Jump to content

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Knowledge Seeker (talk | contribs) at 03:12, 11 June 2005 (→The "small" tag). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Shortcut

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

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

Details about the occasional slow speeds and deadlock errors: here

Please sign and date your post (by typing ~~~~ or clicking the signature icon in the edit toolbar).

Start a new discussion in the technical section

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 


Technical archive

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

Spurious article in a category and search

The category listing for Category:Stub contains an entry for [[Katz%27s Deli]]. This article is also listed in searches.[1] In both cases, though, the links point to Katz's Deli which is not a member of the Category:Stub category. Any thoughts? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 12:32, 12 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I tried adding the article to Category:stub and removing it, which didn't seem to help. It might take a developer to fix this. -- Rick Block 22:15, 12 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Could the article be copied, deleted, and then recreated? Or would the problem be re-animated along with the article? Joyous 23:32, May 12, 2005 (UTC)
This is due to an old page title bug which allowed certain inaccessible titles to be created (but then you couldn't get to them again). I've renamed it to Katz's Deli (broken title); move, delete it or otherwise as appropriate. --Brion 10:19, May 14, 2005 (UTC)
Thank you for fixing it. I deleted the page. It's also at Katz's Deli. - User:Docu

Brion, I'm not sure how you did this :-), but the following articles all appear to have the same type of problem, so if you could fix them too, it would be greatly appreciated!:

RussBlau 18:17, May 19, 2005 (UTC)

There is also an article called Ris%F8 that duplicates Risø. It can be seen in a search]. I can't get at it. Is there a generic solution for this problem? Bobblewik  (talk) 10:22, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

More

A few more: the link doesn't lead to the article whose cur_id and nowiki-title is shown afterwards.

The_Heartbreakers_(band)
953379 Title: The_Heartbreakers_%28band%29
Water_Music_(Handel)
954308 Title: Water_Music_%28Handel%29
Diffusion-limited_aggregation_(DLA)
954998 Title: Diffusion-limited_aggregation_%28DLA%29
Unblack_metal_(music)
955055 Title: Unblack_metal_%28music%29
The_Spark_(band)
955755 Title: The_Spark_%28band%29
The_Three_Musketeers_(1993)
956633 Title: The_Three_Musketeers_%281993%29
Juan_"Chi-Chi"_Rodriguez
958683 Title: Juan_%22Chi-Chi%22_Rodriguez
Gelnaw's_Law
961077 Title: Gelnaw%27s_Law
Ghostclub,_The
962607 Title: Ghostclub%2C_The
Oil,_gas_in_field_effected_geographical_changes
965188 Title: Oil%2C_gas_in_field_effected_geographical_changes
[[Cayetano_Redondo_Ace%F1a]]
967385 Title: Cayetano_Redondo_Ace%F1a
JSA_(movie)
971887 Title: JSA_%28movie%29
Utility Maximization Problem
1018337 Title: Utility%20Maximization%20Problem
Niklaus Wirth
1022419 Title: Niklaus%20Wirth

A query to find them: 

SELECT * FROM cur WHERE cur_title LIKE '%\%%' AND cur_is_new=1

-- User:Docu

BTW, there is

953380 Student_%28newspaper%29
957788 Cats_and_dogs_%28movie%29
958255 Ris%F8

without the "cur_is_new" flag. --User:Docu

Stupid auto-logout revisited

Because the discussion above did not actually answer the question: I have been having the same problem for over a month now. I can stay logged in for 2-3 links, then I am auto-logged out. I am consistently logged out when attempting to edit a page. The ideas mentioned earlier about cookies, browsers, etc, all occurred to me too, so I have varied all of the following:

  1. Firewall. Same both on and off.
  2. Check box. Regardless of what you call it, it doesn't remember me.
  3. Browser. Same with IE, Opera, and even Lynx. Opera allows direct editing of cookies, which here have all necesary permissions and (apparently) don't expire till 2009 or some such.
  4. Computer. Same on other peoples' machines.
  5. Time of login. Followed the advice above. Morning, midday, evening, dead of night: same thing.
  6. Connection. Same deal on both dialup and broadband; thought it might be IP-related. This is redundantly subsumed here, but for completeness-- also the same whether networked or direct connection.
  7. Operating platform, for Pete's sake. This also happens on a Mac I have access to.

So what gives? Have I been exiled by the Wiki gods? Guru comments appreciated. (Signed, Mashford)

I have this experience: I open wiki in a second, third, ... browser (IE, via Citrix). First page: I am logged in, OK (as in the first browser). But almost every other page (tab, Contributions): I am logged out (anonymus user, on IP-number). This happens also when I start Editing. And t happens when I change from say nl-wiki to en-wiki. My solution: every openend browser and every language-wiki need a separate login. That works OK for me. -DePiep 19:56, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
But, with all respect, this hardly seems like a solution. Surely one browser should be sufficient, if it's referring to the same set of cookies. Argh. (Mashford) 66.82.9.34
For me, I can work around the problem. I really skipped the Argh's since. Does it work for you too? Then we have a solution, albeit by working-around. When the technical improvement arrives, that would only be better. btw: I use several browsers to do lookups in wiki while editing - practical reasons. -DePiep 11:19, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"Speedy Deletion" Overkill

We spent a good deal of time last night working up an Indexing (List) format for individual issues of The Saturday Evening Post magazine. Before we got interrupted by mundane life, around 8PM CST, we'd gotten as far as setting up two headers and listing one article as contents for the September 16, 1950, issue. This morning, that's all gone and we have to start over again.

This is absurd. It's the second time it's happened, too. We tried to default several motion pictures from a chronological list, where we'd added the titles, to the main alphabetical list of titles: since our notes are in alphabetical order, it will be obviously much easier and quicker for us to get the data details into each film's "article" by access from the alphabetical list. But first thing next morning, the added titles had all been wiped off that list (while remaining on the secondary, chronological list).

If you're serious about having our input, you're going to have to do something about the arbitrary overnight erasures which accomplish nothing except to set us back in our efforts to help. Why not allow at least a 24 hour period, or 48: since we're not on salary, and have outside lives, we cannot be expected to drop everything and service wikipedia on a 24/7. Program your site otherwise, or run the risk of killing off geese who can lay golden eggs - for you.

23May05

I don't know who deleted them, but deleted pages can be easily undeleted and restored by an Admin, so nothing is lost. Could you please give the article names that you want restored, and I'll bring them back for you. A list of recent deleted articles can be found in the deletion log. Shanes 13:45, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
My gripe is, no one deleted them: there's an automated addition of a "delete" command by the master computer (put there by the owner/programmer) to text spaces that don't have a certain amount of verbiage in them when the writer leaves the page to do something else. The command removes the "offending" piece then within what cannot be more than a 12-hour period. No one reads them, much less tries to understand why they might've been left, or e-mail the contributor to inquire. I found it on a couple of workpages I'd set up, and removed it, and they stand where positioned in the alphabetical film index: those I didn't, evaporated.
Also, NB, I tried to use the list of deleted articles and there are 50 of them deleted between 9AM and 1PM today, and it's just 9:05 CST now: where is this machine's clock? Furthermore, when I hit the "next 50", "next 100" URLs, I kept getting the same first-50 page: either my browser or wikipedia's programming for that page doesn't get me anywhere. (Maybe I should come back at 2:00PM?). In any case, I'm not going to waste time scanning down hundreds of deleted entries looking for one, when I don't even know what time the deletion occurred (my time or wiki-time); it's not worth it to me. I appreciate your offer to help, but the real problem is in the programming, and that would need to be up to an administrator to fix. --24May05, 9:05AM
This is not how it works, so I'm curious to know where you've read or heard about any "automated addition of a delete". Nothing like that is automated as far as I'm aware of. I might be wrong, though. I've been wrong before once. But here's how it works. If you make a very, very short article that clearly is not up to standard and only contains 3 or 4 words, people monitoring the list of newly created articles might see them as just being a test and/or not meriting being an article. They will then manually edit the article and add the delete tag. This again makes the article being noticed by administrators (like me) who again will review the content and decide if it really should be deleted. In my case I sometimes delete them, and sometimes I don't and I remove the delete tag. The point is: Nothing is automated, and it's all done by unpayed hardworking volunteers who just want wikipedia to be as good as possible.
That said, I'm very sory that you feel your hard work is not being appreciated. I wish that wasn't so, and I hope that by clearing up any misunderstandings and inform about how stuff like this works, we can avoid it hapening again. Thanks for contributing. Oh, and btw, the clock in the logs are on GMT time. Shanes 14:52, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the kind response. Will address your comments in my response to Golbez, below, who now has also shown up to defend the ramparts, since they are duplicated there.


