Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bugs and feature requests should be made at the BugZilla because there is no guarantee developers will read this page. Problems with user scripts should not be reported here, but rather to their developers (unless the bug needs immediate attention).

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.

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tildes in a link

What do I do when there are tildes in a link? It messes up the link, inserting my usertag.

Using the nowiki tag will probably help. Æetlr Creejl 18:32, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Searching wiki markup?

Can someone search en.wp, or their copy of the 2008-03-01 dump, for a list of articles with {{DEFAULTSORT:X* or {{DEFAULTSORT|X* ? -- Jeandré, 2008-03-07t12:57z

Total article numbers in categories

I hope I'm asking in the right place. Categories now seem to be able to give the total number of articles in them. This is great! However, why don't the "Wikify by month" categories show this total number? (For example, Category:Wikify from November 2007.) Related maintenance categories show it. Also, is there any way of parsing the total article number to another page? If at all possible, this would make updating the {{Wikification progress}} template much easier. Cheers. – Liveste (talk • edits) 14:03, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

A {{PAGESINCATEGORY}} magic word has been proposed in bug 6943. Mr.Z-man 05:03, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Cool! Does anyone know why the "Wikify by month" categories don't show the total number of articles? The parent category does, as do other monthly maintenance categories: e.g., Category:Cleanup from November 2007, Category:Orphaned articles from November 2007. "Copyedit by month" categories seem to have this problem, too. – Liveste (talk • edits) 04:24, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Population of the number of items in a category is being done by a maintenance script (it's stored in the database as a number). As you may appreciate, there are a lot of categories for which this information needs to be generated. My understanding is that this is probably being done alphabetically, and the category you point to is at the end of the alphabet. — Werdna talk 11:50, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Two of the monthly categories (March 2007 and March 2008) are now displaying the total number, and I imagine the others will soon follow. However, is there any reason why the total number in March 2008 is inaccurate? At last count there were 1552 articles in that category, but the total number indicated was 275. Perhaps it's just an initial glitch, but in any case I hope it's fixed soon. Cheers. – Liveste (talk • edits) 01:52, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Range block bypass flag?

It's a difficult but not uncommon situation. There's an IP range which is used entirely for vandalism. Soft blocking hasn't helped, the track record goes on since forever... hard blocking's really called for... except a handful of genuine users use that range so you can't.

Is there any merit in a flag or right that any sysop can apply to an account (or remove), that lets them edit through an IP range block?

This would essentially mean that a range could be hard blocked in general, and yet specific editors in good standing still edit from those IPs. It wouldn't interfere with blocking that editor, but would mean either the flag would need deleting, or the block would need to be on their specific named account.

I would envisage the flag as being given based on sysop judgement that a range needed blocking and this was a measure to allow that to be done, and removed on sysop judgement that a user was intended to be caught by a range block. The thought being that users who are visibly decent editors enough that a hard range block (almost always for serious disrupters) shouldn't apply to them, probably won't be intended to be caught by a range block or need range blocking themselves that often. Blocks of users like that are almost always placed on their names, not their IP range, by sysops.

It would then allow hard blocking of a range used by a hard-core problem case, for a week or a month or whatever, without so much collateral damage for a clearly well-meaning user on that range.

Thoughts?

FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 08:42, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. It'd make some cases of IP-hopping vandalism easier to deal with. I imagine it'd make CU's lives easier, too. SQL^{Query me!} 08:45, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Look similar to Wikipedia:IP block exemption. But I have no idea how to "exempt" a user, even though it says its possible. And since when is anyone allowed to edit from Tor!? But yea, this could be a useful flag, if it were limited to say Crats/CUs, since I wouldn't trust Admins to make the call or be easy to monitor. MBisanz ^talk 08:53, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I'm reminded of prior proposals to allow unblocking of single IPs within blocked ranges, or to hand out ipblock-exempt via whatever mechanism (most proposals there have focused on open proxies, but rangeblocks are likewise an important issue; the right makes a user effectively immune to anything but a direct block on their account). I'm not sure as to the technical difficulty/ease of a similar flag that would focus solely on rangeblocks, or if this folds into the debates on ipblock-exempt. Either way, the situation FT2 describes has no easy solution, currently, and this might be one fix to consider trying. – Luna Santin (talk) 08:58, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

To clarify, it's not for proxy avoidance, and I'd be more than happy to see its use limited to "users who would otherwise be caught by vandalism or personal attack range-blocks, or the like" or issued by checkusers, rather than proxies. A technical measure for that would be that it would only override an IP range not a single IPblock. (Open proxies are almost always sole IPs.) FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 09:13, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

This was one of the reasons for the Wikipedia:IP block exemption proposal - accounts frequently caught in autoblocks/rangeblocks but who are nevertheless good users would be made immune to such blocks in the same ways as admins are by being assigned IPblock-exempt. WjBscribe 09:07, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

After some earlier edit warring it became a policy a few days ago. -- FayssalF - ^{Wiki me up®} 09:32, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

The important bit is the devs agreeing to enable it - after the fuss over rollback, I could understand them being reluctant :-) .... WjBscribe 09:34, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

...devs not wanting to be called 'devils'?  :) -- FayssalF - ^{Wiki me up®} 09:49, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

According to Brion its on his to-do list, so it should just be a matter of time now. Mr.Z-man 15:58, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

If admins will be involved in either noticing suspicious user with the ipblockexempt flag or de-flagging bad users, can we add something to the new admin school. Rollback was a good idea, but there was precious little training on it, even though we all knew hat it is. I suspect at least half the admins have no idea what ip-block-exempt is or that there is a policy on it. MBisanz ^talk 21:30, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

To be honest, I think that's a good thing. Unlike rollback, this isn't the kind of thing to give out simply based on trust - there should be trust and need. Mr.Z-man 22:26, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) Agree. Dodgy unblocking of proxies by putting holes in them and (accidentally or otherwise) letting bad actors back in, is a favorite use of non-hard blocks, and this will have applications in that area. Since we probably wont be handling this out like confetti, maybe a "request for ipexemption" subpage - same as many other "request" pages... user posts a request and if there is broad consensus (remember this isn't handed out as a norm to all users) then it's given. That way it has some certainty of communal input. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 23:02, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

maybe a "request for ipexemption" subpage... I think this idea has not been discussed at the policy talk page yet. Anyway, I support it. -- FayssalF - ^{Wiki me up®} 04:40, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Bear in mind, though, that blocked users will have difficulty posting to such a page. If requests are to be resolved via a central forum, we'd probably need to be watching for (and harvesting) relevant unblock requests. Not a huge problem, just making sure that's on the table. – Luna Santin (talk) 06:03, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia_talk:IP_block_exemption#Requesting_exemption. FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 03:27, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Redirect question

My problem is the redirect Six Feet Under. There is an article "Six Feet Under (band)" and there was an article "Six Feet Under" about a TV series. But the term "Six Feet Under" was originally taken by the band so i moved "Six Feet Under" to "Six Feet Under (TV series)". Is there some way how to rewrite all "Six Feet Under" links to "Six Feet Under (TV series)" other than make every single one? Some kind of mass rewrite or something quick?... There are hundreds of these links.....--Lykantrop ^(Talk) 18:15, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

I have reverted your move by moving Six Feet Under (TV series) back to Six Feet Under. The TV series is better known than the band and it seems irrelevant for Wikipedia naming that the band is older. If you still think it should be moved then you can suggest it at Wikipedia:Requested moves where others can evaluate it. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:15, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't get this aversion and intolerance against metal bands. You reverted my edit without any knowledge of the matter just because the band is a metal band or what. If you red something about the band, you would see that Six Feet Under is the fourth best-selling death metal act and consists band members from the most influental and important death metal bands ever, 3 of the members were in 3 of 6 best selling death metal bands, Six Feet Under is nuber 4.(link). On Youtube are under Six Feet Under 8 of 20 videos about the band even when the other thing is a TV series with 63 episodes. Google gives for "six feet under HBO" about 318 000 and for "six feet under TV series" about 348 000, for "six feet under metal" 555 000, and for "six feet under metal band" about 1 900 000 ! So the band is not only the original user of the term but also worldwide known, important and frequented and at least so frequented as the TV series. The band is also a present theme with new events, albums... The TV series is a several years old matter with no progress anymore. I am not here to promote any unknown metal bands, but this one is very very very big one. So I would be glad if you wouldn't revert this edit just because of your prejudice to heavy metal. I really think that I don't need to talk to you (an adminitrator) about such things as WP:NPOV and WP:POV. And thanks for such a kind answer to my question...Lykantrop ^(Talk) 13:53, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Assume good faith. I have nothing against metal bands and I don't see how a disambiguating name is related to WP:NPOV and WP:POV. Category:Six Feet Under is about the TV series. Being among the best known in a small genre is not the same as for a big genre. None of the band albums appear to have reached 100000 sold copies. I see you moved the TV series again without discussion. What is your plan for the name Six Feet Under? A disambiguation page would make sense to me but it sounds like you want it to be about the band which you consider most notable. See Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links for some tools to help fix links. As you say, there are a lot of them. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:08, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

