Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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Non-admin rollbackers

I don't know if this has been/is being discussed somewhere else, or even if this is the correct place to post this, but I think that non-admin rollbackers should be allowed to make more than 5 rollbacks in a minute before being throttled. I think that they (OK, we) should be able to make at least 10 rollbacks (15 would be better) before being throttled.

Considering that rollback rights are not automatically assigned (as autoconfirmed rights are), I do not see any reason that we should be restricted so much. I use Huggle rather vigorously, and I would be able to be much more effective in my vandal-fighting (especially during high-volume times) if I was not slowed down by having to force Huggle to mimic the rollback feature for ⁵/₆ of the time after I use up my 5 rollbacks in 10 seconds. (which I do fairly frequently when vandalism is at its peak)

Also, I sometimes encounter someone who adds external links (pointing to pages in the same website) to many articles (think 15-25) before I realize what he/she is doing. I review their contribs in Huggle to ensure that they are all spam, and if they have not been warned previously, I usually give them either a level 2 or a level 3 warning, open their contribs, and click on the rollback links. It is incredibly annoying to only be able to do 5 rollbacks, and then having to click "undo" for the rest. J.delanoy ^gabs _adds 02:04, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have to agree. I had the same problem when reverting someone who had spammed about 120 articles today. Even though I took a second or two to double check every single diff using popups, I still bumped on the limit several times. Rather frustrating and time consuming. —Ashanda (talk) 02:36, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't personally hit the limit but I agree that since there's approval to receive rollback it could probably be increased a bit. xenocidic (talk) 02:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The throttle is set in the site configuration, but it is easy to change. You just need to point the developers the presence of the mythical beast of consensus. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 03:19, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I am hoping to get here... J.delanoy ^gabs _adds 13:29, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't seem like it should be much of a risk to increase the limit to, say, 25 or even 50 rollbacks per minute. Actually, I'm not sure it even really needs a limit at all; after all, the worst you could do with unlimited rollback would be to run a bot to rollback every page and every new edit as soon as it's made — and that would just get you blocked quickly and the rollbacks reverted. Yes, that would be a nuisance, but hardly a serious one. Probably about equal in overall annoyance level to a 5-minute database lock or thereabouts. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:05, 11 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like double or tripling the limit would help editors, while posing minimal risk. Unless a case is made for a higher limit, I don't think we should go there; there is a clear downside, and - absent a demonstrated need - why go there? (So count this as a vote for doubling or tripling the current limit.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:52, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So, would 15 rollbacks per minute enjoy consensus? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:15, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'd say so; the benefit is real, and the opposition is not. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:02, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why on Earth do we even need a limit? We can just revoke it from someone who abuses it. _{1 != 2} 20:10, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that we don't need a limit on the number of reverts a minute: I don't see why it was necessary to include a limit in the first place. Rollback is very easy to remove if it's abused, and changing non-admin rollback from five reverts a minute to unlimited will be a major positive, in my opinion. Acalamari 20:32, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think the limit was placed when non-admin rollback was first introduced, as part of a compromise to those that were opposed to it. I'd be fine with the restriction's removal, now that we've established that granting rollback isn't the encyclopedia-destroying concept some may have been concerned it would be. As has been pointed out, abuse can easily be dealt with by any admin. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:55, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

←OK, it looks like several people think it's a good idea, so, how do we move forward from here? Should I create a poll somewhere to try to get more community input? If so where should I create it? As a subpage of WP:ROLLBACK? J.delanoy ^gabs _adds 21:11, 13 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The feature request is bug 12760. I support this measure and would prefer no restriction, the current limit makes rollback useless at nuking spam. MER-C 06:50, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I put a limit on it because I thought we were going to be sensible and give rollback to all users, and I had the limit set accordingly. I'm not attached to it, and it was pretty much plucked from thin air, so there's no big deal in upping it two or three-fold. FWIW, I've hit this limit too, and it's a bit of a pain. — Werdna talk 09:16, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As the person who filed bug 12760 back when rollback was first made available, this obviously has my full support. I can confirm that the limit is easily reached during busy periods when only a handful of people are patrolling recent changes. While I have addressed this to some extent in Huggle by falling back to normal reversion rather than just displaying an "Action throttled" error message, the difference in speed can be significant Gurchzilla (talk) 12:10, 14 May 2008 (UTC) OK, it looks like we have quite a bit of support for this. I'm going to move it to WP:VPP and open a straw poll. J.delanoy ^gabs _adds 15:18, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Non-admin rollbackers

Bizarre Category Numbers

I've put together a table of various CSD categories for easy tracking, and included the number of pages in each category using the PAGESINCAT magic word, which should - in theory - return the number of pages in each category. When I load the page, however, I get several categories that - when empty - give negative results. The table is here. Even after purging, the number of attack pages for speedy deletion will read as -1 when the cat is empty; Nonsense pages will read as -2 pages in the category, even when empty. Am I doing something wrong, or is there an error with the category or PAGESINCAT? Thanks, UltraExactZZ ^Claims~ Evidence 15:21, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's a known bug; see bugzilla:13683. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:29, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Aha, missed that one. Knowing that, I'll see if I can increment those counts in the template to bring everything to zero. Thanks! UltraExactZZ ^Claims~ Evidence 15:43, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ended up using {{sum}} to fix the problem, though - as the bugzilla report notes - the larger issue is why the counts are wrong to begin with. Interesting. UltraExactZZ ^Claims~ Evidence 18:31, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, they're way off. At the moment,

{{PAGESINCATEGORY:Wikipedia articles in need of updating}}: says 199

and

Category:Wikipedia articles in need of updating shows well over 200

— Carl (CBM · talk) 18:43, 12 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What's more interesting is that the counts appear to be changing. I hardcoded increments into my table, so that when the "All CSD Candidates" category was empty, it would show the PAGESINCAT count of -2 plus the increment of 2 - so the display would be 0. Now, however, it shows -1, so I have to change the increment to match. Nonsense did the same thing. I wonder if it's a growing problem, or if it was an effort to fix it that changed the number? UltraExactZZ ^Claims~ Evidence 12:53, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's not interesting, that's completely expected. Whatever glitch threw off the numbers to start with continues to throw them off. I've implemented a workaround in r34870, so at least the counts won't appear negative (but they may be considerably off nonetheless). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 17:06, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Finding Pages in Two or More Specified Categories

Resolved

– The solution is poorly documented, but exactly what was needed. Proginoskes (talk) 18:26, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a tool which allows one to search for pages which belong to two or more categories supplied to the tool? Treating categories as sets, I want a set of results R (existing as either a list of search results or a generated and discarded category page) such that

$R=\bigcap _{i=1}^{n}{C_{i}}$

where $C_{i}$ is one of the n categories supplied to the tool. If such a tool does not exist, how difficult would it be to make one?

