase the limit, you need to check for loops, database strain, define a "reasonable" limit, and presumably people will be less encouraged to ever fix the double redirects. Stevage 03:20, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Short Articles

Hi folks, as part of my efforts to clean up wikipedia, I've been hunting around looking for short articles that are suitable to be WP:CSD. The way I have been looking for them now is to just repeatedly click random article until I bump into something unsuitable. This is a inefficient process since I hit a lot of good articles (and a lot of 'town' articles which I think should go... but that is another issue...). I was wondering - is there a good way to browse through the shorter articles or to browse through the articles? novacatz 04:04, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Neglected articles and Special:Shortpages might help.--Sean|Bla ck 04:24, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Problem with an old account?

My girlfriend created User:Southpaw some time ago but ended up never using it. Now, she wants to revive the account to upload some photos she took, but she couldn't remember the password and I had her click the "email me a new password" button. However, she never received the email, nor does she receive emails from the "email this user" link, so I suspect that she never initially supplied her email address (sigh). Is there any way for her to revive this account? Her email was <email removed> and is now <email removed>.

Thanks for any suggestions.

—Steven G. Johnson 00:00, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I've taken out the emails (they're still available in the page history) because making it public here makes it very public across the Internet, and we don't want her to get spammed. Since there are no contributions on that account, might I recommend creating a new one? That ended up happening to me too when I came here (see User:TitoXD), and I just made another one and made sure I didn't forget the password. Tito xd^{(?!? - did you read this?)} 00:57, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Donations may be elsewhere?

In the User: namespace, the fundraising message reads "Donations are tax-deductible in the U.S. and may be elsewhere." I guess it's funnier that way, but someone might consider changing "may be" to "maybe". Dmharvey 22:35, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Looks correct to me. Read as "Donations are tax-deductible in the U.S. and may be [deductible] elsewhere." android 79 22:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Ah yes. Someone should change my "en" to "en-0". Dmharvey 23:10, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

In any case, it changed to "Donations are tax-deductible in some countries (like the U.S.)" and quickly changed to "Donations are tax-deductible in some countries". Stevage 01:02, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Multicolumn lists

Value#Personal and cultural values has a long list of values which would be well-served by a multicolumn display. Is there a nice way to get the list to wrap, say by 3 or 4 columns?

Thank you, --Ancheta Wis 00:19, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

One way to do this is using a table - I arranged the entries in three columns. Please take a look to see how it was done. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:24, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Yep, use {{col-begin}},... {{col-break}}..{{col-break}}..{{col-end}}. Stevage 03:05, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

I brought in a couple of templates from Wiktionary a while ago that do this. Take a look at {{Top4}}, {{Mid4}} and {{Bottom}}; the page Template talk:Mid4 presents information on their origin and how to use them. Courtland 03:16, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Thank you all. --Ancheta Wis 10:39, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Stabilisation of articles for general release

It seems to me the strength of the wikipedia is the editors. Particularly the well established editors with many good edits.

The other strength of the wikipedia is the users (these are people who aren't logged in). These make the wikipedia useful, and attract new editors to the wiki. These users need to see well established article versions, that have had a chance to be viewed and corrected by editors, and repaired as appropriate.

The main problem we have is low-edit editors. These users tend to 'test edit'/vandalise the wikipedia and this appears immediately to the users; but many of them also do good edits.

We need a mechanism for stopping the edits from low-edit editors from immediately appearing to the users.

My suggestion is an ad-hoc review process in keeping with the current 'esprit d'wikipedia'

I think that the wikipedia should follow the following rules:

An 'immature editor' is defined as any editor that has made less than 200 edits. A mature editor has made 200 or more.

No raw edit from an immature editor will be displayed to a non logged-in wikipedia user within less than 1 day. (Exception: users at the same IP address will have the article displayed immediately to avoid confusion after edits).

