Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive A

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Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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anomaly with WP's Monobook skin

I've used monobook skin in wp for sometime - just recently it seems to "force" link-decoration:underline and the little link I icon. I have checked my user preferences, turned the preference both on and off; checked my browser settings (Firefox 1.0x) emptied the cache on all occasions to re-view the page.

I've played with changing to WP's other skins and indeed the link marks do go away as per my browser & preference settings. I switch back to monobook and the linklines and icons all come back.

It's probably petty, but WP is my home page and I've found sites that contain a volume of information in a small area to be far more readable without much text-decoration; I love the option to turn it on/off, and wanted to give someone a heads-up. This anomaly also shows up in IE6, with same behaviors.

Thanks for reading this - wikipedia and all the wiki efforts are truly an asset to the internet community. Corqspy : 15:28, Nov 6, 2004 (UTC)

There's a server-side caching bug in MediaWiki, which causes people to get the wrong gen=css for their preferences. Just keep doing full reloads until the underlines are gone, it'll work eventually. Goplat 00:50, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Audio Files

I have noticed that it is possible to upload audio files to Wikipedia. I would like to know if there any guidelines to using audio, such as what file formats are preferable, how links to files should be presented, etc.

I would like to use song excerpts to make album articles more descriptive and wonder if there are any articles that may be used as an example.Justin Foote 22:32, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Sound. For an example of the use of a sample, see the Yesterday (song) (at the bottom of the page).

Upload log unreachable

Whenever I try to open the upload log, I get the following error message:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-new/includes/GlobalFunctions.php on line [varies]

Why? And what can I do about it? —No-One Jones ^(m) 21:01, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It came up fine for me. However, as it is ~320K, I can imagine that at times WP has heavy access, it may be difficult to load. Maybe try different time of day? Niteowlneils 16:57, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

How can I save an article page (for offline viewing) and preserve the look of it?

I've tried IE and Firefox's "save as" method of saving pages, but the results never look the same as what I see when I visit the page online. I'd like to see the saved pages offline in the same form as they appear online. Specifically, the layout is goofy and lacks the menu positioned along the left of the screen with the Wikipedia logo and background. Is there a way? Maybe some HTML that I could change? --Nicknicknickandnick 18:51, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I suspect it's more of a css thing. (MediaWiki:Monobook.css, m:Help:User style) Niteowlneils 20:53, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks -- I'm still flummoxed as to how to get the layout in a saved page, though. --Nicknicknickandnick 18:51, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A problem

Hi, i have a problem wich the wikipedia

often in my navegation see this

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare memsess_key() in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-new/includes/MemcachedSessions.php on line 13

--Angelsh 20:28, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I was seeing this a lot yesterday, but haven't seen it today (last 3 hours). Niteowlneils 20:46, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

And now it's back. !@#$!!@# Niteowlneils 20:21, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

And it seems to be gone again. Sigh. Niteowlneils 16:54, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Not getting along with VfD

I'm having a bit of a brainfug this morning: I'm trying to list the article Corset for children on Votes for deletion, but the discussion looks like its appearing as part of the 'Grant Neufeld' discussion because there is no section header. I can't figure out how to get that header in. I'm sorry for not being able to sort such a small thing out myself, can somebody please help? Thanks in advance, Katherine Shaw 09:15, Oct 27, 2004 (UTC)

Looks like you figured it out. Niteowlneils 16:53, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Loading time

Why did I spend four hours this morning (9 AM - 1 PM EST) just checking my watchlist? Incredible. If the site was running at a normal speed, I probably could've done it in 30 minutes. Surely we're making some kind of progress towards fixing this problem, with $50,000 raised? Everyking 17:00, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It is getting worse over time. Is there a Wikipedia page that tracks the plans and implementations of infrastructure to upgrade the servers? - [[User:Bevo|Bevo]] 15:28, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

See meta:Wikimedia servers. Five more were installed very recently so things should be a bit better now. More are planned, and you might find more details at the dev wiki. Angela. 10:37, Nov 5, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! And I can tell the difference since my original comment. - [[User:Bevo|Bevo]] 16:34, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Cut&Paste move

The content currently at Hock (wine) was at Hock, but c&p'd, instead of being Moved, then Hock was editted into a disamb page. I don't have much time right know to figure out how to get things the way they should be, so I'm hoping someone who does it regularly can take care of it. Niteowlneils 02:46, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks to User:Angela. —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 04:01, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC)

Thankx fer letting me know. Angela is the best. Niteowlneils 16:49, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Watchlist Cache problem

I'm not sure what is going on. My Watchlist seems to have gotten stuck and shows the last edit as being at 18:38:35, an edit to Monobook.css by Eloquence. I've emptied my cache and forced refreshes to no effect. Same thing happens in both Firefox and IE. I can see in Recent Changes that there are edits that should be showing up but are not. Any idea what is happening and what, if anything I can do? [[User:Bkonrad|User:Bkonrad/sig2]] 02:36, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This was happening to me earlier today. I was able to get it to update correctly by choosing a different time-interval display (e.g. "all" instead of last three days). Not sure what was causing it though. Antandrus 02:43, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Lots of people are seeing this problem. Unfortunately, the only developer that seems to be active doesn't know the caching system well. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:28, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It's not just the watchlist, it's also my own contributions, which got stuck at "12:39, Oct 3, 2004 (hist) Cover version (I)", although I have been contributing all afternoon. But it also affects ordinary pages. I have cleared my cache and really cleared my cache a thousand times—to no avail. <KF> 16:47, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

And today it's my user page. I've just switched on my computer and I get my user page from last week, before some major changes. It also happens regularly that when I state a problem like this one no one answers or they tell me they do not have that problem—which doesn't help a lot either. <KF> 17:30, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

I never have problems like these. It may be because I always change any browser I use from the default 'automatically' (IE wording, other browsers have other terminology) to 'always' fetch the actual current page. If you can't find the setting, let me know what browser you're using, and I can give specifics. Niteowlneils 19:25, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I wasn't getting this in early October when others reported it, but I am now. Repeated refreshes eventually seem to solve the problem; the weirdest symptom is that I seem at times to go back and forth (on successive refreshes) between getting current versions and one stalled many hours ago. It could be my browser, but I work on several different machines and have seen this on at least three different machines. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:27, Nov 5, 2004 (UTC)

Adding a caption to a non-thumbnail picture

Is it possible to add a caption to a non-thumbnail picture? If so, can someone point me at a page that does this? Thanks. Tempshill 18:13, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Instead of "thumb" in the image tag, use "frame". This is especially good for small images that "thumb" would try to blow up. Mpolo 18:38, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)

That's excellent. Thanks! Tempshill 18:58, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Error in database, perhaps

I received the following message from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=List_of_songs_with_the_name_of_a_musical_act_in_their_title&oldid=7083458 :

---

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "List of songs with the name of a musical act in their title,oldid=7083423".

If it is a recently changed page, trying again in a minute or two will usually work. Alternatively, you may have followed an outdated diff or history link to a page that has been deleted.

If this is not the case, you may have found a bug in the software. Please report this to an administrator, making note of the URL.

---

SimonMayer 22:26, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I have gotten a few of those too. It seems to happen at random, and reloading a few times fixes it. Thue | talk 19:53, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Plan to make Wikpedia more responsive?

Is there a plan to make the Wikipedia more responsive? The time to load pages is getting longer and longer... [[User:Bevo|Bevo]] 16:46, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Strange bug?

Maybe odd bug... or not being updated...