Proginoskes (talk) 18:34, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

WP:CATSCAN can intersect two categories. Algebraist 21:04, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

And there's a (rather old) proposal WP:Category intersection. Algebraist 21:05, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This now can be done in the standard search box: see Wikipedia:Categorization#Searching for articles in categories. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:18, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But only for categories that are present in the text itself, not included through templates. An important caveat. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 17:08, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

What links here problem

On Special:WhatLinksHere/Image:Flag_of_Georgia.svg, when I click on "next 50", I get the same list - I also get a "previous 50" option, but again it just gives me the same list. That is to say, I can only see the first 50. (If anyone is interested, I'm trying to find where the wrong Georgian flag is being used). DuncanHill (talk) 21:47, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's probably a bug. However, lists like this can display up to 5,000 items at a time by manipulating the URL like this long list of links to Image:Flag_of_Georgia.svg. At the time of writing, there are 2,764 links in that list according to my screen reader JAWS, so that list contains all the links. Graham87 10:23, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 14:26, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The problem seems to have resolved itself now. Still really weird though :D --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:42, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Page creation protection.

Some time ago I found out that protection for pagecreation was case insensitive. Did this stop? I protected here but was able to create here. Could this have anything to do with the fact, that I protected two alternative spellings? Agathoclea (talk) 22:28, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

With the exception of the leading capitalization, everything is case sensitive (ie: jim Carrey is the same as Jim Carrey, but Jim carrey is not). EVula // talk // ☯ // 22:30, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

thanks-- Agathoclea (talk) 22:38, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That did happen for a while; it was a bug. --brion (talk) 23:45, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking what a good feature it was... awwwww. Pegasus «C¦T» 03:18, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree on the feature bit .. but can see the trouble in searching for the right protection could be. Agathoclea (talk) 07:32, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Strange "Go" button behavior

Why does entering After the rain in the search box and clicking "Go" take me to After The Rain rather than After the Rain? (The former now redirects to the latter, but it didn't at the time I did that search.) Mike R (talk) 23:58, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is explained at Help:Go button. After failing to find the precise title entered, it tries all lowercase inital letters (which is what you entered here anyway), then all uppercase initials. It's not clever enough to find mixed titles like After the Rain. Algebraist 01:10, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Mike R (talk) 14:18, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It'll find them, but when there are multiple matches it may find another one first. --brion (talk) 15:47, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Touring around the villages in Somerset

Wandering through the villages in Somerset (category:Villages in Somerset), I discovered that the article Villages in Somerset is included. That might have been fine except that the article is actually a redirect to the category [1] so I foolishly tried removing the article from the category. I tried this (diff} and found nothing changed even after a few days. So I had a go at a null edit to the article redirect (diff) but there is still the circular tour even after another few days. Any advice (just forget it?)? Thincat (talk) 13:11, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think I have fixed it - I made the article a redirect to [[:Category:Villages in Somerset]]. The : in front of category makes it work like a normal link, without putting it into the category. DuncanHill (talk) 13:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, well done! And you didn't even have to wait a few days! This is surely a feature rather than a bug in redirects. Thincat (talk) 13:22, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Punctuation marks

Can anyone explain why the Punctuation marks info box on at sign doesn't link (the words are underlined in blue, but the cursor stays an arrow rather than becoming a pointing finger - MSIE7). Whilst the same info box on brackets and interrobang and elsewhere work fine? -- SGBailey (talk) 14:11, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fine on my computer (winXP, IE7, FF2). Have you tried the usual bypass cache, restart browser, restart computer rigmarole? Algebraist 16:13, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's working fine here. (Also on Opera, Firefox, and IE6.) —Cryptic 16:13, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Still malfunctions today after a ctrl-F5 on top of a power cycle. Hmm. -- SGBailey (talk) 09:40, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Stranger and stranger... I've made it work and then not work and then partly work, all in a repeatable fashion. The key appears to be changing the width of the MSIE window. It seems to work full screen or >90% wide or <60% wide. At about 85% wide the pointy finger works for v,d,e and down to comma but not for dash. At 80% there are no pointy fingers. BTW I'm using classic skin which I don't think has an impact here. Anyway, I can "fix" it by changing the window width. Well I never... -- SGBailey (talk) 10:07, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I did the same test at another XP / MSIE 7 / Classic skin PC and it did the same thing. Really weird. -- SGBailey (talk) 22:30, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguating some template links

The templates at Special:WhatLinksHere&target=Georgia&namespace=10 all link to Georgia, which is a disambiguation page. They should link to Georgia (country). I cannot fix the links myself as the template do not use actual wikilinks, but two letter abbreviations, and I don't know how to do it. Could someone who understands these things fix them please? DuncanHill (talk) 14:48, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that link doesn't work, maybe this external one will [2]. DuncanHill (talk) 14:50, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hrm, I tried, but I don't really understand how they do things, the problem eminates from Template:Iso2country. xenocidic ( talk ¿ review ) 14:57, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed (I think) {{topic/country|GE|{{{prefix|}}}|{{{suffix| (country)}}}}} -- SGBailey (talk) 15:56, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks! DuncanHill (talk) 16:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Our search box-- it's suggestion function?

What is that? I want to add something like that to a private wiki I might set up. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 16:08, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See mw:Manual:$wgEnableMWSuggest. This is new for MediaWiki 1.13; older versions do include an optional "ajax search" variant, but the UI isn't cleanly integrated, making it a bit distracting.

There's an extension which gives similar behavior, though I haven't tested it myself. --brion (talk) 16:47, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks guys. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 17:19, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

New Wikipedia logo

Please see Wikipedia:VPR#Wikipedia logo improvement for a discussion regarding improvement of the Wikipedia logo. I've uploaded a new version of the logo, and since this would be a major change, I'm guessing it would need wide consensus, so I'm posting a notices around. Please direct any comments to the Village pump discussion. Thanks. Equazcion •✗/C • 16:09, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Links to disambiguation pages (Warning when linking to...)