According to the deletion log, this was the content ===Masthead Staff:======Contents:==='''Fiction:''''The Lady In The Jungle'..............Author, Hugh B. Cave. Such a page is definitly not up encyclopedia standards. Why not work on the page offline so that when you do enter it here it is complete? And another thing, wikipedia wont host a separate article for each issue, that is just absurd. Make an article for all the issues and put in the information there. And by the way, none of us (well, very very few of us) get paid to do this. Please don't be so arrogant when posting, it really don't serve your purpose well.

Gkhan 13:53, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Look, friend, don't tell me how to post complaints. I endulged in no obscenities or personal attacks. I'm not arrogant, I'm justifiably angry that my work got the overnight blowoff because wikipedia programming attaches a delete command to contributions that don't have X number of lines of text in place before the contributor goes off to bed. I could put gobbledygook in to hold the space, and that would really not be "up encyclopedia standards" - whatever that means - but it would hold the place 'til I could get back to it. It's obvious from reading several articles on this site that that's just what some others do, intentionally or not. Not "up encyclopedia standards" either. Or I can go in and erase the delete command, something I've done twice, but that requires extra time and energy.

And wikipedia will too host a separate article for each issue, that is not absurd or I could not have started setting up the connections in the first place: there's no way to "make an article for all issues" as this is a weekly magazine of 80 or more years' duration. Such an article would scroll on forever and never be downloadable to users. Let each of us create in his/her own way: no one else is working on this topic, so stop imposing your vision of "encyclopedia standards" on the one person who is. I'm a 59-year-old English major, with nearly 30 years' experience in technical writing, cataloguing and categorization, so stop the unnecessary and uninvited attempt at one-upsmanship. Or, to put it another way, if you can't help correct the problem, then MYOB. --24May05, 9:22AM

There is no automatic deletion system. Nothing is automatically done here. If someone added a delete notice to the page then a human did that.
My assumption, based on the rapidity with which the delete command was added, and the fact that it could be manually disabled (deleted) by me: see Two Lost Worlds for a entry where I deleted the delete command, 4-5 days ago, and it hasn't been touched by human hands since.
It's not a command; it's simply a template that puts the article into the speedy delete category. Then admins look through the category and see if things should be deleted. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is physically located in Eastern, but I believe its official time is UTC, so 9am CDT would be 1pm UTC I think. Lemme check the log... the article "The Saturday Evening Post - September 16, 1950" was created at 21:31 on May 23 and the deletion notice (specifying it as "nonsense") was added at 21:32. I must say, the New Pages patrol was working quickly that day.
Lastime it was done to me, it happened just as quickly. Which also led me to reasonably assume it was automatic.

And it was deleted at 01:00 May 24. The article consisted of, as stated above, ===Masthead Staff:======Contents:==='''Fiction:''''The Lady In The Jungle'..............Author, Hugh B. Cave'.

Actually, it consisted of

Masthead Staff:

Fiction:

which might seem nonsense to someone who's just done a careless glance and made a snap judgment. But anyone familiar with a magazine (and this was an article about a magazine) should recognize the beginnings of a table of contents page, which anyone who stopped and thought about it a moment, might realize could easily be going somewhere, especially since it hadn't been lying around the site for weeks but had just been saved One Lousy Minute Earlier.

You're assuming people on Wikipedia care about familiarity with a magazine. No matter what you say, a mostly empty table of contents is not encyclopedic, even if it does include linefeeds. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
Now, could this have grown into a real article? Entirely possible. But as it was, it was not an article at all. Please understand that we are working against the tide here, and any article that doesn't immediately have context and information runs the risk of being speedily deleted. The best way to avoid this is to finish the article first. This isn't a race.
"Please understand that we are working against the tide here... This isn't a race." Please, make up your mind. You give me one minute to do something to a saved page or else have a delete command attached to it, and about three more hours to do something (at night) to avoid having that command acted upon - whether by a human or automatically, it doesn't matter - and you talk to *me* about a race? C'mon, loosen up, give a plan a chance to come together. If that thing had been sitting there a week, it would make sense to delete; but three lousy hours? I'm not the one who was in the BFHurry.
Sure you were, you submitted an incomplete article. You aren't the one in the race, we are. You have all the time in the world to work on your article - but for us, new edits only stay on the recent changes list for *seconds*. If they scroll off, then it's unlikely anyone will see them. We have to work quickly. Such is the life of a Wikipedia janitor. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
I doubt anyone else in the world is working on "The Saturday Evening Post - September 16, 1950". So what's wrong with not submitting it until its done?
As I said in my original post, I started on it, with every intention of getting it done, or at least getting a larger chunk done before bedtime fell, but got interrupted by another facet of real life. Since it's not "a race", and there were three lines of data (one part of one line being URL'd, even, to something else in the pedia, even) with some semblance of form and relevance to anyone who bothered to look, the real question is, what's wrong with leaving it alone, watch and see what develops? Do you have a "delete quota" to meet each day?
If you got interrupted, then there was no reason to save it to the main namespace. Save it to notepad, or start a sandbox in your user space. No, we have no quota, and your lack of good faith in this circumstance is starting to annoy me. Do you have to try this hard to start a fight, or does it just come naturally? --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
As it was, it could be said to fall under the candidates for speedy deletion, in particular, Article #1 (very short, no context).

What I'm saying is, we have to actively prune wikipedia, or everyone and their mother will have a profanity-laden "article" in this "encyclopedia" about how much they hate their little sister's cat.

Which this in no wise resembled. If I'd submitted that sort of crap, I'd expect my entire account to be deleted.
For better or for worse, we don't work that way. We assume good faith, that bad editors will reform. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
If you can finish the article before you submit it - or, perhaps, start with a different issue, which might have more content readily available - then please, resubmit it. It is your responsibility to make sure the first version is useful. There's really no excuse for starting a new, incomplete article.
A new, incomplete article is called, in your terminology, a "stub". This site is crawling with "stubs", which no one has assumed the responsibility for completing OR deleting. And expanding/editing on even fairly long text is part of the stated wikipedia project. And I *was* going to complete the one I had started; you just couldn't wait even 12 hours to see what happened. Besides which, the whole project could take weeks to complete my part of, and my way of working is to handle several projects at one time, an hour or two on each one, with time off for outside life. There are many (most) issues of SatEvePost to which I do not have access, and can provide nothing more than a date and cover artist: once I'm done with my part, there will still be a need for others' involvement. It isn't a race???? Then back off the delete keys, because this is a big project that will take time and help from others - many of whom may not feel welcome here if they know they could be deleted after hours, weeks and months of contributing, on someone's whim
Yes, the site is crawling with stubs - and the ones that aren't deleted have context, which, again, your article lacked, and you have steadfastly refused to admit that simple fact. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
That said, such articles aren't exactly what we handle here,
What articles *do* you handle? For specific motion pictures, you have a separate article for each picture, not just a big mess for each country or studio or director. For specific novels, you have separate articles for each book, not just a simplistic composite for each publisher or writer. So you don't handle specific magazine editions or their specific stories and articles, you just want everything dumbed down and glumped together under the lowest common denominator. Isn't this what the PC is supposed to do for information - create an environment not limited by the boundaries of paper size, type size or volume size-to-cost ratios in which to install information??

and even if you do make it and complete it, it may be put up for a deletion vote - note that I said vote. If it has context and actual information, then it's no longer a candidate for speedy deletion, and someone could put it up on Votes for deletion, which is a five day process to determine if said article belongs in the encyclopedia. I don't think we typically have articles like this here, so it would be a useful precedent if it did come to that.

Well, I have been roaming around and found quite a bit of disorganization, incomplete text (sometimes marked stub, sometimes not), illiteracy and just plain nonsense on randomly picked "articles" "categories" and "lists"; so, how does one go about putting *them* up for deletion? No one seems to be bothering with those. If it's your intention to "monitor" me, and then after I've done something very time consuming and satisfying at the time, and just kill it off by the vote of some ubercommittee, then you can count me outta here. Please advise; I'm already fed up enough for today.
All things considered, I won't miss someone as unlikely to be reasonable as yourself. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
But all this is irrelevant until you resubmit the article. Long story short: The speedy delete was not overkill. It is not our responsibility to wait for the article to be completed, it is yours to complete it, to a reasonable extent, before you hit submit. Otherwise, the article will scroll off Recent Changes/New Pages, and our chance to easily get rid of what seems to be a horribly incomplete, context-lacking article will be gone. You said yourself, "no one else is working on this topic," so there's no problem in taking your time and creating a proper article.
Like I say, that's what I was doing when I got deleted, taking my time and creating a proper article. I hope you aren't suggesting I write it out in pencil first, or on a typewriter. If that's what you want, give me your mailing address and I'll send it to you written and you can waste *your* time reformatting it and retyping it.
You weren't taking your time - you hit save the moment you got one name in there. As it was, it wasn't an encyclopedic article. We assume good faith in many cases, but when an article meets the criteria for speedy deletion, that isn't one of them. We can't assume that every sub-stub created that has a single valid wikilink and no context will be returned to in good time by its author. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

And I agree, one article per issue may be a bit much, so perhaps a middle ground - one article per year? Either way, I suggest you make only a few, and then see if they stick. Again, if they contain actual context (like explain what this is - never, ever, rely on the article title to do that for you) and information, then it will not be speedily deleted.