In this list, Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Tfd, the article Djibouti is listed but it has no {{tfd}} tag on it. I don't see how or why it is listed. --[[User:AllyUnion|AllyUnion (talk)]] 10:14, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A NULL edit took care of it: must have had a template on it sometime recently which got deleted and the links table didn't update properly. --Phil | Talk 13:27, Nov 3, 2004 (UTC)

How do I find out how popular individual pages are?

Like many of you, I have created a whole bunch of pages that are now getting into the top google searches for those subjects. It is a really weird experience knowing that the article you have created is on page one of google (or even hit no. 1) but that is not enough information for me. I would really like to know how many page hits there are every day, week, month, year for individual wikipedia pages - this should help quantify how much influence our article is actually having. Does anyone know how to do this? Is there a place in Wikipedia to go to? Is there a website outside that can do this analysis? Can I do it myself with my own PC? I would really like to find out and I think many people would too. One Salient Oversight 23:43, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Sometimes stats for pages are published in raw log form, e.g. http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/url_200410.html (warning: very big file ~64M) gives the hits for pages for part of October. Similarly, September's would be http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/url_200409.html

I don't know who generates these files, but is there any chance of getting the October one updated for the entire of the month? (</supplicate>) — Matt 13:29, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

class="floatright" doesn't work in Cologne Blue

On the John Vanbrugh page, User:ALoan had tried to float a table of images to the right by specifying class="floatright". This seems to have worked for most of the skins, but not for Cologne Blue, which I am using. (As a temp fix, I just specified style="float:right" for that table.) Is there someone who can make sure that the stylesheets all have the same classes defined? Mpolo 09:25, Nov 3, 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I did it with a <div class="floatright"> and a wikitable (i.e. {| ... |}). User:Jdforrester deleted the <div> and put the floatright into the table heading (which I guess is the right thing to do). Did your additional style="float:right" fix the problem? Anyway, the question is still a good one: is one of the stylesheets broken? -- ALoan (Talk) 11:51, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes, style="float:right" fixed the problem for me, and seems not to have messed anyone else up, but it's still kind of kludgy... Mpolo 15:33, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)

Ancient Architecture

Why do we refer to ancient Greek and Roman columns as orders?

In this instance, order simply means type (as in 'this question is of a different order to those usually found here'). There are five column 'orders' Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite and Tuscan,and the identification depends mainly on the capital (top bit) and base (bottom bit: Doric colums do not have a base). Filiocht 10:57, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

Using vi the prepare for transwikification

Anyone who needs to do this who has access to vim might like to see User:Ta bu shi da yu/Useful vi commands. Basically, the end macro is:

qa
/\[\[[^|]\{-}\]\]
:s/\[\[\([^|]\{-}\)\]\]/[[w:\1|\1]]
q
100@a
qb
/\[\[[^w][^:].\{-}|.\{-}\]\]
:s/\[\[[^w][^:]\(.\{-}\)|\(.\{-}\]\]\)/[[w:\1|\2
q
100@b

Comments on my talk page will be much appreciated. Cheers! - Ta bu shi da yu 04:38, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

AlanBarrett pointed out that there is, in fact, a much simpler way of doing this:

:g/\[\[[^|]\{-}\]\]/s/\[\[\([^|]\{-}\)\]\]/[[w:\1|\1]]/g
:g/\[\[[^w][^:].\{-}|.\{-}\]\]/s/\[\[[^w][^:]\(.\{-}\)|\(.\{-}\]\]\)/[[w:\1|\2/g

Ta bu shi da yu 12:20, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Malformed redirects

When creating redirects on various Paris Metro stations I realized that when they have a URL escape sequence, they refuse to redirect to the page. See for example Victor Hugo (Paris Metro). Strange. I'd like someone to generate a list of such malformed redirects so people could fix them. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 03:47, Oct 29, 2004 (UTC)

Strange goings on with Anonymous user talk pages

Please could I draw attention to the confusing happenings on User talk:205.188.116.8? It seems that some anonymous users are being misdirected towards that page. Does anyone know why?
I thought I'd draw some attention to it, as only anonymous users seem to have discovered it, so far.
SimonMayer 02:18, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I have received a number of irritated messages from users whose first edits were to my talk page, asking what I meant by telling them to quit "testing" Wikipedia. I've tried to instruct them that it's a software bug, the message was not meant for them, and I clearly left it on the talk page of a different IP, but I've been called an asshole, an idiot, and a loser for my pains. Rdsmith4— Dan | Talk 02:32, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A "how to cite this page" link off every page...

We get a huge number of queries on the Reference Desk about who wrote particular pages, or how to cite pages. To reduce this, I propose that every Wikipedia page should have a link somewhere called "cite this page" that goes to a special page displaying exactly how to cite that specific page in various formats (APA, Harvard, BibTeX, and so on). It wouldn't be terribly difficult to implement, and might reduce the noise on the reference desk quite a bit. --Robert Merkel 22:18, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Great idea! Mark Richards 23:11, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, please do! Also important would be to ref the exact article version in UTC time. --mav 17:20, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• See discussion at Wikipedia talk:Citing Wikipedia.

Using double lines to space TOC.

Using double blank lines in an article to space blocks of text, as I understand it, results in only one blank line being sent to the browser. Makes sense.

One place where double blanks lines DO have an effect, though, and I consider it a beneficial one at times, is to force some extra space above a table of contents. The style I have adopted is to write a very brief introduction, use two blank lines, force a TOC, then begin with the first article heading. Like this:

The subject is the thing we wish to describe or define in very brief terms which give only an overview and very little detail.

(blank line)

(blank line)

__TOC__ == Introduction ==

For a real-world example, I just corrected and reorganized Windows NT using this approach. I have considerable experience with art and webpage layout, and without the double line space the TOC crowds the intro, to my eye and on my browser. Questions:

1. Does this reconcile with how others are seeing the layout, especially using browsers which are not IE 5?
2. If this is widely perceived as a layout improvement, is it worth a mention in the guidelines?

--NathanHawking 01:35, 2004 Oct 28 (UTC)

---

• Putting two blank lines between two lines of text does create two blank lines (though it may depend on the browser). The resulting code looks like this:

<p>First line of text.</p>
<p><br />
Second line of text after two blank lines.</p>

As to your specific question, on the browser I use (Safari) it creates too much white space around the TOC. I don't really like using that type of hack if I can avoid it. If there isn't enough space around the TOC, the CSS formatting needs to be adjusted. (I don't know where you would go to suggest that.) —Mike 02:24, Oct 28, 2004 (UTC)

---

You're right. I'd gotten the wrong impression about how the Wiki server handles this, misreading "a single newline generally has no effect on the layout" and failing to test the effects.

I appreciate the feedback about the Safari browser, though it's hard to say whether the "too much" is actual or differences in our perception of layout esthetics.

Agreed that if mnay people feel the TOC crowds the text above, as I do, CSS or other server code is the place to adjust that, not relying on each editor to toss in extra lines.

Would a kindly Wikitech wade in on this one? --NathanHawking 03:19, 2004 Oct 28 (UTC)

The history of Indianapolis_Colts CB

Moved to Talk:Indianapolis Colts.

User names in red

Why are some names (mine too!) in red on my watchlist page? I see some are also in red on this page too. StanZegel 05:18, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Because you have not written anything at User:StanZegel. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:21, Oct 27, 2004 (UTC)

Automatic thumbnailing of images?