I spend a fair amount of time repairing links to disambiguation pages. It has struck me that if editors received some kind of warning when introducing such links then they would be more likely to realize their mistake and correct it themselves. Would it be possible for some such to be introduced? DuncanHill (talk) 22:32, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Great idea but perhaps a technical hurdle. Even better would be showing them a list of options and automatically piping the link when they select the right one. xenocidic ( talk ¿ review ) 22:37, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that sounds even better! DuncanHill (talk) 22:38, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That could be a WP:WIKED enhancement but I don't think the standard Wikipedia editing interface can do that, ever. Pegasus «C¦T» 03:33, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It could, sure. Wouldn't be too hard to do if it were desirable. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 17:48, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've made a user script: User:Splarka/dabfinder.js to find disambiguations on a given page. However, it will not work correctly in preview because it utilizes generator=links on a page to find all template links on pages linked to from a given page and see which match the list defined at MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage (in this way, it can check all the links on a page with only two API queries). But it is a bit useful after the fact. --Splarka (rant) 07:14, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nifty. If you don't mind searching out all links in the document and doing ceil(N/50)+1 API queries instead of only 2, you can do something like I do in User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js:

Use getElementsByTagName('A') to find all links
Filter out links with classes 'external', 'extiw', 'new', or 'image'.
List the unique title attributes; this attribute contains the target page name, with a few exceptions (filter out '' and anything beginning 'Edit section:' or 'Special:'). Alternatively, you could decode the page name out of the href.


If you wanted, you could filter out anything with a namespace to be left with just mainspace page links.
Instead of using generator=links, pass up to 50 of the linked pages at a time in the titles parameter.


Interesting approach, I didn't know there was an official list of disambiguation templates. My script looks for categories the page belongs to to do the same thing. Anomie⚔ 11:23, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's what the official list does too, more or less.  Actually it differs slightly, but probably on Wikipedia they amount to the same thing. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 17:48, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Some disambiguation pages are a symptom of bad planning and I would be wary of software features that try to discourage the user from linking to them. Smoking, Acoustic guitar, Hip-hop are just a few examples of proper articles which started out as disambiguation pages (for decidedly unambiguous terms) linking to intimately related sub-concepts at the expense of the bigger picture. — CharlotteWebb 20:53, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Any special settings were necessary to make Template:Navbox work?

I am attempting to port Template:Navbox and it's variants to another wiki.  Initially I ported the Templates source directly to a matching article on the other wiki.  Instead of the normal Navbox rendered information, it returned a great deal of HTML and messed with the style of the page putting text behind the wiki logo, pushing the tool/link boxes on the left all the way to the bottom, and it  even spilled the /doc page text out of the bottom of the normal article area of the page.  In an effort to fix this I began playing around with it, enlisting the aid of User:CapitalR on a separate wiki environment that I used for a while to house information on custom content in an online game.  Either way, CapitalR stripped out a lot of the parser functions and other stuff, and simplified it some, and it still seems to be having some difficulty.  If you would like to take a look at the output of the full template as it is ported you can look here [http://www.mendo.org/ultima/Template:NavboxTest].  What I really need to know is, where there any special settings that had to be made to allow the template (in its current form or similiar previous ones) to function.  Barring that, is there any useful help that anyone might give on it.  
Already suggested/tried are the following:

Common.css and Common.js sections that are used by this template may not be present - They are
HTMLTidy may be interfering - HTMLTidy was not initially enabled so far I could tell. I have added some lines to the LocalSettings.php file to try and enable it just to see if it would fix it. and it did not change at all.

$wgUseTidy = True;
$wgTidyConf = "$IP/includes/tidy.conf";
$wgAlwaysUseTidy=true;

Parser Functions are out of date - While they were pretty out of date, they are not up to date with version 1.1.1 displayed (although the files are reported as 1.12...

Any thoughts? Tigey (talk) 01:41, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You might be missing an extension that's necessary: I can't off the top of my head think which it might be.  What extensions are listed on en.wiki's Special:Version#Installed extensions list that isn't on the equivalent page on your wiki? Happy‑melon 09:06, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK there are quite a few of them, but most of them I can't see affecting it, then again, you never know...



Category Tree
Central Auth
Check User


Cite
Cross Namespace Links
Deleted User Contributions


Expand Templates
Link Search
MakeBot


MakeSysop
OAIRepository
Oversight


ParserDiffTest
Renameuser
SiteMatrix


CharInsert
EasyTimeline
FixedImage


ImageMap
Poem
SyntaxHighlight


WikiHiero
AntiSpoof
AssertEdit


BoardVote
CentralNotice
ConfirmEdit


DismissableSiteNotice
Gadgets
MWSearth


Newuserlog
SpamBlacklist
TitleKey


UsernameBlacklist

All that are on my wiki are:

Confirm User Accounts
CharInsert
Inputbox
ParserFunctions 1.1.1

Perhaps tonight I will go through and install some of the likely extensions and see what I can make of that. Tigey (talk) 13:12, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Of Note! I installed ExpandTemplates and it outputted the code like so:

<table cellspacing="0" class="navbox nowraplinks"><tr><th style="" colspan=2 class="navbox-title"><span style="font-size:110%;">Title</span></th></tr>
<tr style="height:2px;"><td></td></tr><tr><td class="navbox-abovebelow" style=";" colspan="2">Above</td></tr><tr style="height:2px;"><td></td></tr><tr><td class="navbox-group" style=";;">Group1</td><td style="text-align:left;border-left:2px solid #fdfdfd;width:100%;padding:0px;;;" class="navbox-list navbox-odd">List1</td></tr><tr style="height:2px"><td></td></tr><tr><td class="navbox-group" style=";;">Group2</td><td style="text-align:left;border-left:2px solid #fdfdfd;width:100%;padding:0px;;;" class="navbox-list navbox-even">List2</td></tr><tr style="height:2px;"><td></td></tr><tr><td class="navbox-abovebelow" style=";" colspan="2">Below</td></tr></table>

The output on the NavboxTester page displays the Title cell below this output:

<tr style="height:2px;"><td></td></tr><tr><td class="navbox-abovebelow" style=";" colspan="2">Above</td></tr><tr style="height:2px;"><td></td></tr><tr><td class="navbox-group" style=";;">Group1</td><td style="text-align:left;border-left:2px solid #fdfdfd;width:100%;padding:0px;;;" class="navbox-list navbox-odd">List1</td></tr><tr style="height:2px"><td></td></tr><tr><td class="navbox-group" style=";;">Group2</td><td style="text-align:left;border-left:2px solid #fdfdfd;width:100%;padding:0px;;;" class="navbox-list navbox-even">List2</td></tr><tr style="height:2px;"><td></td></tr><tr><td class="navbox-abovebelow" style=";" colspan="2">Below</td></tr>

So it processes part of it correctly.  Starting with that "Above" cell all the way up to the end table tag. Tigey (talk) 22:02, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like the necessary fix was an upgrade of the MediaWiki itself as suggested at Template talk:Navbox#Ported to outside Wiki - Problem if no image defined. Tigey (talk) 17:38, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Aligning a template

