Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive V

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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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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Spam blacklist for TinyURL

In my recent edit of TinyURL, I had to cripple all of the relevant external links to TinyURL.com because the site has been put on the spam blacklist. Is there any way around this? Or, where do I need to go to bitch at... er... kindly communicate with... MediaWiki developers to get something changed? I understand the need for this kind of filtering, but the blacklist is functioning rather overzealously in this case. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 00:13, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Just put them within <nowiki> tags. All URL shortening services are blocked by the Spam blacklist, because they are often used to work around the blacklist, and there are no legitimate uses (you can always use the longer URL; the exception seems to be the TinyURL article itself, where you can use nowiki). See also the discussion a few days ago at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive#Spam blocking tinyurl.com. --cesarb 01:39, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Make my Wide Gray Box Go Away!

I have been working on Ancient Order of the Froth Blower (which I found on the verify list). In my browser, at least, the text appears in very wide, gray-backrounded text boxes, for no apparent reason. I can see in the history where the effect started, but I can't see why or how to fix it. Help?

If there is a space bar at the beggining of the line, it will appear in ASCII. Philc _T^E_C^I 23:59, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

• Fixed. The problem occurs because there were extra spaces (indents) at the beginnings of the paragraphs. If you really need to indent something without the gray box, you can put a colon at the beginning, like this (you can see the colon if you click the "edit" button for this section on the page.)

See, Mom! No gray box!

Articles here are usually written in block style, with blank lines separating paragraphs, rather than indents. I hope this helps.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask! Joyous! | Talk 00:01, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Excellent! Thanks! --Brianyoumans 02:22, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Minor edits in diff pages

I notice that there have been developments on the appearance of the diff pages. However, there is no way to know when looking at a diff whether the edit has been flagged as minor or not. Has anyone ever looked at this issue before? --Tēlex 21:56, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

That would be nice, yes. Maybe there should also be a way to see whether a diff is between two consecutive versions or two arbitrary versions. You should probably submit or search for this at bugzilla, though. Kusma (討論) 22:19, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Editprotected

I would just like to point out that admins very rarely check Category:Wikipedia protected edit requests, and requests can often go unnoticed for some time. There are two pages listed in that category now, but MediaWiki talk:Common.css has multiple requests on it, and MediaWiki talk:Edittools has one request. —Mets501 (talk) 21:54, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

This isn't a technical problem. I suggest you post this on WP:AN. It's likely to be more noticed and acted upon at AN, anyway. --Lord Deskana ^{Dark Lord of YOUR OPINIONS} 21:56, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I know it wasn't a problem, I just wasn't sure where to post it :-). Thanks for the link to WP:AN, I'll post it there later. —Mets501 (talk) 22:46, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Commons images

Has there been any progress on a technical solution that could obsolete Template:C-uploaded on Wikipedia, or is any forthcoming? Just a solution where an admin on Wikipedia could protect an image here without having to download from commons and upload locally, which can be frustratingly time-consuming.--Pharos 19:01, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Have you filed a bug report on it? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 23:06, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I would know how. I'm really not terribly well-informed about programming issues– perhaps someone more knowledgable than I could file a report there?--Pharos 00:17, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

There's an open task to move protection to its own table, which would end up having this additional effect (nonexisting pages could be protected). robchurch | talk 00:34, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but that would not differ substantially from the current situation, in that someone can still get around local protection by uploading something different to Commons. Perhaps there could be a way to "loock in" to the image as it was uploaded at one specific time?--Pharos 05:04, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

is this a bug?

Breath_(2_a.m.) - CrazyRussian talk/email 16:40, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I seem to have fixed it. --Lord Deskana ^{I VALUE YOUR OPINIONS} 16:43, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Looks like it was an extra blank line at the top. Redirects must be in the first line to work. --cesarb 17:13, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

merge

I'm trying to work on the article Twenty something. I'd like to merge it into Twentysomething (since without a space is the more correct spelling), though I'd prefer to keep the talk page and history from Twenty something, since it's the bigger article with the most discussion, and Twentysomething is only a disambig. Moving would salvage the talk and history, but that can't be done because Twentysomething already exists. Is there any way to solve this, or should I just merge and forget about the talk page? KyleGarvey 16:20, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

First move Twentysomething to Twentysomething (disambiguation); then ask for the redirect to be deleted, and move Twenty something over it. This is the easier way, requires little admin intervention (a G6 WP:CSD), and keeps all the history. --cesarb 17:18, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Stub template help

I recently started to help contribute at a fledgling Wiki and created a general stub template. I am having trouble making it establish the "expanding it" text become a universal link to the edit section of the corresponding page it might happen to appear on. The Help section regarding stubs applies to this Wiki and I am otherwise unfamiliar with what to replace exactly for the one I am currently contributing toward. If any can help directly, feel free. If not, an explanation on what may need to be done would suffice. 75.2.14.252 09:45, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

The code is: ''This article is a stub. You can help the ATHFWiki by [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{PAGENAME}}|action=edit}} expanding it].'' Cheers! --james_{(lets talk)} 09:51, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Many thanks Bornhj! 75.2.14.252 09:57, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Font problems on Wiktionary

I need some advice from a font expert: I tried introducing at Wiktionary the kind of thing done here in {{IPA}}, {{Unicode}}, and {{Latinx}}, including classes in Common.css with the “font-family /**/:inherit;” IE hack, and introducing the Latinx template some places where they had previously used the Unicode template. (Thank you R. Koot for creating {{Latinx}} here.) The classes included also classes for Arabic and various Arabic-like scripts and also Russian/Cyrillic, which don’t exist here. The changes, however, produced complaints from a couple of Firefox users.

• When I first started replacing the Unicode template with Latinx (in Old English words where my IE6 needs Latinx), a user complained that with the change, bold ǣ doesn't display properly on his browser. (Initially neither Unicode not Latinx had the IE hack; so the font lists applied to his Firefox.) I need Latinx for these words: with Unicode ǣ appears as a box on my browser. Is there a better solution than to tell the other user to specify a font-family for the Latinx class in his monobook.css?
• When I got an admin to create a Unicode class, and I took the style declaration out of the template, the user complained that with the change “it doesn’t display bold macrons on any letters now...I'm getting some horrible blurry on-the-fly boldening.” Perhaps a workaround here is to remove the IE hack from the Unicode template? Or should he specify a font-family for the Unicode class in his monobook.css?
• With the introduction of the IE hack to the Russian class/template, a user complained that when combining diacritical marks are added to Russian words as accents (e.g. мо́ре) the accent mark doesn't combine properly. (The Russian font list is Arial Unicode MS, Gentium, Code2000, Lucida Sans Unicode.) Perhaps a workaround is to remove the IE hack from the Russian template?
• With the introduction of the IE hack to the Arabic(-like) classes/templates, the user complained that without forcing font-families, the scripts were too small and special Kurdish and Sindhi characters did not appear correctly. I had thought that browsers other than IE6 handled fonts correctly, but perhaps not so with Arabic(-like) script? Is the ideal solution to remove the IE hack from these classes?

The other users’ actual comments are at wikt:User talk:TEB728#Templates and wikt:User talk:TEB728#Font templates. --teb728 09:21, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

While I'm not the expert you are looking for, I can at least give a hint of a problem which can happen with non-IE browsers, and which might be the cause for some of the problems: while MSIE shows nothing when the current font doesn't have the needed character, other browsers search all the other installed fonts for it. If one of these fonts is broken, the wrong character will appear. One particular instance can be found at Talk:Voiced velar plosive, where it is discussed that the font "MS Reference Sans Serif" has the wrong character. --cesarb 17:26, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Another one I also know the answer to: the accent is probably placed at the wrong place due to the Verdana combining characters bug. Again, it's a broken font; this time it's Verdana. --cesarb 01:52, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it is the Verdana combining characters bug: What the Firefox user described was that the accent was high and well to the right side of the preceding character. This is, indeed, just what I see with the default font of IE: Cyrillic а́е (as compared with Latin áe, where I see the accent centered just above the a). With the Russian font list, I see Cyrillic а́е also low and centered.

If I understand correctly what you say about other browsers selecting a font as needed on a per-character basis, it follows that they will change fonts in the middle of a word! I am beginning to think that where font-family lists are needed on one browser, they probably should be applied to all browsers. What do you think of taking the “inherit hack” out of the classes even here at Wikipedia? --teb728 08:55, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

They won't normally change fonts in the middle of a word, because usually a word has all characters from the same script, and usually a font either has or doesn't have a particular script. The inherit hack seems to work fine on the English Wikipedia; complaints only happen on a few unusual situations, and in fact people complain when the hack is removed (in fact, IIRC, originally the hack wasn't present; it was added later). --cesarb 19:22, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Need to get rid of old contributions

Hi, before I created this login account, i made several contributions not logged in, to where my ip address was recorded. Now I may get in trouble bc of a few things I wrote that I found out weren't true. I know based on what I contributed to with my ip address here, that it is traceable for someone I know to find out its me. Can I request that all contributions made from my ip address (I can provide it, its this computer) that I did before I made an account be deleted from their respective history pages? This is very important. Thank you.Talkietalkie 06:05, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I do not know the answer. Note that they say also : If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed by others, do not submit it. The same goes for your errors, the whole web planet knows about them. But you have a right to make errors - and those must have been corrected by some WPian. --DLL 22:02, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

HTML tags in template parameters

I have noticed that you can't use HTML tags in template parameters. For example if you do {{codebox|<html type="html: html; xml: html;" style="something: #FFFFF">blah blah blah</html>, all you will see is {{{1}}}. --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 05:02, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I just played with it then, it seems that if you pass {{template|<span style>text</span>}} it will return {{{1}}}, but if you pass {{template|<span styl>text</span>}} it will return <span>text</span>. That'd be the parser cleaning up my invalid "styl" element, but if you put in style, or style="color: blue", or clear="all" (it's also returning {{{1}}} on "<br clear="all">", but not on <br />), it will always return {{{1}}}. So it looks like it's failing on any HTML tags with valid attributes? --james_{(lets talk)} 05:41, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

It is failing on any tags with the equals sign. The first equals sign between each pipe is parsed (in a template tag's parameter section) as a parameter and value. You can overcome this with: {{codebox|1=<html type="html: html; xml: html;" style="something: #FFFFF">blah blah blah</html> usually. --Splarka (rant) 08:29, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

This is why I don't work on templates much :) That makes much more sense! --james_{(lets talk)} 09:30, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, wait... why does {{template|<span style>text</span>}} fail? There's no equals signs (but the first untitled parameter thing works)... all I can think of is that the HTML tidy is adding equals signs before it gets parsed for templates... but that seems a little odd. (see User:Bornhj/sand, and I am aware <span style> is incredibly invalid HTML, but it's weird none-the-less) --james_{(lets talk)} 09:48, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I'd blame tidy on that, probably. Have to ask a dev though, but what is the point? Just don't use invalid html, and use #= trick to get around the problem. --Splarka (rant) 10:06, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't plan on using it, just something I found while playing with the original problem. :) --james_{(lets talk)} 10:36, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't blame tidy. There's a component called the Sanitizer which cleans up invalid and potentially dangerous HTML, and is probably what you are hitting. --cesarb 18:08, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Pseudo-magic word templates

I think there should be a category for templates that act like magic words. For example, {{PAGENAME}} is a magic word, but it is not a template. But, {{PAGENAMEU}} is a pseudo-magic word, and it is a template. I think we should either make all the pseudo magic words real magic words, or we should make a category of them so we can keep track of them, because it is hard to tell which ones are templates and which ones are not. --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 23:41, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

{{sofixit}}. Do you need help creating the categories? ~MDD4696 03:02, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I'll try to find all of them I can. I know USer:Ed Poor has created alot of them, so I'll start searching from his contribs. --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 04:05, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Mozilla Firefox: spontaneous and partial loss of css (FIXED)

Greetings, no help was available on the Mozilla site that I could find so I thought I'd ask here. Last night my up-to-date Firefox client decided to start rendering Wikipedia (and some other sites - not ALL that use css) without css. My pages are very hard to use, and I can't seem to find an option to "turn it back on". I did nothing special last night, one new opened tab caused this all to start happening. My skin is still set to Monobook, changing it does not affect the browser. Thankyou very much for your time! -- Serephine ♠ talk - 23:02, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Does Wikipedia render properly in another browser? ~MDD4696 02:56, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, sorry for not including that. IE displays it fine. Also, some other things which I have discovered:

• looking at it even through Google cache makes it display incorrectly
• navpopup script no longer works.
• other language Wikipedias work fine, it's just the English one which has lost its css
• saving the page as a complete html file and opening it in IE results in the same loss of css, even though commonPrint.css was saved -- Serephine ♠ talk - 03:36, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

EDIT: Fixed! Phew, that was really starting to worry me. All it required was a forced cache reset using Ctrl-F5 *pumps fist* -- Serephine ♠ talk - 04:03, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I've had problems with this - when WP server load is high, some stuff - new messages bars, categories and images in |thumb|s vanish,... - SoM 07:27, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

underline option gets lost

In my preferences, I have Always Underline set. A lot of the time just after I edit an article, this option somehow quits working (i.e. links are not underlined). This happens in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. All I have to do to get the underlining back is to go to preferences and click Save. But is there a way to keep from having to do this? Bubba73 (talk), 22:46, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Have you tried cache-refreshing the page? -- Serephine ♠ talk - 23:02, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean the F5 refresh in IE? If so, then yes. It doesn't help. Bubba73 (talk), 23:09, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Adding
a {text-decoration: underline;}
to your personal CSS (User:Bubba73/monobook.css) may help. Does anyone have any theories as to why this occurs, though? Ingoolemo ^talk 01:53, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I just followed your suggestion. I'll see if the problem reoccurs. Bubba73 (talk), 02:02, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

See the FAQ at the top of this page. --cesarb 03:40, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

How to use: ref_harvard

Is there somewhere that I can read about how to use { { ref_harvard } } for Harvard Referencing? Bubba73 (talk), 22:44, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

The documentation is at Template talk:Ref harvard. It might also help to look at existing articles that use it. Wikipedia:Harvard referencing should also be useful. --iMeowbot~Meow 23:07, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

OK, but I don't see anywhere where it says what parameters can go after ref_harvard and note_label. Bubba73 (talk), 23:16, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

It's definitely there, I see {{ref_harvard_name|Harvard reference|id}} and {{note_label|reference_name|number|id}} with explainations for exch right underneath.

These particular templates don't need lists of named parameters, you just put the information between the pipes, none of the foo= stuff that all the cool kids are using now. Its that the part that's meesing with your head? --iMeowbot~Meow 23:39, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I think that is it. I was expecting parameters such as "year=", "publisher=", "ISBN=", "edition=", etc. But it is pretty much free form, aparantly. Bubba73 (talk), 00:12, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, one more thing. With the new style of footnotes, you can click on the note and it takes you down to the link. At the link you can click on the "^" and it takes you back to the text. If you click on the Harvard reference, it takes you down to the reference, but I don't see a way to have it take you back to the text. Is there a way to do that? Bubba73 (talk), 00:20, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I figured out how to do that by adding a parameter, but it seems like more work than it should be. E.g., the footnote style numbers them for you. But maybe that isn't possible with Harvard style. Bubba73 (talk), 01:36, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it can be a lot of bother. I think that's why the Cite.php form has become so popular. Numbered footnotes are a little harder to follow, but it's a little less fiddly to make it work. --iMeowbot~Meow 02:48, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I prefer Harvard referencing (I don't like putting all of the details in the text), but I'm used to just doing it in the text, the old-fashioned way. I've done two of them the new way now. Bubba73 (talk), 03:39, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Half the article's gone!

I have an enormous problem currently. It appears to happen in both Firefox and IE, though I'm not sure if it goes away when I log out - when I click the edit link at the top of any page in any namespace, the edit box randomly cuts off the bottom part of the article. It's always in random places, sometimes it doesn't happen, and I've tried it on different computers with different internet connections - what could be going wrong? All I can conclude is that it's a Wiki-wide problem, or it's my monobook.js corrupting. Fix, please? —Vanderdecken∴ ∫ξφ 18:22, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

There is a Google toolbar bug that can cause this, however, it only occurs if you change tabs/windows while the edit box is up. Prodego ^talk 18:26, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I get that bug too, uninstalling the google toolbar will solve it. Not ideal I know. Theres more info on this bug here Mediawiki Bug 5643 Ydam 19:01, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Looks like I'll have to survive on the standard FF bar then... No problem. —Vanderdecken∴ ∫ξφ 10:50, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Lockups and delays

I have been experiencing periodic lockups and delays on Wikipedia. No other sites seem to be so affected, so I discount a problem with my ISP, LAN or workstation. In particular, Wikipedia locks up when I try to log on. I am using Internet Explorer -- no cracks please.