The article Bilinear interpolation includes Image:Bilinear interpolation.png, but the image in the article and the one on the image page look slightly different; in particular, there is no vertical line through the points Q₁ and Q₂ in the image in the article. I noted that the image in the article is also slightly smaller (304 by 300 instead of 313 by 310), so perhaps the software automatically produces a thumbnail even though I did not specify the thumb option. Of course, it might also be a browser problem (I'm using Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3) or a cache problem (I did hit Shift-Ctrl-R several times). -- Jitse Niesen 21:02, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• Hmm, that's odd. Images are identical on my end (win xp, mozilla firefox 13 oct build). Maybe it's some weird setting you have somewhere, I dunno. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 21:10, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The HTML source for the article as downloaded by Mozilla contains <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e7/Bilinear_interpolation.png" alt="..." width="304" height="300" />, even after I cleared the cache (in Edit|Preferences|Privacy). However, if I use wget to download the HTML file, then the img tag contains the correct width. Then, I did an empty edit of the article Bilinear interpolation (I added a space at the end), and this fixed the problem. -- Jitse Niesen 22:06, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Sounds like the image caching bug to me. Gdr 00:04, 2004 Oct 27 (UTC)

D'oh!

Dangit! I guess there really was a good reason for my long-standing reluctance to try and merge page histories for cut&paste moves. My first one went fine, but my second attempt seems to have completely obliterated the content of Civic_Act-Up (the older article) as well as Civic_Act-up (the article the content was pasted into). I suppose it takes a developer's valuable time to fix? Don't think I'll be tryin' any more of these. Niteowlneils 23:15, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Actually, it's some weird database synchronization thing or possibly a caching issue. It's been around for quite a while. The solution? Wait a while for everything to shake itself out. I went ahead and reverted to the last non-redirect version of Civic Act-up. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:12, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Great! And it looks like both histories are there. I still don't think I wanna try that again--too scary. Niteowlneils 16:43, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Easy way to for sure see your results? Switch the history length (from e.g. 20 to 50 versions). The results will reload to the most recent status. I encountered this also when I first did a merge, and also went "Oh crap!". zoney ♣ talk 22:14, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks for the tip. I guess I'll never know why I didn't run into this the first time. Niteowlneils 23:54, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikiverse news links - origin?

Hi everyone,

I wondered if anyone knew how the news links in the Wikiverse mirror (www.wikiverse.org) were generated. I can't find any documentation on this. The links occur in the top left-hand corner of the page and are present in the page source. These links are to copyright articles by mainstream media are not present in the wikipedia entries on the subjects I've accessed. How are the links in the wikiverse mirror chosen and how can you help decide what are chosen?

Could anyone point me in the right direction?

Thank you.

A. Johnstone

Sorry, the Wikiverse people don't seem to hang around here much, and they really don't seem to want people to be able to contact them. I don't know of any service that provides such a news listing. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:10, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

User contributions

For some time now, new edits have not been listed (or rather not immediately been listed) on my "user contributions" list. I'm used to getting no answers when I post a question here, but I'm still insubordinate enough to keep on asking: What's wrong? <KF> 19:52, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)

Probably a lagging slave DB server. I wrote a fix for this problem 6 months ago but it hasn't gone live yet. -- Tim Starling 07:06, Oct 25, 2004 (UTC)

Page history merge assistance requested

Someone moved Jesus to Jesus (Christ). I moved it back, but I need help merging the page histories. Can anyone help? [[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (hopefully!)]] 15:33, Oct 23, 2004 (UTC)

I see no history that actually needs merging. -- Cyrius|✎ 16:40, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Image cache problems

Is there any plan to fix the image cache bug? (This is the bug in MediaWiki that updated images are not seen until the old image has expired in all the caches between the reader and the MediaWiki database.) This bug discourages people from fixing mistakes in images because the new image will not seen by some readers for a long time, possibly up to a month, depending on how agressive their caches are. One can work around this by uploading new versions of images under new names, but that's unsatisfactory because you have to edit all the articles that use the image. Gdr 21:37, 2004 Oct 22 (UTC)

Database problems?

I'm trying to revert errors in Moon and the database is choking. I click on an old edit, and it gives something like:

Moon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Revision as of 23:59, Dec 31, 1969)
The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found,
named "Moon,oldid=6781580".

If it is a recently changed page, trying again in a minute or two will
usually work. Alternatively, you may have followed an outdated diff or
history link to a page that has been deleted.

If this is not the case, you may have found a bug in the software.
Please report this to an administrator, making note of the URL.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon"

This is making it exceedingly difficult to edit pages. It has been going on before but not to this extent. Someone please fix it. --Golbez 22:06, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC)

Even better, sometimes a good version of the page will appear, but clicking edit gives me the above in the edit box; example [1]. --Golbez 22:07, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC)

No comment, but I just wrapped some lines in the preformatted text above to avoid a super-wide page in some browsers. - dcljr 05:27, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

donate bandwidth, save wikimedia money.

90% of wikipedia donations goes to servers, in order to support the bandwidth the visitors use. If every visitor could donate bandwidth, a huge amount of money could be saved and used in other wikimedia projects.

The following idea has been proposed, using BitTorrent: http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/6.824/reports/jwolfe.pdf

The project does not exist yet. If wikimedia or wikipedians tried to turn webTorrent into a reality, not only money would be saved but they would be doing a great favour to the internet world.

I am not related in any how to webTorrent creators, i just stumbled upon the pdf and thought about the consequences..

--Alexandre Van de Sande 20:52, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Really? Ever seen how big a bittorrent file? It'd probably be smaller in most cases to just download the webpage direct than have the server send the user a torrent to see said page. EDIT: covered in section 1.3 heh. --Me at work 21:18, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Man, this is no BitTorrent, but WebTorrent, some thing some guy studied for months. They have solved this on the first paragraph of the project. Read it before thinking you can fugure out in five minutes what someguy hasn't figured out in months. Just thought you all might want to know about...--Alexandre Van de Sande 14:30, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Where do you get the figure that 90% of the donations are used to pay bandwidth costs? So far we don't pay any bandwidth costs; although we will start paying some (half, I think) soon, it's unlikely to add up to 90% of total donations. — Kate Turner | Talk 20:32, 2004 Oct 23 (UTC)

I figure it should be made known here that some editors are pushing this "WebTorrent will save Wikipedia" theme very heavily in the BitTorrent article, mentioning Wikipedia by name as a site that could save "tousands of dollars" [sic]. It frankly sounds like someone entranced with an as-yet-unbuilt hammer starting to see nails everywhere; while the theory of WebTorrent sounds great, a look at the proposal shows that in order to scale up to the sizes they are scaling BitTorrent down to, they are proposing that the server bundle together lots of smaller files. When two clients are both going to be downloading the entire contents of the bundle, then yes, a WebTorrent implementation could shift some of the burden of the download off a central server. But if that bundle contains elements in which not all clients are interested, then that's creating more network traffic than would have existed in the traditional implementation. -- Antaeus Feldspar 21:01, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

We have a winner. In order for this to work, there must be other viewers of the webpage. For a majority of articles, they're unpopular, and thus they'll have to download a bittorrent file from the servers, the download the torrent from the 'seeder' servers. There's other effects. For the hashchecking to work, then one would have to recreate the torrent file after each edit, and that would waste cpu on the popular articles which this is designed to save. On the non-populars, they'd get the webtorrent (smaller yes, I suppose) and get it off a few wikimedia servers (I suppose the global distribution they're wanting to do would be a very good thing here), thus losing a little more bandwidth for the webtorrent to be created. It seems there's no way to win. --Me at work 18:57, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Special:Upload changes

The Special:Upload page seems to have been changed recently. Before, it always had a link to Wikipedia:Image copyright tags, which I found very helpful. Also, it currently links to Special:Image use policy, but this page does not seem to exist. Should it be Wikipedia:Image use policy? Where or how could the Wikipedia:Image copyright tags link be added again and the other link be fixed? Thanks -- Chris 73 Talk 04:53, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC)

Huh? Now it's back to the old format again. -- Chris 73 Talk 05:00, Oct 22, 2004 (UTC)

download.wikipedia.org links out of date

In the process of setting up a copy of the wikipedia on my own computer (so I can browse it while offline) I discovered the links for the 'Images and Uploaded Files' area are out of date. The links on that page point to 20040609_upload.tar.aa and 20040609_upload.tar.ab. But clicking those links returns a 404. Curently the correct filenames are 20041013_upload.tar.aa through .ad. Is it possible to get the download.wikipedia.org page corrected?