Resolved

I should know this by now but how do you align a template to the left?  <div align=left style="float: left;">template</div> doesn't work. 
See:


24 Wiki

-- penubag  (talk) 02:13, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]




Village pump (technical) on 24 Wiki

If a template contains code that aligns itself, you can't just align it another way by placing code outside it. You could subst: it and change the align code, or you can do what I did above, confining it to a table cell so that even though it's still aligned right, it can only go to the right of the cell in which it's contained. Equazcion •✗/C • 02:19, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you equazicon, it's been bugging me for a while. I was just working on a minor template page so I decided to bring it up. -- penubag  (talk) 02:29, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
No problem :) Equazcion •✗/C • 02:30, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Graphic designer needed

I'm looking for a skilled graphic designer.
I need an image for a non-barnstar Wikipedia award with the theme "World Traveler".  
I was thinking perhaps the following image, without the barnstar, and with the globe (or another one) superimposed over the Wikipedia globe (or the Wikipedia globe superimposed over it) - I'd like to see the world's countries and the puzzle pieces (with the continents more prominent).
The image also needs a passport laying on the surface beneath the globe stand (where its shadow is, but the shadow should be retained as well). The image's background must be transparent (not white like the background of the image below).
File:Interlingual Barnstar.png
Is this something you can do?
If so, please contact me on my talk page.
I look forward to your reply.
The Transhumanist    17:17, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You could also try Wikipedia:Graphic Lab. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:40, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Adding article sizes in histories

Is there any way that the article's character count can be added next to each listing in the article's history?  If I look at Recent changes, it shows how many characters have been added or removed with an edit, but this information doesn't show up in the article history, so there's no way to tell which edits did damage to the article.  Corvus cornix_talk 18:34, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Er... it does for me :D Happy‑melon 18:41, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It wasn't this morning.  Maybe I needed lunch.  :)  Corvus cornix_talk 20:52, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can get the +/- difference for each edit in the history tab by subtracting byte counts, if that's what you meant:

addOnloadHook(function(){
  if(wgAction != "history") return;  var b, b1;
  s = getElementsByClassName(document, "span", "history-size");
  for(var i = 0; i < s.length; i++, b1 = b){
     if(m = s[i].innerHTML.match(/[\d\,]+/)) b = parseInt(String(m).replace(/\,/g, ""));
     else if(s[i].innerHTML.match(/empty/)) b = 0;
     else return; if(!i) continue; d = b1-b; x = String(d);
     while (x.match(/\d{4}/)) x = x.replace(/(\d{3})(?:\,|$)/, ",$1");
     f = Math.abs(d) > 1000 ? "style=\"font-weight:bold;\"" : "";
     if(d<0) c = "neg"; else if(d==0) c = "null";  else {c = "pos"; x = "+" + x; }
     s[i-1].innerHTML += " (" + x + ")";
     }
  });

— CharlotteWebb 16:25, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Co-ordinates broken (again)

The co-ordinates at the top of geographical articles appear to be broken again, outputting a long string of text which also overlaps the "An n-class article from Wikipedia" text. e.g. at Tavistock, Devon. DuncanHill (talk) 21:26, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not seeing a "class" message.  Maybe that's in a non-default theme?  But the coordinates are placed in an absolute location on the screen, so tinkering with the header is known to make thinks wander.  -- SEWilco (talk) 21:38, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It appears to have sorted itself out now. DuncanHill (talk) 21:39, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The "class" text is a gadget. DuncanHill (talk) 21:40, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It's a dirty hack, we really need an extension that handles the coordinates and their position. You can try adding importScript('User:TheDJ/movecoord.js'); to your monobook.js It makes the coordinates behave a lot nicer, because it positions it correctly in DOM instead of forcing it's position as an offset "close to the header". --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:38, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Redirects don't appear in watchlist

Has anybody noticed that if one redirects an existing article, the redirect page does not appear in one's watchlist even if reverted? Phlegm Rooster (talk) 21:27, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hm? Can you provide a concrete example of the behavior you've noticed? AmiDaniel (talk) 03:38, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Search box suggestion

Dear,
First of all I would like to thank you for the wonderful Wikipedia. I would like to make a suggestion to improve the website. 
I have been talking to other people about it aswell, who agreed totally.
Can the text/typing cursor be standing in the "search box" when opening the starting page of wikipedia like it is when you open google?
This saves some time not to use the mouse and would be more convenient so you can type your search immediately.
I would like to thank you for your time,
Kind regards,
Bert Ameloot (Belgium)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.136.10.199 (talk) 22:05, 16 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's a common request and the reasons not to is that it prevents another logical action - the (page) down arrow key to scroll down.  Web design standards also frown upon focus-grabbing.  If you have an account, however, you can force this by going to Special:Preferences (my preferences above), Gadgets and tick "Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page."  x42bn6 Talk Mess 01:03, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Most browsers will allow you to quickly navigate your cursor to the search bar using shortcut keys. In Firefox, Alt+Shift+F will do the trick. In IE, it's Alt+F, I believe. AmiDaniel (talk) 03:37, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I use Safari on a Mac, and I can just hit "tab" and it takes me to the search box (though that's partly because of a system-wide preference). Personally, I'm opposed to having it auto-focus, as I use the mouse down and up keys when reading, and I don't want an extra click to get out of the box. One of the benefits of registering, though, is that you can easily activate this feature for yourself, though, just like x42bn6 mentioned. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:23, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Finding templates that conditionally pass parameters that are broken in the new parser

I've ran across some problems with the geobox templates tonight and now pose the following question: Does anyone know of a way to find templates that attempt to conditionally pass parameters using the following syntax?

{{template|{{#if:1|a=1}}}}

Not exactly an easy question to answer, I know :) --- RockMFR 01:09, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

how did my edit summary get truncated?

why was the edit summary seen here somehow truncated, or altered?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Badmachine (talk • contribs) 01:09, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply] 
oops i forgot to sign my post and add that the edit summary that i entered said something like 'if you edit someone elses comment then you should remove their signature'. this is what user:sceptre refers to by not vandalism, trust me, I know what section of the policy you're referring to in his own edit summary... so how did he even see what i wrote since its not in my edit summary? did he edit my edit summary?
Badmachine (talk) 01:20, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Huh? Your reversion of his edit contains the edit summary "Reverted 1 edit by Sceptre identified as vandalism to last revision by Hu12. (TW))" I imagine he simply inferred the reason why you reverted him; I don't see why he'd need psychic powers to figure that out... But, to answer your question, no your edit summary was not in any way edited. You used an automated tool, WP:TWINKLE, to revet the edit, which inserts an automatic edit summary. AmiDaniel (talk) 03:35, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
yes thats what the edit summary says, but i after the automatically generated edit summary, i entered 'if you edit someone elses comment, you should remove their signature' or similar. sceptres undo has an edit summary that shows 'not vandalism, trust me, I know what section of the policy you're referring to', which looks like a reply to my complete edit summary, which somehow isnt there. can he, as an admin, edit "edit summaries", and did he do so here? Badmachine (talk) 03:47, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
No, and no. AmiDaniel (talk) 04:06, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, thanks amidaniel. Badmachine (talk) 04:14, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unified login question