Modification within a day by another immature user resets the counter, and the article will only time out after another day The article displayed will be the newest article that has not been edited for a whole day, or has been edited by a mature user, or has been edited by the same IP address as the viewer. This rule can theoretically mean that a new edit never becomes visible, but in practice this will rarely happen, and the next rule helps avoid it anyway.

Modification of the article by a mature user makes the article immediately visible. This can make immature users edits visible- clearly the mature users are supposed to check to make sure that any previous edits are appropriate... the wiki software could help by pointing out if there had been recent changes...

Any mature editor caught making inappropriate edits has their account locked out. They have to start from scratch, this means that at most 0.5% of editors edits are bogus, even if an editor is a rogue.

Ok, my view is that these rules are not absolutely perfect, there's probably no such thing as perfect rules, but they are enormously better than what we have at the moment.

Comments? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wolfkeeper (talk • contribs) 2005-12-16 22:32:16

An m:Article validation feature is being actively worked on and will apparently be available in trial form in the not too distant future. I suspect similar ideas (like yours) will not be acted on until after this trial. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:40, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I question the need for validation of articles. I claim that rejection of bad article revisions is far more important and normally does not require experts. The mechanisms proposed are a superset of what I propose, and the other features seem difficult to implement and at best of debateable value. A more general attempt at a solution is often not better since it is harder to use and harder to implement. WolfKeeper 05:02, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I think requiring even the edits of mature editors to be reviewed is a good idea. We may not be vandals, but we still make mistakes. Probably the simplest scheme imaginable is that no new version would become visible until at least k other editors had approved it, with a user preference to view either the newest or most recent approved version. Deco 06:20, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

The wikipedia has done pretty well so far, without such mechanisms. It would be premature to add such mechanisms, my contention is that there may be better ways to do similar things without heavyweight voting. I also disagree with the political aspects such voting can introduce, it can introduce horse trading on articles and such like. Also groups of users can conspire to push through edits arbitrarily anyway. But that isn't at all the point of my proposal anyway. It is only an antivandalism mechanism, not a validation mechanism.WolfKeeper 06:33, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

200 edits would be a very high bar. I don't think I would have made it to 200 knowing that none of my edits were going to be public for a day. 10 edits would be plenty. But yeah, there are other proposals that go into a bit more detail than this. Stevage 03:08, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

10 is much too small. Any vandal can do 10 edits typing with their nose. 50-200 should be workable. WolfKeeper 03:21, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Any determined vandal can. But it would block the majority of vandals, including the "does this really work?" and "Johnny is gay" types. Nothing can stop a truly determined vandal.

I think 10 is too small; IMO there are too many vandals that are more determined than that. But it's irrelevant really, such a number is extremely easy to change up or down if the scheme has been implemented. My point is not that 24 hours and 50 or 100 edits are critical to the scheme working; my point is that the general scheme is lightweight from the users point of view whilst giving good protection to the wikipedia against vandalism.WolfKeeper 11:48, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

CSS errors

Results from attempting to validate http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Main_Page with the W3C CSS validator

--Dfeuer 09:46, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Please see my comment here which suggests fixes to the two errors I was having at the time. There's yet another error now coming from a line-height with the invalid value auto, which I suspect should be inherit instead. I already made the change, failing to notice the (very clear) warning at the top, and reverted it; but if there are no objections, I would really like to reapply the change. —HorsePunchKid→龜 2005-12-17 03:42:11Z

Won't get any objections from me!

--Dfeuer 07:49, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Finding out the number of users watching an article

Is there currently a way to find out how many users are watching a given page? If not, is there a bugzilla issue for this?