--Bradlegar the Hobbit 04:27, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Page move problem -- technical help urgently requested

I moved the deletion log to Wikipedia:Deletion log archive/October 2004 (2) (as it had reached nearly a megabyte) and accidentally moved its talk page along with it. I moved the talk page back while leaving the archive in place, but now the archive is a reflexive redirect whose only history entry is:

21:26, 21 Oct 2004 Mirv (Wikipedia:Deletion log moved to Wikipedia:Deletion log archive/October 2004 (2))

which means I've effectively destroyed all entries in the deletion log between October 11 (the time of its last archiving) and today. How did I do this? Where did the archive go? Can it be fixed or recovered? —No-One Jones ^(m) 22:15, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Protecting the pump

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals).

Wikipedia usernames in Bugzilla

It'd be nice if we could use our en: usernames instead of email addresses to log into bugzilla. Wikipedia allows (depending on a pref) mail to be sent to us through the 'Mail this user' link, so this should be possible.

BTW there should also be some place to discuss mediazilla-specific things. There are not "talk-pages" ion mediazilla :( -- Paddu 21:10, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Bugzilla

I created an account in bugzilla hoping I'd be able to specify an obfuscated email to be displayed in bugzilla pages (it's been a while since I used bugzilla and there was a bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org about obfuscating email addresses last I checked). Since that's not the case :-(, I'm forced to get another email address for bugzilla. Now it looks like I cannot change my email address in mediazilla, though other bugzillas allow this (at least when I checked last). Is there a way to change my email address in mediazilla or do I have to spam mediazilla with another account? -- Paddu 10:14, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Copied that from Wikipedia:Village pump to which I'd directly added without noticing the changes over the past months to village pump policy. -- Paddu 20:57, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

wrongtitle broken because of existance of title

The Template:Wrongtitle (used to show that MIRC should be mIRC and the like) is currently broken because it contains {{{title}}}, which seems to be some guy's new attempt on a ripoff of the Template:test stuff. It's just plain annoying, and I have no idea what to do to fix this. --Me at work 19:45, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Drat. Turns out some crazyguy edited {{{1}}} to {{{title}}} for no good reason some time ago (it wasn't a recent change). I blame it on sneaky vandals. Carry on. --Me at work 13:08, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It was meant to say that, and your change broke it. (MIRC ended up saying "The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is {{{1}}}.") If you want to use it on your user page, you need to insert "title=" before the correct title to get it to appear (as the page linked to by the template explains). Proteus (Talk) 13:53, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The old version was {{{1}}}, I was not aware of this change to {{{title}}}. Is this posted somewhere? It was not mentioned in the discussion for the page. Or, I have lost my sanity. Which is a more likely answer. Apologies all around. --Me at work 16:10, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Or I just didn't notice the talkpage existed because I was looking at Template:Title like a fool, and thus it's talk page, which was empty. --Me at work 16:12, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Move Needed

Please move The Wooing Of Étaín to Tochmarc Étaín

I think it should be under the original irish name, not the english translation

Someone has moved it, but since "The Wooing Of Étaín" is more common in English, I'm not sure it's a good idea. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English). Angela.

I think this move was a very bad idea. Filiocht 08:36, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

I hold to my opinion that the main article for a thing with a non-English name should be that with the commonly-used English version of the name: there should then also be a copy with the non-English name on the appropriate non-English Wikipedia. (NB my view encapsulates the case where the non-English name is the version usually used.) The non-English names should be used for REDIRECT articles to allow for searching. Similarly with accented names and the like. I also wonder whether the person who performed the move is going to be bothered to fix the 3 levels of REDIRECTs which have now been created (The Wooing Of Etain →The Wooing Of Étain →The Wooing Of Étaín →Tochmarc Étaín—[2]). HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 10:37, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Can the damage be undone? Filiocht 10:50, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

How about making them all redirects to Wooing of Etain? -- ALoan (Talk) 11:33, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, that worked, thanks. What a lot of fuss over a single sentence stub! Filiocht 11:39, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Problems with Move operation

I successfully moved Jungle to a new page Jungle (disambiguation). Next I wanted to move Jungle (terrain) to Jungle which was a redirect with no edit history. However the move failed with error "The page could not be moved: a page of that name already exists, or the name you have chosen is not valid. Please choose another name, or use the Village pump to ask an administrator to help you with the move."

In the Move page it says "Note that the page will not be moved if there is already a page at the new title, unless it is empty or a redirect and has no past edit history." So ideally the move should have worked.

I tried out the second suggestion of blanking the Jungle page. I tried to perform the move again but failed with the same error. The last option was to Delete the page and move, which worked. The question is why did the first two attempts fail ? Jay 12:29, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Moving an article over a redirect also requires that the redirect points at the page being moved. -- Cyrius|✎ 12:53, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This comes up so often - please would someone edit meta:Renaming (moving) a page, Wikipedia:Move and the Special:Movepage to make this clear (I know, do it yourself, but Special:Movepage doesn't show the text that needs editing). -- ALoan (Talk) 13:10, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It was already in m:Help:Renaming (moving) a page, I fixed MediaWiki:Movepagetext.--Patrick 07:15, 2004 Oct 25 (UTC)

Thanks Patrick. But I still don't understand what "unless it (the page) is empty" means. Does it mean that a page doesn't exist at the new name ? Or does it mean there is a page but no content ? I tried the latter and the move doesn't work. Jay 07:47, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You are right, I removed it. Perhaps it dates back to a time when creating an empty page directly was possible.--Patrick 11:10, 2004 Nov 1 (UTC)

This is it, I want final, complete, answers!

What is going on with the whole "You have new messages" problem. Ive seen it multiple times now, and I want to know the truth!

Well what is the problem, specifically? Adam Bishop 16:53, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I have had a problem (on multiple computers, including the school ones) that random messages will apear on the top of random pages saying "You have new messages" to a random IP, I don't understand what this is about. When I search the history of the page for that IP, it doesnt apear. --66.30.53.137 22:58, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It is a well-known bug in MediaWiki, the software which runs Wikipedia, that message notices will appear for random and incorrect IP addresses. Or, if you are on AOL, there are lots of users on the same IP address as you, so the message was probably intended for someone else. There isn't a solution to either problem at present. Rdsmith4— Dan | Talk 23:34, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

O ok, thank you. I was under the impresion it had something to do with spyware, which worreid me. --207.228.220.93 14:06, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Seeking Advice

I have a large amount of information on Collectible Card Games that I am ready to incorporate into the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collectible_card_games. I wanted to know the best approach to take. I have a fairly complete list of all English language CCGs, as well as information about each release. I wanted to know the best way to approach this.

I could:

• Make a complete list on this page of all CCGs and their expansion releases. This list could be pretty long. I can also break this up into two pages.