Apologies if this is answered on a page I didn't guess yet, but: I unified my account (am an admin) shortly after this feature was enabled, with enwiki my home wiki. There were 8 wikis which I had the password to, and approx 16ish that I did not and which, so far as I know/knew were not mine though they had 'my' username. Of those several (not all) I checked, they had zero edits each. This was the status quo until recently. Randomly looking at my prefs tonight, I see that I now own the User:Splash on all Wikimedia wikis, and indeed can login to the arbitrarily selected ru.wikisource, for example. Have the rules changed? Do zero-edit accounts on other wikis get automatically usurped now? Splash - tk 01:59, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, it's probably a bug. Looking into it. -- Tim Starling (talk) 04:52, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed now? It looks like there was never any account called "Splash" on ru.wikisource until you created it just now. The real zero-edit accounts (e.g. on ja.wikipedia.org) were not showing up because of a bug. -- Tim Starling (talk) 05:32, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So zero-edit accounts are indeed automatically usurped? —Remember the dot ^(talk) 05:35, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No, there has been no zero-edit usurpation since shortly after the start of this trial. The initial implementation was flawed and insecure, and was removed for that reason. -- Tim Starling (talk) 06:18, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You are right that I can't login to User:Splash on ja.wikipedia using my global password (nor any other I might expect it to be). However, on my Special:Mergeaccount here, I still do not see the list of same-name, other-wiki accounts which are not yet unified, nor the invitations to enter email or password. I only see the list of the 9 accounts already unified. On the front prefs page, I have a message that my global account status is "All in order!". (This is not causing me any personal difficulty, btw). Splash - tk 12:28, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Reference desk template

This is an absurdly minute matter, but it's starting to get on my nerves. On all of the Reference Desk pages, the box containing "Choose a topic:" (as at the top right-hand side of Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language) has become missized. It should clearly be the same width as the "skip to bottom" box above it. The thing is, I can't even locate the relevant template for that part of the page or determine when the change that messed up the template was made. Any help would be appreciated (though if this is the wrong place to bring this up, I'd like to know that, too). Deor (talk) 04:16, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I tried this at Wikipedia:Reference desk/header. It sort of fixes the issue (which seems to be an IE-only one), but then screws up the background in IE, so I reverted it back. The root cause of the problem is not apparent to me. --- RockMFR 06:18, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
OK, thanks. I guess we IE users should expect to live with some little problems. Deor (talk) 13:40, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It seem that IE was deciding that the position:relative div needed to be on the same line as the next div, and then oddly shrink that div's box to fit its text. Giving the relative div hasLayout seems to have fixed it. Anomie⚔ 13:52, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Works for me. Thanks. Deor (talk) 15:23, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

blockquote

<blockquote></blockquote> does not indent when an image is to the left of the blockquote using <blockquote></blockquote>.  Could someone please post this on bugzilla or whatever?  Thanks!68.148.164.166 (talk) 08:26, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is how HTML is supposed to behave. The images only push the text aside as much as they need in order to display the image. If the width of the image is larger then the width of the blockquote indent, then this indent might be "non visible". --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:44, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes.  If you need to move the text around like that consider using one of the quotation templates such as {{quote box2}}.  --— Gadget850 (Ed)talk 15:54, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

{{quote}} probably mimics <blockquote> better. Gary King (talk) 19:19, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

True, since it uses <blockquote>, but it give no ability for size, margins or alignment.  ----— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk -  22:51, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Where are the Mediawiki foundation servers located?

Can any one point me to a map or list or something? I am curious because I never get lag or denial of service so I figure I must be close. - Icewedge (talk) 18:29, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

m:Wikimedia_servers. Equazcion •✗/C • 18:37, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Not much there on locations actually. They're in the state of Florida, but I don't know anything more specific than that. Equazcion •✗/C • 18:39, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The primary databases are in Florida.  In addition, caches for the purposes of reading pages and delivering images are located in Amsterdam and Seoul.  Dragons flight (talk) 18:43, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, Thanks. It might be the Seoul server that is me fast access. - Icewedge (talk) 18:49, 17 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

change the SEARCH field input box, please

Please make the SEARCH field input box *bigger*, *more prominent*, and at
the *top center* of the home page.
Searching for articles is what people come to Wikipedia *for*.
Making the search box small and sticking it in an obscure corner of the page
is odd, awkward, silly, and for some visitors (elderly, vision impaired, or
otherwise physically or mentally challenged) troublesome enough to make them
give up and look somewhere else for their information.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.159.110.7 (talk) 00:12, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

S/he may have a point there. Perhaps the search box would be more visible to new users if it were directly under the puzzle globe? —Ashanda (talk) 00:21, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Directly under the globe is exactly the right place.  Someone looking for an article wants to go directly to searching for it, not scan down through two boxes and 11 links.  Someone interested in finding out more about Wikipedia can easily skip the search box and browse through the links below it.  -- John Broughton   (♫♫) 01:34, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The Commons' way of doing it isn't bad either. Instead of a list of portals or categories, they just put the search box right at the top of the page. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 01:53, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Quick mock-up. I think it would be nice to integrate a search box into the Main Page somehow. Thoughts? AmiDaniel (talk) 03:30, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Untraceable margin

Anybody has an idea why {{Parish church}} gets a big top-margin when used in St Patrick's Church, Hove? Circeus (talk) 01:46, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's to accommodate the size of the image. Try paring the image down to 200px or so. Cheers! —Ashanda (talk) 01:50, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Even though I've looked at the template code and know there is patently no way this could be the solution, I tried. Lo and behold, it doesn't work. Circeus (talk) 03:32, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. --- RockMFR 06:17, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Adding Applet to my user page

Hi All
I am a registered user  but not in the English Wikipedia.
Can I add an applet to me user home page at wiki? and if so I can I do it?
Thank u in advance  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.139.159.30 (talk) 06:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If you are asking about another language version Wikipedia, the answer is "no" - Wikipedia is not Facebook.  And adding applets raises security issues.  -- John Broughton   (♫♫) 15:55, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a way to count how many articles are in a given category and ALL of its subcategories?