Well, you would have to wait and see. Obviously, Hugh B. Cave was already a completed section of the fiction piece: all you did was cut off the URL by deleting the text. The fiction piece itself would have to be read and synopsized - a ways down the road when we were just at the start of getting the content titles and authors and other names installed.


Do you have any more questions? --Golbez 15:02, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
Golbez puts it in a very good way, and as he said, there is no automated deleting. Two people looked at your article and decided that it should be deleted (the person who tagged it speedy delete and the admin who made the deletion). As for the arrogance part, I was reffering both to your style and the "geese that lays the golden eggs part". If this offended you, I apologise. But to be frank, you come off with an unwarranted amount of hostility, especially now that you were incorrect in your assumption.
The only thing I was incorrect in, was assuming an unreasonably short amount of time had been allotted to an automated program function. Knowing that two actual people showed up and neither one had the decency to wait and see what happened, or ask me what was going on, but just made big-assumptions on their parts - incorrectly - and played god with the delete key, makes the hostility all the more warranted. Treat people like people: I spent 2 hours experimenting with formats and layouts to get as far as I did and, since this is not a race, and this thread is attracting people like flies all of a sudden, with plenty of time to talk, I don't think I'm the least bit out of line with that hositlity.
Why should we have the "decency" to wait and see, if you didn't have the "decency" to wait until the article was remotely finished before posting it? I apprecitate that you spent time and effort learning layout and style, and your next step is to apply it towards a complete article. You started the hostility here, don't push it on us. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

You'd get much more help and the conversation would be nicer if you simply had asked for helped and described your problem. Now, as for the articles, one article per year would certainly be acceptable (52*80=4160, surley that is a bit much, don't you think). Also, consider signing up if you want to make a significant amount of contributions,

I am signed up. For some reason - computer, or human? - when I use Show Preview and then Save Page, I find I've been logged out and the contribution credit goes to some number. I have not discovered how to correct this glitch when it occurs.
It happens on random occasion. We don't know why either. :( --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

it is so much nicer to communicate with someone with a name than an IP-adress. Gkhan 15:18, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Gkhan is a name?? My name, when the -pedia shows it, is Rich Wannen, which is my real name.
(added after an edit conflict, so I'm repeating some of the things Gkhan said)
If I may add to that; here are a couple of ideas you (the original poster) could try out.
  1. It would help if you could write one complete article, to show what the final result would be.
For the umpteenth time, that is what I was *doing*. I had to stop for the night and when I came back this morning to press onward, the start I'd made had been peremptorilly and rudely deleted.
So the main Wikipedia space is just a blank notepad for you to do your scribblings on? That's what sandboxes and notepads are for. Not the encyclopedia. Imagine if Brittanica published an article that the person had put into the main queue but had left for the night before finishing it. Don't you think they'd be annoyed that he had made it a real article? --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

It would seem that at least 2 other wikipedians thought your article had no potential to grow (one who added the {{delete}} template; one who deleted the article). Prove them (and me) wrong.

I will try. However, I have the hunch that if the logic isn't immediately obvious - and as I said above, this is one of several longterm projects - some one or another will apparently feel free to hit the delete key without so much as a courtesy e-mail. It's bad enough that the environment itself allows strangers, even unregistered ones, to stumble across your work, decide they don't like it for any whim or dense moment, and edit it all to hell. It's quite another to find that there is actually a hidden committee of overseers of the same temperament with access to an instant delete key.
If you don't want strangers editing your work, perhaps Wikipedia isn't for you. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
  1. Create an account for yourself. If you do so, you'll get a user page to explain your plans, a talk page at which other people can contact you, and an infinite amount of user space, where you can start writing your articles without the threat of having them deleted. Move them to the main article space when it's ready. If you do this for the first few pages, and if they are accepted, you'll have an easier time convincing us of the usefulness of all of your articles. (Anonymous users also get user space, etc. But it's better if you get an account. It's also easier to build up credibility that way.)
  2. If you want your articles back, go to Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion, and make your case there. It's probably easier if you say that you want them moved to your user space.
No, I'll just start it over again. Maybe. Or maybe I'll just not waste my time trying to satisfy people who claim outwardly to be open and receptive - be bold - but have a clandestine set of narrow, rigid expectations applied swiftly, at least to newcomers, at the expense of creativity and interest. We'll see how I feel tomorrow. From 2-4 I work for IMDb; they have weird constraints and quirky policies, but at least they state most of them up front. --Rich Wannen 24May05 2:04PM

PS - Oh, looky. My name is in red again. Yesterday, it was in blue, after I stuck in a couple of trial sentences, intending to come back to that later too. Guess the delete-o-philes even mess around with user's personal pages!!

It's red because you linked Rich Wannen, not User:Rich Wannen. It's simpler if you simply sign remarks with ~~~~.User pages are ot deleted in the same fashion as other articles. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)
  1. You don't need to type in the date and time manually each time; use ~~~~~ for that (5 tildes). If you have a user account, type in four tildes ~~~~ for user name, date, time.
Eugene van der Pijll 15:28, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wow

This is getting difficult to read. Here's my summary:  :::which is wrong on several key points.

  1. Rich made a short article with no context. It is not our responsibility to know if he was coming back to it; it is his to make it of undeletable quality from the start.
Rich started an article in the context of Saturday Evening Post - Index of Saturday Evening Post Issues - 1950: September 16. He had gotten two headers and one text entry in place on the latter connection when he was called away by other business; so he saved the work done to pick up the next day.
  1. Rich has not assumed good faith in his dealings here; he could well counter that we did not assume good faith with his article.
  2. Rich continues to assume bad faith in thinking we deleted his user page.
I assumed only, in all innocence, that the delete was automatic. Staff members told me it was done wilfully and manually. I assume in good faith they are telling the truth. The only "bad faith" was the two deleters' assumption that I had just stuck in some stuff to annoy them or ruin the -pedia and thus it merited deleting without warning.
  1. I personally welcome any future contributions, but stress that, for temporary or still-working-on-it pages, Rich may want to use a sandbox, like User:Rich Wannen/Sandbox.
I could, but why. If the editors/readers would assume *in good faith* that I would finish what I start, and not be so quick on the trigger, it works better for me to just go on the article page directly and work there. It also makes sense because the -pedia is *filled* with articles by others that are only partly done.
  1. And the fact remains, had he not spent the time ranting on this article, he might have finished the article by now and we could see what he intended.
And the fact also remains, if three or four of the supposedly harried editors hadn't felt it necessary to pile on me in detail for critiquing a user-unfriendly practice, apologized, and restored the work, I wouldn't have felt the need to defend myself against personal attacks (NB: the original post complained about a presumed automation problem. Personal attacks were started by others) and explain in as much detail why I think they need to get flexible here.
  1. I see Rich has made several other edits, including starting a new article, which he should notice was not deleted, and has in fact been improved by another editor. (well, me)
Which one?
  1. However, he also made Index of Saturday Evening Post Issues and Contents. This lacks context, but it has more than the other article did, since the article title says it's an index, as opposed to simply a name. Personally, if I were on deletion patrol, I would give this one the benefit of the doubt - but probably not the older one that was deleted. It might be put on VfD, though, and that doesn't mean it's deleted - part of the VfD debate allows people to improve an article, and many great articles have come out stronger in part due to VfD.
The Index is in the context of the main article on the Saturday Evening Post. Why do you say it lacks context? I simply used a word I was more comfortable with - Index - instead of List (which is hidden). It is intended to be an index of the issues - cover date by cover date over the 80-some years of the magazine's history - in two steps. The first step is to identify (List) each issue by cover date. The next step is, where information is available, to create a page for each issue defining the contents and related demographics of each issue. Those contents - staff, writers, and article titles - will also be accessible and contain an article on each person/literary piece.

Logic: Magazine Main Page, click to see chronological Index of Issue Dates, select and click to specific Issue Description article, select and click title of piece(s) or name of person(s) of interest to read individualized articles. Voila, you have a logically linked chain taking the reader as far into the contents of each issue as he/she wishes to go, without shortcutting any part of the overall subject matter in order to avoid a relatively useless, generalized, single-volume print-encyclopedia short subject on a major piece of Americana.