You can be sure I have a good faith. Yes I want to make a disambiguation page, although I am sure that the band's page is more frequented on wikipedia than the TV series (but that is just my opinion). I moved it without a discussion because it is obvious that the band is at least as notable as the TV series, so I dont see why should the TV series article keep the name of the band, when it is neither originally the TV series, nor more important. And to say that death metal is a small musical genre is definitely no longer matching for several years and not these days at all. I understand that lots of people have no clue about this music, but on the other hand other people have no clue about TV series. It could be discussed what is more notable, but the disambiguation page should be there at least. It has been told to me that the double redirects will be fixed by a bot within a couple of days. Lykantrop ^(Talk) 23:06, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Page views of the article on the band are less than 500 per day. By comparison, page views of the page "Six Feet Under" are about 2,000 per day. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:31, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. If it was only about these 2 articles then continuing with a hatnote on the TV series article at Six Feet Under seems reasonable to me. But a disambiguation page could add more articles (Six Feet Under (soundtrack), Six Feet Under, Vol. 2: Everything Ends, Manorama Six Feet Under, 6 Feet Under (album), Grave (burial)?), so that's OK to me. By the way, both band and TV series are named after the old expression "six feet under" about being buried six feet deep so it seems unimportant which of them adopted the name first, and the TV series article was created first. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:25, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Ok, my guess was wrong, but I would still keep on making the disambiguation page with "Six feet under (TV series)" and "Six feet under (band)" + other "six feet under things" with "Six feet under"-redirect to the disambiguation page. I never wanted to redirect the "Six Feet Under" to the band of course. But if we want to redirect the "Six Feet Under" to the "Six Feet Under (disambiguation), how can we rewrite all the "Six Feet Under" links to "Six feet under (TV series)???--Lykantrop ^(Talk) 10:16, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Changing the links would be relatively trivial for anyone running AutoWikiBrowser - you could ask for help at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:55, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

The real issue here isn't a predjudice against Death Metal... it's the difference between an Emmy-winning television series that was watched by millions of people weekly and a band that has sales in the high 300 thousand range. It may be the fourth best-selling death metal band of all time, but it is demonstrably less known or significant than the television series, and it is safe to assume that the vast majority of people typing in Six Feet Under will be looking for the television show. To that end, a small disambig link at the top of the show pointing to the band article is ideal from a navigational standpoint. Phil Sandifer (talk) 04:33, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

p-batch

Hi, I recently had an anon IP vandal systematically attacking all the pages I've created or edited; when I was in his contributions page, I tried to do a p-batch to semi-protect all for a short while but nothing happened. Is there a problem here? --Rodhullandemu (Talk) 02:02, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

(A google search on Wikipedia pages for the term "p-batch" comes up empty, by the way.) Have you looked at User:AzaToth/twinklebatchprotect.js?

A-ha! I'll ask Azatoth, if it's one of his bits 'n bobs. Thanks. --Rodhullandemu (Talk) 15:17, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Watchlist URL

I'm trying, without success, to add a favourite or create a shortcut to display my watchlist in the article namespace only, but I can't find a URL for it.. I've tried adding "&namespace=0" to the usual path (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist) without success. I know it's possible to do it from the drop-down box in Special:Watchlist, but I'm trying to cut out a step. Any suggestions please? —  Tivedshambo  _(t/c) 07:00, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

[1] appears to work. --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 07:23, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

That's just what I was after - thanks. —  Tivedshambo  _(t/c) 07:28, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Adding parameters with "&..." only works if there are already parameters in the URL. If the URL does not contain a question mark (?), then you should append "?..." instead. Wikipedia's pages (including special pages) can appear in either form. So this would have worked as well. Bovlb (talk) 17:01, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Changes to CSD templates

I'm pleased to announce that we have just concluded a complete overhaul of the db- template series, as written by by User:Coppertwig, User:Moonriddengirl and myself. The rewrite does not (as far as I'm aware) incorporate any breaking changes, but there are several modifications which may be of interest to the technically-minded:

• All templates now support a |bot= parameter; any tags placed by bots should specify their username as this parameter to trigger the display a of a short note indicating that the page was tagged by a bot.
• {{hidden-delete-reason}} is no longer used, as it caused unexpected display of wikibullets, and the method used to fill the <span id="delete-reason"> span made the contents virtually unusable. The <span id="delete-reason"> span is now filled with a clean summary suitable for preloading into the deletion log field.
• An additional <span id="delete-criterion"> span has been provided, which contains only the raw CSD criterion ("A1", "G11", "I5", etc), or "NA" for deletions not based on a defined CSD criteria. This may be useful for java programmers.

For more details of the changes, see the exhaustive discussion at WT:CSD and its subpages. Any comments should be directed there, at WT:CSD#Section break 5. Happy‑melon 11:52, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

problem with indenting

Why is it that indenting (using ":") does not work next to a table which is aligned left (see the source code)?

Non-indented text

Indented text (but does not appear indented)

Can somebody provide a fix for this, please (other than using ":::::::::::::::::::::::::")? Thanks, Jakob.scholbach (talk) 17:45, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Also, I don't want to put the text into a second column of a larger table. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 17:48, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

The dl/dd indenting does exist, but the floating object (in this case, a table with align="left") takes precidence over this. See an example here (all objects on bodyContent shown with a red border on this page.. there is a 100x300 div floating left, so you can see the indents there, but the text being pushed). There isn't really a fix for this, other than something that will remove other features you may want (such as normal indenting being restored when the text passes the vertical height of the image). --Splarka (rant) 07:35, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

BTW. this again shows an oversight in the definition of floats. What Jakob wants is what the original designers intended. This CSS property of float should have just pushed the text AND the indents, but when CSS float was specified in the standard, this was one of the things that was simply overlooked. The same kinda goes for the WP:BUNCH issue. Because this is "logical" behaviour for humans, there is some hope that this will be fixed in a future CSS specification, but for now and probably long into the future, we are stuck with it. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:01, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki

I tried to install mediawiki on my pc for my website but this is what i get. Thank you! – i123Pie _bio^contribs 20:01, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

This place is for discussions about Wikipedia, not the software that Wikipedia runs on. Please direct your questions to MediaWiki --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:12, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Export references to Bibliographic Management software

As a researcher, I find myself often perusing Wikipedia for information about topics, and then exploring many of the references cited in the well elaborated articles to gain a deeper understanding. When writing papers, I often have to go through the process of crafting bibliographies and managing citations, using tools like EndNote/RefWorks/*insert tool here*

It would be nice to have a tool that could export Wikipedia articles in various formats such as BibTex/EndNote, etc...and when we're feeling more ambitious, the references cited in them as well. Compendiums such as the ACM Portal and IEEE Explore offer such functionality...

I'm thinking of whipping up a PHP script to do exactly that and here's approximately how I envison it:

function getCitation($wikiUrl, $requestedCitationMode) {

  switch($requestedCitationMode) //still learning PHP, unsure if it supports string switches...if not, replace with if/else
  {
    case "BibTex": return createBibTexCitation($wikiUrl)
    ...
  }

}

function createBibTexCitation($wikiUrl) {

 // 1. use MediaWiki API to create a new Wiki object for the given url...cursory 10 minute glance at API did not reveal an easy way to do that, so
 // elaboration would be welcome
 // 2. Check if the object contains a "references" section, if not bring up a popup alerting user
 // 3. parse citation and create an output to be returned in a "target = _blank" new window

}

...or something similar...but I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel. Does something like this already exist? Do people know of similar projects? Besides the obvious RTFM, what are the relevant sections I should look through the manual?

I've written a tool zeteo.info which (at the moment) contains all mathematical references (some 5000). I'm about to pull out the physics references as well... The zeteo database has a structure adapted to WP's needs (distinguish between author's information, journals etc., provide wikilinks, a little bit of preformatting, incorporating certain templates such as Template:MR, and the like). It seems that WP more or less urgently needs something in this direction. Maybe we can set up something more broad in scope. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 21:55, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

See also this documentation. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 21:58, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

• You can cite a wiki page by copying the appropriate format from i.e. special:cite/Wikipedia:Village pump (technical), although I don't know of a similar tool for the individual refs. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 16:18, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
  • You might want to check the pages listed in the index; I'm not sure any are relevant, but if a solution has been implemented previously, there is a good chance that one of the listed pages will have it. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:16, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

---

I am looking for reverse i.e. I would like to import entries from Bibliographic Management software (e.g. BibTex) to wikipedia - is it possible? Otherwise the task I would be facing (create wiki article based on an article I have in LaTeX) looks rather daunting... As a next best thing is there any application which would convert .bib files to {{cite}} format? Ryszard.czerminski (talk) 20:23, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Last edit information on article page

Is it plausible to add 'last edit' information to the article page? Maybe put above the page title. By doing this I don't have to click history page and check whether the page already change since I last checked it. Maybe it could be set in user preference, whether it could be shown or not. Thanks in advance. roscoe_x (talk) 22:19, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

The date of the last edit to a page is already shown in the yellow banner at the very bottom, in amongst the disclaimer text. Is this what you mean? Happy‑melon 22:24, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

O yes, but I think it would be more helpful if it could be the same format as in history page. Just the first line, something like this(complete with the link):

(cur) (last)  11:36, 25 March 2008 Dweller (Talk | contribs) (118,224 bytes) (→Barnstars format:  tyvm) (undo)

roscoe_x (talk) 12:04, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

File uploads

Excepting commons, users must be autoconfirmed to uploads files from now on. Thanks. Voice-of-All 06:46, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Barnstars format

When I view my userpage today, I see that my usually neat arrangement of Barnies has been blown up, some of them ridiculously. They look awful. No relevant edits to the page. I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Windows XP Professional. Any help gratefully received. --Dweller (talk) 11:25, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm suffering too, using IE7 on XP Pro. Mind you, it serves me right for using IE and Windows doesn't it? The Rambling Man (talk) 11:27, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

(ec) Removing the "px" from the size parameters appears to fix the issue. {{Click}} was changed recently to use <imagemap>, which may have caused the "px" to become unnecessary. --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 11:30, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much, in anticipation of that working. ;-) --Dweller (talk) 11:36, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I've suggested at the template talk page that they task a bot to go off and fix the puzzling mess lots of editors will be faced by when they next view their userspace. I've seen this problem at any number of user's user or usertalk pages already today. --Dweller (talk) 12:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

It happens to me also, when I try to add something to it that is. Any small edit will blow things up. (Mind meal (talk) 13:16, 25 March 2008 (UTC))

I've responded to Dweller on Template talk:Click, but I'll move the bulk of my comments here for wider scrutiny. Given that {{Click}} doesn't seem to have been updated since February 2 (diff; it's worth noting that User:Ryulong updated the documentation to remove "px" today, though), I don't think it's to blame for the sudden change. Rather, it seems to me that the implementation of the "px" measurement is now a bit screwy throughout the 'pedia, as indicated by User:CambridgeBayWeather's post below.