Other than manually :) I would like to know how many Poland-related articles do we have, which should be possible to find out if we could count articles from Category:Poland and its subcategories. Currently my estimate is based on roughly counting stubs, comparing them to project tagged stubs, and using the ratio to estimate all article. Such an estimation, of course, is far from satisfactory (FYI, it gave me a numbers: ~300 tagged stubs, ~9000 stubs total, ~3000 tagged articles, ~100,000 Poland-related articles total). The 100,000 number itself seems more or less correct, but I'd like a more precise estimate - since the error margin here is quite big.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 13:53, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The editor's index reveals that User:Chris G Bot 2 does this. Algebraist 14:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

When I need a quick count I usually fire up AWB and just click "make list", but I expect it would time out with such a massive number of articles to assemble.  Plus there's the usual problem of Wikipedia's category tree being sufficiently jumbled that you're not going to get a very accurate count for "poland-related articles" from this analysis anyway: how closely related do you think Scripps National Spelling Bee is to Poland? (That's Category:Poland → Category:History of Poland → Category:Military history of Poland → Category:Military operations involving Poland → Category:Wars involving Poland → Category:World War II → Category:Events cancelled due to World War II, if you want to look it up.  Category:World War II is a favourite of mine in pointing out things like this, as it seems to have worked itself into some of the most unlikely parent categories: I found it in a distant subcat of Category:Thailand once!). How accurate do you want to be? Happy‑melon 14:11, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
OT:It's at Category:Thailand → Category:History of Thailand → Category:Wars involving Thailand → Category:World War II. That's not very distant. Algebraist 14:48, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I once determined you can get to something like 80% of Wikipedia through subcats of Category:Sports.  As I recall finding the path from Sports to Religion was one of the more complicated.  Dragons flight (talk) 16:22, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Gah, I haven't thought of that. Yes, that kills that idea right there :> --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:28, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps WikiProject Poland should consider creating something like the List of mathematics articles, though that takes a fair amount of effort to create and maintain. Algebraist 14:20, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Some time ago I prodded List of Poland-related topics as it was indeed not maintained. Plus, can you imagine a list with 100,000 entries? There is Category:Poland-related lists and forgotten Wikipedia:WikiProject Lists of basic topics/Draft/List of basic Poland topics. No, as far as those lists go I'll stick to supporting only the assessment-related Category:Poland-related articles by quality, but as I pointed out above - those still cover less than 10% (probably around 3%) of eligible topics.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 14:28, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
We at Maths survive OK with a list with 20,000 entries, and I suspect that 100,000 is a substantial overestimate: it seems likely that non-stubs are much more likely to get tagged than stubs, and unlikely that as many as 4% of all en.pedia articles are Poland-related. Algebraist 14:43, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's an interesting hypothesis - I would love to test it (see how large a % of en wiki is related to pl subjects), but I cannot think of any feasible methodology to do it (at least not anything short of many hour effort, which may be sensible if I were to write a paper based on a results, which I am not planning to do - yet... :).--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:14, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at the index, perhaps User:Erwin85/CatCount is a better place to get a count; as I read it, User:Chris G Bot 2 will produce an actual listing, which doesn't seem to be what is requested here.  -- John Broughton   (♫♫) 16:37, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I can tell from the documentation, CatCount doesn't delve into subcategories. Algebraist 17:02, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
If I give you a list of subcats would you be willing to filter out the non-pl cats? β^{_{command 2}} 16:37, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia as a chat client?

I just got this rather odd edit to my user talk page.[3] It occurred to me that while running Huggle I've sometimes seen what look like chat conversations going on as vandalisms to different articles. I wonder, is it possible that someone's using the recent changes feed as some sort of chat client? —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 16:11, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't we have a long discussion recently on this? In any case, given how quickly most vandalism is reverted, and how quickly an account can be blocked for repeated vandalism, it seems to me that Wikipedia is spectacularly inefficient as a chat room, and that the Internet has plenty of free alternatives far better suited for this type of thing.  -- John Broughton   (♫♫) 16:41, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Can we produce a time graph / stats of article's activity?

Is it possible to feed an article (talk page, etc.) into some bot or other tool, to get information on how many edits (and editors) contributed to each over time (for example by month)? PS. I am relatively familiar with editor-side counters, but not with article-side counters, which is what I need for this question.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 18:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's what wikidashboard's for. Algebraist 18:42, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but that tiny graph at the top, with no extractable data, is more of an eye candy than any serious research tool :( --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 22:34, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
In that case, you probably want Wikipedia page history statistics, or one of the other options listed in the index. Algebraist 06:59, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Pages renamed

How and why are the pages listed as renamed on these pages being renamed? Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/DC Comics articles by quality log and Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Marvel Comics articles by quality log.  Thanks for any help, Hiding T  18:30, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

They're pages that have been moved between runs of User:WP 1.0 bot - when it doesn't find a page that it found last time, but it finds a 'new' page with similar content, it twigs to the fact that it's been renamed and logs this appropriately. Happy‑melon 18:56, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
But there's nothing in the move logs, or deletion logs.  Not that I can see, anyway. Hiding T  19:17, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For example, ah, they've been moved back.  But Sigmar (Marvel Comics) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) shows no record of being moved to Sigmar (Marvel comics) or even deleted, even though the bot log states it was renamed from Sigmar (Marvel Comics) to Sigmar (Marvel comics). What's the bot picking up? Hiding T  19:23, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There appears to be a relevant log entry. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:06, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Okay I need a bit of help here with some formatting and stuff....

Okay, so I need some help... it's kind of hard to explain what I'm trying to do but... I'm trying to have it so that when you visit a page (my userpage, specifically) it will be different every time, like there will be random options for words....  I'm not sure how to achieve this....  I've seen on other wikia's where they have template:verb or template:noun or something like that, and they have it all formatted with different options of verbs and nouns and such.  I would just steal the formatting from those pages but pretty much all other wikias are blocked on this computer :( anyways does anyone know how to make this work? let me know at my talk page please. -Guitarplayer001  —Preceding comment was added at 22:05, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You want {{rand}}. Gary King (talk) 16:18, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

User talk:Neil- the new talk page and my sig are allergic to each other

Hi my sig works fine as far as I know on every other page. But when it's put on User:Neil's it turns bits of his text there green afterwards. I have cut and pasted the code he gave me, which just meant two square brackets showed after my sig, could you look at the sig and the page concerned, and see what's happening? Because until then I can't post to the lovely Neil's page. :( Anyway, my sig is orange, not green, so I'm completely at a loss and intrigued as to why this would happen. Hope you can help.Sticky  Parkin 22:08, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Your sig does not terminate it's tags properly; html tags started inside a wikilike must be closed inside the wikilink (not outside). I've corrected you sig above (see diff).  — Edokter • Talk •  22:22, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
aaah, thanks.  I think my clipboard was clogged too, so when I copied a bit of code it still was pasting an old version in to my preferences.  I had to try turning it off and on again. :) Sticky Parkin 23:09, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sandbox

Isn't working.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.194.245.224 (talk) 22:30, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It was unreasonably large for a while. It's been cut down to size now, which seems to fix it. Algebraist 22:39, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Infobox titles centered with the [hide]/[show] button?