The strategy and logic of the approach I propose is applicable to any topic, many of which have bits and pieces unconnected and floating about the -pedia currently. (Some, of course, follow similar constructs). We had hoped to do some other tidying up as well so that users could, e.g., look up Cinema on the search field or go to Cinema in the Index for the Culture page, and come up with the same main article, something you can't do now, or couldn't as of 2 days ago. We have several areas of interest, tho film is our major one: but we've been 9 years with IMDb and are/were looking forward to making publicly available collected data in other areas of interest as well. Wikipedia appeared, by a recommendation from a contributor and by its main page, and with some early experiments, to seem a place open to creative structuring as well as in need of certain types of coverage, especially in areas (such as the SatEvePost) where there isn't a great deal of evident contributor involvement.

Hopefully, this little escapade with the overzealous anonymous deleters and the gangup on the visible newbie for trying to help with a personal, creative spin on data organization, is not a harbinger of worse things to come. IMDb has a number of problems arising from institutionalized rigidity, and it is only trying to deal with film, TV and videogame: Wikipedia is still new and trying to cover the entire universe, no small undertaking, which requires openness to newcomers and their experiments, not reactionary deletionism. RW


In short: Rich, please calm down and try again. --Golbez 19:39, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

I might want to warn Rich, though, that even if he completes an entire article which contains nothing but the table of contents for one issue, or even the table of contents of an entire year's worth of issues, some (myself included) would conclude that such an article is not an encyclopedia article, and would list it for Votes for deletion, where it would sit for 5 days while the community would discuss whether or not it should be retained. RickK 21:19, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Rich, you have repeatadly assumed bad faith in this discussion, you have been angry and bascially insulting wikipedia when twice when you were wrong (the automated deleting thing and assuming your user-page had been deleted). You are over-all very uncivil. Calm down and realise that your article simlpy wasn't good enough. This is not something to be ashamed of, when I was a newbie I created a few articles which were all speedied (including a vanity article, of which I am a little ashamed :P). Get off your high horse and accept our advise. We arn't "ganging up" on you. Because you are new you do not know how things are done here, and that is ok, none of us did in the beginning. There is nothing wrong with that! Now, please calm down, read Wikipedia:Civility, and try not to be so hostile to everyone. Gkhan 21:58, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you both. You continue the process of blaming the unfairly injured, good-faith contributor and avoid absolutely looking at the actions of staff and interloping (troll) users in inciting and fuelling the hostilities on this board. It is clear this is not an open site focussed on the product and quality improvement through infusion of new ideas, but just a closed clique trying to appear as one; and complaints and disagreements that confront the clique's pre-established notions will only result in more and more personalized insults, "warnings" and other acts of Wikipedia "civility", and always dodging the major issues raised.
At this juncture, I can only offer that a Wikipedia staffer submit the description of my plans for improving the Saturday Evening Post coverage at the site to the Five-Day Community Discussion Board, or whatever it is; and if you decide it would be something really worth examining in more detail without any reactive "I...would list it for Votes for Deletion" attached, you can e-mail me and I'll consider whether I feel like giving you a look at what you would've had if your two editors hadn't decreed my bare start "nonsense" (covertly, amongst the staff) and consigned my 2 hours of thinking and format-experimenting to the Wikitrash. Having had my enthusiasm for this site completely numbed by the wet-blanket-and-cold-shower verbiage of most of the respondents here (especially Golbez), I imagine I'll decline, but you do have the option to try. You might include a thanks for the stuff I contributed that you did decide to use and probably will decide to keep, at at least a rate of agreeability as the disagreeability the majority of your responders have presented in defending the indefensible here today.
I also suggest you look at severely revising your home page to indicate that this is not the open, curious, progressive and friendly site you play it up to be. That way, at least you will attract more of your own kind and not have to waste *your* time trying to drive off people who don't exactly fit your narrow views and ways. Whoever said it was right about one thing, I have been wasting my time today. Indeed, I've been wasting it for the last few days.
Meantime, to the couple of you who've shown some effort at trying to understand and mediate - thank you. It's just too bad you're in the minority.
Adios, wikeroos.

---Rich Wannen, 24May05, 6:55PM

I am very sorry that you feel this way. I always hate seeing editors go, especially those who can contribute anything worth including. I would email you but you provided no adress. Suppose that you email me instead (don't forget to include a return adress). Gkhan 00:12, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
I think Rich's description of how Wikipedia works is quite perceptive and accurate. Mirror Vax 03:22, 25 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

So

I know I tend to stick my nose into things, but honestly, someone else say something, did I say anything that was remotely wrong or hostile? If I was hostile, I was certainly less hostile than he. Cmon, repair my wounded ego please. I could expound on how irritated his parting shot makes me, but hey, we don't get anywhere by biting the newbies, right? Especially if they start out by stabbing us. And mirror vax, if it's so accurate, I suppose you're welcome to come to the same conclusions and take the same actions - whining and leaving in a huff. The article was a bit crappy, yes. --Golbez 03:37, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Reading through this exchange I'm not sure who was at fault, but the fact is a newbie distinctly felt bit. I think we should all feel bad about it, and I think we should all try to make newbies feel more welcome. IMO, some of your comments weren't exactly welcoming. Was the article crap? Who cares. The newbie felt bit. -- Rick Block 04:04, 25 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
(Note: refactored my argument above to remove my attack, retained word "crap" so as to not change the meaning of Rick's response) Perhaps we did bite him, but what do you suggest? That we don't slap {{delete}} when needed? It was a bit quick, but 99% of the articles caught within the first minute by new page patrol are worthy of deletion. If the newbie didn't want to feel bit, maybe he shouldn't have come at us with teeth gnashing. Because we bit the newbie, do you propose we change the way CSD works, Rick? --Golbez 11:41, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
In my opinion we shouldn't be critisising a new wikipedian on a page like this. Even if a new contributor comes across as abit angry and teeth gnashing, we should just not comment on that and just explain politely what he had missed about the technical stuff. Thats what this page is about after all. Shanes 13:49, 25 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
We weren't the first "criticism" he received; he got one in the form of the delete template, and in another in the deletion itself. He had already felt criticized and came across that way. We tried to be civil and understanding; he refused to be. --Golbez 14:16, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
I fully agree with Golbez here. The newbie came here with all guns blazing, and the old hands tried to be reasonable in explaining what happened, why it happened, and what to do to achive his goal without the same happening again. He was also asked to calm down and remain civil, but he refused and kept raging at the "staff and interlopers" of Wikipedia. Thryduulf 14:27, 25 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to point out that Golbez first edit to this discussion [2] which is now hoplessly massacred, was a long helpful and generally nice comment. He had not been nice, made assumptions that weren't true and generally said that we sucked. I could have perhaps been a little more diplomatic in my first comment, but my second was a genuine attempt to be nice and help, and he responded in a very hostile way. We did nothing wrong here. Gkhan 14:37, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
I'm not suggesting changing CSD policy. It's not obvious it was followed in this instance, particularly Try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its initial creation, as the author may be working on it. I am suggesting if you can't see a very clear difference between this response and this one, you might want to refrain from commenting on pages regularly accessed by new users. IMO the above protestations of innocence are stunningly insensitive. And, in case anyone doesn't know, telling someone to calm down almost always has exactly the opposite effect. -- Rick Block 18:40, 25 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Oh hey, you're right, it does say that. --Golbez 19:07, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
So his grievance was founded after all. Well, who's willing to contact him and offer an olive branch? Or don't we care?
Hi Rich! I am glad you decided to come back. I assume that this is you since your ip-adresses are nearly identical? I would have contacted you but you did not provide a return adress. Pleas do, and I will certainly email you. Or you can email me instead if you wish. gkhan 20:04, May 26, 2005 (UTC)
Huh? - 00:11, June 6, 2005 (UTC)

Rabid deletionism, hostile atmosphere

Well, it's no surprise to me to read this thread. This is exactly what I've been opposing all along. Notable to see that the original assumption was that some sort of bot was killing this poster's work out of hand. That is exactly how we appear to the newcomer -- unthinking, machinelike, and ultimately hostile.

This community has become a nest of snakes and anyone foolish enough to take the invitation at face value to Be Bold is in for a rough time. His incomplete or tentative work will be trashed; he'll find a nasty, snippy comment or three on his talk; and when he gropes around for answers, he'll come across a bevy of assertive pages that contradict one another, each one such the scene of a pitched battle. For every genuinely helpful user, he'll run into 4 more with axes to grind, who somehow manage to turn every conversation around to their pet peeves.

Only two kinds of people are likely to join this community now:

1) Otaku whose interests are so narrow that they just plow ahead and (by luck more than anything else) churn out dozens of lightweight, insipid edits or even whole pages of cruft. This content is so un-notable or detached from reality that the community has no warring factions ready to hound the new guy for his honest effort.

2) Those with an inability to respect or a disregard for the opinions of others; these range from vandals to trolls, but in any case contribute even less to the project than the otaku. These may be very thick-skinned indeed and difficult to eradicate.