Thanks, nyenyec ☎ 18:52, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

No and no. Note that being able to determine how many users are watching a page might be useful information for vandals. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:07, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes and yes, though not on this mediawiki. Fixed using the Enotif patch. See meta:Share watchlists for more information. ∴ here…♠ 19:09, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I believe it would also be useful information for fighting vandals. -- nyenyec ☎ 19:41, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

It could be both. If it existed, it would be interesting to show edits made by users to unwatched pages. Or, you could always group together low numbers of watchers to avoid giving the precise number to vandals Stevage 03:15, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

"But how many people are watching RecentChanges?" -- Beland 09:07, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Trouble with Template:Ref

I have burned way too many hours trying to figure this out -- it is definitely time to ask!

I am using mediawiki, but for some reason, couldn't get Template:Ref to work using {{NAMESPACE}} or any other generic tag, therefore, I cannot use the same template across different pages.

I first employed template:ref on this page. (at [5])

The Template:ref that I tried to appropriate: [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}#endnote_{{{1}}}]

Would not work in any way shape or form, so I had to resort to this:

[http://wiki.uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/European_Commission_Policies_and_Initiatives#endnote_{{{1}}}]

How can I fix this so my Template:Ref can work across different pages on the wiki and not have to make a new Template for each page?

Try: [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}}}#endnote_{{{1}}}]

The fullurl stuff is probably newer than your version of mediawiki. - Lee (talk) 05:38, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks... that did it!

My SVG got squished

Tennessee looks a lot like Arkansas when it gets squished.

I tried to make an SVG image (shown on the right) to replace the image in Template:Tenn voting example. The problem is that it's getting squished into a square when it appears on Wikipedia. Other SVGs have had slight rendering differences on Wikipedia, but never this drastic. Does anyone know how to fix this? rspeer 03:54, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Your file has a weird header which specifies width="100%" height="100%". This would make it fill the available space its given, but tells the programs dealing with it nothing clear about how it ought to be sized. It ends up defaulting to a square. If you could change it to specify some actual size, it ought to clear up. --Brion 08:59, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Characters with unusual diacritcs: how?

How do I enter characters with unusual diacritical marks, especially for transcribing Arabic? (This Wikipedia page gives codes for a variety of coding systems.) Which coding system is best to use? ISO or unicode? How does one enter Unicode? (Entering Unicode would also make it easier to enter non-Latin-based characters, such as from Arabic or Urdu.) Thanks! Kitabparast 00:51, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia uses UTF-8, which is a Unicode encoding. If your browser is up to it, you can just directly enter the characters in the edit box. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:08, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia causes browser lag?

I've noticed that large pages like Special:allmessages will lag my browser. However, other sites with large pages (for example, a message board with 100 replies per page) do not lag my browser. Perhaps there is too much HTML code on Wikipedia? Oh, and I'm using the Classic skin, if this helps. --Ixfd64 00:27, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Most wikipedia pages are cached. The ones that aren't (like Special:allmessages) are dynamically generated based on database queries, and these will typically take somewhat longer to generate. Responsiveness is related to a number of factors, raw amount of traffic being one of the most important. Your message board site almost certainly has nowhere near the traffic of wikipedia, so even though its pages may be dynamically generated they may be able to be generated faster than wikipedia's pages. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:16, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

User preference to reject edits without edit summaries

Edit summaries, in revision control circles, are a very important function that help make sure we can figure out exactly what is going on when someone edited a page. Unfortunantely, even the best of us sometimes forget to add edit summaries. I would propose a user preference that would allow users to force the system to reject their edits if they did not give an edit summary. I would like that. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 21:20, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

This can easily be achieved for your own purposes with a user script. See Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Force edit summary. jnothman ^talk 23:46, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Oooh, I've been looking for that for a while... Shimgray | talk | 23:49, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Bot advice

I've seen the requests for bots on the community portal and would like to help. I'm pretty handy with Perl, which I understand isn't the ideal language for bots, but it's what I know. Are there any guides or tips out there for would-be bot coders? Or perhaps examples of bots written in Perl that I could crib from? Thanks. | Klaw ¡digame! 05:45, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

My bot uses perl, and perl only. :) The hard part is to download and install Meta:WWW::Mediawiki::Client package and its dependencies (there are around 6 of them). I can help installing it if you plan running it on Linux. That package has good documentation about how to use it.