Is there any technical way to have the title of the infobox centered without moving it to another line or adding any space characters in the front of the title?  Because there is a [hide]/[show] button the title cannot be centered. And it doesn't look so good. I hope there is a way to "fool" the software to make the title centered.
I know that you can add "state = plain" attribute so there won't be a hide/show button, but I mean for those infoboxes that use the button. ---Majestic- (talk) 23:08, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]




 Reviews

Add {{pad|5.7em}} before "Reviews".  For a more elegant solution, see the code for {{navbox}} that just resolved this issue.  ----— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk -  02:25, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I can't find it, as Navbox is a very complex template. Please show me the code. ---Majestic- (talk) 07:26, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Just because I know it is in there does not mean I know how it works.  I took a quick look, but I don't see how it works either.  ----— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk -  08:36, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I will try {{pad|5.7em}}. There's one problem though. When one adds the "state = plain" attribute the table will always be expanded and the [hide]/[show] link on the right will not be displayed. But with the {{pad|5.7em}} the title is no longer centered either. Can you add an "if" parameter so that if the "state = plain" is used the "{{pad|5.7em}}" will not be used? ---Majestic- (talk) 09:05, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I added {{#ifeq:{{{state|}}}|plain||{{pad|5.7em}}}} before "Reviews" and it seems to work. ---Majestic- (talk) 10:02, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Image page file histories

Has someone been changing the format of file histories on image pages? My image tagging script (Howcheng's) isn't working anymore. Kelly ^hi! 02:03, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. --brion (talk) 02:08, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Why are some items on watchlist showing as bold and items in history have odd message?

Some items have just recently started appearing on my watchlist as bold. I've no idea why. Also, when I look at the edit history for page that I was the last person to edit, the following message, highlighted in light green, appears after the edit summary for my edit: updated since my last visit. Again, I've no idea what to make of this. older ≠ wiser 02:08, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It means they were updated since your last visit. However as it's a bit flaky atm, it's been disabled again for now. --brion (talk) 02:09, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Still showing up as bold for me.  I've also tried visiting a page and coming back to the watchlist, but it seems as if it's not unbolding it correctly. BuddingJournalist 02:11, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Also still present for me. If this is gonna be a longterm change, can you tell me the necessary style information now so I can block it in my monobook (it makes the Watchlist HIDEOUS)? JPG-GR (talk) 02:14, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It might be a good improvement once it works okay, but at the moment it is fairly confusing. I think the disabling may have bolded everything rather than unbolding everything... Geometry guy 02:14, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(after ec) Thanks. The bolding on watchlist, perhaps I can see that. But the message in edit history was on my edit. There was no subsequent edit (even after purging). older ≠ wiser 02:12, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the bolding of titles, I'm not exactly sure where the helpfulness is, I check the time since I last clicked on my watchlist and go from there. The green "updated since", I saw on commons and spent awhile trying to figure out, since no-one had done anything to the page, and I couldn't even find a linked page having been deleted. Confusing at best, can we have a preference here? Franamax (talk) 02:16, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'll second that. If this is permanent, I'd like to have the ability to individually disable it. -MBK₀₀₄ 02:17, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This is a great improvment. Watchlists on other projects have this feature (ie Commons, meta, books) and I was wondering when Wikipedia would catch up to have this useful feature, I hope it stays. -- penubag  (talk) 02:18, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm no wonder the logo hasn't been changed yet. I really wish the community-proposed developments with consensus were given more priority than these backroom things they do. It's really quite frustrating. Equazcion •✗/C • 02:19, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is this going to be fixed any time soon? Everything is in bold for me as well. My left eye has melted out of my skull. Gwynand | Talk•Contribs 02:21, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Cool. Got a pic of that? Raymond Arritt (talk) 02:24, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Some code changes cleanup improper settings checks. The downside is that it triggered some old code that bolded items by default, since apparently, that was how they were in 1.4. Items should be in regular font now. Aaron Schulz 02:27, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