I've looked through the Bugzilla reports, and it seems that there was a report made yesterday by User:FT2 concerning font scaling and "px" (bugzilla 13494). Given that this bug is listed as still being open, I don't think that the big images can necessarily be blamed on it, but it's certainly something to consider. --jonny-mt 13:54, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Nice work and good thinking. My bot suggestion might be worth taking onto a wider footing in that case. --Dweller (talk) 14:06, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Check out [2] - note how all of the images with "pxpx" in their image size are displaying as if there are no sizes specified. Also check out my comment in the section below, which ties into this. --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 14:09, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

(ec) If it's a permanent change, then we may need a whole slew of bots to help out :) I've gone ahead and filed Bug 13500 in the hope of getting to the bottom of this. Hopefully Bugzilla adheres to WP:BITE, too.... --jonny-mt 14:11, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Good stuff. And I've posted to Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Lots_of_images_now_appearing_in_incorrect_size and suggested to the Signpost that they cover this as it's affecting so many images in userspace and mainspace. --Dweller (talk) 14:15, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Gah. I'm the one who updated the template on 2008-02-02; I even wanted to use a bot to manually correct the syntax before updating, or at least AWB, but was convinced otherwise by someone who found that it wasn't an issue (then). A bot correction run sounds good; that's the easiest solution. Nihiltres^{t.l} 15:21, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

It's worth noting that this problem isn't restricted to {{Click}} (contrary to my original comment); it's site-wide, affecting any image with a specified size in "pxpx". --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 15:27, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Are we basically saying that we need to have as many editors as possible program as many bots as possible to change [[Image:...pxpx...]] to [[Image:...px...]]?? If so, use the regex (\[\[Image:[^\]]+\|\n?\d+)pxpx([^\]]*\]\]) --> $1px$2 - I think it's pretty reliable. If the problem is elsewhere, then so is the solution :D. Happy‑melon 16:31, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Tim Starling has responded to the Bugzilla report above noting that he changed the code so as not to allow resizing using "pxpx" per Bug 13436, so that confirms the root cause indicated by TMF (the specific revision has a 5:17 UTC timestamp). It seems to me that the best solution is to edit all templates using "px" by default to remove the offending markup. I imagine there will be a new wave of fun stuff to deal with if we do that, of course, but maybe it's time to go ahead and focus on a bot request? --jonny-mt 16:24, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I personally think the best way would be to leave the templates alone and remove the offending "px" from its transclusion calls. Will it ultimately require more edits? Yes, but on the article level, it is more efficient in the long run IMO. (FWIW, I just spent an hour removing "px" from pages that transclude {{OHShield}}, since the template already includes "px".) --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 16:33, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Also consider that either method is likely going to cause some type of mass article editing. Scenario: If "px" is removed from a template's code, then all the articles that correctly just had the number will need to be fixed. If "px" is left in the template, then the articles that incorrectly have "px" need to be fixed. It's pick your poison, I suppose... --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 16:57, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I hope template click will be fixed, one way or another. Check what happened overnight to my userpage template :) --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 16:39, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, I have a fix available. MelonBot is in the process of creating has now created a matrix of pages at User:MelonBot/ClickFix/nnnpx, where nnn is a number between 0 and 999. This enables a simple fix:

1. Add the code <includeonly>{{#ifexist:User:MelonBot/ClickFix/{{{suspect_parameter}}}|[[Category:{{subst:PAGENAME}} needing ClickFix|{{PAGENAME}}]]}}</includeonly> to any template which may be affected, replaicng suspect_parameter with the name of the parameter which may be holding duplicate "px" in instances (usually something like imagesize, width, etc).
2. Create Category:TEMPLATE NAME needing ClickFix, with the following text:

   __HIDDENCAT__ [[Category:ClickFix maintenance categories]]

3. Once they work their way through the job queue, broken instances will be categorised into this category, where they can be fixed manually, or by bot using suitable regexes.
4. Once all the instances of a template have been "ClickFixed" - ie checked for duplicate "px" statements, list them at User:MelonBot/ClickFix. Happy‑melon 17:35, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Would you believe this works just as well without a butt-load of temporary pages:

{{#ifeq:{{#expr:{{{suspect_parameter}}} }}
| <strong class="error">Expression error: Unrecognised word "px"</strong>
| [[Category:TEMPLATE NAME needing ClickFix]]
}}

It works by comparing the result of #expr (which expects numerical values only) to the predictable error message produced when #expr encounters the text "px". The #iferror function would also work, but might catch a lot of false positives from parameters that never were valid. Maybe fixing those too wouldn't be a bad idea... hmm, don't mind me. — CharlotteWebb 16:59, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Clever! Now if you'd been around this time yesterday, I wouldn't have my bot blocked or my userspace filled with near-empty pages :D. Happy‑melon 17:04, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh good lord. — CharlotteWebb 17:09, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Geez, maybe just use #iferror. --Splarka (rant) 07:32, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

{{Infobox Station}}

I just hit this on a number of main-page train station articles. I edited them for something unrelated, and the images went haywire. For those of us less wiki-code inclined, is there anything we can/should do to fix this? A quick glance at {{Infobox Station}} shows no references to this pxpx mentioned above. - TexasAndroid (talk) 18:31, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

See the section below this one; removing the "px" from the "image_size" parameter on that article will fix it. --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 18:34, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

It seems that there are a lot of errors in {{Infobox Station}}, which are backing up at Category:Infobox Station needing ClickFix. Any help would be appreciated. Happy‑melon 18:46, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I removed the px from the template itself, but am currently second-guessing myself as to whether that was the correct fix. If anyone agrees, please feel free to revert me. - TexasAndroid (talk) 18:49, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Bad idea - I see it was quickly reverted. Essentially that just breaks all the currently unbroken instances, and we don't have a way to find them. Happy‑melon 19:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I've gone through the maintenance category adjusting as needed. Slambo (Speak) 19:35, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

How widespread do we think this problem is? Happy‑melon 19:55, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm seeing it hit Featured Article and GA icons on userpages. Seems very widespread. Could you crank up the maxlag on Melonbot? MBisanz ^talk 20:02, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

The hit and miss looking I'm doing is finding *lots* of infobox templates with image size parameters, but the spot checks I've done so far have not found any more specific instances of these size parameters in use. As long as the parameter is empty, we are OK. But the problem is that each of these templates has many, many articles on them, and any one of which could easily be using the size parameter and hitting the problem. So far we are finding the templates where the image size parameter is in wide use. But the problem ones will be the many, many templates where most do not not use it, but a few do. - TexasAndroid (talk) 20:11, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, I've created Wikipedia:ClickFix, with a brief explanation of the problem, and how to fix it. It was made in an awful rush, so feel free to clean it up, expand, rewrite, etc. Do you think it's bad enough to warrant a sitenotice or watchlist-notice? Happy‑melon 20:14, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

(ec)I suggest we centralise discussion at Wikipedia talk:ClickFix. Happy‑melon 20:22, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

: Here's something to look at for the wiki-code enabled. Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. First airport I found that uses {{Infobox Airport}}, uses the size param, and uses a px on the size param. I did a null edit to it, and.... nothing. With the Station ones null edits were making the images go haywire. The template looks to have the "px". The article looks to have the "px". But I'm not getting the same results. Is something else different about this example that is preventing the problem? Has the problem meta-wiki change been backed out, maybe? - TexasAndroid (talk) 20:20, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Strike. Figured it out. Article px is on a different image. - TexasAndroid (talk) 20:22, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Template:Infobox Airline

Something is causing the images to be displayed rather large, see Emirates Airline for an example, but I'm not sure what. CambridgeBayWeather Have a gorilla 13:13, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

It seems to be the same "px" problem as above. Remove them from the image size, and I'm betting you'll be fine. --jonny-mt 13:36, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Based on both this and the above section, I'm beginning to believe something was changed in Mediawiki so "200pxpx" is no longer interpreted as "200px". --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 13:41, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I've noticed similar behavior on {{Infobox rail}} with regards to the map_size parameter. On the ones I've seen so far, removing the px resolves the issue. Slambo (Speak) 15:33, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

THanks to all. Either no image size or dropping the "px" works. CambridgeBayWeather Have a gorilla 17:03, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