I have tried leaving the logon attempt alone for an extended time (an hour) and no success; however, if I close my browser and immediately open a new session, I am treated as logged in over half the time. Furthermore, I find that I need to leave the browser locked up for at least one full minute or I will not be logged in when I open the new session.

The last time that I experienced this, it got so bad that I could not get logged in under my user ID for several months, although I could edit under my IP address. (No, I was not blocked -- I have a clean record.) Any clues? Robert A.West (Talk) 12:08, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Can you describe what a lockup means here? What web browser are you using? --Brion 15:58, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

During logon, Internet Explorer shows the progress bar as progressing slowly through to around 2/3 completion, then just sits there. The window can be closed normally, but so long as it is open, any attempt to access Wikipedia via another window fails. I can, however, access Google, for example, via another window while the Wikipedia logon is pending. Closing the window and opening a new browser window may find me logged on, or not, as described above. The problem can go away spontaneously and then recur. Does this help clarify? Robert A.West (Talk) 16:33, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Protection

What is the point of being able to protect pages with "move=autoconfirmed" if not-autoconfirmed users can't even move pages? Why don't we just remove that protection option if it is completely pointless? The options should be edit=autoconfirmed, edit=sysop, and move=sysop. Also (I don't know if VPT is the right place to put the following sentence), why don't we just move=sysop articles like cat and dog permanently? They are a high target for page-move vandalism, and if a scientist renames cats and dogs, an admin will probably have heard about it, and move the page. --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 02:02, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

While the second part of your question is more suited for WP:VPP, I believe move=autoconfirmed will stop new users (< 4 days) from moving a page. I agree with you though, but I guess having all 3 options for both edit and move might make more sense being stored in the database (not that I know much about the MediaWiki schema)? --james_{(lets talk)} 02:14, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I mean that users who aren't autoconfirmed can't move pages, so move=autoconfirmed is totally useless--GeorgeMoney ^T·C 02:25, 20 June 2006 (UTC).

a) Not all our wikis are set that way.

b) There's no guarantee this wiki will always remain set that way. --Brion 02:28, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

And FWIW, I didn't know non-autoconfirmed but logged in users couldn't move pages :) I've learnt something today! --james_{(lets talk)} 02:30, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the option seems relatively redundant, though as Brion said, most Wikis allow non-autoconfirmeds to move pages. My real question is "Why would we want to go out of our way to remove this option, when having it is not causing any harm to anyone?" AmiDaniel (talk) 02:31, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Falling off the edge of a cliff in Alexa

So what might be the cause of a one-day fall from 16 to 30 on Alexa? Might there be a server slowdown? Or might it be some other cause for a loss in traffic? Ancheta Wis 23:44, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

We're still 16th on this list? --james_{(lets talk)} 00:15, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, but the detailed graphs show a steap drop. I'm thinking, summer maybe? Fewer students are in school. I couldn't say why all of sudden it has fallen though. Doesn't matter really, we are here to make great free content, not to have a popular website. BrokenSegue 00:32, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

It wouldn't surprise me, wikipedia is a pretty geeky site and educational institutions are about the only situation i can think of where you are likely to have geeks with free time using machines infested with stuff like alexa. Plugwash 00:35, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't see a steep drop here, but you hit it on the head with "we are here to make great free content, not to have a popular website." :) --james_{(lets talk)} 02:18, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

BBC has a drop in the same time period as has CNN. Informational webistes are takeing a hammering. not sure why. Google reorg perhaps but the date is wrong.Geni 02:41, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I also suspect we've been overtaken by both the official FIFA site and the World Cup 2006 official site in the last couple of weeks, to name but two... Grutness...wha? 01:17, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Plenty of subjects are no more discussed at my job. The world revolves around boys in bright colours in Germany. Let this be a lesson. When following sport on the TV or the net shall become compelling, WPs and wikis shall wither. --DLL 20:07, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

They've changed their minds about the fall to 30th, and now it only went down to 19th, but the reach and pageview scores are still well down. I don't buy the World Cup explanation. The fall started very suddenly and well after the World Cup was underway. Anyway, Wikipedia covers the World Cup and it is generating a vast amount of edits. Also could Americans please remember that based on comScore stats, they account for well under a quarter of users, so they don't determine everything. Plus a majority of Wikipedian users are probably adults. I think they are having technical problems at Alexa's end. This has happened before, for example a few months back several Chinese sites that are normally in the top twenty fall into the thousands for two days. 62.31.55.223 02:39, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

The drop from 16 to 30 was most likely Alexa's fault, I have also seen such discontinuities in their figures before. Alexa rank is based on a composition of two figures: reach and traffic. Their measurement of traffic is typically fairly stable and reliable, but reach tends to jump up and down randomly. The reason is probably that reach can't be measured exactly, it requires some manual fudge factors that they tweak periodically. Our absolute traffic as measured by us has been roughly steady for the past month, see [1]. -- Tim Starling 07:05, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

The 21 June numbers are normal for the time of the week. It looks like the apparent crash was all an Alexa screw-up and hopefully it is now over. 62.31.55.223 19:13, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Easy list creation

Hi. Is there an easy way to create lists on Wikipedia through use of another software application (e.g. FrontPage, Excel, etc.)??

I'd like to clean up the List of places in New York which is a series of sub-pages with tables, one for each letter.

The problem is two-fold: 1. The tables on each subpage (e.g. List of places in New York: A versus List of places in New York: L are not consistent. 2. Duplicates abound in the lists (e.g. "LaFayette" appears twice in List of places in New York: L).

I presume this is an issue with all similar lists across all 50 states. Additionally, perhaps a better template can be determined to incorporate or merge the sublists like towns, villages, CDPs, and unincorporated places.

Perhaps a WikiProject?

More experienced users, please reply. Thank you. CPAScott 20:01, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

There's some way to edit Wikipedia with an external editor, but I'm not sure of the exact procedure. (It involves going to Special:Preferences → Editing → Use external editor by default, but how you'd set up your editor to accept the pages I don't know.) As for inconsistency, since as far as I can tell the only stylistic inconsistency is the lack of a single table class in some of the tables, there's probably not much point in creating a template, which would be awkward in any case. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:20, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Simetrica, but more important than consistent tables is the presence of many, many, many duplicates in those lists. To remove them by deleting Wiki's code would take HOURS. If I were able to download the tables to Excel, say, I could search and eliminate duplicates very quickly and then reload the tables. I'll check out the section suggested by Tom (below), but more assistance is requested. CPAScott 14:01, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Information about using an external editor is at m:Help:External editors. Tom Harrison ^Talk 02:30, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Edit links in difference links

I don't know if anybody has actually noticed this, or whether it's meant to be like this... for a couple of weeks, an extra (edit) link has been appearing in difference links like these. However, both the link that says "Revision as of 18:05, June 4, 2006" (on the left side only) and the link that says "(edit)" do the same thing - edit the prior version of the page. For some reason they both point to different links, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Brother_%28TV_series%29&oldid=56856770&action=edit and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Brother_%28TV_series%29&action=edit&oldid=56856770. I would have thought that the "revision as of..." link on the left hand side should be a permanent link to that version of the page, like the "revision as of..." link on the right hand side does? — FireFox 16:21, 19 June '06

It works as expected for me. They point to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Brother_%28TV_series%29&action=edit&oldid=56856770 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Brother_%28TV_series%29&action=edit&oldid=56869582 respectively. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:08, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

That's not what I meant. This link, which is the "Revision as of 18:05, June 4, 2006" link on the left of this page should be a permanent link and it's not. Forget the right hand side of the page for now – both links on the left hand side point to the same thing. — FireFox 12:45, 20 June '06

You're seriously confusing me. The link entitled "Revision as of 18:05, 4 June 2006" points to here, which is a permanent link to the version as expected. The link immediately next to it labeled "edit" points to this, which is a permanent link to edit the version as expected. None of the links on the page point here, which is a reordered copy of the edit link. Could you provide a screenshot to clarify what's weird for you? What skin are you using? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 22:57, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Don't worry, I asked in #wikimedia-tech and it turns out I've probably got something or other in my monobook which is making the permanent link an edit link. — FireFox 10:54, 22 June '06

Time signature problem

When I sign my comments, the time that is written down is 6 hours too late. For example, if the time is 10:00 UTC, the timestamp will sign my comment as 16:00 UTC. Any reason why this should happen?--The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 16:02, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I think you're confusing something. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time, don't ask me why it's appreviated UTC) isn't any U.S. time zone. It's the same time as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). —da Pete (ばか) 17:19, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Not really. GMT has daylight savings time, UTC doesn't. But that's where it's centered, yeah. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:06, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

No, GMT also has no summer time, it only happpens to be used as timezone name in winter by folks who use BST as daylight savings time in summer. Wikipedia has some articles about the details... <gd&r> -- Omniplex 06:49, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

No no, I mean the history says that I wrote this comment at one time, my timestamp gives a time 6 hours ahead. I assume they are both running on UTC, but there is a 6 hour discrepancy.--The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 22:46, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

The history does not show the times on UTC; it shows them using the timezone offset you configured on your preferences. If you change it to 0, you'll notice the times will match. --cesarb 01:11, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I fixed it. Thanks, CesarB.--The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 01:18, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

"How to" do and "what to do" pages

I know that Wikibooks has a "How to" and the Wikipedia has an "How to" edit an article but are there any "What to do" help articles for users for dealing with things like the discovery of pornography obscured somewhat by body paint or indecent discussions or topics that disquise profanity and obscenity, etc.?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pce3@ij.net (talk • contribs) .

This really isn't a technical question, try Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) or Wikipedia:Village pump (assistance) for people who are famliar with the latest on these issues. --iMeowbot~Meow 17:36, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

So are you saying that only established procedures are "technical" and these procedures are not established? ...IMHO (Talk) 20:50, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, no, I'm saying that it's a policy issue, and not a technical one. That's why the other links above would be more useful places to bring up the question. --iMeowbot~Meow 20:56, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, you should have asked your preceding questions there too. Technical is for technical issues, generally involving software problems. Deco 21:20, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Once policy is established its fulfillment becomes a technical issue. Once you decide to let your son drive the family car to the store then his driving the car to the store becomes a technical issue, i.e. where the keys are, is there enough gasoline, does he have his drivers license with him, are the breaks in good order. If he wants to take his girlfriend with him then that is a policy issue. All I am asking is where are the keys. It is a technical question and not a question of policy. ...IMHO (Talk) 23:37, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

You are using a different definition of "technical". This page is for technological software issues. Questions regarding policy go on the policy page, including anything community- or rule-related such as questions of where to locate policy pages. Deco 19:42, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Redirects

I have noticed recently that whenever I redirect a page and I don't put in an edit summary, it automatically puts one like "Redirecting to page2". Is this a special javascript I have or is mediawiki doing this on purpose? --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 00:27, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

New feature, see last week's B.R.I.O.N., no JavaScript. -- Omniplex 06:38, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

This is part of the new Sentient MediaWiki programme being implemented at present. Thanks for participating. :) robchurch | talk 20:03, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Wow, that is a really useful feature for vandal fighting. I was RC patrolling, and I saw the autosummary "rediticting to insert text". --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 18:30, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

PNG thumbnail problems

I uploaded a PNG of the FoxTrot Sunday banner to replace a JPEG that was out there. Originally, I uploaded a true-color PNG. For a few days, the thumbnail wouldn't show up. I couldn't figure out why--I didn't know I could purge the cache then--so I decided to upload a 64-color version of the image, which I needed to do anyway. As soon as I uploaded the 64-color version, the thumbnail appeared. But the thumbnail's file size was more than twice that of my original file! As far as I can guess, the thumbnail is of the true color version of the file, not the indexed color version.

I'm not entirely sure of the right way to purge an image's thumbnails. I just added the {{purge}} template to the image page, hit preview, and clicked the link. That wiped out the thumbnail for a few minutes, but the new thumbnail had the same outrageous file size as the old one.

Maybe I just don't understand how to purge images properly? I don't know. Starwiz 01:18, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Purging wouldn't solve it; AFAIK the thumbnails are always truecolor. If you are worried about the file size, upload a preresized version to use in the article, adding a link to the full-sized version on its image description page (don't forget to add {{notorphan}} to the full image). --cesarb 01:26, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

In fact, doing some experiments with OptiPNG, it looks like not only the thumbnail is truecolor, it has more than 256 different colors (ImageMagick says it has 5517 colors). The original image has 32 colors. --cesarb 01:58, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

How strange! I guess I won't fight it. Did I at least purge the cache correctly, or is there an easier way to do that? --Starwiz 02:00, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

The easiest way is to copy the edit link and change the action=edit to action=purge. It should give you the same URL you got with {{purge}}. --cesarb 02:34, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

That's a good idea. Thanks for all your help! By the way, I have another problem, which I described on the assistance Village Pump, that I think you might be able to help me with. I'd really appreciate your assistance, if you're able to help. Thanks again, --Starwiz 03:14, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Thumbnails typically have more colours than the original image because of interpolation. You could say that some of the information that was lost by reducing the image is in fact not lost at all, but instead transferred into the colour data. This colour data is not as easily compressible as the original spatial data was, so the thumbnail ends up with a larger filesize. If we don't do this interpolation, the thumbnail looks crap. It would be nice if we could send the full-size indexed image to the browser and have the browser scale and interpolate it, but unfortunately browsers can't be relied upon to do this properly. -- Tim Starling 04:29, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Appendix: namespace

Reference lists are constantly being proposed for deletion. They don't seem to be well-liked in "(main)", nor in "Wikipedia:" (largely administrative), and would be warping "Portal:" from the current usage. Yet, anybody with familiarity of an actual paper encyclopedia knows that reference lists are encyclopedic. The solution over at Wiktionary appears to be adding an Appendix: namespace for reference lists, about 6 months ago.

Please add an Appendix: namespace here, too.

--William Allen Simpson 09:56, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org

Component Wikimedia, General/Unknown. Severity enhancement. shell as a keyword. Make sure you mention the English Wikipedia in the report. robchurch | talk 15:47, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

I always thought bugzilla was for general software changes, and here was for en: specific. For example, I couldn't find the Appendix request for wiktionary there. Anyway, bug 6346, thanks for the help!

--William Allen Simpson 19:23, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for pursuing this, William. User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 10:09, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

How to fix bunched up edit links

I created a new howto, Wikipedia:How to fix bunched up edit links, on how to fix that problem where floated images push section edit links to the wrong place (which seems to be a FAQ). Please take a look and correct any mistakes I might have made. --cesarb 20:43, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

That is a very concise and helpful page. Are you going to add a link to it at the top of this forum in the FAQ list? Also, for one wiki, we had a solution for very large pages (like vote pages) that had bunched up sections that would be a pain for us to maintain manual clears (especially since most users adding to it didn't know how). In the common.css we put:

#headclear h1 { clear: both; }
#headclear h2 { clear: both; }
#headclear div.editsection { clear: both; position: relative; top: 2em;}

And then we wrapped the page in a <div id="headclear">. Not perfect, but functional (although it seems to cause problems in some versions of IE). --Splarka (rant) 00:59, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

I intend to add it to the FAQ (which I wrote most of) as soon as I get more feedback (in fact, it's my intention from the beginning). I don't want to impinge potentially bogus advice on any newbie which might happen to wander by. --cesarb 01:48, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Legacy clear after "unknown" (legacy or CSS) float should always work. The opposite would fail on legacy browsers, CSS clear after legacy float. The main difference between {{clr}} and {{clear}} isn't legacy vs. CSS, but inline BR vs. block level DIV. Inline works everywhere within a block, block level isn't allowed in some places. For strict XHTML an inline element outside of all block level elements isn't allowed, in that case you'd need the DIV. Both are kludges, anything would be fine if folks start a DIV before any floating magic, and close it when they're happy with the result. For legacy browsers the "right" and "left" of [[image:]] is at best a waste of time. A dummy table with align="right" or "left" containing only the image works with "any" brwoser, and in that case you'd need {{clr}} or <br clear="all/left/right/>. Example on WP:EIS, if it's still there. -- Omniplex 06:06, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I think I understood it better now, thanks for the explanation. I've removed the incorrect information from Wikipedia:How to fix bunched up edit links. --cesarb 12:14, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

The entire article content is wrapped in a <div>, which in turn is wrapped in a <body>, which in turn is wrapped in an <html>. All elements are thus within multiple block-level tags, so there's no violation. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 22:36, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, sounds good now. In theory you could "downgrade" your 2nd example to work with older browsers, add align="right", optionally strike the then redundant float: right;, ready. That would be also a case where you'd use {{-}} or <br clear="right" /> to stop the floating.