Why would anyone join this community to do thoughtful work? Good work is still being done by members who have been here for a long time; they have developed ways of coping with the hostile atmosphere and they have already invested much of themselves; they won't be chased out by rabid deletionists or arrogant "RTFM"-type remarks. But who willl join now?

A month ago, I still thought it possible to help to turn this community away from becoming a behavioral sink. Now, I just don't know. — Xiong熊talk* 23:30, 2005 Jun 1 (UTC)

And also:
3) People who are able to admit it might be their mistake after all, and learn how to work with the older members who are already here.
I find your lack of faith disturbing. --cesarb 23:51, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
4) People who are willing to perform "grunt work." I've joined this community very recently, and have not been bitten, insulted, slapped, or otherwise abused. Most of my contribution has been in the areas of stylistic editing and categorization, with very little actual content addition -- because I feel I should take the time to become familiar with the standards and norms here before I attempt to produce content from scratch. It is my opinion that the OP should have done the same.
Adalger 04:44, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As one of the resident snakes, I can only say: thanks for your elucidating summary. The fact that you pointed it the situation to us in such analytical terms is a great boon. You stride towards well-founded conclusions through impeccable logic, and in doing so support our own efforts at understanding and solving the problems.

But enough irony. Required reading material for everyone, and I mean really read it again, don't just throw around the page name as a cliché: Wikipedia:Assume good faith, Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers and Wikipedia:Remain polite in the face of overwhelming rudeness if all you have to lose is your ego. Well, I'll admit that last one isn't written yet, but you can fill it in for yourself, right? Note that "this is how we do it and you do not conform" is generally not a productive approach. Newbies can't be demanded to conform; cooperation on a wiki doesn't work by lecturing newcomers on the existing mores. Even vandals are given the honor of a "please" (and I don't mean a "please don't be so arrogant" either...) Instead explain why we do what we do, and be very much willing to consider the possibility that we are wrong from the newbie's point of view, and tailor your response to that. The object is not to explain why we are right, but to convince others that we are, which is not-so-subtly different (and, I'll readily admit, a hundred times more tiring than just slapping people with Da Rules, as you'll be doing it over and over again and worse, suffer some fools in the process).

At least some of the unfortunate dialogue above could have been avoided by a simple change in tone, even if the helpful information was all there. It's all water under the bridge now, however. And let's not blow it out of proportion, either. This was an unfortunate clash of attitudes, but you're not going to convince me this is some symptom of the Wikipedia community (or even a significant part of it) being rotten to the core. Hiss! JRM · Talk 00:47, 2005 Jun 6 (UTC)

Move option

As a accounted user I have the ability to move pages. However on some pages I can't see the move button. These happen to be Wikipedia and Helium, they are both {{featured}} so I thought that had something to do with it. You know, the best articles shouldn't need moving. But I go to other featured articles, namely Buddhism and Emacs, have the move button there. What's the deal? --metta, The Sunborn 16:39, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That is what was happening, thanks. --metta, The Sunborn 19:17, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
That doesn't quite make sense, since Helium is not currently protected, is editable, but is not movable. I have no plans on moving the article, but is this a mistake? — Asbestos | Talk 00:12, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There is a special form of protection (protection against page moves) which is separate from the normal edit protection. From the logs:
17:54, 8 May 2005 ABCD protected Helium (prevent page moves)
--cesarb 00:48, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Ah-ha, that explains it. Thanks. — Asbestos | Talk 11:31, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Blue background?

Ok, I'm extremely confused as to why namespaced pages are suddenly appearing with blue backgrounds. Did I miss something? Oh look, I notice as I type that this edit page has a blue background as well. What's going on? Sorry if I'm being extremely unobservant and stupid etc. AdamM 18:49, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The light blue background for non-article space pages has been introduced a loong time ago, shortly after the introduction on the monobook skin. On July 3, 2004, to be precise, after having been voted upon. Got a new monitor? Lupo 19:37, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, they look blue on my CRT, but basically just white on my LCD. - Omegatron 20:03, May 30, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Formatting Software?

Is there any kind of software package available in which one could either 1) convert an MS Word file to Wikipedia markup, or 2) format text (for example, bold, italic, underline, etc) for Wikipedia by highlighting and picking from a menu, like typical word processing software. (Preferably something that runs under Mac OS X, but I can also run WXP.)

I want to write some taxonomic articles, which require lots of italic type for species names. Having to manually type in apostrophes each time is ergonomically inefficient to say the least.

Peter

The buttons at the top are to assist you. You can actually highlight text and format that way. Specifically, if you highlight some words, then click the I button, it will insert the '' for you. -- AllyUnion (talk) 06:15, 27 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]


There is also a Firefox extension at [3] if you use that browser
If you use the NoteTab text editor, there is a set of edit clips you can download for adding Wiki markups. I write all my orginal stuff in NoteTab and then upload, but I have no doubt that the Firefox extension is the most useful for making edits on the fly to existing texts on the Wikipedia servers. Just right click. There is also a spell checker extension as well. Apwoolrich 18:17, 28 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You could build a parser with any number of tools, but the disadvantage is that this forces you to create an intermediate file, so your workflow must be unidirectional.
Suggest you simply go to your external editor -- such as Word or BBEdit -- and create a series of macros for common markups. This will not give you WYSIWYG, but it has the advantage of simplicity. — Xiong熊talk* 23:02, 2005 Jun 1 (UTC)

Article appears twice in Category

See: Category:Lists of songs.
Yesterday I edited the article List of Number 1 albums (UK), so as to have it sorted under "1" instead of "L" in the category. Afterwards there appear two references in the Category-list. Since it's 24h ago, I dont think it has to do with server-delay. Possibly related to way of my editing: I was doing a manual sweep, using two browsers (MS IE; both used my user-name) alternatively. I can live with the situation, but it's not as expected. Anyone an idea, or solution? Bye, -DePiep 15:31, 27 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It works fine for me. Probably was just server lag. gkhan 15:36, May 27, 2005 (UTC)
You're right, I misread, the difference was singles & albums. Sorry, & thnax-DePiep 15:54, 27 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The Dobbs effect

Hello, I just noticed that the Lou Dobbs is not alphabetizing properly in the People from Idaho category. The article is listed under "L" rather than "D."

The cat code seems to be correct... and it is listed properly in other categories it belongs to (like 1945 Births). All other members of the Idaho category seem to be in the correct spot. - Boisemedia 08:30, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

  • If you look at the history you see that it was initially added to the category without the pipe, and then edited to get the correct sorting. There is a known issue about category sorting not updating correctly in all cases, but I don't know what (if any) progress has been made towards fixing it. Thryduulf 09:07, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Image 'file links' section

How often is the file links section updated? If you take a look at Image:Flag of Europe.png there are hundreds of file links, most of which were through {{MEP-stub}} or {{EU-stub}} and they're now using Image:European flag.png (there are 4-5 different versions of the same flag at the moment on wikipedia) but the file links haven't updated at all, as far as I can see, any ideas? -- Thanks! -- Joolz 15:32, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The "what link here" pages only show up to 500 inbound links, including redirect pages and pages that link through redirect pages. I believe that they are sorted in the order the links were placed, i.e. looking at the what links here for this page, the first entry is user talk:Enchanter followed by User talk:Chris Q, meaning those were the first two pages that linked here that still link here.
If there are more than 500 links then the ones added more recently than the 500th are not shown and, I don't know of any way with the current software to see any more. What links here pages, at least for articles, are updated real time, you just need to refresh to see the changes - for example this morning I went through avoiding redirects to an article that I moved (changed an 'o' to an 'ó'), when I had gone through the list I refreshed the what links here (to see if I had missed any) and the changes were visible, seconds after I did the last one.
There doens't seem to be an image named Flag of Europe.png so I'm not sure what exactly your query relates to in this regard. Thryduulf 16:12, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The 'what links here' and 'file links' are two different things, the 'file links' is for Images and appears on the Image page itself, listing all pages which use the image. The image Image:Flag of Europe.png is on the commons but other than that I'm not sure why you're claiming that it doesn't exist, I can see it plainly and there are hundreds of file links for it. -- Joolz 16:44, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I believe this is due to the templates' having been updated. The links to image files will not be refreshed until the pages themselves have been edited. Try doing a null edit to an article and seeing if the page remains listed on the incoming links section. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 17:14, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I thought that too, but I've tried that with no luck unfortuantly -- Joolz 17:24, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It worked for me with ESPRIT, no longer on the Flag of Europe.png page. Smoddy (Rabbit and pork) 17:36, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You're right, I've just tried it again, I'm not sure why it didn't work when I tried it the first time (I probably screwed up) - Cheers! -- Joolz 17:39, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I created the Basket Case disambiguation page and as a follow-up tried to link several pages to the Basket Case (song) page. However, on some of those pages "Basket Case" only appears within Template:Green Day, and I have already changed the link in that template. Still the wrong link shows up in the Basket Case "What links here". It seems there is nothing I can do about that. What is wrong? <KF> 22:37, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