See Template:Bug. The previous functionality permitting "pxpx" to be interpreted as "px" now no longer works. This mostly happens when a template uses {{{height}}}px or something and people specify height=200px. Just change that to height=200 and it will work as desired. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 17:30, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I think may also be related to the size of the original image. Both American Airlines and KLM look fine and have image_size = 200px and 250px. But look at the difference in the original images, Image:American Airlines logo.svg, Image:KLM logo.png and Image:Emirates logo.png. CambridgeBayWeather Have a gorilla 17:54, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Since the AA and KLM logos have "px" in their calls on their articles, it ends up being "pxpx", and thus the software basically voids the size specification and displays the images at their full size. There is no size specified for the Emirates logo at its article, so the size just defaults to whatever the default size is for that template. --TMF ^{Let's Go Mets - Stats} 18:00, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Yep. I took the size out and not just the px. When it was set earlier to 200px it was showing the image at full size. CambridgeBayWeather Have a gorilla 20:13, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Background color between mainspace/non-mainspace

There is an ongoing discussion at Mediawiki talk:Monobook.css#Light blue background to determine if the light blue background currently in use on all non-mainspace pages should be converted to plain white. Any input on this is appreciated. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 18:01, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Single user log-in

See also: Wikipedia talk:Changing username/Usurpations § Single User Login: thoughts?, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Single User Log-in, and Wikipedia talk:SUL/Consultation on renames

I just got round to reading Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-24/Single User Login (strangely, I thought I was reading last week's story, but then I ended up at this week's story - which has only just been published). Anyway, I went to meta:Help talk:Unified login, but wanted somewhere on en-wikipedia to discuss this. Unhelpfully, WP:SUL is a soft redirect to meta. So I thought I'd start this Village Pump post. As the story says, only admins so far, but still, it would be nice to discuss this somewhere. I have some questions I'd like to ask before I enable my global account, and as I don't have a meta-account yet, I'd like to ask the questions here. So, should it be here or should WT:SUL be opened for business? Carcharoth (talk) 20:54, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Lets keep it here until it grows too big. MBisanz ^talk 20:56, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Oops. I was bold. Still, I'll add a note on the Signpost talk page. Two or three parallel discussions never hurt anyone. Well, not yet anyway. Carcharoth (talk) 20:59, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning this - I would otherwise have sailed through the test period blissfully unaware that I was missing the opportunity to be a guinnea-pig :D! Makes me want to go log onto some obscure wiki now just because I can hehe! Took me long enough to remember my password at http://test.wikipedia.org though! Happy‑melon 21:14, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

I found it a rather easy process. What happens is someone on the Albanian wikipedia registers Carcharoth now that SUL is open but before Carc declares his global account? after he declares it? Should we encourage admins to login to as many pedias as possible to pre-empt squatter vandals? MBisanz ^talk 21:57, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Anyone (ie any admin) who goes through Special:MergeAccount has their username reserved on all languages on all projects where it's not already taken, and has all accounts with the same username (which they can prove is theirs by comparing password hashes) linked to their main account. So no one can register ca:User:Happy-melon now. There's a horribly complicated four-stage usurpation process documented somewhere on meta which explains how conflicts like the one you describe would be sorted out - except in controverisial cases, the account with the most edits 'wins', and the other account is forcibly renamed by a 'crat (or a MediaWiki maintenance script posing as a 'crat). The real problem is that you can't (AFAIK) have different usernames between projects, so if you're active on the english, arabic, russian and chineese wikipedias, and have a username which means the same, but is in a different script, on each, you're in big trouble :D! Happy‑melon 22:12, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Some combination of renaming, registering both accounts, redirecting user and talk pages, and setting up the signature to display the script you want it to display, should work. Or maybe not. I took ages to find out that ".el" was the Greek Wikipedia. It looked Greek, but there was surprisingly little to confirm this in a language other than Greek... Carcharoth (talk) 22:40, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) As it is only admins who can register global accounts, those can't be squatted. God knows what will happen when it is rolled out to everyone. I don't really care if someone cybersquats my name on the Albanian wikipedia - I'll be the only one with a global account - I don't think another account exists called Carcharoth that is an admin... The real problems come with common names, eg. User:Daniel and the like. My name, although not that common, has actually been used on other wikis. I don't mind giving a few details, as I trust squatter accounts (and unintentional clashes, as is the case here) will be dealt with appropriately (though some reports, over on that meta page, are saying that squatter accounts need to be dealt with before going ahead with a global account). Anyway, I ran this tool (found out about it at meta), and found five sets of contributions under my name: German Wikipedia; Greek Wikipedia; French Wikipedia; Commons (this is different from commons:User:Carcharoth (Commons)); and en-Wiktionary. Now, the strange thing is that I only ever remember trying to register an account at Commons, and finding that the name was already taken, so I registered the "Carcharoth (Commons)" account I linked to above. And two of the accounts above are clearly a different person (some French person), namely the French Wikipedia and the Commons account. But the other ones, the Greek Wikipedia one and the German Wikipedia one and the en-Wiktionary one, seem to be some of my edits from en-Wikipedia that have been exported over to those projects, somehow. Examples are this edit compared to this edit (note the one hour time difference); and this edit with this edit (no time difference here); and this edit with this edit (all edits I've quoted from other projects are here being compared with the same edits found on en-Wikipedia). Does Special:Export do this when transwikiing? Does anyone know what is going on here? Do those accounts (other than the French and Commons ones, with French edit summaries) actually exist? Does this affect single user login? Should I just go ahead with creating a global account anyway? Carcharoth (talk) 22:36, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

this edit link says that en:wikt:User:Carcharoth is not registered, which must be a really wierd result of the transwiki procedure, as you guess. It makes sense given that the Export/Import feature must feed directly into the revision/page tables - presumably any users who co-incidentally shared the same username on wiktionary as one of the wikipedia-editors of the article that was transwikied, would have found themselves with extra edits. Once you visit Special:MergeAccount, of course, the question becomes moot, as your username is reserved (and logged) on all wikis and languages. Recovering all your lost transwikied edits is a nice reward, actually. Once they get their head around centralised edit counts (and interwiki redirects), we'll be in business. What will most likely happen, unless one of the other Carcharoths is an ArbCom member on de.wiki or something (:D), is that de:User:Carcharoth will be renamed to something like de:User:Carcharoth_renamed_2, the French guy will get fr:User:Carcharoth_renamed and commons:User:Carcharoth_renamed (or another name of their preference), and a 'crat on commons will rename commons:User:Carcharoth (Commons) to commons:User:Carcharoth and then merge it with your global account. You'll probably be asked to put a note on your commons and fr.wiki userpages to note that the poor french guy had his name pinched, because there'll be an awful lot of signatures floating around which point to the wrong place after this is all over. Happy‑melon 23:13, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Just a note, if you are merging accounts, they all need to have the same username. If you need to have an account renamed, do so before merging your accounts as it is currently not possible for bureaucrats to rename an account to a name reserved by a global account. Mr.Z-man 23:06, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Right. Thanks. So I will need to try and get Commons:User:Carcharoth (Commons) to usurp Commons:User:Carcharoth before creating the global account, but I wouldn't need to usurp fr:User:Commons before creating the global account, or would I? Both accountslook fairly inactive - the fr one has about 160 edits between June 2006 and January 2007 and the Commons one has about 18 edits between November 2006 and August 2007 - can't see deleted edits for either). Would I need to register a different account at fr before usurption or not? What about these strange transwiki contributions at de, el and en-wiktionary? The user creation logs ([3], [4] and [5]) seem to indicate that these are phantom edits or some kind, even though a contributions log exists. Really strange. Ah, I see Happy-melon has answered above. Carcharoth (talk) 23:21, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

The transwiki contributions are definitely a result of a full history export. For an example see my contributions on the German Wikipedia, only a few of which I actually made there. You can already get your global edit count with this tool]. Graham87 00:14, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

<3 hostile takeovers. This should be great fun for common names like mine (per Carcharoth above). Daniel (talk) 01:21, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

When I checked to see if my username was registered on other Wikis, I found my own accounts on Commons, etc., but also found my username on a non-English language wiki. The name was registered in 2006, but has no contributions. It would be helpful if there were an automated way to request usurpation in such cases without trying to navigate the request in a language the admin doesn't know. — ERcheck (talk) 00:09, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

The simple way is to submit a request to meta:Steward requests/Usurpation. Unfortunately the page is currently shutdown "due to technical difficulties". --Allen3 ^talk 21:43, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I used to be known here as User:Woodym555, an account which I still hold. I also use that name on commons:User:Woodym555, meta:User:Woodym555 and on km:User:Woodym555. None of these accounts are admin accounts but User:Woody is. Do I need to get all the other accounts usurped to Woody before I attempt unified login? Woody (talk) 21:56, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I'll stick my neck out here and say yes - if the software were smart enough to be able to combine unlike useraccount names, there would be no need for usurpation at all, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:36, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I went and got the single login for my account (User:Sam) and discovered that there are more than sixty accounts in other projects that have my user name! -- ☑ SamuelWantman 09:57, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

SUL and renames

Wikipedia:SUL/Consultation on renames

The implementation of Unified Login may mean that bureaucrats should agree to perform renames in circumstances where our practice is currently to decline them. I have created the above page in an attempt to get a feel for community consensus on SUL and how far bureaucrats should go to accommodate SUL-based rename requests. Input from all welcome and appreciated. WjBscribe 01:20, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Signal it on your userpage

Of late, I've been more off Wikipedia than on it; so, I do not know how the community reacts to SUL. I personally feel that SUL is indeed a good system in non-controversial cases where there is no conflict of 2 users having the same username on different Wikimedia projects. I also believe that it is important that people who have gone for SUL signal that their username is unique on all Wikimedia projects - I created the template {{Unified login}} to signal that. Pl. feel free to use it/ improve it. --Gurubrahma (talk) 09:30, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Happy-melon formatted it as a userbox: {{User SUL}}. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:35, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Do we have templates similar to the geographic taget template on other language websites?