• Make a list of the CCGs, make stub pages for each game, and list their expansion information on the stub pages.

• Make just a list of the games that were released as the list looks now, filling in just what is missing.

-- Jmricker 20:06, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

First, allow me to say that this is a great idea. As for your question, if we're dealing with a lot of information, stubs might be more appropriate. Could you give an example of "expansion information"? -- Itai 20:36, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Here is a chunk of game information, in this case information for the CCG Illuminati: New World Order

Illuminati: New World Order

Steve Jackson Games	http://www.sjgames.com/inwo/
Release Name Edition Size Date Type Reviews Limited 1st Ed. 409 1994/12 S+B D4,IQ2 Unlimited 2nd Ed. 409 1995/03 S+B Assassins Exp. #1 123 1995/08 B One With Everything Fact. Set 450 1995/04 BS Blank Cards Sp. Set 50 1995/07 B SubGenius Sp. Set 100 1998/?? BS Bavarian Fire Drill Sp. Set 100 1999 ? BS Deluxe INWO Set Sp. Set 500 2002/?? BS S53

In general basic information of the name, date, and size of each release. Also the review listing is of reviews written in Scrye, Duelist or Inquest. After putting together the table for this post, I kind of like the layout. A little tweaking and it may turn into a nice sidebar like the elements have (Carbon). What do you think? --Jmricker 22:50, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I have a particular interest in the area of CCG's. I don't think that simple tabular data, though, is by itself valuable enough to add just yet. Is the information already available online? I'd be happy to work with you to expand this area. -- Netoholic @ 02:49, 2004 Oct 20 (UTC)

Main page

The main page is too wide. This is very poor. Acegikmo1 16:47, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Good, now it's better. Acegikmo1 16:49, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Page move request: Matthew Smith

I was trying to move Matthew Smith to Matthew Smith (disambiguation) and Matthew Smith (programmer) to Matthew Smith. (I believe that most people who write "Matthew Smith" to the search engine are looking for the programmer.) The first move was successful (even though I received a page claiming that it wasn't), but the second one has failed (even though a redirect with no history can supposedly be overwritten). I'd like you to complete the move (or, if you disagree, to undo it). Thanks. - Mike Rosoft 09:56, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Done. "Move"ing over a redirect only works if the redirect redirects to the page being moved (if you see what I mean). -- ALoan (Talk) 10:21, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Strange entries at Category:Candidates for speedy deletion

At Category:Candidates for speedy deletion there are two entries in the category named "%23%33%45%77http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Movepage&target=George_III_of_the_United_Kingdom" and "%27%77%33%27%77%33%27%77%33%27%77%33%27%77%33%27%77%33%27%77%33%27%77%33%27%77%33%27%77%3http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Movepage&target=%25223". Looks like a mediawiki error. Thue | talk 19:35, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Saving changes

Why is it when I make and save a change, the change sometimes does not appear, though there it is in the source text. In other words, why is it that sometimes what people read and what "Edit this page" says they ought to be reading differ? User:Gene Ward Smith

Maybe try a forced web browser cache refresh, CTRL-SHIFT-r in mozilla-firefox. Thue | talk 19:47, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That in fact was about the first thing I tried, but it doesn't seem to work--the changes I made to Herbrand-Ribet theorem, for instance, are not appearing. User:Gene Ward Smith

This has also started happening to me very frequently in the last few days. It is not a client-side issue. [[User:Smyth|– Smyth]] 17:06, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Saving images

I tried to save some images: Indianumbered.png etc but when I opened them in my image editors such as GIMP and Irfanview, they game be an error "incorrect file format". I picked the same images from the browser cache (Opera 7.54) without any hitch. Why is this happening? [[User:Nichalp|¶ ɳȉčḩåḽṗ | ✉]] 20:09, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to assume you're talking about Image:Indianumbered1.png and possibly Image:Indianumbered2.png. Both saved fine and opened without error for me. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:13, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

They show up as absolutely nonexistent for me. --Golbez 21:44, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, that was supposed to be Image:IndiaNumbered1.png and Image:IndiaNumbered2.png. Looks like I can't check to make sure my links work either. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:54, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I worked with all three images. (The first one is now deleted.) All images I save, which are hosted in wikipedia, are 'tainted'. Images saved from other sites are perfectly OK. [[User:Nichalp|¶ ɳȉčḩåḽṗ | ✉]] 20:07, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

Non-blank page appearing blank

(Should be first checked by somebody else, it is possible though unlikely that the problem originates in my computer)

I reverted vandalism on Armistice Day about ninety minutes ago ; somebody had completely erased page contents.

But to no avail : the page seems still blank. However, if I try to "edit" it again, its text appears to be there. I have not tried to save again, since I wanted to preserve a proof of this possible bug.

I have of course thought of a caching problem, or a problem of synchro between servers, but waiting one hour and a half changes nothing ; neither does reloading even with various modifier keys pressed.

Does somebody else see the same phenomenon on Armistice Day and can somebody give an explanation ? --French Tourist 11:47, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Clear your cache - did you try Shift-Reload? Your revert worked and I get the version with text, so it must some cache which continue to show you the outdated vanadlized version. andy 12:02, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I had tried Shift-Reload, to no avail, and now after two hours and a half, I retried and it worked, I got the full page. Hence I don't think it is coming from my machine (I have done nothing new this time, especially no new reload) but might be a problem of synchronization of servers. (I had not the same problem on a similar revert later in the day). --French Tourist 12:55, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Removal of a reference

Can you please remove the reference: Digitally imported  ??

There is another one called Digitally Imported. (note the case)

Much thanks! User:Chemical

Does anyone understand this question? -- Jmabel | Talk 07:06, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)

He moved Digitally imported to Digitally Imported. I tink he wants the redirect deletet. -83.129.35.124 08:24, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Various annoyances today

Is something up with Wikipedia today? The default theme (which I only see before I log in) has been showing the side-bar in front of the other text, my watchlist page has been out-of-date and I have got error messages (when following links from my watchlist page) like "bad title" or "you might be trying to view the history of a deleted page," that don't seem to be accurate. I wonder what's going on. Tim Ivorson 20:37, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm not getting the sidebar problem, but I am seeing the others. I've also recently started getting JavaScript errors (syntax error on line 3) every time I load a page. —Triskaideka 21:47, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've had an outdated watchlist temporarily as well, also the new pages showed an outdated list sometimes, occasionally for several minutes answer from the server, and even some revision of articles gave a database error, but showed up several minutes later - I guess it must have been one of the cache servers who had problems contacting the main database server. But now it seems to be running smoothly again. andy 08:06, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm still getting a horribly deformed main page, until I log in. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it only affects old versions of Firefox (I have been using 0.9.1), but this browser hasn't given me this problem before. It's not stopping me from using Wikipedia. After all, I can just log in. The main panel doesn't appear at the correct size, but very nearly fills the whole page. The side bar appears in front of it and the "Create account or log in" link is mostly behind the main panel. Tim Ivorson 08:24, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I am having the same problem. The inability to submit edits is particularly annoying. Is this related to the recent increase in the Alex rank? That is, the server is overwhelmed by trafic. -- Taku 03:21, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)

To Do item not showing up in Talk

At Talk:Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma there's a to-do list of 5 items. I clicked "edit this list" and inserted the line "Illustrate the importance..." but my edits aren't showing up in the Talk page's to-do list (or, oddly, on the to-do list page itself). Any ideas? Tempshill 20:07, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Your edits, plus a test edit and rvert of mine show up fine for me. Paul August 20:22, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

I've noticed similar behavior on some of the todolists that I've edited recently. Since the lists themselves appear correct when I go back to edit the lists, I attribute it to either browser or squid caching. There was some discussion of this phenomenon on Wikipedia_talk:To-do_list last month. slambo 15:16, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

If you make a small edit (insert or delete a space) on the Talk page, the todo list will update. Filiocht 15:24, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

You will also find that the colon following the "Pending tasks for ..." rubric is a special link of the form ...&action-purge. If you click this the cache for that page is cleared and you can refresh. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 16:12, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

OK you compugeeks, how did this happen?