Indirect references from a template are only updated when the article is next changed. You can make a null edit (edit and submit with no changes and no summary) on the articles to fix this if you'd like. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:09, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
Ah, I would never have thought that. Thanks a lot! <KF> 00:30, May 30, 2005 (UTC)

Messed-up page history on Germany

For some time now, there's been an apparent problem with the page history on Germany; this version always appears as the second-most-recent, producing some very odd-looking results when one looks at the most-recent diff. Anyone have any idea what's causing this, or better yet, how to fix it...? Thanks. Alai 05:45, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is another remnant of the 'year 2025' problem that briefly cropped up when some new servers were misconfigured. Domas is looking into cleaning these up... --Brion 07:08, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, I feel somewhat reassured already... Alai
Would this "year 2025" problem explain the following weirdness I encountered on Germany:
  • I see some garden-variety vandalism at the end of one section (non-sequitor, all caps, something about "GERMANS NAZIS R")
  • Edit section, delete line, save without previewing. (Straighforward cleanup, right?)
  • Then I look in the history of Germany to identify the vandal & see if he left any other traces on Wikipedia. Hmm, that's odd: last few edits appear to be legit, no sign anyone else has seen this edit.
  • I then compare my version with what was before, as a sanity check, only to find no record of the edit that resulted in the vandalism. WTF? I check several times, same result. (Sheesh, if I'm hallucinating a line of gibberish, I'd expect something more interesting -- & grammatical.) What's worse is it appears I just removed the next section of text.
  • I restore the text I've accidentally removed, come here & post, hoping someone can explain this as a bizarre caching behavior -- or at least how to imagine more interesting samples of vandalism. -- llywrch 19:15, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Swell. Now even the record of my reverting myself has gotten lost. Is there something about that page that turns people into loonies? -- llywrch 19:24, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Avoiding edit conflicts

When someone presses edit, a flag should be flipped so that if someone else presses edit they get a simple notice at the top of the page that it may be in use and when the edit button was pressed. When the person presses save, the flag will be flipped back.

It will also flip back to normal after a specific time period with no "preview" button presses, like half an hour.

It will still be editable with or without the flag. It will just have a notice.

This seems pretty obvious. - Omegatron 20:00, May 30, 2005 (UTC)

By "When someone presses edit", I assume you mean "When someone presses Show preview"? If so, that's a decent idea. Speaking from the user POV, if I were to edit this page, and I saw the notice, I could keep careful track of what I edit (and do a copy and paste of my text), or refrain from making any scattered edits until the flag is flipped back. This sort of flagging would be like an automatic {{inuse}} template, but not just for major edits. --Deathphoenix 20:23, 30 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]
No. I mean when Person A presses "Edit", the flag is flipped. If Person B then presses "Edit" they will see "Another user may be editing this page. The Edit button was pressed at 15:23, May 30, 2005. You might want to wait a few minutes to avoid edit conflicts." Every time Person A presses "Show preview", the message will be updated (Refreshing Person B's screen will show "The Show preview button was last pressed at 15:26, May 30, 2005." instead) and the timer will be reset. If Person A never saves their page, the notice will disappear after x minutes since the last button pressing by Person A.
Yes, exactly like an inuse template, but automatic.
Also, edit conflicts don't apply if two people are editing different sections, right? That is built into the software correctly? It should not indicate a potential conflict if you are editing two different sections. - Omegatron 20:49, May 30, 2005 (UTC)

Downloading entries/articles in Wikipedia

Hi,

I was wondering if there's any way for me to download all the entries (just the name) in wikipedia. For example, the entry for "condoleeza rice" - I just want to download "condoleeza rice" and nothing else. Basically, I want all the article names that are in the wikipedia.

Any help/suggestion appreciated!!!!

http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/all_titles_in_ns0.gz --Brion 23:11, May 30, 2005 (UTC)

Misuse potential for Special:Email

I was just thinking: if I wanted to send an email to someone and make it look as if it was from someone else, Wikipedia is the perfet tool to do it. I'll explain (for this purpose, I'm Eve, I want to send an email to Bob as if it came from Alice - see Alice and Bob).

  1. Eve sets up an account in the name of Alice, using Alice's email address.
  2. Eve sets up an account in the name of Bob, using Bob's email address.
  3. Eve logs into the Alice account, and does "email this user" to Bob.
  4. Bob receives this insulting/abusive message, and checks what email address it came from. It comes from Alice.

Q.E.D.-->Energy (talk) 07:18, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Alternatively, Eve reconfigures her mail client to set the from address to Alice's, and saves the hassle of creating wikipedia accounts and having to use a web interface. --W(t) 07:44, 2005 May 31 (UTC)

Well, I don't know how to do that, so Eve likely wouldn't either. If we're talking about Hackers Supreme, obviously they don't need WP. Anyway, is it actually possible to send emails from any address?-->Energy (talk) 07:58, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I don't know how to do that, so Eve likely wouldn't either. There's no need to be so sure of yourself. Set up a new account in any mailreader and you will notice that it requests your email address. This is just used for the From: line. (Note: Some ISPs carefully restrict sending mail so that you cannot pretend to be at another domain; some spam filters detect the faking.) r3m0t talk 15:01, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
Yup; How else would wikipedia be able to send email from whatever address you specify? --W(t) 08:18, 2005 May 31 (UTC)
MediaWiki 1.5 includes an e-mail verification step before enabling the e-mail feature, so Eve would need to be able to intercept Alice's e-mail to set up this attack (and Bob's, or else use a redirection and hope he doesn't notice the fake To: address). This will go live within a couple weeks. --Brion 09:28, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
Anyone who is somewhat knowledgeable about computers can fake an email from "gbush@whitehouse.gov". This can be detected however, but not many people know how. Email is an intrinsically unsafe mode of transferring messages. I do not think this is really an issue on wikipedia. gkhan 21:26, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not being sure of myself. I'm simply saying that if there is one human being (me) who can't, there is likely to be another. That other human being could be Eve.-->Energy (talk) 06:19, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

And there are plenty of Eves who know how. There are also many human beings who don't know how to use wikipedia to fake email addresses, and they could also be Eve! There are also plenty of Eves starving in Africa who are completely unable to fake any messages in any way whatsoever, and Eves who ask their Evian freinds about how to do this. ;) r3m0t talk 13:56, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

Vanished into thin air

The Inner Circle (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Revision history
There is no edit history for this page.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Circle_%28novel%29"

Okay, I've been getting stupid error messages all day, but this seems to be the last straw. First I created a new article, then it was gone again -- just an empty page. I wanted to try again from scratch, so I decided to delete the empty page. But I couldn't -- "internal error", it said. What the hell is going on here? Can anyone retrieve the text? <KF> 21:47, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

It shows up in the history for me. I'll revert it back. Sometimes when you create a page, it doesn't show up right away. It says that on the edit page (something like "if you just created the page, it might not have shown up yet"). The way I fix this is to press the articles history, look at the adress bar which will look something like "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Inner_Circle_%28novel%29&action=history", change the last part that says "history" to "purge", i.e "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Inner_Circle_%28novel%29&action=purge". Then it always works for me. Cheers! gkhan 21:56, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
Look like another symptom of the database lags we have been having lately. You may have to wait several minutes for the changes to actually appear. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 22:05, 31 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Move bug

This is a rather strange bug... if you move Template:foo to wherever (for instance when userfying a template after WP:TFD discussion), Talk:foo is moved along. Radiant_* 08:17, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

  • Brion Vibber has informed me that this has been fixed; the fix will be incorporated in the next upgrade. Radiant_* 10:08, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

Short term blocking of anon users from a given ip range

David Gerard wrote at WP:RFA in relation to the Zivinbudas request:

This got me wondering about whether as a measure to deal with this type of situation it would be possible to block anonymous editors from any given IP range, but still allow registered users to edit (unless otherwise blocked). The block wouldn't be permanent thing, just long enough for the intended user to get the message. Those trying to edit anonymously from that range would see a notice along the lines of:

Due to the actions of one or more people who use the same ISP as you, it has been necessary to temporarily disalow anonymous contributors from this IP range. If you are not (one of) the user(s) in question, then you are welcome to contribute as a registered user. <standard create an account or log in stuff, or link to it>.