Floating right can cause havoc if it meets something further down that can't be folded, wide <pre> lines or wide tables, unfortunately also long section titles in a ToC (unless the ToC is put in a table with width less than 100% leaving enough room for anything floating right). Maybe mention that floating left is better than floating right under rare conditions (vague because I'm not sure how much of it is only an oddity of my browser). -- Omniplex 17:22, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

No. The whole point of the second example is to work exactly like the first example. Since the first example uses only CSS floats (and thus would not float with obsolete or uncommon browsers), the second one has to also use only CSS floats. Doing otherwise would lose the whole point of the method, which is to fix the edit links while changing nothing else. I did think of align="right" versus style="float: right; clear: right", and concluded being as similar as possible would help avoid possibly susprising results, and thus would be better. If the first example had used align="right", the second example would have to use align="right" also; however, this is not usually seen in actual articles, and the page was written to help with the specific situation seen in several articles (and is supposed to be newbie-friendly, so it should avoid discussing obscure corner cases).

As to floating left, unless it's being proposed as a way to fix the section edit links, it shouldn't be in that page. --cesarb 04:01, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

For popular browsers there's no difference between inline CSS style="float: right;" and legacy align="right", they interpret it identically. I hope with a priority for inline CSS in the case of conflicts. For uncommon devices (mobile) or old browsers inline CSS is invisible, no effect. Where that's no problem it's fine. A huge sidebar appearing before the relevant content can be annoying, sooner or later somebody will fix or remove it.

Floating left, I can't tell if that's in any way related to edit link issues, inline CSS has no effect from my POV, also no undesirable side-effects. -- Omniplex 12:58, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Transclude across sister projects?

Anyone know if/how it's possible to transclude a page across Sister projects? For example, I would like to use the WikiQuote of the day on Wikipedia pages? The following link works just fine:

q:Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/December 11, 2024

But, it won't transclude:

{{q:Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/December 11, 2024}}

Am I doing something wrong? or is this just not possible? -Aude (talk | contribs)

It is not possible. --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 15:36, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

It is possible, but it's disabled on Wikimedia wikis and I'm not sure of the state of the code as is. robchurch | talk 15:50, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. Though it would be nice to use "...of the day" features across projects, it sounds like more trouble (than it's worth) to enable it or add such a feature. Perhaps there are also server load issues? -Aude (talk | contribs) 05:26, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, inter-project transclusion is indeed enabled in Wikimedia wikis, only it is restricted to the image namespace and images coming from Commons. I have no clue if that would work as an ugly hack, but I sure would love to have some sort of transclusion between projects... although ideally, I would want SUL before that too... Titoxd^(?!?) 05:32, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, if you cluld, it would be terrible on the servers. That is why if you can't have a red interwiki link, because it would have to check in a completely different database to see if the page exists. And imagine if people started using {{tl}} in other wikis. It would be ac complete load on the servers if everybody typed {{en:tl|template}}. --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 14:52, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

What do you think the link cache is for, then? It's probably crippled due to some dumb bug or instability or just fascististic administration. robchurch | talk 23:52, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

If we could just transclude the Commons image description pages for the limited purpose of Template:C-uploaded images, that would help significantly. See also my related post below.--Pharos 19:12, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

View article including text that has been deleted removed?

I'm wondering how to view an article and see all the text that has been added to it throughout its history. This view would include the current as well as text that has been added and then deleted later. Yes, even the stupid vandalism text, I suppose.

I guess this would be similar to a multi-version diff that showed the adds from multiple versions. Instead, I theoretically could view each diff on an article's history page, but that would drive me and the WP servers nuts.

Does the software allow something in any way similar to this? Thanks! Bob schwartz 17:32, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

What sort of format are you looking for? Combining all diffs would be ridiculously long for any sizable page. What's your purpose?

(Incidentally, you don't mean to discuss deletion. That's something quite different from what you're talking about.) —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:38, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! Seeing the article including all the text that was ever added (or at least in some time period) would give a fuller picture of the WP community's knowledge about that topic. There are often varying legitimate opinions around what content is too trivial, controversial, or off-point to belong in an article. Some articles have a few "guardians" who are vigilant in removing information that they view as inappropriate. Being able to see all the content ever added would be great for pages where useful information has been removed. (Of course you'd also see the vandalism, but the text added in those cases is almost always short and easily ignored.) Or is there a way to see or download the history of an article, even if it is in some less-than-user-friendly format? Bob schwartz 17:47, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

There's no easy way to do this at present, at least that I know of. To get all history of all Wikipedia pages in XML format, you can go here; it's 7.6 GB compressed. Do with that what you like. (You could also file a feature request for an easier way to do this at Mediazilla:, but don't expect any devs to take up your task within your lifetime.  :)) —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:42, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I think your best bet would be to ask at Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts (or someone with access to the m:toolserver (when it gets fixed, which may be a long time from now, sadly)) it sounds like something that should be feasible; just load all the revisions, and remove duplicate text (although, hm, I don't know of a well-known algorthim for that specfic task...) JesseW, the juggling janitor 08:49, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

PHP Implementation

I am currently doing a minor overhaul of the Engineering Portal and I would like to implement a script that cycles the Featured Article and Selected Image based on the current date. I've already used similar code on a website I did a while back, but I remember having to set up some server-side things to get the PHP recognized (sorry if this is a little vague, but it was a while back). Is Wikipedia set up for this kind of script, and if not, does anyone know of a way to pull the date with javascript?
Thank you,
Âme Errante 05:36, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

You should easily be able to do this with avaiable 1.7 wikicode using parser functions, variables and/or magic words. For a quick example:

{{#switch:{{CURRENTDAY}}
|1|4|7|10|13|16|19|22|25|28|31=[[Image:Image 1.ext]]|
|2|5|8|11|14|17|20|23|26|29=[[Image:Image 2.ext]]|
|3|6|9|12|15|18|21|24|27|30=[[Image:Image 3.ext]]}}

Shows each image every third day of a month (using the #switch "fallthrough" method). You can do transclusions as well as image tags. --Splarka (rant) 07:10, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Thank you Splarka. I didn't realize that Wikipedia's native pseudo-code had that kind of power. If I have any additional questions I'll be sure to let you know.
-Âme Errante 22:57, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Sure thing. Just drop a note on my talk page. --Splarka (rant) 23:13, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Where is my mono.js file?

I have been searching under Wikipedia tools and can't find the darn thing now. I just put a popup script into that file from Wikipedia tools and accessed it from the tools page. But now I can't find how to access it there. I've been looking and looking all over that page.

The script goes into some kind of loop and screws up my browser. I have to remove it. But where is the js file? How can I access it? KarenAnn 00:08, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

User:KarenAnn/monobook.js. :) --james_{(lets talk)} 00:13, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Złotoryja editing problem

Following the setting of a redirect the hyperlink below the 'Coat of Arms' picture in the Złotoryja article is now circular. I don't see how to get rid of this hyperlink. Help welcome, please. BlueValour 19:48, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

You can't get rid of the hyperlink. It's part of a template. Instead, try requesting that Coat of Arms of Złotoryja be deleted by using {{db|[explanation of the difficulty goes here]}}, or else at WP:RFD. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:13, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for this. BlueValour 21:27, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Monobook tools and 'Classic' skin

I have monobook tools that work well in the default skin but they do not seem to work in 'Classic' skin.

The monobook code adds a 'units' tab and a 'dates' tab. To get these tabs, copy the entire contents of User:Bobblewik/monobook.js to your own monobook. Then follow the instructions in your monobook to clear the cache (i.e. press Ctrl-Shift-R in Firefox, or Ctrl-F5 in IE) before it will work. To make the tool work, click on the 'units' tab or the 'dates' tab in edit mode. The tool shows its proposals in the usual "Show changes" mode. You can then save, cancel or continue editing.

A user of the 'Classic' skin asked me if it possible to get them to work in that skin. Does anybody know how? bobblewik 17:32, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Best way to correct article title capitalization error

Is simply recreating an article in lower case the best way to overcome a capitalization error? ...IMHO (Talk) 15:51, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

No. The best way is to use the "move" function, which should be next to "history" if you are using the Monobook skin. --cesarb 16:04, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Front Page CSS issue

The CSS on the main page on the secure server seems to be a bit off - I'm on a high resolution, and it works fine on the 'normal' en.wikipedia server. Screenshots here and here, -- 9cds^(talk) 13:09, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I have the same problem when using the secure server in Firefox, but it seems fine in IE. — FireFox 13:15, 19 June '06

Hrm, the HTML details differ more than expected between the two. Well, I'm not sure why, but in Firefox's DOM tree, in http://... div#column-one is a sibling of div#column-content, and in https://, div#column-one is a child of div#column-content, not sure if that's related. --0x845FED 14:29, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I just checked my userpage on the secure one, and it is really jumbled. The edit tabs and the wikipedia logo are both on the page instead of being on the top and on the side. And the "sign in/create account" is on top of the donations thing. Here is the page: [2]. And when I logged in, it got even more jumbled, and my JS went crazy. Here are some screenshots of the secure wiki: screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3, and screenshot 4 - logged in. Here is a screenshot of how it is supposed to look on enwiki: logged in and logged out --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 18:19, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Images from other Wikipedias

How do I get images from the Hebrew or French Wikipedia to be on the English Wikipedia? I can't find any of those images in the Wikimedia Commons. PiMaster3 12:37, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

If they're free images, upload them to the Commons. If they require a claim of fair use, you need to upload them onto en.Wiki. --Lord Deskana ^{I VALUE YOUR OPINIONS} 12:39, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't know what they are though because I can't read the copyright information on account of it's not in English. PiMaster3 12:44, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Can you link me the files? I have (very limited) ability to read French. --Lord Deskana ^{I VALUE YOUR OPINIONS} 12:48, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

fr:Image:Missorium Theodosius whole.jpg, he:תמונה:1111הצבימיושרמיושר.jpg, and he:תמונה:LogoMaaleLevona.gif, o the French one is on wikimedia commons, the other 2 weren't though PiMaster3 12:58, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

I can't read Hebrew unfortunately. Perhaps you should go looking for someone with a Hebrew babel box on their talk page. I'll find the category for you if you want. --Lord Deskana ^{I VALUE YOUR OPINIONS} 13:37, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Category:User he, or perhaps more specifically, Category:User he-3 or Category:User he-4. You could give one of them the link and ask it to translate it for you. --Lord Deskana ^{I VALUE YOUR OPINIONS} 13:39, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

You could also check the templates used for the copyright tags there for interwiki links. Some templates have interwiki links to their versions in other languages. --cesarb 16:10, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

he:תמונה:1111הצבימיושרמיושר.jpg is a photograph of a newspaper and therefore {{newspapercover}} plus {{GFDL}} (the latter for the derivative portion in which the cropping and angle were chosen); he:תמונה:LogoMaaleLevona.gif is {{logo}}, of course. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:01, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Western Albemarle High School

This link is for a high school but when I click on it it comes up for Crozet Virginia and not Western Albemarle High School. John R G 06:03, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

www.k12albemarle.org/WesternAlbemarle/home.html redirects to this page, which appears to be the official school site. OhNoitsJamie^Talk 06:11, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Lets see go to this page AA Jefferson District then click on Western Albermarle High School and you will see what I mean. John R G 06:22, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Western Albemarle High School is currently a redirect to Crozet, Virginia. It appears that this was done because the article was a tiny stub. If you look under the article title, you will see the text "(Redirected from Western Albemarle High School)" -- that is how you can tell when a redirect is in place. --iMeowbot~Meow 08:35, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Supplementary Javascript in non-monobook skins

I have just been alerted that supporting JavaScripts do not exist for skins other than MonoBook. For example, MediaWiki:Standard.js is a meaningless page. Is there a bug report filed on this subject? (Just making sure before I submit one.) Ingoolemo ^talk 05:10, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

They do work for some skins other than monobook; they work on all monobook-based skins (see Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes for the list). They do not work, however, on the standard-based skins. As for bugs, I know only of bugzilla:4178 which asks for MediaWiki:Common.js, but none asking for MediaWiki:Standard.js (and the equivalent for cologneblue and nostalgia). --cesarb 05:48, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

File:No redirect button.gif

A screenshot of editing in Classic. In monobook, there would be a '#R' button inside the red circle, which is used to insert a redirect tag.

Well, I'll hold off on filing a bug report just yet. For the moment, anyway, 'tis just a matter of curiosity for me. The specific issue that I have is the lack of an edit button to insert a redirect tag in the Standard skin. (Such a button exists in monobook.) Any Classic skin users can remedy this problem by adding the following text to User:YOUR USERNAME/standard.js Ingoolemo ^talk 21:21, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

function InsertButtonsToToolBar()
{
//Redirect button
mwCustomEditButtons[mwCustomEditButtons.length] = {
    "imageFile": "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c8/Button_redirect.png",
    "speedTip": "Redirect",
    "tagOpen": "#REDIRECT [[",
    "tagClose": "]]",
    "sampleText": "Destination"}
}
addOnloadHook( InsertButtonsToToolBar );

A bug report has now been filed at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6377. Hopefull 'twasn't redundant :) Ingoolemo ^talk 21:37, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Misspelled title

I know how to edit a page, but can't figure out how to correct the wrongly-spelled title of the page "Evie Tornquist-Karllson" which should be corrected to "Evie Tornquist-Karlsson."

How do you correct misspelled titles, please? Gontroppo 04:36, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

You have to use the "move" function (which is next to the history tab on Monobook). --cesarb 04:43, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Dates in current revision on diff view

Whoever made diffs with the current revision display the date of the current revision, thanks. --cesarb 03:48, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Seconded. I always wanted that. --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 04:10, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

That would be Leon Weber, committed by Brion. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:59, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Strange bug

the third header in the Category:Infobox templates pages displays wrongly. It acts as if there was a missing "=", even though they match perfectly. Circeus 00:42, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Oh great... I look like an utter idiot now... I could have sworn they matched... Circeus 01:29, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Namespaces in articles

Is there a way to bypass namespaces to use them as articles? For example, what if you wanted an article on something like Portal:12006h, which might be a special kind of portal that needs an article on it (maybe it could be a portal in space that NASA discovered and named it that). Is there any way to make it just an article? --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 23:58, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Nope. --Brion 00:14, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

internal-external links

Is there some way for MediaWiki to tell if an external link is linking back to wikipedia (for example, for diffs). I think mediawiki should add the class "internalexternal" or something like that to links that link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=. Then, in the mediawiki:monobook.css we can add

#bodyContent a.internalexternal {
	background: none;
        color: #002bb8
}

and in our own personal css, we can add

#bodyContent a.internalexternal {
	background: url(http://en.wikipedia.org/favicon.ico) center right no-repeat;
	padding-right: 18px;

which adds a little wp logo next to the link (so you know that it is meant to be external), but the color is just like an internal link. That would help, because a) when people want to link to logs, they wouldn't have to keep putting <span class="plainlinks">[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&page=Wikipedia:Village%20pump%20(technical) <font color="002bb8">logs</font>]</span>, all they would have to put is the link. --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 23:58, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Assuming you don't use Internet Explorer, try CSS attribute selectors. --Brion 00:17, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

PRODing an article

I have prodded an article - if the box remains there after five days does the article get deleted automatically or do I need to alert an admin? BlueValour 23:27, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

The articles are categorized per day and admins will check the category when it is time for deletion. You won't have to do anything (unless the {{prod}} is removed). Kusma (討論) 23:31, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

It is not automatic. An admin will see it and delete it. Deco 23:54, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks folks. BlueValour 00:26, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Wrote a page that is now lost. How can I find it?