Take a look at http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_%28Californi%C3%AB%29, I noticed that the Portuguese Wikipedia has the same sort of targeted template to indicate towns in the local area of a designated spot. Do we have something similar in the English Wikipedia? Corvus cornix_talk 23:09, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Issue related to ClickFix

I fixed the ClickFix-related issue with Template:DallasMap, but can't get the road/interstate symbols in the right place. Can someone check this template and its subtemplates and fix? Ral315 (talk) 04:53, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Need help on searching talk pages

Some months ago I had an exchange with someone on a talk page which included terms like Sulpico Kalaw. I'd like to refer to that discussion, but don't remember the article name.

Following info seen at Help:Search and Help:Namespace, I tried the following URL:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&ns1=1&&fulltext=Search&search=Sulpico

This produced no results, and it should have gotten hits. Can anyone help? Also, either I'm misinterpreting it or the info at Help:Search needs a look. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 05:55, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

The search stinks is sub-optimal, have you tried Special:Contributions/Wtmitchell (for whatever wiki and whatever username) ? --Splarka (rant) 07:14, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

It was on a wikipedia article talk page, but I don't recall the article name. I can muddle through without the info I'm trying to retrieve from that exchange, but having the info would be useful. A google search with "site:en.wikipedia.org" searches the wikipedia article namespace. I vaguely recall some past discussion here about using google to search namespaces other than the article namespace but don't recall the details and the "site=whatever" variations I've tried don't work. Oh well;thanks for the response anyhow. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 07:59, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Changing your URL to use "en.wikipedia.org", I get two relevant results. Also, you can specify the namespace by typing the namespace, a colon, then your search term in the search field. So typing "talk:Sulpico" and activating the search button gives the same results. Graham87 12:20, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I've updated Help:Searching. The instructions on searching namespaces should be a little easier to follow now. Graham87 12:52, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

I have added a link to Wikipedia:Searching at the top of Help:Searching (where it may be deleted in the next update from meta), and to {{Ph:Searching}} which is transcluded in Help:Searching#Wikipedia-specific help (and should remain so after updates from meta). PrimeHunter (talk) 00:14, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've now found that past discussion I was looking for. Cheers. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 00:37, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Search box cursor on main page

Would it be possible to have the blinking cursor automatically appear in the search box when visiting the main page (like on google.com)? Many people use the search box on the main page, and this "feature" would let us start typing right away without having to click on the box first. Are there any reasons why this would be a bad idea?Dwr12 (talk) 09:10, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes. See Wikipedia:FAQ/Main Page#Why doesn't the cursor appear in the search box, like with Google?. Algebraist 10:55, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

If that sounds like a snarky response, it's really not. That section of the FAQ provides JavaScript so that the page focus is automatically in the search box; so any registered editor can make the change (for his/her own use) if desired. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:29, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

No update

In the article Nazism i always get the second last version, which is vandalism. Cache is empty - refresh is done, but i always see HAHA NO MORE NAZIS KILL EM ALL although there is a newer edit. confused... --91.35.169.101 (talk) 12:31, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Try purging Wikipedia's cache. I've just done that on the nazism article. Graham87 12:49, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

single user login & edit counts

I did a single user login for myself. and I swear my total edit count in en.wiki is ~2500 edits less now than it was yesterday. Either that or something is wrong today with wannabe_kate. Kingturtle (talk) 17:30, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. I haven't done SUL yet. I'll try and take note of my edit counts before and after. Carcharoth (talk) 22:56, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

It seems ok. Maybe there was just a hiccup with wannabe_kat. Kingturtle (talk) 03:08, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Image size at William Wilberforce

I've still got a problem with the image size, which many users appear to think is fixed by the ClickFix thing. No such luck with the article William Wilberforce, I'm afraid. Any help from technically-minded users would be appreciated, as this is up for GA Review this week. Many thanks – Agendum (talk) 18:27, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

It looks okay to me, try clearing your cache. Corvus cornix_talk 20:30, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

All the images look fine to me too. Looks like a good article, albeit one that could really use the always-just-around-the-corner functionality for page numbers in reference tags. Happy‑melon 21:24, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Image "File links" problem?

This page has an infobox which includes this image. (You can click through from the article to the image page to verify that it reallyis this image.) However, the "File links" list for that page says:

No pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file. (Pages on other projects are not counted.)

This doesn't seem to me to be what I expected. I've done the usual purging, editing and saving with no changes, and so on. Is this correct? TimR (talk) 22:33, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

WP:PURGE of the image and the article seems to have cured the problem. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:02, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

(ec) Hmm. I did a null edit on The Lord of the Rings (1981 radio series) which has relinked the image so it no longer appears orphaned. Not sure how it go unlinked in the first place though. mattbr 23:07, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks to you both. I was pretty sure I did a purge, but maybe I didn't do it correctly. Your help is much appreciated. TimR (talk) 23:50, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

How are hyperlinks copy-pasted with images from Wikipedia?

I was wondering if anyone might be able to answer this question I have...

Many-a-time have I copy-pasted images from Wikipedia pages into Microsoft Word. In doing so I have noticed that the images are hyperlinked back to the source location, i.e. if I right-click on the image once pasted in Word and select 'Edit Hyperlink', the address is listed as http:\\upload.wikimedia.org\wikipedia\en\...

What I was wondering is how the images retain the hyperlink, whereas other images I have copy-pasted from the web do not? Any information anyone can give with regards to this would be much appreciated.

Special:SpecialPages is blank

I currently get a blank page at Special:SpecialPages ("Special pages" in the toolbox). My browser displays the source as:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>

Other links like Special:ListUsers are working. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:18, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I got a blank page until I refreshed. Working for me now. --CWY2190^TC 03:14, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

It also works for me now. It was gone a long time. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:20, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Picture issue

Could someone take a look at this article Family Force 5 - One image is showing in the info box. When you click on it, you end up at a different image's information page. Thanks! TheRedPenOfDoom (talk) 02:51, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

No, that's the right image's information page: just the big thumb displayed on the description page hasn't been updated yet. The image you see there is an old version of the image. Give it a few hours and it should fix itself. Nihiltres^{t.l} 03:21, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

class="sortable wikitable"

class="sortable wikitable" is part of a template which allows wikiusers to sort the table by clicking a button. Here is an example.

1. Where can I find information on how to create class="sortable wikitable" on my own wiki? I can't even find the page where the coding for class="sortable wikitable" is.
2. Is there a list of all template classes?
3. How would I go about adding class="sortable wikitable" to my wiki? Template:navbar, which allows wikiusers to collapse templates, seems incredibly complex. Trav (talk) 10:03, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind: Help:Sorting Trav (talk) 10:07, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Category totals

Category:Living people: "The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 262,520 total." - thank-you, thank-you, to whoever made the change to display the total number of articles in a category! That is wonderful for large categories. Carcharoth (talk) 10:10, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Do we have a list somewhere of the biggest categories? And this feature doesn't seem to work for Category:All non-free media, which says "The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 506 total." - which is just wrong. There are far more than 506 images in that category. Carcharoth (talk) 11:05, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes I noticed that the last time I was there. The category totals are (IIRC) a new field in one or other database table, which are being populated by a maintenance script; I guess it just hasn't finished yet. I know there are still categories which don't display the numbers, presumably because the script hasn't counted them yet. Happy‑melon 11:26, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Special:MostLinkedCategories ? — Werdna talk 11:30, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

That's it! One of the more fascinating lists. Add the "listas parameter" categories together, and you get the total for WPBiography (508,493 articles). Though not all people (lots of music groups, due to the history of how that template was set up and used). The discrepancy between WPBiography labelled articles on living people (227,943) and Living people (262,055) is interesting. Possibly another 35,000 articles that could get WPBiography put on them (maybe just before they get deleted as vanity articles, but still). All non-free media is 281,986, which is a figure that should be tracked over time. Is there a way to get the population of a category over time to be recorded in the database, rather than having bots record the numbers? Carcharoth (talk) 11:46, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Cool! #3 and #15 depress me greatly :'(. As you say, that discrepancy is interesting. Clearly there's a tagging mismatch to be rectified there - surely there aren't 35,000 articles with {{db-a7}} tags on them :D Happy‑melon 12:09, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Many of those biography articles are start or stubs (in case the #s change on that list - those are the #15 and #3 you were referring to) because there is not much information about them, and they got automatically (or semi-automatically) assessed that way by the various assessment drives. Some might actually be OK articles, but the assessors rarely felt knowledgeable enough to assess them as B-class. #12 - all articles lacking sources (118,806) is worse, though. Carcharoth (talk) 12:21, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Another intersting category is those articles that are only in living people (or the years of birth and death categories). Many of those are, shall we say, borderline. See Dana C. Bradford - McCarthy Group, LLC for one example found at random. That need renaming for a start. Carcharoth (talk) 12:25, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

It looks like the SPA that maintains that and a few other pages hasn't been around for awhile to do the renaming, so those may need prod tags. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 16:22, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

As for why some of the category totals are wrong at the moment, the pages in the categories will take some time for the server to count. The category totals will be automatically updated once the new category table has finished being populated; I'm not sure whether it's populated yet at the moment, but once it is all the totals should be correct (and until then some of the totals will be wrong). --ais523 14:06, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Črni Kal Viaduct: discrepancy between WikiMiniAtlas and Geopedia

I've asked this question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates already but no one has replied so I'll ask here too.