I edited Wikipedia:WikiProject:New Zealand by removing one word, (Kaikohe). Six lines above that word was the header Geography which was somehow changed to ,®|,3Taphy=== during the edit. I never altered Geography, so what caused this to happen? I didn't notice anything awry when I checked preview before saving, and another user noticed it and fixed it. Any thoughts? Moriori 19:39, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Paragraph alignment

For some reason, paragraphs are justified on my screen. Checking my preferences, I seem to have turned "Justify paragraphs" Off. The justification of lines in tables seems especially irritating. How does one rid oneself of this alignment? -- Emsworth 20:42, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It seems that a lot of the preferences keep getting ignored. :( violet/riga (t) 20:56, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yes this has happened to me a couple of time recently. The fix seems to be to empty your browser's cache. Paul August 21:07, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

It seems it's not the local browser cache, but the squid at wikimedia. Apparently it doesn't remember for which setting it created its cache copy, and then serves the same copy even though the settings aren't compatible. And maybe it even ignores the setting of "Disable page caching" in the user preferences. andy 13:12, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm having a similar problem, plus links are not appearing underlined for me, even though that is set as a preference. Filiocht 13:32, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

I've seen elsewhere that the developers were doing some testing at the weekend which caused numerous forced logouts. It's possible that the preference changes may have resulted from their investigations, I suppose. [[User:Noisy|Noisy | Talk]] 17:22, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Account access log? (or account compromise?)

Hi there, I'm fairly new to Wikipedia. This morning I saw a small grammatical error in the page of Adolf Hitler and inserted a single "he" to correct that sentence. Later on I was made aware that it looks like a bunch of edits (including calling Hitler a "good man") was credited to my account. This is most definitely not the case. Now I am wondering if there's a way to find out how this happened, and if there's a way to revert back the history page of that particular page. I'm quite sure that the issue is not with my laptop since I've been using it continuously since that particular edit.

On a related note, what happens when two users edit the same article at the same time? Could this be a database consistency issue? Thanks in advance.

Julius.kusuma 18:17, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I was the one who reverted your edit, and did find it odd, since you weren't a regular vandal to that page, why you would add "good man", among your other edits. Sometimes, the difference engine gets confused... but I don't know why. At least I didn't accuse you outright - I thought you might be editing an out-of-date version of the article.

As for what happens if two editors edit at the same time, you get an Edit Conflict page. It shows you what's different between your version, and the version that was saved before you hit Save (but after you hit Edit). However, if you edit an out-of-date version of the page, like to revert, this trumps edit conflicts - your version will save over the most recent version no matter when it was made. --Golbez 18:53, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for catching the incorrect edits, and for the benefit of the doubt. Is there a way to revert the associated history page? I'm a believer that what one should be responsible for what one writes online, and I certainly do not wish to be associated with a POV edit that I didn't do. Sigh.... I did hesitate to edit a page that I thought was a prime target for vandalism, maybe I should have stayed clear. -- Julius.kusuma 19:03, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

OK, I think I figured it out finally. I was indeed editing an older, and by luck vandalized version, of that page. But the minor grammatical mistake that I had meant to fix in the first place is in both that old version, and the latest version. Now I can rest in peace! Yee-haw. -- Julius.kusuma 19:09, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I don't *think* history can be excised like that, but it's also now on record in the history that it was a mistake, through our comments. I think. Anyway, don't worry about editing a high-traffic article like that, just make sure it's the most recent version. :) --Golbez 19:40, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

Medgar_Evers

Could someone take a look at Medgar_Evers? The markup is broken, for a few months now it seems. -- Solitude 13:48, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

Done. - 14:28, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC) Lee (talk)

Video format of choice for the wikipedia

Is there anywhere I can get info about showing short videos on the wikipedia? I've got a beautiful echocardiogram of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that I can legally upload (It's from my hospital and I'm stripping out all patient and hospital information). Each video is 5-10 seconds (should be shown in a loop to simulate constant motion), and I think I have the programs necessary to change the format/codec to whatever is necessary. For hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, I would like to add a total of 3 or 4 video clips (And associated still images), showing systolic anterior motion of the mitral valve, eccentric mitral regurgitation, and asymetric septal hypertrophy. Also, if it goes smoothly, I can access echocardiograms and coronary angiograms of normal individuals and various other conditions and procesures, such as atrial septal defect, ventricular septal defect, myocardial infarction, etc. I'm kind of itching to add some of these to the wiki, with the first one to be ready by the middle of November (I'm busy until then). Ksheka 10:18, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

For a quick and dirty solution, can you make your videos into animated gifs? --Phil | Talk 11:24, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

see m:video policy

Actually, The AVI files I have so far (MS-MPEG4 v2 codec) are each 480x430 pixels, and the largest is less than 500K and less than 5 seconds. I guess I'll wait until Theora players and encoders/transcoders are available. Thanks for the link. I'll check in on it occassionally to check for availability. Until then maybe I'll try to amass some nice videos in preparation for the right time. :-) Ksheka 01:04, Oct 14, 2004 (UTC)

Ksheka, players are freely available for Windows and Linux (and Mac, I think) right now, and there are encoders available for Linux which I'm enthusiastic to try. If you'd be prepared to send me one of the videos (preferably one that's not been recompressed) I could have a play with encoding it with the theora encoder! Alternatively, if you have access to a Linux box of your own, apparently Kino now supports encoding in Theora format. --Robert Merkel 03:26, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Is it just me or are dates acting strangely?

I've noticed on a couple of pages (James Joyce and George A. Moore since you ask) that the birth and death days are displaying as Year Month Day (1933 January 21, vor instance). Why is this happening? It looks really bad. Filiocht 09:21, 2004 Oct 12 (UTC)

See what you have under 'Date format' in your special:preferences. --mav 16:55, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, that did it, but why did my prefs change overnight? Filiocht 07:36, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Picture of the day templates

There seems to be an issue with densed formatted POTD template, available from WP:POTD. {{Pic of the day}} can be included fine in a table (for instance on my user page), but when I try to replace it with the no-text version {{POTD}} the result is borked. I've looked at the code but can't seem to find the critical difference, could someone please take a look? -- Solitude 07:55, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica Template?

Is there a template that informs readers that content may be 90+ years out of date because it was taken from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica? (This should be separate from the template 1911, which should remain even after the article is made current.) The Ainu article, for example, has lots of content copied directly from E.B. including the use of the present tense. I'm not familiar enough with the subject to know what is still current and what is outdated; I hope someone will look at it carefully and bring it up to the year 2004. A template could similarly alert readers that other articles might be comparably obsolete. The template might say something like this: "This article contains material from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Due to changes that have taken place since the publication of that encyclopaedia, some statements might be factually incorrect or out of date. We invite you to correct this article." The template might be named "1911 out of date" or something similar. And whereas the 1911 template seems to be at the bottom (which is appropriate for attributing material to a source), the out-of-date template should go at the top, as do some existing templates such as the one that warns of factual disputes.