I wrote a page called "Out of This World (song)" because Wikipedia said there was no such page. The page refers to a song by Johnny Mercer and is listed on the Johnny Mercer page under songs. I composed a page, saved it and updated it a few times. Now the link goes to a song by Jo Stafford. And I don't know how to find my page.

Is there a way of finding lost pages? On the disambiguation page, it is only listed as the Jo Stafford song.

I don't know how to access my page to change its name, as someone as redirected it. (I saw that on my Watchlist.) KarenAnn 18:59, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the page you wrote was Out Of Ths World (note the missing "i"). I've moved it to the more appropriate title Out of This World (Johnny Mercer song). Eugène van der Pijll 19:14, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Thank you so much! How did you find it? What is the method in a situation like that? KarenAnn 19:19, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I looked at your contributions (the link to your own contributions is on the top of your screen when you're logged in), and then saw the Out Of Ths World article, which was at that time a redirect. When you're redirected, there is a notice below the title of the article, saying "(Redirected from Out of this world)", for example; if you click that link, you arrive at the redirection page, which you can then edit. Eugène van der Pijll 19:25, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

When you say the redirection page, do you mean the Disambiguation page? And if I edited that page, how would the Wiki know how to find the renamed page (since I wouldn't be able to get to the page to rename it)? And where is it in the meantime -- it must be on a list somewhere to delete or something? It's all very mysterious. KarenAnn 19:59, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

When I say "redirection page", I mean a page such as Out of this world, which redirects to Out of This World. If you click on the first link, you end up on the second, but with a "redirection notice". If you then click on the link in that notice, you arrive at the real Out of this world, which looks like "#REDIRECT Out of This World". You can edit this page to make it a real article, or to change the redirect target. You can find more explanation about redirection pages at Wikipedia:Redirect. Eugène van der Pijll 20:06, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, none of that seems to work as you say, but thanks for helping me out on this one. One other article a while ago, I really did lose -- it was never found, so I get a little uptight. But thanks! (I have read all that redirect stuff and everything else I can find about the problems, but I guess I'm missing a screw.) KarenAnn 00:24, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

If you click on the "my contributions" link in the top right (when you're logged in) you'll be able to see every change you've made to an article and so see what articles you've edited. --Daduzi ^talk 01:41, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Clicking on Edit my Talk Page Results in Opening a File: Security Warning

Hello. As I click on "edit" for my talk page I get a security warning asking if I want to open, save, or cancel a file with the following name, type, etc.

Name: index.php Type: Microsoft Digital Image Document, and From: en.wikipedia.org

I am new here, very new, and also have had my Digital Imaging PROGRAM open upon simply clicking on some links, mostly errors I was trying to fix.

Is there some was to fix this, to make it stop happening. I prefer to edit right from the website, if possible, at least for now. VX 18:41, 18 June 2006 (UTC)VX

Go to Special:Preferences, select the Editing tab, and ensure that Use an external editor is not enabled; this would cause edit links to start a download similar to that hinted at. robchurch | talk 20:01, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Microsoft Digital Image Document? Isn't the content-type text/x-wiki? I find it strange that an image editing program is associated to that MIME type. --cesarb 21:16, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, wikitext is not traditionally a desktop document type... — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 00:48, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

It's probably sniffing from file extensions. PHP is a Microsoft Digital Image file extension. æ² ✆ 2006-06-19t02:47z

Cool. That was too easy. Thanks so much! VX 05:14, 19 June 2006 (UTC)VX

Image undeletion now possible

By the way, effective immediately, image undeletion is now possible, thanks to Brion. Titoxd^(?!?) 04:44, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Wow. All hail the mighty Brion! Joyous! | Talk 04:46, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Huzzah! That's a majorly good thing, yes. --0x845FED 11:00, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Does this mean that the WMF is now retaining copies of copyright infringing media in some form? -Splash - tk 14:58, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Presumably yes, just as ordinary text deletion retains an admin accessible copy of copyright infringing text. Dragons flight 15:02, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

True. We just seem to have more eagle eyes for deleting infringing media than we do for content. Or that's how I feel it, anyway. -Splash - tk 15:05, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

"I wrote it" is a much more tenable defense for text than "I am the author of this screenshot of a copyrighted computer game" is for images. :) —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:48, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

How do I join 2 usernames of mine?

A long time ago I created a Wikipedia username but I have not used it since. Recently I have created a new Wikipedia username because I did not remember that I had created one before. Is there a way to join these two usernames? Thanks for your suggestions --Ntsiebel 17:30, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

That question recurs frequently. I do not think that it is easy ; and, besides personal glory, why does it matter ? There are other advantages with two pseudos, see Romain Gary. --DLL 23:24, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

See WP:CHA. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:46, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Ip Problem

Hi, I am in Cordova Tennessee and I am on Charter Internet. They share IP's throughout the south. I tried to make a Wiki account and it said I was blocked by a Locust43 or something and I didnt even have a chance to post 1 thing yet. I called charter and they changed my IP this time but said that IP is back in the IP pool and I would probly get it back soon. What can I do to prevent the system from thinking im someone else on Wikipedia? ( I forgot to put those ~ Thigs sorry ) Cola2706 02:07, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Please give the IP and we can unblock it. If you had it, the vandal obviously doesn't still have it, so the block isn't being very effective anyway. Deco 02:07, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Unblocked. It was 68.113.77.49 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · filter log · WHOIS · RDNS · RBLs · http · block user · block log). --cesarb 02:21, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

It has come to my attention that the Cola2706 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) is a sockpuppet of Locust43 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log). Because of that, I've reinstated the block, and indefinitely blocked the sockpuppet. --cesarb 15:38, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Template:Dynamic navigation box with image

Something is wrong with this template, as you can see wherever it is used, for example on {{Cities and towns in Enz (district)}}: the title frame overlays the image, instead of the other way around. As the template is almost the same as de:Vorlage:Navigationsleiste mit Bild (and the difference does not seem to be the cause for this): is this a CSS or JS issue? Kusma (討論) 21:35, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Disappearing Images

I am curious to know if people can see some of the images in a couple of articles depending on where the image is placed on the page. I have looked at the articles using both my home and work computer and using Maxthon/IE and Firefox. And I did try the purge trick several times.

The two images in question are Image:Great Slave Lake and Lake Athabasca 6.png and Image:YVR-logo.png.

Vancouver International Airport: In this version the png image is in the infobox and appears at the top. If you scroll down a second (jpg) image showing the airport should be visible below the box. In this version the overhead jpg has been moved to the infobox and the png to the left of the fourth paragraph. In the first version I can see both the images but in the second the png vanishes. Viewed with Maxthon I see a white box with a red X in a smaller white box in the upper left corner. In Firefox the only evidence of the picture is that the fourth paragraph is indented by one letter.

Great Slave Lake: In this version the png is visible in the top right corner of the article. In this version an infobox is added with the same png as part of the infobox. This gives me the same result as above in that the picture is not visible.

So can anybody else see the png in both edits of both articles? CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 14:38, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

They are differently sized thumbnails. In both cases, one of the tumbnails is broken and the other is working. I downloaded one of the broken thumbs, and it shows the same symptom we've been seeing a lot lately: it ends at the vpAg chunk, before the IDAT chunk. The workaround is to purge the images a few times, as described in the FAQ at the top of this page. --cesarb 15:58, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I tried that several times but no success. In the Great Slave Lake I downloaded the picture and converted back to jpg to solve it. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 16:53, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

commonprint.css

Is there a way to have your print css view different that this css file? I want to change some things, but I don't know where. For example, for the monobook non-print version, it is /monobook.css, so where is the print css? Would it be at User:GeorgeMoney/print.css? Is this even possible? --GeorgeMoney ^T·C 00:27, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

You should be able to use @media print { ... } in your monobook.css. --0x845FED 05:02, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

dealing with obscenity

Is there a tag or otherwise a way to request that an article's subtopic or talk page sub topic be deleted because it is personal and not public, in bad taste and obviously for no other purpose than to be provocative and indecent? ...IMHO (Talk) 13:21, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Sometimes they can be speedy deleted as vandalism (Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion, General rule 3); the deleting admin would have to make this judgement call. If in articles, they may qualify as attack pages (CSD: A6), but your question was not about articles. Blanking is always an option available to any editor, and some believe that personal attacks should be deleted (a contested viewpoint). If all else fails, there's WP:PROD, which is unlikely to let through an obviously inflammatory and counterproductive page. This question is, however, more appropriate for Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Deco 14:19, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

If it's a specific section (and hence only some revisions), any admin can delete and selectively restore the page so that those edits disappear (but this is tricky for pages with a large page history). Alternatively, you can find a user with oversight (Special:ListUsers/suppress) and ask them to remove the revision(s) for you if they contain personal information. --james_{(lets talk)} 14:35, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for both comments. It looks like the topic has already been deleted. I will copy your comments to my offline reference file so that I will know what to do in the future should I come across such a thing again. Thanks. ...IMHO (Talk) 03:18, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Change Title

How do I change the titie (main heading) of an article?

The article is "Bartlett Yancey" and needs to be changed to "Bartlett Yancey, Jr." so that he will not be confused with his father.

Thanks. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Rfrederi2 (talk • contribs) .

There's a "Move" tag at the top of most pages. That'll change the title of teh page to whatever you want. See Help:Moving a page for more.

However, per the Manual of Style, articles about people should be named in their most common form (i.e. Jimmy Carter instead of James Earl Carter, Jr.). Since we don't currently have an article about his father, I've redirected Bartlett Yancey, Jr. to Bartlett Yancey. Hope that helps! --james_{(lets talk)} 16:30, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

ok...

will the IP address and the contributions EVER go away? there's a bunch of stubs I have no idea where they came from, and some embarrassing things that were written under this IP. I use it frequently for video conferencing, so I hope there is a way the old contributions under this IP can be erased somehow. I have gone and created a new username however.68.102.190.236 06:55, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

The only way contributions/edits would be erased is under very rare circumstances like libel or copyright violations (I'm not sure about the exact details, but it's rare). You've done the right thing by creating an account. It makes lots of things easier.--Kchase02 T 09:30, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

IP again

so if I make an account now, with this IP, will the older contributions under that IP disappear? I need to have all past contributions from this IP address removed please 68.102.190.236 06:24, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Old contributions won't disappear, and it really wouldn't be right to do that. As you mentioned above, they came from more than one person and the identity of those people isn't known; and you can't give permission to delete other people's contributions. All that said, once you create a username, the IP edits will not be associated with your new account, so you don't really have to worry about it. --iMeowbot~Meow 06:34, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

IP Removed

Help! I think someone else is either using my computer to edit, or I have a shared IP (which might be the problem!).. how can I go back and have all the entries this IP address contributed to deleted? There is an article or two that this IP address linked to me edited.. and added false and disgusting information. I much rather just make a user name from now on. Thanks!68.102.190.236 06:16, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

It's easier to make an account, and anonymous IP edits are not attached to it. No one will know the account's IP, as it is prohibited in the vast majority of cases by the Privacy policy. Titoxd^(?!?) 06:18, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

If parameter for infoboxes

I see Template:Infobox CVG, which has only 4-5 required parameters but has at least double the optional ones. I was tinkering with Template:Infobox Casino and added a logo parameter. After getting some complaints, I attempted to make it optional by adding the if parameter, but it doesn't work. Can anybody see why and fix it please?

Hi. I've made the logo optional. For comparison see Stratosphere Las Vegas (no logo) and Caesars Palace (with logo). Icey 05:22, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Red links

Is it just me, or are red links now showing up as little red question marks after the linked word? (sample) This seems like an outrageously stupid change if it has been instituted on a larger level (nothing lilke adding incorrect punctuation marks to a sentence to confuse everybody). Where do decisions like this get made, and where do I go to complain? --Fastfission 00:31, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Read the FAQ at the top of this page. --cesarb 01:14, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

While I'll be! The answer was there after all. My faith in the developers has been restored. Thanks. --Fastfission 01:41, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Making Columns

Any way to create columns that aren't in boxes? This is only for a user page: I'd like to eliminate some white space.J. Van Meter 23:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Aye, you can do any kind of layout you want. I'm not sure I get what you mean exactly though. Perhaps you could explain a bit more detail? Do you want a box on the right side with no border that contains all those DYK boxes? I've gotta go to sleep for a few hours, so I'll check back later and see if you've replied. *zzz* Icey 05:33, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Icey. On your own user page you have two columns of text. I have ben trying to do the same thing - create two columns of bulleted text w/ the second column starting half-way across the page-- but I don't want the text in boxes. Tried to figure it out from the code on your user box, but no luck. J. Van Meter 11:40, 17 June 2006 (UTC) I'll have more coffee and try again.

Hi J. Van Metere, the columns/column templates would be perfect for that. They are in testing, but seem reliable and they're really simple to use as well. I've converted your articles list into a two-column layout. Icey 12:56, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, that's ridiculously simple code, isn't it. Thanks so much! J. Van Meter 13:06, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

No problem! Here's some other ways. I think the first method is probably the best to use, it seems the simplest and most reliable. Icey 13:11, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

FIFA table

Somebody fucked up this table. I gave up trying to fix it - it needs someone who got some of that - what's it called - patience! Gardar Rurak 22:01, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

What's the problem, exactly? I'm not seeing anything obviously wrong with it. --Daduzi ^talk 01:59, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Any way to get information on click-through?

I was wondering if it's at all possible to gey information on what links users use on a page. In particular, is there any way to find out what links are used most and/or what percentage of total visitors use the links? It would be very useful to know this in order to settle naming/disambiguation issues. WP:TOOLS and WP:STAT didn't seem to have anything so I figured I'd ask here, apologies if this is well known. --Daduzi ^talk 05:15, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia doesn't collect any usage statistics (the servers can't handle it), but User:Deco can sometimes get some usage information form an old database dump. —Ruud 10:59, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

No, this information is not available from database dumps either. It would require significant modifications to the software and the link URLs to even find out this information. Deco 19:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough, thanks for the replies. Is there any point suggesting this on bugzilla? --Daduzi ^talk 19:56, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

None that I know of - there would be a significant overhead though, in that it would be necessary to send a redirect request for every internal link click. Deco 20:04, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Not really; you can use the referer header. --cesarb 22:11, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Woops, not sure how I overlooked that. Point taken. Deco 11:53, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Blocked: See Senator Joe McCarthy...

Hello Wikis, I desired very much to be a part of a group that is , for the most part, "copyleft", and I was shown what (Senator) Joe McCarthy was like and as a teen I felt his long reaching hand on my shoulders for the things that I believed in, and I knew that soon, people like his would point at me, if he was not stopped and his ultra-conservative right hand views were let to fester on society. Sen.Joe McCarthy was truly like in my history studies, but to have eit happen to you, personnally, in a public forum, is downleft humiliating. I was reading, about my favotite play "Fiddler On The Roof" and when I got past and basically it was too late to go much further, I still felt that Maria Karnilova deserved more than a 0.0 score for her efforts as I enjoyed the "Fiddler" so much. I understood Tevya's plights and his agitation with all, it seemed, eating away at his "traditions", so, for hours past my bedtime I went else where an basically "S-T-U-D-I-E-D" Maria Karnilova and I felt that she MUST be recognized for her works in the theatre. Also, here on and in wikipedia/wikimedia!!!

When I returned to the main "Fiddler" page, I wrote of Tevya and the constant Fiddler" his mind was seeing as he left the tailor, and on the way home started "talking to GOD" Himself, because he started talking, looking up, then after his divine prologue, he began to sing "If I were a Rich Man"...Lyrics by "Maria Karnilova", the HIT of the entire show, I think, with one exception: Tevya's dreaming up his own ideas of a dream for his supersticious wife Golde..the best plot a Jewish man could think of, and I wrote , work for word, the entire lyrics that Maria thought up for a Jewish Man losing his "foundations" of the Jewish community[ to know these , please read the Pentateuch, the first five (5) Books of the Holy Scriptures, which I cherish, and which I found that someone was following me and changing my stories! I knew I was "livibg with a "Hacker"...look up diryt back stabbing sub-ape.

He had done some thingto my writings as I found out that he hit another one of my writings or editorials.

He left words for me to receive the credit for, and this is not "JURIS PRUDENCE" as I lost my rightsd to buy and sell on eBay because of, (so far 7 excuses, as eBay cannot nail down what I had done after only 7 sales this turn, as I was a member of eBay since the year 2000, and this froup of binary idiots, just pirated my site and filled everything I toughed into filth!