For the article Črni Kal Viaduct: Why do I get different results when I click the blue globe (at the bottom of the infobox) and when I click "coordinates/GeoHack/Slovenian/Geopedia"? For me the prime method for determining coordinates is by using Geopedia where the objects in Slovenia (like Črni Kal Viaduct) have been marked already.

Another question: Why does GeoHack not show the main map of Geopedia but shows the Wikipedia - SI layer instead? --Eleassar ^{my talk} 13:26, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Article Title - Change Case

Howdy! I just posted my first article, and I have a stupid question. How do I change the title "Ann barnes" to "Ann Barnes"? Thanks! Rob Craig (talk) 13:20, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_barnes

There's a tab above the article that says "move". --Eleassar ^{my talk} 13:26, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

But that tag only appears four days after you have registered your account. However, another user has already moved the page for you. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:43, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

The OP's account was created in '06. Algebraist 18:18, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

User merge

Hello, I have forgotten the password of my original username (SpeedKing) so I made this user (SpeedKing1980). Is there any way to merge these two accounts? --SpeedKing (talk) 15:16, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

No. I doubt anyone would mind if you redirected your user and talk pages, though. Algebraist 18:17, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

You can get an USURP, to get your old account back, if your edits are not GFDL significant. Soxred93 | talk bot 18:23, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

The issue is whether you can prove that you are indeed the person who owned the original account. That can easily be done if you have enabled email on the old account, but presumably you didn't (otherwise a temporary password could be mailed to you). So then the only way to prove identity is via matching IP addresses; I suspect that running a checkuser to find out wouldn't be approved. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:57, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

My IP has changed since then but if there would be a possibility to check my original IP (from when I registered), there is a possibility they could match (if the change didn't happen earlier). --SpeedKing (talk) 18:04, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Coordinates are overwriting the top line

When I look at city articles today, the "Coordinates" are overwriting the gray line beneath the article title. This is in Firefox 2.0.0.13 (the latest), on Windows XP. Screenshot follows. Tempshill (talk) 19:35, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it is related, but I noticed the coordinate problem as well as the fact that the little image of a person next to "login/create account" no longer appears next to my username when logged in. The coordinates are not overlapping for me anymore, but the little image of the globe is. See Image:AUNoman.jpg for what I'm talking about. - auburnpilot talk 20:08, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

There is an ongoing discussion on whether that little man is racially biased, though as far as I know, no one has attempted to remove it, and it remains visible for me. Dragons flight (talk) 20:27, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Racially biased? That's quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I've heard in my entire time at Wikipedia. It's no longer appearing for me, as you'll see in the above linked image, but I hope it comes back. Thanks for the link. - auburnpilot talk 20:34, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

The image was removed in common.css for a few hours, and sebsequently restored. — Edokter • Talk • 20:45, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Although I've always (i.e. at the few times I've actually noticed it) found this little icon rather useless, I wouldn't want it removed because of silly political correctness.

That said, I should add that it would need to be darker to match with the Miami article. Its tan leaves a lot to be desired. :-D Waltham, The Duke of 03:45, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't want it removed because of silly political correctness. - How 'bout we remove it because (a) it's useless and (b) having useless stuff is confusing to new editors and (c) anything that simplifies Wikipedia for new editors without removing any functionality is a good thing. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:54, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

This is a completely different thing, Mr Broughton. Although I cannot really believe that a small piece of ceiling decoration can in any way confuse editors, I would not object to its removal on such grounds (I'm not that attached to it, anyway). Waltham, The Duke of 14:28, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Template inclusion question

Someone recently added {{db-redirtypo}} to the Wikipedia:Template messages/Deletion. There are what, 50 or so other templates on the page, but for some reason *this* one has included its categories. So now the page shows up in the Category:Candidates for speedy deletion, though it didn't before. Help? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 00:48, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Why do you say that it didn't show up in that category before? Looking at (for example) the 10 November 2007 version, I see that same category. And when I looked at a different template than the one you mention, also listed on the template messages page, what I saw looked exactly the same with regards to includes/noincludes. (In short, I'm not convinced you've identified a problem; I doubt that any admin is going to blindly delete this page just because it's in a CSD category.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:10, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Flash

I think Wikipedia would benefit from the ability to display flash in articles. We could use it to create educational graphics. Does MediaWiki have the ability to use it?--Awareshiftjk (talk) 04:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

There is a MediaWiki Flash extension, but it is not enabled at en.wikipedia. I'm not sure why not, but I'd guess either security or interoperability considerations. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:55, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikimedia only uses open source software, Flash is proprietary. Mr.Z-man 04:59, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

In security terms, it'd be like enabling raw HTML. -- Tim Starling (talk) 05:58, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Well that puts paid to that one then :D Happy‑melon 10:16, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Extra <p> generated

• I observe a bunching problem in First Battle of Beleriand, probably caused by an Infobox immediately followed by a Campaignbox.
• I notice the problem is not present in the similar page Dagor Bragollach.
• Inspection shows that the latter puts the two boxes in a right-floating table.
• I introduce "identical" (cross my heart) code into the first page. It clears up the bunching. BUT ...
• An extra <p><br /></p> is generated in the single cell of the containing table, right before the Infobox, which pushes the Infobox down a line in the cell.

What I want to know is: what's generating the extra paragraph? The markup looks identical. Oh, and of course: how do I get rid of it? Elphion (talk) 06:02, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I fixed it by removing the newlines between </tr> and <tr>, they give excess newlines before the table.--Patrick (talk) 14:15, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks! (At this stage I'm not going to try editing templates!) I'm puzzled though why the space didn't show up in the second article, which was using the same table + templates construction. Elphion (talk) 15:18, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

It seems that three consecutive newlines in the table code, outside tr-tags, give excess space at the top. So it depended on which parameters of Template:Infobox Me battle are defined.--Patrick (talk) 17:14, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

What links here — images using the ":" syntax ?

Is it possible to know when a page links to an image using the syntax [[:Image:Three checks chess.png]] ? I choose this particular example, because I knew it was linked from a user page, but could not find it using the What links here feature. In the meantime, I found the user page, but would still be interested in having a way to find such links in the feature. Any help ? Schutz (talk) 07:48, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

So I see that the current page now appears in the list of pages linking to the image; is there any reason why the user page does not ? Have I missed something simple ? Schutz (talk) 07:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I think the purpose of the extra leading colon is precisely to prevent whatlinkshere from cataloging the reference. As far as I know, it has no other purpose. To find these, some sort of Google expression ought to be possible, perhaps: site:en.wikipedia.org Image:Three_checks_chess.png. —EncMstr 07:56, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Both have the leading colon — which, as far as I know, means "display a link to the image rather than the imag itself". I have just seen a difference, though: the user page uses underscores instead of spaces: [[:Image:Three_checks_chess.png]], so this must be the reason: the link works, but not the backlinks. I don't know if there is a way around it ? Schutz (talk) 08:05, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I made a dummy edit to the user page, now it appears in whatlinkshere. I don't know why there was this error in the first place, but I suppose it did not fix itself because the page has not been edited for years. The underscores for spaces do not seem to matter.--Patrick (talk) 12:15, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

It was a bug then. Many thanks for fixing it (at least in this case). Cheers, Schutz (talk) 12:55, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Problems with tab header

I have used the codes on Wikipedia:Tutorial/TabsHeader to create Wikipedia:WikiProject Bangladesh/Deshipidian tabs. But, I can't get the edit tag to show along with headers on the pages I used it in. You see, on Wikipedia you get little "edit tags" ([edit]) on the right hand side of every header and sub-header. It makes editing much easier, especially for longer pages. But, when I use the tab codes, that [edit] tag vanishes.

How can I keep the sections editable, without opening the whole page for edit (like ordinary Wikipedia pages)? Wikipedia:Tutorial/TabsTopWithEdit supposedly helps to have that. But, I couldn't figure out a way to use it. It could be a bug in the codes. I don't know who created the codes and can't get directly to that person. Would you take a look at the problem? Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 11:34, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I fixed the problem; you needed to subst the PageTabs template and replace the {{PageTabsTop}} subtemplate with {{Wikipedia:Tutorial/TabsTopWithEdit}}, which doesn't include the magic word __NOEDITSECTION__, which was what was causing the problem. I also cleaned up the subst'ed code to remove unnecessary ParserFunctions (the {{#if:}} and {{#ifeq:}} stuff). Hope that helps, Nihiltres^{t.l} 13:20, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. This is really what makes Wikipedia so great. Thanks, really. Aditya^{(talk • contribs)} 14:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Parser Functions in Monobook.css

Is it possible to use parser functions in Monobook.css? Do you need to do anything special to use them? And is it possible to change the colour of just one tab at the top of a page? If so, the code would be very useful :P — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tiddly Tom (talk • contribs) 12:55, March 28, 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, it is possible to change the colour of individual tabs at the top of the page; each is specified by a unique CSS id beginning with ca-. For example, the edit tab's CSS ID is ca-edit. I use Safari 3; if you use that, or, I hear, some versions of Firefox, you can use an element inspector to find the id of the tab. You also can handle for whether the tab is selected or not; selected tabs have the class selected which overrides border colour (and more, if you specify it) for those tabs as long as it's put in the right spot in the cascade. Nihiltres^{t.l} 13:33, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Navigation popups

Many of you know Navigation popups. It seems Lupin is not so active anymore for the past year, and since popups was still using query.php and I wanted to learn about the new api, I figured it would be a nice and useful experiment to convert the tool to use the new api.php. User:TheDJ/apipopups.js is a direct conversion that adds a new mode (autoenabled) that "should" replace every single query.php call with an equivalent api.php call. No more no less. The goal was to prepare the tool for the time in which query.php might be disabled. So it is not a rewrite, and it adds or removes almost no functionality that wasn't there before. The only place that significantly differs atm, is detection of images that clash with commons images, and previewing the pages of images that are on commons (there is a significant change in the API that makes converting this almost impossible without rewriting key parts of popups). So I'm looking for some people who are already using popups and want to check this version of popups for any unsuspected significant differences. If you have tested the api.php version, then please drop me a line on User_talk:TheDJ/apipopups.js I'm interested in both "it works exactly like I expected" and "This preview is totally different now" type of comments. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:12, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Does there exist the technical ability to revise edit summary spam?