See what others have to say also. I need to go to bed now, but we can talk more about it tomorrow. PS Despite of what people say, Perl is the language for bots! :) The python framework works very well with Wikipedia, but for actual serious text processing Python is not good enough in my opinion. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 08:00, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Mine is in Perl too and uses the Anura MediaWiki library which I'm the co-author of, it has some rough edges but is mostly neat-o;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 06:32, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Blockipsuccesstext

...messes up if invoked on a username containing spaces (since in a single-bracket URL, a space is the delimiter between URL and description, part of the ULR will be turned into the desc). Any ideas on fixing that? R adiant _>|< 03:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

It would appear $1 is not expected to be used in an external link. Seems like providing the username in external link format (as, say, $2) this should be a reasonably trivial fix for somebody who knows what they're doing in the source. Have you looked in bugzilla? -- Rick Block (talk) 05:16, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

According to Brion, it's not trivial, and we should change the MediaWiki msg. R adiant _>|< 15:06, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Editboxes are slow?

Does anyone else have this problem... since a couple of weeks, the 'edit this page' function performs extremely slowly on my computer when dealing with lengthy pages - by that I specifically mean the edit box that appears. It feels like some complex function is called for each letter I type, the keyboard rate literally goes down to one letter per second! R adiant _>|< 21:53, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

That sounds like a memory problem. Do you use Firefox? A similar thing happens to me on a memory-low computer running Firefox, but it doesn't happen in IE or Opera. [[Sam Korn]] 21:59, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
- I've had that problem also; it does seem to be related to memory issues, but I hadn't thought of that. Thanks, Sam. JesseW, the juggling janitor 22:16, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
 - Yes, I am running Firefox, and frequently experience memory problems. So second question, does anybody know how to alleviate that? It seems that Windows is slurping up too much memory for some reason, given that my taskbar is mostly empty. R adiant _>|< 22:25, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I've also experienced this problem, but only on Firefox 1.5 for Linux. It could be that a MediaWiki change coincided with my upgrade to 1.5, but that's when I noticed the slowdown. Are you using 1.5, Radiant? android79 22:53, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
- No, 1.0.7 here. R adiant _>|< 00:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I've noticed it too, I'll try to hunt it down with CVS & gprof;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 06:30, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Edits by browser

I would like to do research that would be required for doing an offline Wikipedia (similar to a German "Wikipedia-CD"-like project, but for frequent editors) in English. What percentage of Wikipedia edits are made by users who use browsers other than IE, Netscape, Safari and Firefox releases? Firefox betas are ok to count. (I feel my set of criteria is an okay proxy for "at least somewhat-technically-inclined users" but the information is not accessible at Wikipedia:Statistics.) --Unforgettableid | talk to me 06:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Honestly. I use the betas, but in between releases and betas, I see no reason to rush off and get the nightly build. That's just a waste of time. Your criteria seems quite sketchy; I would at least include regular Firefox releases. Superm401 | Talk 04:30, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, that was a bit arbitrary, but the problem is that more and more people are using preinstalled Firefox at libraries, schools, etcetera. But that's OK, let me change the question then: what percent of our edits are made by non-IE, non-Safari users? :) --Unforgettableid | talk to me 21:20, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

User:Bitcyh

Note: I have warned User:Bitcyh, who claims on User talk:Bitcyh he/she is an animal at the Okinawa zoo, that he/she may be blocked soon. I am not an admin. --Unforgettableid | talk to me 06:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I have blocked User:Bitych with the template {{UsernameBlock}}, a template that is also accessible to you. Sycthos 02:42, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Scythos, I feel it would be misleading to admins etc. to put that template if I can't actually block them. --Unforgettableid | talk to me 21:21, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