I felt horribly "Blacklisted" and the only things that came into mind was the books that I read as a teen ager..my favorite was "Black Like Me" where a white man undergoes bodily changes to find out what it feels to "BE" BLACK..I ended up being so anti-biased, I refused to ever hurt another person for these "under-the- skin" hatreds that the hater will never share with you, but this shadow of mine who, because, he uses wireless and infrared adaptors, violated my machine, learned my passwords, and I found out who he was by doing what we had done in the NAVY: I "Pinged" his calls, and it was coming right from AOL Headquarters in Dullas, Va. the handle he used was domains@aol.net..his phone number was there and all. His signals were always coming from the "middle east">Europe>from ASIA> and always to Salina, Kansas,> and right to our >Capitol,and AOL, Dullas, VA. as I informed the FBI and IFCC (now known as the "[I3C.gov])"one night I had 565 "hits" on my ports to try to get in as he was running a website from my computer, and I could NOT and would not return the favor. I received so much ad-email, spoof e-mail, phishing, and offers all designed to get vital information from me, as if I was a greedy hog.

Sirs.../ Ladies, I am a man of 60 years of age this upcoming Sept. 09, 1006, and I had seen a great deal, but never had I been pointed out in a "COMMUNNIST LINEUP", held by Sen. Joe McCarthy himself...this "Kabala" and another name , which , I apologize...I forgot, as I age, it happens often. But I know a bunny, as it hops, and grinds his cud with his front teeth, he looks , acts and feels and smells like a bunny...therefore???......

All, indications proved that this "Irritant Supreme" has liabled and slandered me as we share the same I.P. number, as he comes to you and other forums, through my "spirit" and you cannot see who I am, really!

Other than being 60 this year, I have been a practicing Christian Minister since June 10, 1970, when I took off my long hair, gave up smoking, dope, grass, and playing in my favorite past-time...being the best durn Bass player that many had come across....but, for the sake of the HOLY NAME of GOD, I told the "guys" my interests are clashing" between being a Rockin' Hippie, and a Christian...nobody told me that it was, my inner self, or "Christian trained Conscience" told me that useng filthy language, even ,terms that imply cusses, but are not quite...to me it was still the same "spirit" that lies in the darkness.

So, as "Kavala" has said I would not use phrases like "motherfucker"...(as a matter of fact a euphamism of the swear, IS THE SWEAR, in a mask!)...which was in my second edition and , at this time I am in a quandry as to whom it was about. My mind, as I was smashed into a windshield, in a 172 Cessna Skyhawk" and disabled for the rest of my life.

How I enjoyed debate clubs, and I know that wikipedia is not, but a place of facts as things even change, we can allow ourselves to change also, so when I would be researching an item to sell, if it was in Wikipedia/wikimedia, I would leave a note on the bottom that my views can be found where?? HERE! So, I am not the sort to trash my own home"

But, the surprise hit me so hard, when I saw that image of a "palm stopping me from doing any editing in being a "wiki", which in my heart, I fully believe in, not 100%, but, a good share moves me!

My llast words for now, is :I NEVER used an out of place term, as for 38 years I have had control of my tongue,(see: James, 3:5-10, as it fits like a piece of a puzzle.

But, sirs , eBay has just said it, I must hand over to them , my driver's license, my, income, statements from the banks in which I use, "copy of a recent credit card, or statement, a bank statement" (I'm quoting now as I have the letter right here, a Government issued ID, a utility bill statement, (clearly showing my address.(Do not send a "COPY" of a credit card...(what? they want the card itself??)..this is to process my appeal, for allogations for which I proved every statement against me to be proportionately or according to the proponderence of the evidence....I was right, so they jumped from accusation to accusation.

I have been with them since the year 2000, under many and sundry names as I had to keep closing my account, and build it all back up many times.

Hackers are no longer, harmless kids, when learning HTML or Java, write mystery notes to your computer...they are vicious animals as this man has shown you.

And, men/ladies, being a decent person, is what I am I would never take a position for Maria Karnilova and speak of Tevya feeling like he is trying to keep his balance in life and trying to pass it off to his family as they eat poor Tevya's spiritual traditions away...I know, as MY daughters, (one of two), left the Christian beliefs, and decided "witchcraft had something to it"..so as I saw and read "Fiddler" I hurt and was in pain, and when a woman such as Maria Karnilova was NOT given ONE WORD...after writing for 20000 musicals could NOT go on without a word.

I ask you to please reconsider the "BLOCKING" of myself because this animal follows me and even steals my e-mail before I am done with it...this is one way I know "HE MUST BE A TECH for AOL"...as when a tech laughs at your plight, and I can tell when he is answering after the female autonimatron asks 50 questions, instead of 3-5 questions, I am gruelled there so I get disgusted, and walk off hanging up the phone!

Gentlefolk. I will suffer for the things that I do wrong to someone else or blastpheme God Himself, but, please, please do NOT judge me on the basis of a shared I.P., so...beware, there'd be dragons!

Oh , yes, another favorite book and film that I always enjoyed was 1984... a prophecy come true, except we have chosen to wear the blinders of ignorance! So, NOW, anyone can control us: eBay, AOL< who calls me one of their finest customers, and now WIKIPEDIA..well, I may never will be a "WIKI" and I thought that it was important that I would be as I could editorialize tha many things that I had learned in the past 55 years or more!

Richard Layzon (perkydan60@aol.com)172.144.205.64 02:20, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Advice to AOL users. As I see it you have three choices. 1) put up with occasional blocks because of how AOL allows its users to connect to the internet, 2) figure out how to avoid AOL's proxies when contributing to Wikipedia, or 3) get a different ISP. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:59, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

There is no tech support guy out to ruin your name - there's simply no technically feasible way he could keep tabs on you. Changing your ISP will secure your freedom from interference and also save you a nice chunk of money every month - give it a try, maybe even upgrade to broadband. Many sites routinely ban large blocks of AOL users out of necessity. It's worth the effort to switch, I promise. Deco 11:57, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

commons cross-link

The various languages nicely cross-link to similar pages, with special code to put the cross-link in the margin (on monobook). Is there a way to do the same for Commons? There's a fellow making floating infoboxen for similarly named categories and templates, but it would be cleaner to have a nice inter-wiki cross-link instead.

--William Allen Simpson 10:12, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

this was a very similar suggestion, but for links to wiktionary rather than commons. Both are a good idea for the same reason. Martin 10:20, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

bug 6347

--William Allen Simpson 19:24, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Image Loading Problem

I uploaded a new version of this image [[Image:UEIN_Crest.png]]

However, now the page that it links to (St_Christopher_Iba_Mar_Diop_College_of_Medicine)won't display the image. It had no trouble with the previous version of the image. The image is loading perfectly find in it's own image page. I'm having the same problem in Firefox & IE. I tried reverting and uploading the new version again, but that didn't help. I tried flushing the cache of both browsers, but that also made no difference.

This was the code used to display the image:

[[Image:UEIN_Crest.png|left|80px]]

Any ideas on what could be causing this to happen?

should be okay now. --iMeowbot~Meow 17:59, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! Worked like a charm! Spikey 20:08, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem with FoxTrot. What do I need to do to get it to work? Starwiz 01:09, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

And as soon as I post this, it shows up again! Kind of...I'll start another heading.

block list bug?

The block list shows that 24.117.53.180 (talk · contribs) was blocked by Freakofnurture. However, the block log shows that the IP was never blocked. Anyone know what's going on? --Ixfd64 10:00, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Probably the usual: an expiring conflicting autoblock. Just block again and again until it sticks. --cesarb 16:12, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

The image at Isaac Pitman

At Isaac Pitman there's supposed to be an image of him, Image:Isaac.jpg. The image description page shows the picture correctly, a black-and-white picture of a 19th-century gentleman. But, at least for me, the article shows a completely different image, one of a young man and woman talking to each other, squeezed into the dimensions of Image:Isaac.jpg. What's going on?

Looks fine to me at the moment. --Daduzi ^talk 16:30, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Very weird. I'm on a different computer now than I was when I wrote the above, and it's still wrong for me. I'm using Firefox on Windows XP if that's relevant. User:Angr 17:04, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

That makes it even weirder since I'm also using Firefox (1.5.0.4) on XP. http://img.waffleimages.com/img/7bec9da7f94b71a60cd309aea0c439cf7bf4ba90/Isaac.png is what I see when I load the page. Maybe a stupid question, but have you tried purging the cache (ctrl*shift+R)? --Daduzi ^talk 17:15, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I have tried purging the cache, several times. Not that it really should have been necessary, since the "wrong" image was what I saw the very first time I ever opened the article on either of the computers that I use. What I see is at Image:Angr screenshot.PNG. User:Angr 17:25, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Then I have no idea what's going on, I'm afraid. Someone a bit more familiar with the inner witchcraft of mediawiki could probably be more constructive. Sorry. --Daduzi ^talk 18:08, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Colors

I know how to do back ground colors the code is bgcolor but what is the code for text colors or the words you type. Thanks John R G 06:43, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Try a span. --Splarka (rant) 07:23, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Help with ParserFunctions

I need a way so if it is at least 14 days before User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start, then it displays User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice, but when it is between User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start and User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/End, it should display User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Page. The reason I want to do this is so I just have to update a few pages. This helps, because a) I can update it ahead of time and b) I don't have to put the template on my pages when I have to.

What I have so far is:

{{ #switch: {{CURRENTDAY}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 14 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|14}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 13 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|13}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 12 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|12}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 11 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|11}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 10 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|10}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 9 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|9}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 8 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|8}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 7 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|7}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 6 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|6}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 5 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|5}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 4 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|4}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 3 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|3}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 2 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|2}}
| {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 1 }} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice|1}}
| {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} = {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Page}}
| #default = 
}}

What I am stuck on is how do I make a {{ #expr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} + 1 }}, +2, +3, etc.. based on the days of User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Duration instead of having to add more +'s or removing some? I just want to make it so if the duration is 5 days, then it does +1, +2, +3, +4, +5. But if it is 2 days, then it just does +1 and +2. Is this even possible? Or is there a different way? GeorgeMoney ^(talk) 05:31, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

How about as follows? Revised to accommodate possibility of CURRENTDAY changing. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:05, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

{{#ifexpr: ( {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} - 14 ) <= {{CURRENTDAY}} and
    {{CURRENTDAY}} < {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} |
    {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Notice}} }}
{{#ifexpr: {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} <= {{CURRENTDAY}} and
    {{CURRENTDAY}} < ( {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Start}} +
       {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Duration}} ) |
    {{User:GeorgeMoney/Wikibreak/Page}} }}

Difficulties with staying logged in

I am currently browsing using Safari 1.2.4, using Mac OX and a Hughes Net connection under the username Archaeo. However, whenever I log in, I am immediately logged out when I switch to a new page. I have tried to enable all cookies, and I've clicked on the "Remember Me" box. If this question has been asked before, I appologize profusely for wasting your time. Thank you. (N.B. I am not the vandalizing user that this IP address seems to be associated with.) 66.82.9.53 21:03, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Satellite internet systems are notoriously unreliable for any web site that requires login sessions. Contact your service provider for instructions on disabling proxies (which may reduce performance) or switch to a network provider that is not gratuitously incompatible with much of the web. --Brion 03:30, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Article protections temporarily 'removing' articles from watchlists

Ever since protections began appearing in page histories, there has been a problem to do with articles showing up on watchlists. Basically, when someone protects a page, the article is removed from your watchlist until someone makes another edit to it. Can we do something about this - either showing the protection in watchlists, or showing the previous edit? Thanks, — FireFox 20:08, 09 July '06

This is a known issue. --Brion 03:30, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Signature help

Can someone PLEASE tell me how to change my signature into a different font,color, size, etc.? Everyone but me seems to know how to change their signatures. HELP!-Andrewia 19:48, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't know the exact page, but WP:SIG should be fine. I actually made my sig from looking at other people's sigs and doing a whole lot of show previews to see what it looked like. Yanksox 19:55, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! That helped a lot.-Andrewia 20:27, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Right now, your signature doesn't contain any links. It's considered good practice to link it to either your user page, your talk page, or both. Zetawoof^(ζ) 07:55, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Search engine is lacking

If you search for the island Morro de São Paulo, and write "morro de sao paulo" in the search box, you are not directed to the article "Morro de São Paulo" which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morro_de_São_Paulo

This is not very good. The article should be found with this string, as most searchers will not bother with upper case letters or accents. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.52.69.223 (talk • contribs) 14:28, Jul 09, 2006 (UTC)

You can fix the problem yourself: create the page morro de sao paulo and make it a Redirect to Morro de São Paulo. And please sign your comments by putting --~~~ at the end. --Daduzi ^talk 15:42, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I often do that for simple and common typos, but once you get used to Google's autocorrection of typos in search terms you get spoiled, so I also often use the Google site search when I REALLY want to find something within Wikipedia. Spalding 15:47, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I think the point is not that it's a typo, but that it's a differently cased version of the existing redirect Morro de Sao Paulo. For most article titles, the hueristics "go" uses to find the article you're looking for makes it appear to be case insensitive. These heuristics don't work for some article titles, specifically ones where the words are not all upper case or not (except for the first) all lower case. You can fix this yourself, by adding a redirect matching the heuristics "go" uses (see Wikipedia:Go button). In this case, I'd suggest Morro De Sao Paulo (note the upper case "De"). I've responded about this enough times that I should clearly add this to a FAQ page somewhere. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:14, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Redesigned special characters box

The special characters box under the edit window had a nice redesign recently, organising it into sections like Greek and IPA. However, some of the most basic IPA characters are not there (unless my browser is at fault), the most obvious being schwa - ə. (Note that this is not the same as ɘ or ɚ which do appear.) Where can I put in a request for new characters to be added? I've searched around and can't find any discussion of this box anywhere. --Blisco 13:02, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Besides here (and archives of the technical village pump), the box is discussed at MediaWiki talk:Edittools. --Interiot 13:47, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Spam blacklist

Apparently the spam blacklist is not letting me make an edit. I just wanted to add a scrollbar to the page User:69.145.123.171/registering, adding the code

<div style="border: thin solid blue; background: white; padding: 7px; font-size: 10pt; overflowWWWW: auto; heighTTTTTt: 200px;">
text that was here already before I made the change
</div>

.

I made a different edit and added a period, and it let me. I looked at the show changes, and even it says all I am adding is the <div style="blah">. I don't know why it considers that spam. The only external links on the page are links that just link back to WP. It is not spyware, because it let me add the period. Any ideas? It won't even let me save this page. GeorgeMoney ^(talk) 05:20, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I just looked at the message, and it says "The following text is what triggered our spam filter: overflowWWWW: auto; heighTTTTt:". (remove the WWW and TTT). GeorgeMoney ^(talk) 05:22, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Confirmed. Just the string overflow:auto;height: (written with HTML entities here to avoid the blacklist) is enough to trigger it. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 06:03, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Update from IRC (#mediawiki, quoted with permission):

<@TimStarling> Vyznev: the reason that string is banned is because wiki spammers were using it for a while to hide spam links
<@TimStarling> invisible divs
<@TimStarling> I gather they were already having trouble with display:none being blocked, hence the more unusual method
<@TimStarling> oh, actually I bet the search engines filter out hidden links

—Ilmari Karonen (talk) 06:07, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

In fact they're still using it.

<brion> oh i still see that shit all the time

<brion> http://wp.wikidev.net/User:203.220.82.252?curid=1739&diff=0&oldid=5039

We could probably make it more specific if it's causing problems, or you could work around it. -- Tim Starling 06:29, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I know for a fact that googlebot will follow display:none links. I had been using that hack to modify some software, but ended up having to change my methods after google started grabbing up the hidden content. Dragons flight 06:37, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I did find a workaroud to my original problem by making the height: at a previous point in the <div style= .GeorgeMoney ^(talk) 06:39, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Search Engine

I don't think the internal search engine is much good in wikipedia. A small error in typing can result in not finding the appropriate article. Maybe one of those internally enhanced Google searches would be good to solve the problem. Hobo 04:49, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(perennial_proposals)#Better_search_feature.-gadfium 04:54, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

An entry FAILS to link to an the existing article, even though it exists

In the Symbology article, I tried to link Symbolic Anthropology, which there is an article for, but it becomes red. It is now doing that for Victor Turner, as well, even though there is a correct article for that too. People keep editing the links out (because they are red), even though these articles DO exist, and they are the CORRECT topic. How do I get a link to connect?