This user account, Eadgils (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log),
apparently a sockpuppet, performed many moves of articles with edit summaries which amount to comment/link spam. Is there any technical ability to purge items like this? (See the contributions of the blocked account). -- Yellowdesk (talk) 14:23, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

There is oversight, but that is only used in cases where someone has been endangered(such as the release of personal information) or seriously libeled. _(1 == 2)^Until 14:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. That's good to kow, and also (unfortunately) good to know that edit summary link-spam is here to stay. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 16:14, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

At least external links don't work in edit summaries, so the links aren't actually "going" anywhere :D Happy‑melon 18:32, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

And search engines can't access the text in edit summaries, so putting linkspam URLs in edit summaries is really quite pointless.-- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:26, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Unified account?

I just now saw for the first time about the idea of having a unified global account for all Wikimedia projects. My username is Old English, so I doubt that there's anyone else using it on any Wikimedia projects, but I have similarly-named accounts on the Commons and on the German Wikipedia. If I decided to unify accounts, how would those two accounts be affected? Nyttend (talk) 16:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Before unifying your accounts you should check that they have either the same password or same e-mail address. If that's the case they will be merged. Before merging you will be shown a list of accounts to be merged and accounts with the same name that won't be merged. See m:Unified login for more information. The only accounts with username Nyttend are indeed the three you mentioned. You can check this with SUL Util. --Erwin85 (talk) 18:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Note that if your accounts don't have the same passwords yet, that's ok! You'll just have to log into them again to confirm. --brion (talk) 21:03, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

So how does one get a unified account? DuncanHill (talk) 23:32, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Unless one is an admin, one waits. Algebraist 23:36, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Henry Somerset, 2nd earl of Worcester

Can somebody explain why this whole article is inside the person box? Corvus cornix_talk 23:01, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Some bizarreness to do with the way the children were formatted, fixed now by [6]. DuncanHill (talk) 23:20, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

How weird. Thank you. Corvus cornix_talk 23:39, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Which translation tag, please?

Most of the key content of Moyshe Altman needs translating. Is there a suitable tag, please? BlueValour (talk) 23:25, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia articles needing translation has a template, as well as links to similar categories with their own templates. You should find what you want with one of those templates. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah, yes, thanks that's helpful. BlueValour (talk) 23:58, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Broken gadget

A clock in the personal toolbar that shows the current time in UTC and also provides a link to purge the current page gadget generates a malformed purge link - it doesn't URL-encode & character and probably something else. Can someone fix that? MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 05:48, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Any admin can fix this. At the top of the file it says

title=' + wgPageName + '&action

change this to

title=' + encodeURIComponent(wgPageName) + '&action

--TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:59, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

The file in question would be MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js of course. If someone with admin privs would be so kind... --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:19, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I've corrected it as you suggested, but this change doesn't seem to help. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 14:32, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

It is likely that your browser has cached the script and that you need to clear your browser cache. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:59, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Strange, I cleared Opera's cache manually, anf first it did'nt help (???), but now everything's OK. Thank you. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 15:02, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Changing a large quantity of links

I was just browsing, and found that the page Dosed, had two different articles on it, one about a band, one about a song. I thought this was extremely confusing, so moved the part about the song to Dosed (song). I then looked at what links here on the original page so I could change all the links, and then realised how many there were. Is there a quick way to change all of those links? Otherwise, maybe I should have relocated the article about the band instead, with less links to it? Thanks for your help, Alex9788 (talk) 11:59, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

AutoWikiBrowser can semi-automate the process, however, I don't think you quality to use it yet (less than 500 mainspace edits). The band should likely have the article over the song, so right now your best option is to either find someone that knows the band and that has AWB access that can do this, or just start working through this yourself (firefox and "open in new tab" will help.) --MASEM 12:31, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

The article on band is speediable under A7 in its present state. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 13:00, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Yep, it was added recently by an anon, I've simply reverted it to last good version that described the song. Problem solved. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 13:04, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for sorting that out, Alex9788 (talk) 17:24, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Transclusion of lead section

I would like to create in an article some links to the Lead section of some other articles. My intention is to use this feature in some Project pages. Are there some special Variables or Magic Words that could do that, please ? SyG (talk) 12:23, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Since the lead is always at the top of the page, why would you specifically link to it? Anyway, you can try linking to the first header, which is also the article's title, like [[Article#Article]]. — Edokter • Talk • 12:28, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion, but it does not seem to work. For example if I write a transclusion like {{:Alexander Alekhine#Alexander Alekhine}} it will add the whole article Alexander Alekhine and not only its Lead section. I would like to be able to transclude only the Lead section, and even possibly without the TOC. SyG (talk) 13:03, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

You would have to prepare the article for this usage: everything beyond the lead could be made conditional depending on a parameter, see e.g. User:Patrick/example of page prepared for transclusion of the lead section (talk, backlinks, edit). A complication is that the section edit links disappear in the full article; they could be put explicitly.--Patrick (talk) 14:07, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I see... Adapting all the articles for my goal is clearly too much of a burden given the usage I intended, so I will look for something else than refering to the Lead. Thanks for the explanation and the clear example! SyG (talk) 14:16, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I really hope that we don't encourage the kind of article modifications mentioned by Patrick; adding a special template in the lead section and then putting in explicit edit links for sections because the template removes them is - to my mind - particularly off-putting to most editors coming upon such an article and looking at the underlying wikitext. At minimum there really should be some invisible comments to help out editors unfamiliar with the concept (that would be almost every editor here).

To be more constructive - what we really need is to have mw:Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion implemented. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:19, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Mmm, interesting one. Are there any plans somewhere to implement this extension in Wikipedia ? SyG (talk) 15:31, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't look like a bug report has been opened yet for this feature on the English Wikipedia (it is currently installed on all language Wikisources and English Wiktionary). Most project pages (and portal "featured article" sections) usually include articles by copying and pasting the lead. Gracenotes^T § 17:32, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

This sounds awesome. -- Ned Scott 03:10, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

It is an interesting extension, which may have some advantages over the method I mentioned, but note that the article to be partly transcluded requires a similar preparation, and that there is the same problem with missing section edit links.--Patrick (talk) 09:47, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

The extension shouldn't have any missing section edit links. The main part of the extension, which is used on the sites noted above, does require some preparation on the page to be transcluded. There is another part which allows transclusion by the visual headings, although I don't think that's ever been reviewed for use on these projects. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 17:50, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

You are right, edit links are present and work fine, so it would be good to have this extension installed.--Patrick (talk) 18:38, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

It might be more useful and intuitive if the syntax were simply {{:Mozilla Firefox#History}} (transclude Mozilla Firefox#History into the current page). {{:Mozilla Firefox#}} could be used to transclude just the lead section. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 18:24, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm still a bit leary of transcluding arbitrary sections by their heading, since it's unlikely someone would realize when they change a heading that they're breaking transclusion. Transcluding the introduction should be a little cleaner, unless the article has an infobox. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 19:28, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Maybe I'm crazy...

...but I can't seem to figure out why Sylpheed is in Category:Requested moves. The category isn't linked to from the article itself or from any transcluded template I can find. I've tried purge the cache and bypassing my cache, but it's still there. Is my computer being crazy or is it the article? Thanks. JPG-GR (talk) 19:00, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm... gone now, finally. JPG-GR (talk) 19:11, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Categories always seem to lag a few minutes behind in my experience. — Edokter • Talk • 19:16, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, but this one had been in there for the better part of the week. JPG-GR (talk) 19:32, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Purging is not enough for some situations where an article is categorized because of former content of a transcluded page. Purging updates the purged page but not necessarily the category pages it appears in. An edit may be required to do that. It can be a null edit which doesn't show up in the page history. Maybe somebody made a null edit on Sylpheed after seeing your post. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:48, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Why'd it think I added an external link?

When I did this edit just now, I got the screen that says "Your edit includes new external links. ... To help protect against automated spam, please enter the words that appear below". But as you see, I wasn't adding any external links. What's up with that? --207.176.159.90 (talk) 03:24, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I too have occasionally got that screen (when working as an anon) when I've not been adding ext. links.--217.43.84.100 (talk) 06:39, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I notice the edit immediately before yours added a naked link to the same line you edited. Maybe has something to do with it, but I'll leave the mechanics of it for others to comment on. Franamax (talk) 07:09, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

When this was asked recently, one reply stated that it can be triggered by bad links in another section of the page, which would have been added before they were blacklisted. The spam filter then picks them up on the next edit to occur after their addition to the blacklist. Adrian M. H. 15:11, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Suggested edits to Wikimedia press release

This isn't only about English Wikipedia, but I can't log in to Wikimedia Foundation. I suggest that someone who can log in there consider making the following suggested changes.