IPA characters in the "insert" box

I want to give a big thank you to whoever added IPA characters to the "insert" box that appears under the edit window. How do I find out who did that, so I can thank them personally? Can anyone add things to the "insert" box (i.e. could I have done it myself)? --Angr (t·c) 14:40, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

That "insert" box is MediaWiki:Edittools, editable by any sysop. You can just look at its page history. --cesarb 15:18, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Aha. So being a sysop, I could have done it myself. Wish I had asked three months ago! --Angr (t·c) 15:45, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Page protection interface updates

I've installed the new user interface for page protection. It's a bit more complex, but it does make it possible to tell what things are set to, hoepfully without being too complicated.

Additionally a new level between unprotected and full-protection is available (per WP:SEMI) which restricts edits from unregistered users and users registered less than 4 days ago. (At the moment the time restrictions apply only to accounts registered since the upgrade was installed.) This mode is currently only on en.wiki.x.io; on our other wikis it's just the updated interface with the same levels available.

The protection log also now shows the exact permission settings being stored; it's a bit of an ugly field, but it'll allow distinguishing full from move-only restrictions, etc. --Brion 07:06, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm, has the "less than 4 days ago" part actually been implemented? JosephBostwick (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) was registered at 10:52 (UTC) today (after you wrote the above) and was able to edit George W. Bush immediately. -- Curps 11:19, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, Splash was able to create a test account and post to GWB immediately. I'm guessing it's just a bug, but please look at it, Brion. --Woohookitty^{(cat scratches)} 12:53, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

pending commits for anonymous users

With the recent discussion of restricting anonymous edits - it occured to me that one useful solution might be to have edits from unknown/untrusted users go in a pending commits queue that can only be applied after a reviewer has approved. This would still allow anonymous editors to add stuff on the 'spur of the moment' while protecting against the serious issue of casual vandalism.

LetterRip

Soliciting comments

I have recently rewritten meta:Writing a new special page. Soliciting comments and expansion, as it is not finished. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 03:41, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Honouring white space

I recently added a couple more examples to the word square article, where I wanted multiple spaces to be honoured and not collapsed into one. If you look at the article you can see that the way I did it is a horrible mess of   characters. Does anyone know a clean way to get Wikipedia/HTML to honour multiple spaces without adding unwanted vertical spacing and WITHOUT adding that nasty dotted box? Matt 03:00, 22 December 2005 (UTC).

Edit: Oh, without the box? Guess I should read the whole comment. Nope, sorry, no way that I know of, except perhaps through CSS or a font tag. --Golbez 03:06, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I gave it a try with <pre>. See if you like it. If you don't, you can easily revert to what it was. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:16, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

In my skin at least, that's identical to beginning the line with a space, which is what he was trying to avoid - it has the dotted box. --Golbez 03:21, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, yes I tried <pre> but unfortunately it doesn't work properly. On my browser at least, the text displays OK at first, but if it is scrolled off the screen and then scrolled back into view then a partial dotted box appears. The dotted box also always appears when you print the page. (There is also supposedly a "white-space:pre" style attribute which supposedly forces multiple spaces to be honoured, but that doesn't work either.) I can't believe that something so simple can be so difficult... ho-hum... Matt 12:11, 22 December 2005 (UTC).

Well, I found it very strange that white-space:pre would not work, since the way Firefox implements <pre> is exactly by using white-space:pre. Looking at the generated HTML, it looks like it's MediaWiki that's eating the whitespace (or perhaps the HTML Tidy step). The solution would be to use <pre> with some CSS to undo the skin's CSS (hard to do because it can vary between browsers), or as Ambush Commander said, use a table. --cesarb 15:13, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I'd say use tables. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 03:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Page Counters

Can't we get at least a page counter on each article page? Statistics would be nice (visitors per day/week/month), but a counter should be fairly trivial?