I would try making sure you have the links exactly right. Is Anthropology capitalized? not likely. Also make sure you don't have an additional space at the end of the title. Try this: Symbolic anthropology AdamBiswanger1 03:42, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I just added it to the article, and it works. -- Donald Albury^(Talk) 03:50, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps I cross-corrected it, and now it doesn't work again. 9 July 2006

It looks like you are trying to add the article to categories named "Symbolic anthropology" and "Victor Turner". There are no such categories, nor should there be. Symbolic anthropology and Victor Turner have already been added to the "See also" section of the article. I'll remove the inappropriate categories for you.-gadfium 04:51, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

2:35 my time O.k. I figured out what was wrong. Apparently (who woulda thunk it) in order to have a link in the category part, the topic has to be a formal "Category". So I found some relevant categories and put those in there. Some one else fixed the "See also" links that weren't connecting. I think the problem for those was I spelled "Symbolic Anthropology" with a capital "A".

I still wish people would check to see if an article exists before they erase it totally. People were taking them (Victor Turner and Symbolic anthropology) out of the "See also" section, too, just because it was spelled with a capital "A". And, I don't know why they took out Victor Turner... I think it is much better now, thank you for your help! :)

Please add to Bugzilla bug #4899

Would someone with a Bugzilla account please add this comment to bug #4899 -- Thanks

---

I'm finding this too in the Wikipedia article Al Gore. If you go down to the section "Mosaic" and click its "edit" link, you get the following two sections (and not the correct section) in the edit window. This is the only case I'm getting two (wrong) sections for one edit link, but all of the edit links in the lower area of the page at least seem to be "off by one".

Note the long page size ("This page is 61 kilobytes long -- This may be longer than is preferable"), complex sub-sub sections, and my archaic browser Netscape 7.02.

[3] --Brion 01:07, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Saving image deletes number string in name

When one user tells me that when he saved an article page, it shortened the names of the images in the article by dropping a string of numbers from the name. See Talk:Chrysobalanus icaco for the discussion. The images in questions were Image:Chrysobalanus icaco starr 031108 2161.jpg, Image:Chrysobalanus icaco starr 031108 2013.jpg and Image:Chrysobalanus icaco starr 031108 2137.jpg. Apparantly the number strings look like valid telephone numbers in the Netherlands, and the user has Skype on his computer. Is this an idiosyncracy of his setup, or should reupload these images with different names? -- Donald Albury^(Talk) 23:54, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Help correcting interlanguage link

There is a problem with interlanguage links to the Aramaic Wikipedia. Currently, any interlanguage link to this wiki gives the text ܕܥܒܪܝܛ in the other languages box. This word is d-`Ivrīṭ, which means in Hebrew. Obviously, this is wrong. How can I change the text of the link to say ܐܪܡܝܐ (Aramaic)? I'm a sysop on this wiki, but not on arc. — Gareth Hughes 13:14, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I think this can only be done by a developer. --cesarb 15:35, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Where is the most appropriate place to flag up this error o a developer? — Gareth Hughes 15:48, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Either bugzilla or the wikitech-l mailing list. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:16, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Word has it they sometimes read this page too. A reference would be appreciated, we hate it when we end up changing language names to obscenities. -- Tim Starling 04:15, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if you can find appropriate online references that ܐܪܡܝܐ is 'Aramaic'. I can tell you that it is upheld on p 29 of Payne Smith A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (ISBN 1-57506-032-9). Syriac is the variety of Aramaic that all entries have been written in so far. Is that OK? — Gareth Hughes 13:25, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

An entry links to an incorrect article, how do I unlink it?

I think I know how to edit within an article. But on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Sacramento there is a Horace Smith listed as a past mayor of Sacramento. The name may be correct however the Horace Smith artcle that comes up when I click on that name is a different Horace Smith. How can I edit the connection, in other words make the name not link to THAT Horace Smith article? Thanks, Jay

You could set the link to Horace Smith (politician) and then either create the article or else leave it for someone else to do. If you do make the Horace Smith (politician) article you'll also need to create Horace Smith (disambiguation), put all the Horace Smith articles in there and change the message on the top of the Horace Smith article to point to the disambiguation page (you can use {{Otheruses}} to do it automatically). --Daduzi ^talk 07:09, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Edit conflict! But I'll post my message anyway since I spent 5 minutes on it ^_^ --Splarka (rant) 07:11, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

As there doesn't seem to be an article on that particular person (prefix search), your best bet is probably to change the link in that list to Horace Smith (politician) with [[Horace Smith (politician)|Horace Smith]] (even if he wasn't a career politician, it is apparently what he was notable for). Then, you should check Special:Whatlinkshere/Horace Smith and see if any of the other links point to him instead of to one of the other two, in which case correct the link. Note that they will be red until an article is created (but most of that list is).

Also, if you feel all three are equally notable (or semi-notable) you could contact the major contributor to Horace Smith (of which there seem to be few) or leave a note on the discussion page, indicating you'd like Horace Smith to be a disambiguation page to all three (example: Tom_Jones). --Splarka (rant) 07:11, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Sorting What links here

Would it be technically possible to sort the special page What links here by namespace, project space, talk, etc.? Or perhaps just namespace and non-namespace or any variation? I presume something like Interiot's contrib tree might be a source of code, but I know almost nothing about such things. The reason I bring this up is that many of the more linked to articles have this special page cluttered with links to talk pages, etc.--Kchase02 T 04:35, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Similar question: is there any way to exclude template transclusions from an image's File links list, to only show articles and templates in which the image is directly used? ~ Booya ^Bazooka 04:47, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Try my whatlinkshere tool, and/or vote for Bug 4624. For what it's worth, the on-wiki whatlinkshere sorts by page creation time, I believe the oldest pages at the top, if that helps any. --Interiot 05:48, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

You have created some truly awesome tools, Interiot. Thanks for pointing it out to me. Is it linked up somewhere already? Perhaps I just missed it.--Kchase02 T 05:53, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Hopefully all toolserver tools will eventually be linked to from TSTOC or the Projects list, is that what you mean? --Interiot 05:56, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I meant a wikipedia page like Wikipedia:Edit count, where I found your other tools, but if people know where the above pages are, that's obviously the important part. Why are the pages in English, but the website is German? Is that where the server is physically located?--Kchase02 T 06:01, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I guess m:Toolserver/TStoc#Interiot is supposed to be the most up-to-date, but the toolserver version is more informative and easier to navigate. The toolserver is a machine that has access to most of wikimedia data, but it was donated to Wikimedia Deutschland by Sun, so they own it. --Interiot 17:51, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Please help me nominate Pjotro for deletion!!

I put the template on the page Pjotro. And filled out my reasons for the nomination Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pjotro -- basically the character was made up as a promotional piece for Nokia - see [4] but I can't seem to get it listed on the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 July 7. It shows up in the text code but not in the saved list.

I don't understand. I have tried over and over. KarenAnn 18:45, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Works for me, Pjotro is listed as section 120 on today's AFD. -- Omniplex 19:15, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

It had no header, and has since been fixed. Prodego ^talk 01:36, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Artcles with the same name?

I was going to create an article about a American magazine called Photo. There is allready an article about a French magazine called Photo (magazine). What should I do? Bolesjohnb 17:53, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

If you mean the magazine called "American PHOTO", I'd suggest American PHOTO (with a redirect from American Photo). -- Rick Block (talk) 18:16, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your help but the magazine is called just "Photo", it is from the fifties. I was thinking about moving Photo (magazine) to Photo (French magazine) and then creating Photo (American magazine). Would that fit into the wikipedia format? Bolesjohnb 18:53, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a reasonable plan, and if anyone ever creates American PHOTO it won't collide (but they should clearly have mutual disambiguation links to each other). -- Rick Block (talk) 19:09, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I've changed everything around allthough I put it under PHOTO (American magazine). I created a Photo (magazine) disambiguation page and fixed the few links to Photo (magazine) to Photo (French magazine). Bolesjohnb 20:10, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Requesting addition of a new HELP page and also...

In most cases, people use DIV and SPAN instead of tables on Wikipedia. But I couldn't find any info on it except some incomplete information on meta.wikimedia.org here. That same incomplete help article doesn't exist on this Wikipedia, but I don't know where to request it. In the requested articles categories, there are no categories for "help pages" or "miscellaneous." I also need the article (or the information elsewhere), because I want to know the various classes and styles you can use with spans and divs on Wikipedia and the specific syntax. --Robocracy 16:43, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

See WP:CLASS and Help:User style. GeorgeMoney ^(talk) 17:24, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

IMO the m:Help:Cascading style sheets article is far from ready, at the moment it's just a fork of m:Help:User style with some of its worst parts removed. If you like it anyway just copy it, adding two dummy templates needed here (Wikipedia specific help and header) is simple, somebody will do it if you don't. But it would be more interesting if you start to work on this wannabe-master help page. You could be bold and start from scratch. If all you want are some technical details about <span> and <div> read XHTML or look into Template talk:-. -- Omniplex 19:04, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Help with deck template

I need help with finishing a template. It would probably take 30 seconds or so of a veteran templater's time to help me. NorrYtt 16:42, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Responding at user talk:NorrYtt. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:18, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

How do I list article for deletion so community can comment on it.

I listed Clarity Systems because it seemed clearly a promotional piece. Within a few minutes, the author removed the template without making any changes to the article. I have been looking at the deletion templates and can't seen to get the code to work when I try to list this article.

Either I can't get the template on the page correctly, or when I try to list it on the page for comments, I make mistakes there and it doesn't show up.

This article Clarity Systems is one that I think needs more than just the author's judgment to decide whether it is a promotional piece. Sorry for not understanding the process! KarenAnn 14:26, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

You seem to be doing fine; I suggest you sign your name on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Clarity Systems, but that's all I can see. That's one of the problems with prodding — tag removal is considered enough of a contention to require a listing on AFD. æ² ✆ 2006-07-07t14:50z

I just now did sign entry but it is still not showing up on the list (even though it is entered there and you can see it in Editing: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 July 7 KarenAnn 15:07, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

You might just need to refresh the page (could be in your browser's cache). SB Johnny 15:13, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! Did work. KarenAnn 16:00, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Now I am having exactly the same problem trying to get Identify software on the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2006 July 7 and have signed it and emptied browser cache, etc. -- and I am talking about listing it 5 or 6 times now and it doesn't show up on the list. KarenAnn 17:02, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I just tagged that page as a copyvio. It's basically a copy of the corporate web site's "about" page. Left the AfD tag intact, which isn't usual, but it's clear that page has to go. --John Nagle 17:25, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Autoblocker and already blocked IPs

What happens when a blocked user trips the autoblocker, but thier IP is already blocked? I suspect that the autoblocker blocks the IP for 24 hours and the block expires even though the IP block may have been for much longer. Is this the case? Theresa Knott | Taste the Korn 10:03, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

The blocking code checks if the IP is already blocked and won't add a new block unless the autoblock would extend beyond the existing IP block. Dragons flight 11:24, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually as I look at the blocking code again, I think I had the sign of the effect wrong, that an autoblock is added unless doing so would extend the length of the IP block. If that is correct then the kind of conflict you suggest is entirely plausible. Dragons flight 11:30, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I thought so. I've seen willy on wheels be able to edit despite the fact that his IP was long term blocked and i think this is the reason why. Is this easy to fix? Could we keep it simple and have the autoblock check to see if the IP is already blocked and if so do nothing? Because reducing an IP block to 24 hours if it's already been blocked for longer than this makes no sense whatever. Theresa Knott | Taste the Korn 13:19, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Ideally, the solution ought to be to stop short blocks from cancelling longer blocks, but that is apparently hard to do. Simply stopping the autoblocker from issuing any block against an IP that is already blocked should be easy to do, and I can't think of any negative consequences. Dragons flight 16:18, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

After running some tests, it appears that autoblocks can not be created against an account that is already IP blocked. However, the expiry of an autoblock that existed before any other IP block was issued will also kill the IP block. Dragons flight 00:54, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Ah I see. Thanks for your help. Theresa Knott | Taste the Korn 14:20, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

This will be fixed soon, I'm doing some work on blocks. -- Tim Starling 05:43, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Image not loading & need an editor!

I am total newbie. I have started a new article Gilbert Waterhouse I uploaded an image, but cannot seem to get it to link.Would appreciate help to tell me what I am doing wrong.

Secondly. it has become blatantly obvious to me that the amount of material I have in comparions to my time available to work on it means I will never complete this article. How can I enlist the help of a volunteer to send them the material - it would appeal to a volunteer interested in WW1 history

--Gonker44 23:49, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Your image works now, maybe a cache issue, see the FAQ above, it's somewhat tricky wrt images. -- Omniplex 04:59, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

copyright

hello, I started a small wiki (is uses wikimedia softwrae) and want to know where to change the text which appears beneath the edit-box (currently on wikipedia this is Do not violate any copyright! You agree to license all submissions under the GFDL. Use verifiable sources for encyclopedia content.

Could somebody tell me how to do this on Wikipedia? I'm quite sure it's the same on my small new wiki. thanks Sacca 02:44, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

The copyright text that is at the footer is MediaWiki:Copyright . GeorgeMoney ^(talk) 03:12, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

In fact, the text below the edit box which Sacca refers to is in MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning. -Splash - tk 11:50, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

See Special:Allmessages for a list of editable messages as well. --Splarka (rant) 07:31, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

thank you... --Sacca 09:44, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Template inclusion

Is there a way to list the articles that include a certain template? Like sort of a "What links here" for templates. I'm listing a TfD, and would like to see if the template in question is being used. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 23:13, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Special:Whatlinkshere lists transclusions as well as links, marked as such. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 00:29, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Sandbox Help

I'd like to add a new project to the sandbox. There are several there already by I dont know how to go about adding a new one. Is it even possible? Any help is welcome? Laurence 1 18:21, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Add it at Template:Please leave this line alone (sandbox heading). GeorgeMoney ^(talk) 22:08, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

IMO a sandbox should be an almost clean empty page where users feel invited to edit stuff and see the effect immediately. More instruction creep, links to dozens of other sandboxes, etc. ad nauseam are most unwelcome. It also doesn't work directly as you say, this template is itself updated by the Sandbot from another source (no details, professional spammers probably read the pump). -- Omniplex 12:22, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

My contributions

What is the best way to get a clean dump of the My contributions page for posting to the Special:Export textbox? ...IMHO (Talk) 17:39, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Yurik's query interface (example of your last 20). You'll probably have to filter out repeats yourself. --Splarka (rant) 07:48, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Fully justified

Has WP all of a sudden decided to, instead of normal justifiication, put it to fully justified? I think it looks horrible, as the history pages to articles are all spread out everywhere. Iolakana|^T 17:33, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Do a forced reload or clear your cache. This is in fact the same problem as the one mentioned in the third FAQ at the top of this page (which I'll update shortly). --cesarb 18:43, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

How can I match the length of two boxes

I'd like to match the length of the Related WikiProjects and Related Portals in Portal:Portugal, but I don't know how to do it. Can someone help? Afonso Silva 11:40, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

You will have to use tables instead of divs. Gerard Foley 13:20, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

How? But is that compatible with the portal layout? Afonso Silva 14:24, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

The table solution doesn't seem to be compatible with the portal layout currently being used. I tried another solution: I put a div inside those both two boxes to force them to fill the available space (with 100% (of 49%) width and 10em height). It looks good in Firefox but not quite perfect in IE. --Splarka (rant) 07:40, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Width of edit summary text field

I'm having some problems with the edit summary text field. Whereas the main text entry field adjusts size to accomodate the (considerable) size of my display, the edit summary text entry field doesn't. This simply isn't working for me. It's much too small, less than a third of the width of my screen. When I'm editing sections with long names I have to scroll over in the edit summary text field just to see the end of the section name. It's inconvenient, and worse, it leads to me not using edit summaries as often as I should. Does anyone know how to fix this on a per-user basis, and once we get that done, maybe we should consider making the change site-wide? --Cyde↔Weys 03:58, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Try this in your monobook.css:

/* edit summary box - 100% wide */
input#wpSummary {
width: 100%;
}

It works, but it's a little ugly (the "Edit summary" text link will expand to 100% of the screen and will appear above the edit summary box instead of beside it. --james _{// bornhj (talk)} 04:18, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

This works great. What I've done is just use 80% instead of 100% — still allows a lot more width, without the ugly wrapping. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 04:56, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Automatically subst: user name

Is there any variable whose value is the name of the user? I'd like to generate it in Template:Prod in order to automatically produce the name of the user who tagged the article, and I'd prefer not to use ~~~ because the signature might contain a lot of extra code and might not close all its tags properly. (Liberatore, 2006). 11:55, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

There isn't one, according to m:Help:Magic words. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:13, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I requested that as a new feature: bugzilla:6553 (Liberatore, 2006). 12:37, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Image doesn't show in File links section of image page

Image:WoW Box Art.jpg shows no files linking to it. However, it is linked from World of Warcraft. Why doesn't this show? I was just about to tag it for speedy deletion as an orphaned image. __meco 10:36, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

There's definitely a link there now, did you do anything in the meantime? --iMeowbot~Meow 10:51, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

NUMBEROF PAGESINNS

The syntax for the NUMBEROF variables was simplified, the "raw" qualifier is now separated with a colon instead of a vertical bar (aka pipe ). See also Help:Variable with links maybe helping to find broken usages of the old format.