In the press release about the 10 millionth article, it says "worldby Alexa". It needs a space inserted between "world" and "by".

Perhaps more serious: The press release gives a link to a list of statistics, but due to technical difficulties gives an outdated number of articles for English Wikipedia: "(1418145) en English (!!Oct 2006!!)" Yet we have more up-to-date information right on our Main Page: "2,310,997 articles in English". If the automated statistics from the database dump can't give that information, then surely it should be added by hand, either to the press release itself or in the header of the file of statistics if it can't be added to the actual table for some reason; it should at least state that English Wikipedia has "over 2 million articles".

Another suggested edit to the press release: "The goal of the Wikipedia" I would delete the second "the". --Coppertwig (talk) 13:04, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Your link on list is to meta:List of Wikipedias which has updated counts. The press release also has the link Detailed Wikimedia statistics, a page where the first link is Wikipedias which redirects to http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm where the mentioned "(1418145) en English (!!Oct 2006!!)" is. [7] shows that meta:List of Wikipedias passed that in Oct 2006. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:50, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry -- I gave the wrong link. Oh, there are two links that sound as if they'll give the numbers. I still think it would help if the header for the Wikipedias page of the "detailed Wikimedia statistics" would mention at least "over 2 million" for English Wikipedia, (or a particular number associated with a particular recent date), but I guess it may not be as urgent as I thought. --Coppertwig (talk) 14:48, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

The bottom of http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm has an email address. You could also try User talk:Erik Zachte/Statistics. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:03, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Category problem

As part of a stub-sorting project, the West Virginia geography stubs have been divided into several regions with county-level templates. Recently, I created Category:Mountaineer Country geography stubs and moved the stub templates for the counties in the region over to that category from Category:West Virginia geography stubs. Articles such as Corinth, West Virginia, which has one of these stubs, is therefore in the category. However, when you look at the category, it supposedly has nothing in it except the stub templates, while articles such as Corinth are still in the state category. What's wrong? I've compared the coding to other West Virginia county stub templates that didn't and don't have this problem, and I can't find any difference. Nyttend (talk) 13:11, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

If a transcluded page changes categorization then it can be necessary to edit the transcluding page to update the category page. A null edit is enough but purging the page is not enough (purging can update the category listing at the bottom, but not the category page). If you want the category to be updated quickly then you can go through Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:PrestonWV-geo-stub. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:23, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I've gone and done null edits to all of them, and seven pages are listed in the category now. On the other hand, there should be several dozen; and what's more, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) and Wikipedia:Village pump (all) are listed! Any suggestions now? Nyttend (talk) 17:42, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

The VP was listed because you forgot to prefix the Category links in this text with : I have corrected these lines here. Not sure what is going on with the rest. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:00, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Need replacement for WatchlistBot to build page of links to WikiProject-cataloged pages

In August, WatchlistBot ceased operating. This bot built pages for various WikiProjects that included links to all the pages (both regular and talk) cataloged for these projects for the sake of having project watchlists. Is there another bot that can be run regularly (like once a week) for this purpose? Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 16:05, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

There is JoshurBot that has recently been set up for the Sheffield project & has been run for the Yorkshire project, though it is a manual run. May be you could ask its owner if you think it is suitable. Keith D (talk) 18:13, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the lead! Stevie is the man! ^{Talk • Work} 19:23, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

if you want I can get something like WP:BABS for a project that wants it. β^{_{command 2}} 20:30, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Looking through the WikiProjects topic in the editor's index, there seem to be a couple of possibilities, with the most likely being User:AlexNewArtBot. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:17, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Problem with Firefox

I don't usually use Firefox, but IE7, but because of the unrepaired problem in which IE7 takes an extremely long time to load pages, I've been forced to use Firefox almost exclusively when I'm at home. But now I've found a problem with Firefox that I don't have with IE7: If I'm on an article's history page, and I do a "compare selected versions", I can't go back to the history page and do a compare of selected versions for a different set of diffs without being forced to reload the page. A second attempt at a compare does absolutely nothing. Is this something to do with something in particular with my version of Firefox, or is this a problem that everybody who uses Firefox has? Corvus cornix_talk 21:22, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I use Firefox 2.0.0.13, and don't have this problem. Does using MediaWiki:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Compare link.js and 'open in new tab' help? Algebraist 21:46, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I use the same version of Firefox. I don't use any userscripts. Corvus cornix_talk 21:50, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Update description at www.wikipedia.org

I notice that when googling for wikipedia, the first hit is www.wikipedia.org, which lists a slightly out of date description:

The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over 7 million articles in over 200 languages, and still growing.

It might not be a bad idea to update this a bit.--Filll (talk) 12:16, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

It's not written by Wikipedia. Google gets many of their descriptions from the Open Directory Project, including this one which is from http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Groupware/Wiki/Topics/. A new description can be suggested with the "update listing" link at top. An ODP volunteer editor will review the suggestion at some time. But I don't think they should be troubled every time Wikipedia grows a little. There is a way to ask Google not to use the ODP description of your site but I don't know what they will use instead, and the description looks OK to me. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:53, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, we have over 10 million articles in 250 languages now, so it is quite out of date. Mr.Z-man 14:55, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Can't figure out why a portion of the page does not display

I was not sure who to post to, I hope this is the appropriate forum

The monowheel page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowheel has something wrong with it and I can't figure out what it is. The discussions are from 2006 so I'm guessing its not an active page, thus I thought if I just posted it in the discussion page nothing would happen.

The problem with the page is that some of it does not show and I don't know enough formatting to figure out why. When I look at the page I see a "Fiction" section at the bottom of the page, but when I go to edit the page I see there is a "non-fiction", "advertising" and "external Links" sections in the code that do not show. The code looks good to me (with my limited knowledge of the wikisyntax) but they don't show so something must be wrong.

I just noticed the discrepancy and hope that someone can take a look at it.

MarkButler10 (talk) 15:50, 31 March 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by MarkButler10 (talk • contribs) 15:50, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

 Done The closing </ref> tag was missing, so Wiki assumed that the remaining text was part of the reference- and correctly didn't print it!ClemRutter (talk) 16:07, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Trying to delete revision of image (admin issue)

Wondering if anyone could help me here. Someone uploaded a copyrighted image over Image:Jesus.jpg (vandalism for sure). I have reverted that, but I have been unable to delete that old image. I've been hitting the "delete this" link in the column for the image, but I get There is no archived version of Jesus.jpg with the specified attributes. What am I doing wrong? Can another admin try to delete that revision using the "delete this" link? -Andrew c ^[talk] 16:52, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

text/x-wiki - action=raw

Is there a way to make firefox view these directly in the browser as text rather than attempting to download it as a file called "index.php"? —Random832 (contribs) 17:33, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

No. Maybe we could get the developers to change the MIME type to text/plain which would work fine. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 18:25, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

One can specify a MIME type, but the only allowed types are text/x-wiki, text/javascript, text/css, and application/x-zope-edit (mw:Manual:Parameters to index.php#Raw). Perhaps the devs might be willing to add text/plain to that? Gracenotes^T § 18:58, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Special deletion

I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right place- somebody just posted a redirect for deletion; apparently there is an old redirect to Slashdot under the name [[/.]]. It's visible in "whatlinkshere" for that page but gives a bad title error if you click the link. I thought I'd post it here in case admins can't get to it to delete it. Thanks, JeremyMcCracken (talk) 19:18, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

It's already been reported to the right people, and they say that since it shouldn't cause any actual problems, they don't plan to do anything about it. There are plenty of bad titles in the database, the software does a decent job of working around them. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:13, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Makes sense. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 22:12, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Import references from Bibliographic Management software

I would like to import entries from Bibliographic Management software (e.g. BibTex) to wikipedia - is it possible? Otherwise the task I would be facing (create wiki article based on an article I have in LaTeX) looks rather daunting... As a next best thing is there any application which would convert .bib files to {{cite}} format? Ryszard.czerminski (talk) 21:05, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Check out Wikipedia:Tools#Importing (converting) content from other formats to Wikipedia (MediaWiki) format. (I found it in the editor's index, under "Importing".) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:08, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps you are the right guys to ask

I need help with personal attacks

After all this time on Wikipedia I still do not know how to deal with them. For example, I think that two of the diffs below are the correct way to do a diff and one is not in terms of reporting or trying to get help for this problem. Could you tell me which?

• [8]
• [9]
• [10]
• [11]

Also, I only know one kind of template: ({{uw-npa3}} I put it on his page but he removed it. I know you will say cool off, etc. except this is ongoing for over a month now in an article that is in FAR. Is it true that sometimes there is just nothing to do about it and I have to just let go of the article. My view is the majority view, but everyone else just gets frustrated and leaves.

Thanks! Mattisse (Talk) 23:01, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

In a technical sense the two pairs of diffs you provide are equivalent. For the rest of your question I'd suggest reading Wikipedia:Dispute resolution. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:06, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Problem with redirect (bug?)

Would an administrator please have a look at Gömböc. It strangly redirects to Gomboc (the old site), although there is no redirect. Gomboc on the other hand redirects to Gömböc. Something seems to be messed up here. SpNeo (talk) 00:56, 1 April 2008 (UTC)