I guess this isn't currently technically possible, but would it be something worth investigating further and/or requesting? Thryduulf 08:28, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

  • That sounds like a feasible solution. Radiant_* 10:08, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

I've been pointed to an open feature request: MediaWiki bug 550 "Blocks on anonymous users only". Thryduulf 10:42, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

  • This would only cause blocked people to make more sockpuppets. I like the idea, but we'd need to have something in place to check new user registrations to make sure the blocked user doesn't return. Mgm|(talk) 17:14, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)
    • As I wrote on the bugzilla page ealier:
      Reading earlier comments about account creation, I don't think this should be restricted but perhaps there should be a list somewhere of all accounts created from an IP address in a range blocked as above. That way it will be easy to check the contributions of those new accounts and to block any that are used for vandalism or other block evasion. Thryduulf 17:58, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • That could work. Mgm|(talk) 14:25, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

RFC

Anyone who's a frequenter of WP:RFC would have noticed that it's regularly a lengthy mess of old proposals, and most people only read the top few and comment on those (and watch them if appropriate). Presently, cleanup consists of copy/pasting a bunch of old ones to the archives whenever they get too long. Ideally, people unlist RFCs when they no longer apply, but in practice that rarely happens.

It would be useful to employ a bot to do this work. The process would be simple - once per week, examine all RFC entries and check when they were last edited. If they haven't been edited for two weeks, they can be archived, because that means the discussion has died (and, hopefully, been resolved).

An alternate proposal would be to have them time out one month after creation, on grounds that by that point, the discussion would have gone stale anyway.

Would anyone have a problem with this? It would make the page a lot more legible. Radiant_* 12:25, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

see my comments on the VP (proposals). Thryduulf 13:31, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
  • The kinks about when it should be archived need to be ironed out, but I'm pretty sure AllyUnion's archiving bot could do the job. Mgm|(talk) 14:27, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)
    • You ask if I'm Scotty... I can certainly try to make it archive correctly. It will be extremely hard to figure out how to tell what the next RFC block if there are comments and such... -- AllyUnion (talk) 10:57, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Deleting some contributions

My nephew was around and he added some stuff to wikipedia, because he thinks he's funny. It's on this IP (he added Davy Buntinx and Jonathan Quarem), can you please delete these posts? Thank you very much!

The pages created have been deleted. The IP address was also used to add some information to Nieuwerkerken that looks reasonably factual. However, as there are very few pages on the place on the web and I can't read Dutch, I can't be sure. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:51, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I can read Dutch, and I can say that this edit was OK. Eugene van der Pijll 05:53, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How big is the english version of wikipedia exactly?

How many gigabytes are we talking about with articles without media and how big is it with media?

The article counts are at Special:Statistics; to me it just said that "There are 1707300 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Wikipedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 580065 pages that are probably legitimate content pages." To get the number if gigabytes, look at the Wikimedia download site. It says that the size of the current pages is 905.64 MiB and including the histories 35.15 GiB. The size of the media is at the images dump page; there it says 16.7 Gb. — Pt (T) 20:10, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Babel Doesn't work for some languages

I just added the Babel thing to my user page and I am having problems. I typed {{Babel-3|en|es-3|ta-2}} because I am a native English speaker, am proficcient at Spanish and can speak and understand Tamil. The problem is that it loads fine for english and spanish but fails for Tamil. if you would like to see what happens, please visit my user page. Please provide me assistance as to what I need to do to fix this. Thanks. --R6MaY89 22:55, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)

The template {{ta-2}} has not yet been created. You would need to sort it out further, probably at Wikipedia talk:Babel. Good luck, smoddy 23:05, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Accessibility

I have occasionally seen references to the accessibility of Wikipedia. Out of interest, I tested todays featured article with access valet at (http://valet.webthing.com/access/) and it failed. Criticisms included:

    • Ensure that documents are readable without stylesheets too.
    • Table cells should be associated with headers
    • Ensure that information conveyed with colour is also available without it.
    • Provide concise abbreviations for long table headers
    • Provide an accessible alternative to SCRIPT elements.
    • Create keyboard shortcuts and/or a logical tab order between controls.

I know enough about accessibility to know that an good site can fail the test and a bad site can pass. So my test may not mean much. I do worry that an extremely high proportion of Wikipedia articles contain templates. The use of 2D formats are regarded as 'not a good thing' for accessibility.

In any case, I wonder if we could increase accessibility? We could at least discuss it when we promote one style over another, or modify software. Comments welcome. Bobblewik  (talk) 23:03, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Those are mostly generic notes that will be printed for about any page. The MediaWiki basic page layout is designed to be readable without style sheets; table issues obviously depend on the use of the table; edit links are reflected by title attribute as well as color; the JavaScript elements are purely supplementary; there are keyboard shortcuts and some effort is attempted to arrange tab order for main controls. I'm not sure what templates have to do with '2D formats'? See the tracking bug for accessibility issues. --Brion 01:46, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
I suspect the 2D format issue with templates is that many templates organize information (i.e. convey meaning) via the 2D spatial layout. Imagine a Lynx (web browser) rendering being fed to a text-to-speech engine. Will a left to right, line by line reading of a template necessarily even be understandable? -- Rick Block (talk) 02:21, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
Templates are just insertion of text into a page from a common source. There is no particular implication about layout associated with templates. Of course, there may be particular templates which use poorly accessible markup (for instance badly laid-out tables), but that has nothing to do with their being templates; people made wacky inaccessible tables and things long before we had templates. --Brion 09:37, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)

Templates no longer contain implied new line

It has been observed that the behavior of a template has changed. Where is a description of this change? It used to be that a template automatically created a wiki end-of-line, so an implied end-of-paragraph could appear. This was observed when a template tried to include the '#' numbered list token, as the entire list used to have to be on a single line because an actual newline would create a paragraph break which would start a new list. Apparently template behavior changed recently, as some weakly-formatted articles started showing material grouped in a single paragraph. (SEWilco 03:44, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC))

Wikipedia_talk:Footnote3#template:note_now_broken: Apparently an HTML-handling change broke the <cite> incantation which was used by {{note}}. (SEWilco 03:48, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC))

Someone has hacked your servers to do auto-vandalism

I was viewing the Nikola_Tesla page when I encountered the language, SHIT FUCK NIGGER WHORE SLUT or something similar. I tried to revert the page, but there was nothing there to revert. There were also no recent changes to the page. I can only assume that WP's servers have been hacked in some manner. Mbstone 07:04, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

  • Hmm... I see no trouble at the Nikola Tesla page. Sjakkalle (Check!) 07:10, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
    • I checked the templates used on the page as well, nothing recorded as happening there. -- Cyrius|✎ 07:23, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
      • I can see a spate of vandalism in the history. Nothing unusual, it was reverted fairly quickly and the point here is that the vandalism IS actually showing in the history. - Ta bu shi da yu 07:45, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
        • There was no vandalism visible in the right timeframe. -- Cyrius|✎ 07:44, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

lost my account

I have just seen the "Create account / log in" despite having "remember my account" set. Tried to login, got:

The password you entered is incorrect. Please try again.

Tried emailing new password and got:

Error sending mail: There is no e-mail address recorded for user "Chris Q".

What's hapened to my account! -- 213.38.213.226 10:41, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC) (Chris Q)

You don't seem to be the only one. See Wikipedia:Help desk#Password trouble. Thryduulf 14:08, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It now works again -- Chris Q 06:47, 2005 Jun 6 (UTC)

I had the same problem, although I was more than happy to blame it on an off-WP conversation I had with an admin. Perhaps I was too quick in my conclusion(s). I was too impatient to wait very long tho, and requested a new pwd, and was immediately able to log in using that new pwd. Tomer TALK 11:39, Jun 6, 2005 (UTC)

Last night, a number of pages appeared in Category:Stub when they were edited to change from {{msg:stub}} to {{stub}} in advance of 1.5. While it was unsurprising that the first edit since Category:Stub was added to the template in January populated the category, they had not previously been listedin Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Stub (which has less than 500 entries thanks to the Stub sorting project). Any ideas as to why this should have happened? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 11:54, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Marginal Rate of Transformation

Could you please review the definition of the Marginal Rate of Transformation in the Welfare Economics section. It should be the Marginal Rate of Technical Substitution when it refers to the mix of factors of production used in a particular production process. It is the slope the isoquant. On the other hand, the Marginal Rate of Transformation is the slope of the Production Possibilities Frontier.

moved to reference desk at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk#Marginal_Rate_of_Transformation

Where are template changes announced?

Where are changes to template behavior announced? Not Template History; I mean MediaWiki or CSS changes which affect templates. (SEWilco 14:05, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC))

I believe the answer is "nowhere"; however, you can catch most CSS changes by watchlisting MediaWiki:Monobook.css. --cesarb 16:46, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant "Wikipedia templates". Trasclusion as used by the Template: namespace. (SEWilco 03:19, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC))
See the MediaWiki 1.4.5 release announcement. bugzilla:2309 is tracking the issue with legit templates broken by the security fix. --Brion 08:08, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)

too many connections

I created a wiki using mediawiki. It was working perfectly and i left it some weeks by itself. After some time it gave me the message:

Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server. Too many connections


I am sure that the wiki is not having too many visitors, as it´s unkonwn. Any ideas what caused this? Thanks...