In theory this also affects PAGESINNS and PAGESINNAMESPACE, but these magic words were disabled, see Help:Magic words. The new magic word mentioned on WP:BRION

is not yet documented. The purpose of the old magic word raw: is still

. -- Omniplex 03:54, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

AllowSlowParserFunctions

Background here, if $wgAllowSlowParserFunctions is relevant, how about "exporting" it to the MediaWiki namespace for easy access without "bug a dev" procedure? Or the opposite approach, kill that setting plus PAGESINNS if it's too horrible. At the moment it's in limbo, in theory nice to have, in practice not essential. -- Omniplex 14:52, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Custom Signature

How do I modify my signature so that it appears like User:Draicone/Signature?

Please at least trim the code first; it's currently FIVE lines long, with a huge amount of redundant code. --cesarb 02:01, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I've taken a crack at shortening it, but it still would be nice if you could shrink it down more. That sig code will get substituted into every post you sign, so it's irritating when it takes up that much space in the edit window. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 07:14, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

To change your signature, modify your preferences, choose 'Raw signature', and put the sig code in the 'Signature' box. Please take note of the size issue first, though. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 07:14, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

download bot

Is there a bot I can use to download the text of all my contributions - even those that have been archived? ...IMHO (Talk) 23:40, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

*In the alternative what is the best method of downloading or otherwise obtaining a copy of all contributions you have made? ...as above. ...IMHO (Talk) 05:09, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Never mind but would have appreciated a ref to Special:Export. ...IMHO (Talk) 17:33, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Reporting a possible copyright violation -- can't figure out code

The instructions on the Template message say to go to go to Wikipedia Problems page and paste in:

* {{subst:article-cv|Template messages/Maintenance}} from [http://example.org]. ~~~~

However, after I do that, I don't know what else to do. I know how to substitute the URL for example.org. But after that, I get it wrong. I usually end up with Template messages/Maintenance in red. And the (history - last edit) is either missing or (if it is there) it doesn't link to the article I am reporting.

I usually end up having to copy someone else's entry and then figuring out how to substitute my own report into it.

What is the secret? KarenAnn 18:53, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Don't look at the code from the Templale messages page, copy it from the tag that you have placed on the article. Kotepho 19:16, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Table conversion

I use Excel to create tables because of the may, many advantages using Excel provides. However, the HTML table that Excel builds is extremely large due to the details Excel utilizes. I need a way to convert some tables which are very sophisticated to Wikipedia markup. Is there a software available that I can use to do this conversion? Never mind found it! ...IMHO (Talk) 13:22, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Adding a custom infobox to articles

I made Template:Infobox Northern Irish location for use in Northern Irish locations. (Gilnahirk for an example) but I don't know how to incorporate it into my articles! Can someone help me here?

It's not any normal one too - I may have made it incorrectly, but I am custom making that one to support the Template:Location map feature, so I am hoping to have the ability to add the lat and lon like; lat = x.xx lon = x.xx

Thanks. --Dom0803 12:29, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Is there some reason template:Infobox City won't do (the map with a locator dot can be put into the infobox)? There's an effort underway to standardize on this template for all city articles within Wikipedia. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:08, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Well the infobox I created isn't for city's as such - or at all really. It was created intentionally for use in articles for towns and villages and the like. Apart from anything I'm doing it for the education. --Dom0803 13:59, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Commercial links

I'm repeating this question as I haven't yet had a useful response. I seem to be coming across more and more WP articles with blatant advertising links. I've read through WP:LOP and WP:NOT but I haven't been able to find any specific policy on this. Surely purely advertising links that don't contain encyclopedic information should be removed? I would like to be able to cite WP policy before launching a purge.--Shantavira 09:50, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Probably better asked at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) --Daduzi ^talk 10:11, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Better yet, try asking at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spam. SB Johnny 10:14, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Found the answer at Wikipedia:Spam.--Shantavira 11:22, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

CANT upload a picture!!

halow!! i totallyyyy cannoottt upload a pikk!!! whats with the lisence thing, i just cant figure it out!!!

can sum1 plzzz plzz plzzzzzz give me simple understandable directions??

i tried to fix it but it all got muddled up( like me!!) plz help me put here. thnks!!

tulika — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tulika 99 (talk • contribs) 00:10, 3 July 2006

I'll take this to your talk page, you've run into more of a copyright snaggle than a technical problem. --iMeowbot~Meow 04:44, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Broken history + possible vandalism

I noticed an out of place template on an older article. Somehow, Template:Afd top managed to be included here in the article.

Trying to see who put it there, I went to the [history]. On that page, there are a large number of consecutive entries by Sam Vimes; all of them are broken. The template wasn't there before them, but it was there after, so it must have been included in his edits.

What is causing this? Is it a random glitch or could somebody be trying to hide something in those edits? -- kenb215 03:05, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

While I cannot find the revision where it appeared (the revisions are absurdly long, and there are way too many of them), I know what's going on. What you are seeing is not {{afd top}}, but {{afd}}. That article was part of an evil experiment by User:Jguk, which transcluded whole articles within a larger article. This being highly confusing, it probably caused someone to put one of the component articles on AfD, and the damaged renmants of the tag remained within the article when the component pieces were finally merged into a sane article. If you can somehow find the original component article, you will be able to restore the contents of the section (even if it has later been deleted; it can be easily undeleted for that purpose). --cesarb 06:09, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Found them: Nottinghamshire v Kent 20-23 May 2005 and Hampshire v Glamorgan 20-23 May 2005 ([5]). If you want to see the whole debate, you can start at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cricket matches articles. --cesarb 06:16, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Userpage Formatting

Hello. I wanted to edit my userpage by condensing my userboxes into two rows on either side of my userpage. What is the formatting for doing this? Also, the title of my userboxes is skills and interests. Do you know how to format one row skills and one interests? If you visit my userpage you'll know what I'm talking about. Thanks. --Clyde Miller 01:23, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Is something like this roughly what you're talking about? If you look at Template:Boxboxtop, you can see all of the parameters for it — the one you're looking for is align to put one of the boxes on the left. I warn against doing this, though, because it uses up a lot of horizontal space; viewers with lower horizontal resolutions may have difficulty, because it leaves little room for text in the middle. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 02:17, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I used the formatting you used on your sandbox demo and I like the way it looks. There isn't that much text on my userpage, so I'm not really going to worry about the horizontal space issue. If someone can't see my userpage I will either change it so they can, or just have them talk to me on my talk page. Thanks for your help.--Clyde Miller 16:31, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I added a secondary page. Thanks for everything. --Clyde Miller 20:58, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

How to add structure to a list

Hello. I'd like to display structure in a hierachical list using wikipedia text markup

The result should provide the same infomation as this example:

File:Things (classification).PNG

What I want to know is how I can include the lines? (I am already aware of use of colons and asterisks.) Is this possible. Thank you.HappyVR 19:40, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

So far, when similar structure are needed (for sport event articles, notably), very complex markup has tobe used, so I'd assume the answer is "no". Circeus 00:16, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

If you've got a link to any sport page that uses the complex markup I'd like to have a look at it - if it can be done I'll have a go.HappyVR 01:49, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

The easiest way to do this is using tables and images. It's not easy. A software extension could make it easy, but that's unlikely for such a narrow purpose. In short, it's probably best to forget about it. Deco 00:18, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Thats a shame - it seemed like all I might need was the 'codes' for two 'T' characters, 2 lines and a right angle? Maybe such characters don't exist.HappyVR 01:49, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually, as I've just discovered, such characters do exist and seem to display okay in IE7 and Mozilla; see box drawing characters. I haven't tried IE6 though. Deco 02:18, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I was looking for, but know I need to check if everyone will be able to actually see them if I use them.├>HappyVR 02:44, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Sorry if this is too obvious, but you might be able to do a rough approximation of what you want with <pre></pre> tags. older ≠ wiser 02:27, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

All Things
   |
   |---Things without legs
   |    |
   |    |---Houses
   |
   |---Things with legs
        |
        |--etc.

Useful - not sure what it does?

Thanks to both of you. This really helps.

I've tried a combination of the two - (not sure about 'pre' but I used it anyway)- what I need now is a way to 'turn off' the box around the text...HappyVR 02:44, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

  All Things
    │
    ├───Things without legs
    │    │
    │    └───Houses
    │
    └───Things with legs
         │
         └──etc.

Good thinking! I removed the border by using <pre style="border:0px;">. Deco 03:09, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

And I removed the background for ya using <pre style="background:none">. --Daduzi ^talk 04:00, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Excellent.HappyVR 11:44, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, this solution doesn't work if you need wikicode inside the tags, as at Family tree of the Greek gods. If you do, I don't know of any way to suppress the background and border. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:08, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Such a thing seems impossible at the moment. While the <pre> tag allows for HTML markup inside, the wiki doesn't permit wiki markup inside the tag. That leaves the question, is there any other tag that does preformatted text? Code sort of works:

All Things

   │
   ├───Things without legs
   │    │
   │    └───Houses
   │
   └───Things with legs
        │
        └──etc.

But not quite Kevin_b_er 22:33, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

All Things
   │
   ├───Things without legs
   │    │
   │    └───Houses
   │
   └───Things with legs
        │
        ├──etc.
        |
        └──Squid

? (Spaces used are U+2003 em spaces, &emsp; works too) Kotepho 00:18, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

That works though I don't know why, only there are gaps between the vertical lines on my browser, so I guess that all that needs to be done is change the line spacing - is this possible?HappyVR 16:41, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

One solution could be to (ab)use the family tree template…

All Things
				Things without legs
				Things with legs
						Squid

–Gustavb 23:54, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

How amazingly cool! AnAccount2 06:49, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

My Hero! Thanks.HappyVR 16:40, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

New Comment Section Using Internal Wikilink?

Is there a way to do via an internal wikilink -- as opposed to an external link -- the link that takes someone to the "new section" link for a talk page?

For example, right now, if I wanted to send someone to a link that opened a "new comment" section for them on my talk page, it would be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:WCityMike&action=edit&section=new

Is there a way to do that, somehow, using an internal wikilink instead? — Mike (talk • contribs) 15:10, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not completely sure, but I think the answer is no. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:44, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

You can use the CSS class "plainlinks" to get rid of the pointy-square-arrow, but that's lots of markup. Also, you can use {{fullurl:User talk:WCityMike|action=edit|section=new}} as the URL instead; it's shorter and more portable. æ² ✆ 2006-07-02t21:56z

Wikibooks transwiki

Came across this article the other day: Organic_lawn_management. It's definitely a how-to article. I'd like to transwiki it to WB where it can grow into a chapter or book (it has good information in it, but rather stubby), but not sure how to go about this.

My technical question is: is there a way to simply move an article to WB with the edit history? SB Johnny 11:42, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I've tagged it for transwiki; this is the standard way of moving pages from wiki to wiki. æ² ✆ 2006-07-02t13:30z

I've tried to figure out how this is done, but I really have trouble understanding the procedure. Would anyone be willing to tutor or mentor me on this? (Posting this on meta:transwiki as well). SB Johnny 16:20, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

www.alnaja7.org

I hope this is the correct board.

I am beginning to get seriously annoyed by links to www.alnaja7.org continously been posted in a number of programming articles, as these links have previously been discussed in the articles and decided to be of poor quality. These links were previously being placed by user:Alhoori, an now by User:Rehabe. Is there some standard system to stop this kind of behaviour? Also, why doesn't the search facility seem to find URLs in articles? Thank you Mrjeff 10:58, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Not the best place for link spam disputes, but for your technical question try this link. -- Omniplex 15:08, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Dynamic NavBar modifications

I want to do inline dynamic NavBars with variable toggle texts but could not figure out how to do it with the current NavBar code. I've posted some sample code to MediaWiki_talk:Monobook.js (Sample code passes toggle texts via a hack with the title attribute.) Seeking alternatives/comments. Gimmetrow 05:23, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Interface changes (fonts)

There have been various small changes to the interface recently, including the text styles for section headers. Is there any way for me to change them back? Ardric47 23:17, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Never mind...it was something with my browser. Ardric47 23:39, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Imports and transwiki (en.wiktionary)

As has been announced recently, Special:Import is back. En.wiktionary now has its import target synchronized towards en:wp so that Transwikis can happen directly, saving page histories, logging things automatically (for us, then) and converting {{templates}} into [[w:Templates]]. View wikt:Special:Log/import for two examples I tested. The newest feature I requested even allows imports to go directly in our Transwiki: namespace, which is another advantage over manual cut-n-pasting.

Anyone has ideas how this can change the Transwiki thing, balancing out the task between Wiktionary and Wikipedia volunteers? Special:Import is restricted to sysops, which means that the Wiktionary sysops could do the import while the Wikipedians could concentrate on getting the things logged and deleted, merged, redirected etc. here. Given the fact that WP:TL is considered to have a backlog, that should be considerd as a Good Thing™. It'll require some cross-project communication and cooperation, though.

(Right place to post?)

Cheers, — Vildricianus 19:03, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Basically, everybody who uses the import function on Wiktionary should log it at Wikipedia:Transwiki log. Logs on Wiktionary shouldn't be necessary anymore since it's already logged automatically there. As long as it shows up on Wikipedia's transwiki log, we'll pick it up somehow and know what to do with the articles. If you're up to it and are familiar with Wikipedia's inclusion policy, you can help us figure out what to do with the articles once exported (paths are listed at the Transwiki log page).

I'd be very much obliged if those importing at Wiktionary could kindly keep a continual eye on CAT:MtW: it has a tendency to fill up rapidly. It would help me if I could be told who to bug when CAT:MtW backs up now, as I won't be able to proactively do something about it, not having sysop powers on Wiktionary. Also, if Wiktionary already has an entry to which a transwikied article on Wikipedia would not add anything, it can probably be proposed for deletion before it's transwikied, saving a bunch of work. theProject 05:28, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Great jumping headers

The header line (USERNAME my talk my preferences my watchlist my contributions logout) on the main page does curious things periodically. When I move the mouse to any of the items on it, the whole header jumps from the right side to the left side of the screen. It doesn't jump back until the screen is refreshed, when it reappears on the right. This behavior has appeared intermittently over months... It's a little unnerving but there's no loss of functionality. Any ideas how to fix it? Hgilbert 13:18, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

I've heard of this happening to users of Internet Explorer 6. Report the bug to Microsoft. robchurch | talk 15:10, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

finding a reference

In a discussion which occurred within the last month (I think in a section entitled "Death" on the science reference desk page or on the Half-life talk page) I have a record of the following submission. Can you help me find out it the section was deleted or what happened since I have been unable to find its location anywhere in the Wikipedia. The only date I have is the date that the record was created on Wednesday, June 21, 2006 11:57:05 PM. ...IMHO (Talk) 06:12, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

---

Okay using your own criteria (above) of percentage remaining p=1/(2^(200/50)) consider this:

We want to know the percentage remaining after 200 years of any amount of anything that has a half life of 50 years.

We therefor apply the formula p=1/(2^(number of years/half-life)) or p=1/(2^(200/50)) or 1/16 or .0625 or 6.25%.