Or is there a workaround which would enable a third-party counter added? --Iantresman 08:54, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Technical FAQ#Can I add a page hit counter to a Wikipedia page?. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:08, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Heh, that certainly covers the question, but it doesn't seem to give the answer: No, it's not possible to add an external page counter image. Stevage 21:07, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

However, you can get a recent database dump and examine the column which shows number of visits. This is reset every now and then though, so for older articles it's not entirely accurate. Deco 22:46, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Actually it hasn't been updated for years. We stopped displaying it on pages when we stopped updating it. It's never been reset. -- Tim Starling 23:42, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

But presumably, a database dump indicating the number of visits, could be extracted and compared for two different time periods resulting in an average number of visitors per day? But I guess it would not be completely accurate because of the way pages are cached? --Iantresman 13:28, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Watchlists

Is there any way for me, looking at a particular article, to see how many editors have it on their watchlist? Thanks. Matt Yeager 01:48, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

No - this is a feature that has been requested forever. Raul654 01:53, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

What's it's BugZilla number? I feel like coding another special page. :) 86.133.53.111 13:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

List of all articles

Now that I have your attention ... is there a straightforward way to get a list of all the articles on a particular Wikipedia? I'd like to prepare a script that can compare, say, all the articles on en: and es: to see 1) what's missing from the former vs the latter and 2) where the greatest differences in article sizes (sans images) lie. I know there's a partial list of missing en: articles based on # of crosswiki links on es:, but that's not quite what I'm after. Thanks. | Klaw ¡digame! 01:29, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Special:Allpages. Radiant_>|< 15:05, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
- Well, would you look at that? Thanks. | Klaw ¡digame! 00:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Strange diff highlighting

See this diff [14]. What is odd is that what has actually happened is that one line of text has been moved up (call it A), two lines have been moved down (B and C), and one new line of text (D) added below A's new location. However, what is highlighted in Red is the old A, and the new B and C, while the new D is just in the normal green. I would have expected at the very least for D to be highlighted, and preferably for none of the other text to be highlighted in red. Is this a bug, or just some weird side effect of the colouring algorithm? Stevage 13:06, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

as far as I can see, it's fairly standard diff / minimal change behavior. Note that the square brackets aren't highlighted. This means that that secton of text is seen as a section which has been kept but modified. The rest is seen as standard deletion and addition so isn't highlighted. It sort of makes sense if you get away from your actual knowledge that the removed and added lines are actually the same thing. Mozzerati 21:11, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

IP Administrator?

We at the CVU have been pondering... Is it possible (and by saying possibly I mean techinically possible) to give an IP address admin privilages? The IP in question is 68.39.174.238, who does a lot of work in the CVU but won't create an account. It's a static IP - it doesn't change - but it'd be interesting to see if it would be possible for them to get admin privilages, and if the rules could be bent a bit. Fir e Fox 21:59, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Nope, can't be done, won't be done. --Brion 22:01, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

It is technically impossible. Rights are related to accounts and an IP address has no account to grant rights to. With apologies to the IP user, some form of account is mandatory. Jamesday 22:17, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Added to which, an IP isn't as secure as an account. I'm not sure whether it could be spoofed, but imagine if one day the user's ISP reassigns his IP, and some random stranger suddenly has admin rights. Goodie! :) Stevage 22:18, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether it could be spoofed. Definitely: by anyone with access to any of the routers in path from the IP to wikipedia. However the same people could just steal your session cookie or password. Mozzerati 21:06, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Session data problems?

I'm having a lot of problems not being able to make edits due to "session data being lost". Anyone else? Stevage 14:36, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

You are not alone. I've gotten quite a few of them today. It's almost like the cookie is expiring in under one minute. Slambo (Speak) 14:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Server overload issue. R adiant _>|< 16:21, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Incorrect. This bug has been reported (and reproduced) in environments where the load is not as great as that on the Wikimedia farm, and the chances of it being a load issue were reduced. It remains unsolved, however... 86.133.53.111 13:31, 22 December 2005 (UTC)