To summarize:
The bold-since-last-change is now disabled here again as it doesn't seem to work quite properly. (It used to be inactive always unless e-mail notification options were enabled.)
Disabling it temporarily caused the behavior that *everything* would be bold. This was apparently a weird "compatibility" mode for a 4-year old version of the software, and has been fixed. :)
If and when the markers work consistently, they'll be enabled. You won't have the option to opt out of them as a preference, as it should be very clean and transparent, but of course it would be trivial to do a CSS hack to remove the bolding if you can't stand having the information available. :)
--brion (talk) 02:27, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'd recommend having that CSS hack ready... :) JPG-GR (talk) 02:33, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate this whole boldness in applying boldness thing, but lots of people hate it, and there's near-unanimous community consensus that the logo should be changed. Can't we do the stuff people actually want and have discussed first? I hate to complain and stuff, just saying. This kinda came out of left field. Equazcion •✗/C • 02:36, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Got a new version ready? If so, file a bug request with: a link pointing to the updated file, a link pointing to the on-wiki consensus, and use the 'shell' keyword. You'll have far better odds of having something accomplished that way than kvetching here. ; - ) --MZMcBride (talk) 02:53, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It's all done already, a few days ago: bugzilla:14137. More generally though, requested things should be given priority. I mean we;ve got the edit conflict bug on file for years, bugzilla:4745, and they're working on this bold crap? I'm sorry this is just really ridiculous. Equazcion •✗/C • 02:56, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The majority of the developers are volunteers and work on what they feel like/have experience in/think they can do. I believe Aaron has been working on this for at least a couple weeks now (or at least he was talking about it), far before the proposal to change the logo began. Further, only a handful of the developers have shell access to the servers and actually can change the logo. Mr.Z-man 03:18, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Understood, but I'm a volunteer too. Developers are also part of the community, aren't they? If someone can point me to a community discussion that addressed the need for bold links in the watchlist with enough support was gained, I'll shut up. But as a frequenter of VP proposals, I find it frustrating that we can discuss things til we're blue in the face and nothing that requires developer intervention gets done, while they don't discuss anything with us and just implement what they like. Equazcion •✗/C • 03:23, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
A) Something that's easy, like the logo will get done soon, its not like its urgent. More difficult things like bug 4745 will wait until someone actually comes up with a solution, just because there's consensus that it should be done does not mean that it necessarily can be done. B) The English Wikipedia is not the only project. The majority of software changes (like the watchlist) will affect more than just us. C) If every project had to get consensus for every software change, we wouldn't have much. Remember rollback? Mr.Z-man 03:33, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not asking for wide consensus, but some discussion to determine whether this is worth the time or even whether it's a popular feature would've been nice. With everything we're currently waiting on, it's frustrating to see something being implemented that wasn't even discussed. It seems like the software is someone else's pet project and the community isn't a priority. If the developers have a good feature suggestion, why not bring it up at VP to see what we think before they spend 2 weeks developing it? Equazcion •✗/C • 03:41, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It's quite difficult to instruct the volunteers. One can always step in to do it yourself. Beyond that, bitchin' and badgerin' aren't productive strategies. Has anyone said yet how happy we are that the dev's have produced this new feature? Way to go people! Some of us might think it sucks, but we probably haven't had a good look yet, and thanks for your help :) Now, having done that great piece of work, here's another one to look at... Franamax (talk) 05:31, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please note, first of all, that most developers do not have shell access and could not change the logo.  Aaron, who I take it was doing the fiddling that caused what some people are complaining about, would not have been able to do what you ask even if he wanted to.  Second of all, developers who are volunteers (i.e., all but a couple) will do what they feel like working on.  Saying that they have a duty to work on what the community wants is like saying all Wikipedians have a duty to work on the articles selected by WP:AID.  They don't (although we might have more featured articles if they did!).  The one or two who are paid, of course, are not directly responsible to the community either, but rather to the CTO and ultimately the Board, like any other paid Wikimedia employees.
I should also point out that shell work like changing logos is extremely boring and repetitive (keep in mind that there are hundreds of wikis that make requests like this on a continuous basis; see the 112 open bugs of this sort) and only a very small number of people are able to do it.  In the present setup, anyone able to perform this kind of change has root database access.  This gives them the rights of checkuser, oversight, steward, except without logging (look here and see if you can find any rights logs).  And they get abilities far beyond those, too.  They can silently and untraceably alter any aspect of any article's history, logs, or whatever else they want.  They could in fact delete the site, out of either malice or incompetence.  Now to compound all this difficulty, enwiki has the unique habit of going ballistic when a request is fulfilled and they then decide that they really hadn't made up their mind after all (witness: rollback), so some shell users are probably reluctant to do what it asks for.
Anyway, back to the question of who gets to decide what.  The goal of developers is not to do anything for the English Wikipedia.  It's to improve the software, for all users.  It is not remotely practical for developers to start a discussion on every single Wikimedia wiki, especially since most are non-English.  German and French Wikipedia editors have their opinions just as much as English Wikipedia editors do; what purpose would an enwiki discussion alone serve?  We could have the discussion on Meta, but that still misses the point.  MediaWiki is one of the most popular wiki software packages there is.  It's used by hundreds (thousands?) of Wikia wikis, and countless others scattered around the Internet.  We can't go out of our way to ask all of them their opinion before we make any change.  Nothing would ever get done.
Now, we could still have discussions somewhere before implementing changes, and in fact we do.  Discussions about software features regularly occur on wikitech-l and #mediawiki.  If you're interested in keeping track of this kind of thing, you need to go there, not expect us to treat enwiki specially and come to you before doing anything.  In many cases changes are still committed without any discussion, but those who follow mediawiki-cvs-l can comment on them before they go live.  If you choose not to do so, then don't complain when you can only object after they go live.  You can't reasonably expect MediaWiki development to give any special preference to the English Wikipedia. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:41, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(ec, this was in reply to franamax) That's just it, I'm not too happy that this was done. The fact that a lot of work went into it doesn't say anything about whether or not it should've been done. If I spent a month writing a policy in my userspace that would eventually affect everyone on Wikipedia, and I suddenly moved it to WP: space and tagged it as a policy, everyone would tell me listen, we love you for putting in all that work, but you should've discussed it with us first. I'm telling you (everyone) the same thing. I appreciate all the work you put it, but sorry as I am to say this, it should've been discussed first. You're part of the community, or at least you should be, and you're here for them the same way I'm here for them. The processes for implementing changes that affect everyone apply to you too. Just because you have the ability to circumvent that is no reason to do it. Equazcion •✗/C • 14:46, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In reply to Simetrical: If this is the way it's supposed to work, and the community isn't actually supposed to be involved with development, with its discussions occurring away from them, then I'll have to accept that. I don't agree with it, but if this instance is just one example of the way things have always worked, then my beef is with the way things have always worked, and I apologize for complaining about this one thing.

In response, to "developers who are volunteers (i.e., all but a couple) will do what they feel like working on.  Saying that they have a duty to work on what the community wants is like saying all Wikipedians have a duty to work on the articles selected by WP:AID" -- This is different from telling me I should be working on a requested article rather than whatever article I want. We're not talking about articles, but changes that affect everyone. If there were a pressing and demonstrated need for a particular policy, I'd feel obligated to offer my assistance there. Similarly I think requests from the community (yes even from one language version) should be given more priority than a feature that was just discussed among the developers. Again, developers are here for the community, the same way I'm here for the community. I think they're treated (and treat themselves) as too much of a separate entity. I appreciate all the work they put in, but if the end goal is to help write the encyclopedia, and the people doing the writing have already decided on something that would help them do that, it should be given priority over other things. Equazcion •✗/C • 15:25, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please keep in mind that more time and effort has been put into this thread than the recent one-line tweaks to the bolded-pages-in-watchlist feature (which has been in the software for years, but originally was attached to the e-mail notification feature which isn't enabled here yet in part for performance reasons). --brion (talk) 16:04, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, I'm just a volunteer. Equazcion •✗/C • 16:08, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
:D --brion (talk) 16:12, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Undelete text

What is "Undeletion will not be performed if it will result in the top page or file revision being partially deleted. In such cases, you must uncheck or unhide the newest deleted revision." talking about when you go to undelete a page?  It doesn't make any sense - how can you partially delete a file or revision?  I would remove it or ask on the appropriate talk page, but I can't even find where it is coming from - it is not in MediaWiki:Undeletehistory. --B (talk) 21:08, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wrapping images with text

On Myanmar, the SVG image in the lead is followed by a comma. If the page is the right width, this comma gets wrapped to the next line without the image. This is wrong; the comma and the image should be "non-breaking". Is there a solution to this? BigBlueFish (talk) 22:37, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]