Also, I have created a category for such articles as a subcategory of Category:1911 Britannica.

Forgot to sign! Fg2 02:21, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

Generally good idea; I wouldn't make this template specific to Britannica, probably more generic to taking from old public-domain sources. Just as much of an issue, for example, with articles taken from the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. -- Jmabel 06:10, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

There is already a template {{1911}}. Susvolans 13:04, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Right. That would stay in the article after the article is updated simply to attribute the content to its source. The proposed new template addresses a different issue: the fact that the content is 90+ years out of date. That's why a new template is necessary. Fg2 06:45, Oct 14, 2004 (UTC)

You could always link to As of 1911. anthony (see warning) 16:48, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

A new feature? (who is watching this article)

I know this should have been in the Mediazilla, but I thought that it would be a little hasty to put up a new feature request there before getting some feedback on what people might think of the idea first. I've been involved in discussions concerning more responsible editing, and maybe this is a related subject. We all know — or at least should know — that it's good policy to place a comment in an article's talk page before actually making certain edits in the main article. I've always tried to do that, but it's a little annoying how most of my comments are simply ignored, until I actually edit the article. So I was thinking that perhaps we could add a feature to the toolbox, something like "who is watching this article". Supposedly, people who add an article to their watchlist are those who have contributed heavily to the article and tend to watch over it more closely. The trouble is a lot of these people are simply ignoring what is brought up on the talk pages and only react when the main article is edited. If we create a feature that allows users to know who is watching the page — which are those who should respond to comments made in the talk page, since edits there show in their watchlist — I believe we would have a powerful tool to resolve at least some of the edit wars and issues arising from editing articles. Meaning: if I were to place a comment or suggestion on a talk page and those who are watching ignore it but decide to react only when I've edited the main article (in accordance with what I had proposed in the talk page, of course), I say the resolution of the conflict would tend to be in my favor. The bottom line is: we should make page watching a public information for purposes of settling editing issues. I don't know if this has already been proposed or discussed. Comments? Redux 19:49, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

There's been discussion of "number of watchers" before, resulting in the idea that vandalism may well occur on those articles with a zero count. Perhaps the best way to do this is simply look at the edit history and see who has made major or recent edits to an article. violet/riga (t) 20:06, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

But the point is concerning articles that are under the proverbial spotlight, where edit wars or edit altercation might ensue. More to the point, watchers are those who get a "note" (so to speak) in their watchlist when there's been an entry in an article's talk page, so they are always aware of comments there. So, if they disagree with what has been proposed, they should respond. If they don't, it's as if they forfit the right to complain about that edit. That does not mean that it would turn into a carte blanche for some wackos to write in nonsense as long as they say that they are going to do so first — especially because people tend to not take crazyness seriously. But a lot of edit altercations involve somewhat trivial questions, that only appear to be important for those involved. Example: let's say there's an article for the musical band The Cars, but for some reason the person who started the article named it just "Cars". If I write a suggestion on the talk page arguing that the correct name of the band is "The Cars" and therefore the article should be named as such, wait a few days without any response and then move the article, the article's creator (who will most likely be watching it) would have a weak case arguing that it should not be moved for whatever reason. The fact that he/she was watching the page and was hence aware that a comment/suggestion had been placed on the talk page would work as "evidence" for a speedy resolution of the conflict. You see, it's a policy change as well: if you are watching a page and you do not deem to respond to a comment on the talk page that will entail some modification (excluded nonsense and wrong/false information), you forfit the right to dispute it in the event of an edit war that would call for external resolution — and if it is found that the watcher contacted some other user who was not watching the page and had nothing to do with the case at hand and asked that person to dispute the change by engaging in an edit war on behalf of the watcher, or that the watcher used a socket puppet to do so, it would be cause for suspension of editing rights for all the parties involved. Redux 20:34, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The idea of making information as to who was watching a page public has been raised before, and rejected as likely to cause far more problems than it solves. You'd need to search the archives to find where, good luck. But I'd certainly vote against this proposal as it stands. Andrewa 20:16, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

More to the issue, I never forfeit the right to dispute a modification. Every article should be the best it can be, not kept in an unacceptable state just because someone forgot to dot an i. anthony (see warning) 16:45, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Editing mediawiki so only certain users can edit certain pages

I want to edit mediawiki - I think the file to edit is includes\EditPage.php so that if a person's username contains a colon (e.g. "FOO:Bob") then they can only edit pages that are in the same form (e.g. "FOO:Page_Name"). I want it to treat users with usernames that don't contain a colon normally. E.g.

1) Someone with the username "FOO:Bob" can edit "FOO:Page_Name" but not "BAR:Main_Page".

2) Someone with the username "Bob" can edit "FOO:Page_Name" and "BAR:Main_Page" and "Main_Page"

Hope you can help. I'm happy for this edit to take the form of an edit converting "you must login to edit this page" to "you must login and have the right permissions to edit this page". I think that EditPage.php would need to be edited twice in the areas containing the text:

if ( !$wgUser->getID() && $wgWhitelistEdit ) {
	$this->userNotLoggedInPage();
	return;
}

Why? and why would anyone have a username with a colon in? Please sign your posts with ~~~~ Dunc_Harris|☺ 19:08, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

On my wiki, users are assigned usernames. I want to restrict them to only editing specific sections of the wiki. ~~~~ Anonymous.

Oh I see. I think you have to go to http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org and put in a request there. Or you could try http://meta.wikipedia.org/ you're more likely to get served there. Dunc_Harris|☺ 21:27, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm being forcibly logged out all the time! Arrgh! Not sure if this is a bug.

After logging in today for some reading and editing, I have repeatedly been 'automatically' logged out after a couple of minutes. I won't even try to describe how annoying this is (#&¤#&!). I couldn't find any prior discussion about this, neither was I able to find a relevant bug in BugZilla. Anyone know what is happening? --Wernher, a little past 3 o'clock PM UTC, Sun 10 Oct 2004

I think it's just the developers trying out new software builds. [[User:Noisy|Noisy | Talk]] 15:08, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanks to you for answering :-). Non-thanks to the developers or whoever is relevant, for not informing properly of this (if the trying-out of sw builds is, indeed, the cause of my trouble, and information of such testing has indeed not been properly posted; if, on the other hand, it has been visibly posted, and I haven't noticed, then I apologise). --Wernher, ~half past four UTC, same date

Login sessions do seem more broken that usual as of late, we're poking it trying to figure out the problem. Check the "Remember my password across sessions." box and it shouldn't hit you... --Brion 02:31, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I keep having the same problem. When editing Wikipedia, I often get delay of about a minute, and then I am logged out. (I have had a number of edits not attributed to me.) I don't want to use "Remember my password" option since I often use a school computer. - 195.113.23.190 13:36, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

You see. It took place once again! - Mike Rosoft 13:43, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've been getting this a lot today (and on some previous occasions). Using Firefox 1.0PR on Windows. If this happens a lot, perhaps it should go in the FAQ -- it took me quite a while to find this discussion. -- JTN 22:18, 2004 Oct 25 (UTC)

requested moves -- policy change?