So it appears that since there is a percentage of 6.25% of the item left after 200 years that it does not matter what the item is or how much of the item there was to start off with. This is where your concept fails. For instance suppose that we start with only 10 items. How much will I have left after 200 years. That’s easy. I just multply .0625 times 10 and we get .625. Thus we have .635 items left after 200 years of the original 10 we started with. But what if the items are not divisible? What if there is not such a thing as .625 of the items we have and that any amount of the item that is less than one simply does not exist? Hummm... Since we can not divide an atom into parts by the method of Beta decay then sorry but even though we might have 6.25% of the original amount of the items left that percent is meaningless because 1.) we started with only ten items and 2.) each item is a complete and indivisible unit rather than a continuous value. If you apply half-life computation to the real world then you must take these facts into account.

---

Perhaps this (from the page history for the reference desk) is what you are looking for? I found it in your "User contributions". It also appears at Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Science/June 2006. Hope this helps.--GregRM 13:08, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Log-in program is malfunctioning - BIG TIME !!!!

I log in as Martial Law, then when I sig. a edit, this mess appears: 66.82.9.59. This mess could cause someone to accuse me of using socks or worse. I log in, only to be logged out by some glitch. I've done what I could do on my end to rectify this problem. 66.82.9.59 19:52, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Hasn't this issue been explained to you several times? --Brion 20:19, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Wiki Time

What is Wiki's standard "local time" for time stamping contributions? Is it possible to identify a user's time zone? Ptmccain 18:27, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) and no, not unless they amend their signature manually to indicate their time zone. -Splash - tk 19:56, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

also they might say on their user page where they live - you could work it out from that. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 00:55, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

53.5618°N 9.9652°E / 53.5618; 9.9652 Have fun with working that out. -- Omniplex 20:33, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Guten tag from 45.8917°S 170.4722°E / -45.8917; 170.4722 :) BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 01:35, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

:-)   I needed two sites, GeoURL and World time clock, to find your timezone. Oops, already Monday for you, from my POV it's still Sunday for some hours. -- Omniplex 15:39, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Editing an Article's Title

Well, I think I've made an error. I've added an article to Wikipedia that is titled "The Mayborn Museum Complex". After reading a bit more about Wikipedia I saw that using the word "The" in a title is discouraged. Is there any way I can change this?

Also, are there any sort of meta tags I need to add to an article to enable users to find the page easier through Wikipedia's Search? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cahbreis (talk • contribs) 16:03, 30 June 2006

Once your account is 4 days old, a 'Move' button will appear, and you can use that to move the page, along with its edit history to a new title. For now, someone else has already done this for you. The Wikipedia search engine only gets updated when a new database dump is complete. See the second bullet-point in the FAQ at the top of this page. Typically, however, Google picks up new pages within a few days. -Splash - tk 16:13, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Stopping google from indexing a talk page archive

Some talk pages I have been dealing with have what some participants consider personal attacks but others do not, and some particpants object to removing them altogether. The real objection is that the negative comments come up in a google search for one person's name. I had the idea that if the talk page was archived, and the archive was tagged with <nofollow>, or maybe <meta name="robots" content="noindex">, then the comments would no longer appear in google (after it updated, anyway. Will this work? More importantly, will it break some wikipedia policy? Thanks. Thatcher131 15:16, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

And what if someone wants to search for the attacks contained in this archive? I don't think it's up to anyone to decide what should and should not be pushed under the rug here. Before you go looking for the technical solution, I suggest first getting an answer to the policy questions, perhaps on the talk page of No personal attacks. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 22:14, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Any user who does not want to have his name found in a googlE search could use a pseudonym. --DLL 22:21, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Won't work. The correct method to prevent comments posted on a public web site from appearing in public archives and being made available to search engines...is not to post comments on a public web site. robchurch | talk 15:12, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Changing colour of text + difficulty uploading new version of pictures

I want to change the colour of texts that link to Wikipedia articles on a map that i made of the Roman Empire (see User:Daanschr/ Maptest). I think white would be good.

I can't upload new versions of pictures anymore. Wikipedia says that the picture has been uploaded succesfully, but the old piccture remains and it doesn't show on my user contributions.--Daanschr 12:48, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

You seem to be uploading fine. Also, uploads don't show in contribs, but in your user log.

I've set an example at User:Daanschr/ Maptest in white. However, you must define underline color too, because people with underline links enabled will see the default color (blue, red, purple, etc) under the color if you do not. It would be nice if we could edit the <A> (anchor) tag in a wikilink, where we could specify a color that would work for both underlined and non-underlined text, but as the anchor tags are generated by the wikicode we cannot. This method defines a span in the anchor which colors the text (crudely). You could ask for a class addition to MediaWiki:Common.css but that is probably futile. --Splarka (rant) 07:34, 1 July 2006 (UTC) Sidenote: There is a class="nounderlines" but as it does not use !important anyone set "Underline links: Always" in their Preferences will still see them.

Wrong. The declaration for .nounderlines a at MediaWiki:Common.css has a higher specificity than the declaration for a at the autogenerated CSS, so it always take precedence. There's no need for !important. --cesarb 23:02, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

How to purge an SVG?

Earlier I had problems with SVG not appearing, and it was solved by purging the image: [6]. I'm getting the same problem (this time at Image:Netscape-navigator-usage-data.svg), so I'd like to know: how do I purge an SVG?

Normally it should be the same process, but the .svg file (here) is giving me an XML error in Firefox 1.5.0.4/WinXP. That might have something to do with it. --james _{// bornhj (talk)} 11:52, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I didn't encounter any trouble on the Wikipedia side, the original problem may have been a local browser cache that needed clearing? Anyway, I added the missing namespace to that SVG so that Mozilla browsers won't choke on it. --iMeowbot~Meow 14:54, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Mansun/Redirecting

I was wanting to create pages for the band members for the English band Mansun, as they are only listed on the Mansun page. When you search for the band members, they are redirected to the Mansun page. How can I stop them redirecting, so that I can create seperate pages for them?

When the pages redirect to the Mansun page, you'll see a line at the top of the page saying "Redirected from [band member's name]". If you click the link to the band member's name, you'll be taken back to the original redirect page, which you can then edit as normal. --james _{// bornhj (talk)} 11:56, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Strange characters on a page

On the Weyland-Yutani article there are a couple (?) strange characters just below and to the left of the article tab. See screenshot below... Does anybody know if it is intentional? If so, what's the purpose? I haven't found any other page that has it, though I did not really look.

Screenshot of page in question.

Screenshot of page in question.

--Robert Harrison^{talk contrib} 04:09, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I figured it out... It's a output of a bad template call, namely Template:cquote --Robert Harrison^{talk contrib} 04:29, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Can't get to certain pages

Various pages from all over the wiki multiverse have suddenly become un-accsessible to me. This is particularly true of main pages. Cetain links load just fine, many other's just return the error message "Server not found" This includes all the main pages for wikipedia and its sister sites. Yet other pages are fully accsessible to me, this one for example. What on earth is going on? Is it a problem with my internet service provieder? I use a private local one. I am using Mozilla Firefox, and all the computers in my house suffer the same problem, though some are able to accsess pages others arn't. I am having no trouble with any other site on the web. Why is this happening to me and how can i fix it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.50.112.95 (talk • contribs) 21:41, 29 June 2006

"Page already deleted" error page differs on secure server

When I attempt to delete a page someone has already deleted when logged in from secure.wikimedia.org, the "Internal error" page links to http://secure.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Candidates_for_speedy_deletion&action=purge, which brings up a "Wiki does not exist" message. The correct URL is https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Category:Candidates_for_speedy_deletion&action=purge ; I looked for the page in Mediawiki namespace for this error but couldn't find it.

As an afterthought, shouldn't the "Internal error" (deletion failed) page and the "Action complete" (deletion successful) page show the same set of "return to..." links? --Kimchi.sg 00:44, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

This is MediaWiki:Cannotdelete; someone incorrectly added site-specific links which fail on the secure server. Use {{fullurl:}} instead, perhaps? --Brion 03:48, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I've fixed it to use {{localurl:}}. Seems to work now. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:56, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I changed it to {{fullurl:}}, because when I previewed it on the secure server, the server name in the links appeared to be omitted. Using fullurl there wasn't such a problem. Kimchi.sg 15:23, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

That's what {{localurl:}} does. I did test it on the secure server and it worked just fine. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:29, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

I also went and fixed a few other messages with hardcoded links. One I couldn't fix was MediaWiki:Searchquery, since {{localurl:$1}} does not produce the expected output. :-( —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:29, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

The same problem exists also with MediaWiki:Blockipsuccesstext, I just didn't notice it while testing. I've reverted my changes until this can be fixed somehow. (Thanks to Freakofnurture for notifying me.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:58, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

The first of these is one of the few messages which still use HTML. A workaround could be Brion configuring the non-secure server to redirect /wikipedia/en/wiki/ -> /wiki/ and /wikipedia/en/w/ -> /w/ (which would allow the use of the secure version of the URLs even on the non-secure server). --cesarb 22:43, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia sometimes loads blank pages

Recently, I started getting blank pages when browsing Wikipedia. However, refreshing the page usually solves the problem. This happens with both Internet Explorer and FireFox. Has anyone else been encountering similar problems lately? --Ixfd64 23:44, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Me. Just the last couple days. -Splash - tk 00:14, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Doubt you need another useless confirmation, but yes, I've noticed it as well. ~ Booya ^Bazooka 03:57, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

My browser claims "document contains no data". -- Omniplex 04:23, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Good, so it's not just me :P --GeorgeMoney ^{(talk) (Help Me Improve!)} 23:17, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes, (problems with other databases too.)HappyVR 20:26, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I believe it's called "The White Screen of Donation". --Lord Deskana (talk) 20:28, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

It happened to me in Internet Exploder but not Firefox. —this is messedr͏̈ocker (talk) 22:43, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Article access/popularity statistics

Yes, I have read Wikipedia:Technical FAQ#Can I add a page hit counter to a Wikipedia page? and if it's in the FAQ, I figure it must be a popular request. Are there any access logs available from just a brief time interval, with which we might determine a rough estimate the top-100 articles by reader popularity? Publicola 22:09, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Nothing too up-to-date. As a rough guide, though; the last time we had such logging enabled, the popular topics came out to be current affairs (and similar), sex, and something else which I'll have to dig through IRC logs to find. robchurch | talk 23:13, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Soccer football ? --DLL 22:25, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

That's a decent enough deduction for what's popular now, due to the World Cup...but that falls under current affairs. More stuff that's liable to be popular now; US and international politics (Iraq, Iran, et al.), tennis (Wimbledon), etc. robchurch | talk 15:16, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

External Image

Hello,

In the Transmitter article, I'm trying to add an example image of a transmitter circuit. But the image ("Emetteur.jpg") is hosted on the French Wikipedia, and I don't know to directly put the image in the article rather than re-import it in the English wiki and then link the image.

Thanks for all future help. E-s-B∂_Talkfr 17:56, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

It needs to be uploaded onto en.wikipedia for it to be accessed. If it's a free image, you could upload it to the commons instead. --Lord Deskana ^{Dark Lord of YOUR OPINIONS} 17:57, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I asked the question as it is possible to do so (directly link across wikis without reimporting) in the french wikipedia. Perhaps a feature to ask ? E-s-B∂_Talkfr 18:04, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Really? I thought it was disabled. Commons is the exception here, but I thought it was disabled across all Wikimedia wikis. --Lord Deskana ^{Dark Lord of YOUR OPINIONS} 19:09, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

You cannot use images from another project. You can use images from the shared upload repositories, i.e. the Wikimedia Commons. There isn't a feature that's "switched off" here. robchurch | talk 23:15, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Well some people on wikis that allow it use external image linking to drag in images from other wikis (that could be the switched off feature being reffered to here) but this isn't encouraged and is disabled on most of the bigger wikipedias as it doesn't result in proper attribution. Also different wikipedias have different copyright rules (thats why commons has to be so strict) so enabling ad-hoc image inclusing between them would not be a good idea. Plugwash 01:30, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

This is deep linking / direct linking / inline linking. __meco 10:31, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

How do I make Main Page not show on top of the mainpage?

English Wikipedia has the main heading - Main Page removed (or not visible in the main skin). I'd like to do the same for Georgian wiki new proposed mainpage (see one version here თავფურცელი). Anyone knows how? If it had been discussed somewhere specifically, would appreciate the link. gmadlobt. Alsandro 16:03, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

This effect is achieved with a piece of JavaScript; see MediaWiki:Monobook.js. robchurch | talk 18:07, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

if I read you, the last part from this page beginning with

var mpTitle = "Main Page";

has to be inserted into our mediawiki page (translating the names)? Tnx! Alsandro 19:05, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Correct. You could also try something very simple like:

if(document.title == "მთავარი გვერდი - ვიკიპედია") {
   document.write('<style type="text/css">/*<![CDATA[*/ #lastmod, #siteSub, #contentSub, h1.firstHeading { display: none !important; } /*]]>*/</style>');
}

--Splarka (rant) 01:00, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Done! we've actually copied all remaining javascript from english version (below this one) and got some other goodies as well. :) Thanx much. Alsandro 01:04, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

How do I make my Userpage render properly in IE?

I really don't know very much about designing a webpage, and even less about designing a Wiki userpage. I was just told that my page (which I copied mostly from User:Jimbo Wales) doesn't render properly in IE. The box with my picture covers up some of the text of my description.

Can someone: a) Show me what to do to make it work or link me to something? b) Fix it for me? Alphachimp ^talk 14:04, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Looks okay now - just a width=100% which I deleted. Cool Cat helped me with user page formatting a while back so glad to now be able to help another user. Of course that's assuming I have actually fixed the problem you were talking about... --Singkong2005 ^{(t - c - WPID)} 14:35, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Commercial links?

Under the subheading "brands", the mead article lists about twenty commercial links. Is this acceptable?--Shantavira 13:27, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't think so. I can't find the specific policy right now, but I know we discourage links to commerical sites (except in the case of an article about a particular company, like Amazon.com). Also, all those links are extern links in the main article. It'd be fine to wikilink to a few articles about specific brands, but not extern link to a whole bunch of commercial sites as it is now doing. — Frecklefoot | Talk 14:35, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Since writing the above I seem to be coming across more and more WP articles with blatant advertising links. I've read through WP:LOP and WP:NOT but I haven't been able to find any specific policy on this either. Surely purely advertising links that don't contain encyclopedic information should be removed? I would like to be able to cite WP policy before launching a purge.--Shantavira 13:39, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Page views?

Is there a way of seeing how many times a page has been viewed in a certain period? (And ideally, how many unique users/IP addresses). Thanks --Singkong2005 ^{(t - c - WPID)} 06:10, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

In the FAQ you're supposed to read before posting here: Wikipedia:Technical_FAQ#Can_I_add_a_page_hit_counter_to_a_Wikipedia_page.3F. --Splarka (rant) 08:25, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I'll help you out. :) It's been disabled on wikipedia for performance reasons. Imagine having to run to a chalk board 20 feet from your mailbox and putting a tally every time you check you mail. Wikipedia has enough traffic that this would turn into a riduclous endevor. Hope this helps. JoeSmack ^Talk 14:08, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks - that does help. And sorry for not reading the intro and FAQ before posting (d'oh!) --Singkong2005 ^{(t - c - WPID)} 14:10, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

"<<<END" in PHP source

What precisely are the <<<END and END constructs used in the PHP source of MediaWiki? Like in this (from includes/ImagePage.php):

					$wgOut->addWikiText( <<<END
<div class="fullMedia">
<span class="dangerousLink">[[Media:$filename|$filename]]</span>
<span class="fileInfo"> ($info)</span>
</div>

<div class="mediaWarning">$warning</div>
END
						);

I can see the effect of the "tags," but where is their use defined? Are they built-in to the interpreter or are they elsewhere defined as > and <?php, respectively? I'm not fully familiar with PHP (if you couldn't tell) and I don't want to misuse these. —Bradley 22:36, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

http://uk.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.php robchurch | talk 02:07, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

That makes no sense. It is three less-than symbols and the left-shift and less-than operators are all binary operators. How does this entity effectively escape text in the middle of a PHP file? —Bradley 03:44, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

It's called heredoc syntax [7], and I suppose it is a little odd. It isn't the only time PHP uses less-than and greater-than symbols for purposes other than comparison, though. Consider the arrows ( => and -> ) used in array and class syntax... ~ Booya ^Bazooka 04:14, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

That's what I was looking for—difficult to find as the search engines don't index or simply don't work with "<<<". Thanks —Bradley 16:19, 29 June 2006 (UTC)