Alexandre

This is not a MediaWiki support forum. Try the mediawiki-l mailing list. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:20, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Moving images to commons

If I want to move some GFDL images that I had uploaded here on Wikipedia on to the Commons, would the best thing to do be simply to upload them again in commons and have the ones here deleted? I assume that links would remain intact? If I do that, would the originals be Speedy Delete material?

Thanks, — Asbestos | Talk 18:00, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Uploading them again on Commons is the only way of accomplishing it. If you want to have the ones here speedy deleted, that's okay, but unnecessary. Links to the images will still work assuming the titles are the same. A duplicate image existing on Commons is explicitly listed as not being a reason for speedy deletion. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:22, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It's a bit of a pain to get the images deleted. You might be able to get an administrator to delete it for you (if you're the creator of both); if not, list them on WP:IFD. You may find the template {{dbc}} useful. — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:05, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Map showing location from coordinates

Will this ever happen? I make maps of thousands of locations, just make a map and plot in red dot. Easy to generate automatically, I think. How long I continue make simple maps?

--Fred-Chess 11:44, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That is already possible and applied, see Template:Ie citytown infobox.--Patrick 22:31, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A technical solution for footnotes?

It seems that every Wikipedia article reinvents the wheel when it comes to how to do footnotes. Just a quick review of recent featured articles shows at least half a dozen different ways of handling footnotes (some more successful than others). I think editors would be much more inclined to use footnotes to cite their sources if there was a straightforward way to do it. I am familiar with Wikipedia:Footnotes, Wikipedia:Footnote2, Wikipedia:Footnote3, Wikipedia:Footnote4, etc. Clearly we need a better way to handle this problem. Perhaps a technical solution would be possible? Any thoughts on this? Kaldari 20:07, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There are existing proposals:
(SEWilco 20:32, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC))

Scheduled downtime on 7 June

Anyone know how long this will last?

An hour?

A day?

A week?

The advertised mailing list doesn't give any info at all.

MPF 21:32, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:Announcements, it will be down for max 14 hours. - Shanes 21:37, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks! - MPF 21:58, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
No no no. That is the expected maximum length. Since when has any hardware-related activity gone as expected for Wikimedia? -- Cyrius|✎ 02:14, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Well, based on my watchlist the servers were down from about 07:50 UTC to about 18:38 UTC, or about 10 hours 48 minutes. So, Cyrius's (understandable) pessimism was incorrect on this occastion. Thryduulf 19:54, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It's not as much pessimism as not wanting the words that I wrote misinterpreted. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:27, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Deletion is broken

At least, partially. A couple of article I have had no problems deleting, but I have tried at least ten times on both Danza Slap and Ben Wyrosdick, and keep getting an ERROR message when I attempt it. RickK 22:54, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)

They sure look deleted to me. --Brion 00:16, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
This has been an ongoing problem for weeks. Deletions fail to go through with resulting error pages on a regular basis. One must try, try again. If you look at the deletion history, both pages were deleted later by other admins. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:25, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Gee, thanks. So you just keep trying, 50, 100, 250 times before it takes? OH, and duh, how stupid I must be, to think that red links aren't deleted. Wow, I mut really be a moron. Thanks for pointing that out, that was very useful. RickK 06:39, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
You do realize I was being sarcastic in Brion's direction, not yours? -- Cyrius|✎ 09:48, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Today deletion is totally impossible - earlier it took maybe 1 hour of repeated retry until a page finally got deleted. The last week it had the error message sporadically, but now it is nearly constant! As a software developer I know such a bug "cannot happen" - but it does. See also Bugzilla #2195 andy 21:02, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Curse you, inclusionist cabal! You may think you have the upper hand now, but the worm will turn!
Dan, I know that was you. Stop hiding the truth. Inclusionism is the new deletionism. The featured article of June 9 2015 is Smoddy's nasal hair. Don't give us that foolhardy deletionist populist rhetoric. Foolhardy inclusionist populist orator 17:04, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not encountering any problems deleting, but if this happens to you just blank the page, protect, and list it in a new list on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Old with a note explaining why it needs to be deleted. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 18:06, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sporadic Returns

I've made a little program that goes and retrieves my watchlist for me. However, every once in a while, I don't get any response from Wikipedia. Error code is 0, just no content returned. No headers either. Here's my request: 

GET /wiki/Special:Watchlist HTTP/1.0
Host: en.wikipedia.org
Connection: close
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Cookie: enwikiUserID=93732;enwikiUserName=Ambush+Commander;enwikiToken=(INSERT VALID WIKI TOKEN HERE)

Is there something wrong with this request header? Why do I not seem to get any output at all? (By the way, I'm using PHP SimpleTest's virtual browser to handle the transaction.

The "small" tag

The "small" tag <small> doesn't work in my IE when I have the text font set to "large". Anyone knows why and if it will be fixed by the Wikipedia software some day?

If not, is there a better tag to show smaller text?

Thank you --Fred-Chess 11:18, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

  • It seems to be a behaviour of the IE browser itself. When you set the text font to "large", IE seems to ignore <small> and similar tags dealing with fonts. Zzyzx11 (Talk) 23:35, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes, unfortunately IE doesn't do a good job with some of the font tags—or some other tags either. Hopefully they'll fix it in their next version; otherwise, I'd recommend switching to any standards-compliant browser (I personally like Firefox, but there are plenty out there). — Knowledge Seeker দ 03:12, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Search field - more options

Maybe put a link to "search commons", "search other languages" etc on the standard search page? -SV|t 00:20, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Logging in

Why can't I log in? A message "incorrect password" appears, even though the password is correct. Fenice

When did this start, and when was the last time you tried to log in? -- Cyrius|✎ 20:18, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It started about an hour ago and I just tried to log in now - it is still not working.Other language-sites are working, even though fr.wiki and es.wiki had not remembered me across sessions, I could log in.Fenice
Nine hours later it is still not working. Who can I contact? Who could fix the bug? Fenice
No one else seems to have this problem. I think that "incorrrect password" explains your problem. --Fred-Chess 04:52, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
So what can I do - I obviously cannot change it back, if it was really changed.Fenice
Actually, you're not the only one to have this problem—it happened to me and many other users, although it was several days ago, and that problem was supposed to have been fixed. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-06-06/Password security for more information. I am not sure what you should do, though. Do you have an e-mail address registered? — Knowledge Seeker দ 05:30, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
No, I don't have an e-mail registered. Do I have to register under a new name or can it be fixed with the old name?Fenice
I've harassed Brion, he's futzed with it, says you should try logging in again. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:41, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Let me know if this works; if it does I'll run a mass check for any others that got broken that way. --Brion 05:44, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
Thank you, it's working again!--Fenice 08:24, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Users accidentally editing templates.

The image source template {{Image source}}, is being widely placed on talk pages at the moment. Like many other talk page templates it generates a header. Proper use of this template is through the subst: mechanism, but inevitably many users are not substituting it, but just inserting a template.

If the template isn't inserted with subst:, when a user clicks on the "edit section" link, they don't edit the section of their talk page, but the original template. This has resulting in it being commented on, and blanked.

Besided trying to get users of this template to use subst, or protecting the template, is there anything else that can be done to prevent this sort of thing? I'm thinking of making some templates always subst. Zeimusu | (Talk page) 23:48, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Removing the heading would be the simplest way. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:40, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Another way is to use <h2>...</h2> instead of ==...==, which removes the "edit section" link. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 11:47, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
But then it doesn't go in the table of contents. Anyway I hear that Mediawiki 1.5 will treat html headers identically to wiki headers, and this trick won't work. (though I may be wrong) Zeimusu | (Talk page)
Thanks for mentioning that. If we're tweaking the software, is there any reason not to disallow page blanking in MediaWiki? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 15:05, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Revert Photo

This [4] uploaded photo used to be something completely different (an image of a xenon flash lamp) before the cartoon image was uploaded over it. Why can't I revert it??--Deglr6328 06:32, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Because it was deleted:
The previous contents of the image description page were "{{unverified}}{{ifd}}".
  • I remember seeing this question before.... Am I dreaming? Mgm|(talk) 11:29, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

Watchlist deletion

I cannot delete articles from my watchlist using the "display and edit the complete list" page. The attempt repeatedly times out with the "wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request" error. Using the "watch" and "unwatch" links on articles works fine. – Smyth\talk 11:39, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Text-Only/PDA format

I love Wikipedia and use it very frequently. However, it does not work well on my Treo 650 PDA's Blazer browser. I have tried turning off image loading on the browser, but it still does not look very good. Are there any plans to create a text-only version or a PDA version of wikipedia?

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&oldid=15007655"