At the moment a dead move (e.g. let's say I wanted to move Birmingham New Street Station to Birmingham New Street, the technology stops me. Instead it directs me to post a note to the village pump. With this page being long and a bit daunting, I think we should establish a page instead at Wikipedia:Requested moves which admins can watch. This however, then needs to be put into the wiki technology to direct users there rather than here. Any thoughts? Dunc_Harris|☺ 10:38, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hmm... maybe MediaWiki:Articleexists should reference Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion instead? A fair number of requested moves have been posted there as is. • Benc • 10:53, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Ah! I see how it works now! IMHO I think that having a separate page for requested moves works best. Redirects for deletion is a bit quirky, and perhaps should be for other redirects like "George Woshingtin". Let's set a trial page up. Dunc_Harris|☺ 11:06, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, Wikipedia:Requested moves is worth a trial run of 2-3 weeks. Let's wait at least a couple days to get more community input and to smooth out any rough edges. (See: Wikipedia talk:Requested moves.) If there are no major objections by that time, I'll modify MediaWiki:Articleexists to reference the new page and we'll give it a go? • Benc • 19:24, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

monobook.css

I think I can create a monobook.css file in User:Duncharris/monobook.css and then edit that to produce a custom skin, can I alter it and what kind of features are available to change? Oh yeah, and where can I get the copy of the classic css to base it on? Dunc_Harris|☺ 22:35, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC).

The file is at MediaWiki:monobook.css. Use that as a template. You can also read the talk page. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 00:05, Oct 9, 2004 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Monobook.css actually consists of modifications to certain parts of the original. The entire original can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/style/monobook/main.css. Ðåñηÿßôý | Talk 22:03, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

So what do I do then, it's all as clear as mud and there seems to be little help around. Dunc_Harris|☺ 22:14, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

For guidance, see m:Help:User style. You can also look at the gallery for inspiration. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 22:39, Oct 10, 2004 (UTC)

Need admin help re bad page moves

Hi, I would like to request someone with delete power help me out with an issue I just discovered. Some bad editing decisions were made regarding the articles Northeastern University and Northeastern Illinois University.

Apparently, a contributor who IMHO did some extremely poor fact-checking wanted to add an article about Northeastern University (Liaoning). He must have thought there must have been some mistake, because the Northeastern University article was talking about some American college. So, he moved Northeastern University to Northeastern Illinois University (apparently presuming that must be the only "Northeastern" university in the U.S.), and then edited the resulting Northeastern University redirect to contain his substub for the Chinese school.

As a result, this new Northeastern Illinois University was picked up by editors familiar with that school, and tore up the article text relating to the school in Boston, changing it to reflect the Illinois school as the article title indicates.

Later someone else came by to Northeastern University and, realizing that the Boston school is more appropriate for the article than the Chinese school, began a whole new article there on the Boston school, not knowing of course that an original article with some further information on the Boston school was buried in the history for Northeastern Illinois University. (He moved the info on the Chinese school out to another article.)

So.... I tried to carry out a number of moves to correct this history shift, but unfortunately I bungled it a bit (the move leaves a redirect page at the old name, meaning I can't move another article onto that same name... which is much preferred in order to keep the histories aligned).

So my request is:

• Northeastern University be moved to a temporary space (which I've done),
• Northeastern Illinois University be moved to Northeastern University
• The current content of Northeastern Illinois University (which would then be called Northeastern University) be copied into a new Northeastern Illinois University article
• The resulting Northeastern University article be reverted back to last edit by User:Neilc.

Of course, admins and sysops and etc. may have better tools than this method for correcting such history mixups.

Thanks, KeithTyler 20:58, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

The Northeastern Illinois University article, to me, should stay put. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 23:28, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

If you check its history, you'll see that it started out life as Northeastern University, and got wrongly moved. Then an unnecessary new article for Northeastern University ended up being made. This is why I'm suggesting this reshuffle. I'm not suggesting that there not be an article for NIU. (Ideally, the edit histories could be demerged, but afaik that's not possible.) - KeithTyler 23:36, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

Oops. Okay, I put both "Northeastern University" and "Northeastern Illinois University" into speedy deletion, for the sole purpose of preparing for the moves of their respective temp pages. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 23:46, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

Poccil, thanks a ton for helping clean up this nightmare. I suppose there's been worse, but I was apalled. On the bright side, the recent-changes bump has brought with it some copyediting :) Thanks again, KeithTyler 07:57, Oct 9, 2004 (UTC)

Adobe Illustrator files

I have created a couple of maps and then made png files of each. One user has asked me about using my format. Is there a place to upload AI, CDR etc. files so that maps can be edited by others as time goes by? --CloudSurfer 23:52, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Three days later and no comments on this. Perhaps someone might like to say whether they think this is a good idea or it if has problems. This concept has a larger application. The idea is that source files used to produce resources would be availabe for editing rather than having to edit the file that has then been produced. --CloudSurfer 23:30, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I think the best solution for the moment is to upload your source image (the cdr, ai...) to some web site of yours and link it at the Wikipedia png's page (this image is GPL'D by CloudSurfer and the original Illustrator file can be downloaded from -and your site-). If you do not have a web site, well, it's quite easy to get some Mb at Yahoo or wherever. I recommend to you freeshell.org: you can get 100Mb for as little as 5$. HTH. Pfortuny 07:45, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. This doesn't overcome the problem though really. As long as someone is associated with Wikipedia their work is always available by direct contact. When they leave, for one reason or another, it is gone. The same with their websites which they can erase or close. I am trying for a generic solution to this one. --CloudSurfer 23:05, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

At the moment our uploads are more tightly locked down than usual since we found some fun security problems with Internet Explorer being exploitable to steal session cookies via embedded JavaScript. So, for the moment you probably won't be able to upload such files.

More generally, uploads to Wikipedia should be in an open format; for one thing the GFDL license wants things to be editable for further creation of derivative works. SVG is thus probably preferable for vector graphics to AI, but EPS is probably ok. --Brion 08:34, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Brion, I thought there might be a security issue. I didn't think of it but of course SVG or EPS is better since it doesn't imply a native editor. However, from your answer it looks as though such uploads/downloads will not be possible for some time. I would be very interested to hear if and when you overcome the security issues. --CloudSurfer 23:00, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The page you are looking for is Wikipedia:Image source files. It's little wonder you didn't find it; I created it and I still have to hunt for it when I can't remember the name. -- Wapcaplet 00:42, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Cannot upload image

Whenever I try to upload an image, I get "The file is corrupt or has an incorrect extension. Please check the file and upload again." What's wrong? --Jiang 23:39, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Name of the image? [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 23:48, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

Images that don't exist. i also tried to revise Image:IndiaNumbered1.png. --Jiang

It's possible that there's a problem with the image file validity check, or the files might be unusually named or otherwise strange/unusual/corrupt. Could you please supply some sample image files that you're having problems with? Open a bug report at http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/ and try attaching them there, and I'll take a look. --Brion 06:25, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

URLs after redirects

Currently after ending up at a redirect, the page URL keeps the redirect, and not the correct URL. This is confusing (and I find it annoying). Is this a limitation of the software, or a (strange) deliberate choice? {Ανάριον} 09:13, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This is so that the wiki can provide a link back to the redirect page in case it needs to be modified (or just so you know how you got where you are going!). Alternative ways to do the same thing will either be equally ugly in some way (extra junk on URLs, harder on the cache when changing links, or won't cache well) --Brion 06:29, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Finding user registrations?

Is there any way to find a chronological list of user registrations, or registrations around the same time as another registration? I ask because I've noticed a number of articles from users with very similar IDs (EG 0101CHANyf, 0101KONGkh, 0101LIhm, 0101TSOIyy, 0101HOhy, 0101WONGsh, 0101WANty, 0101LEUNGcy, 0101SOwk, 0101SOym, 0101LUIkw marco (the only one that has anything on their user page, so far, and it states "I am HKU BJ student Marco Lui. Feel free to leave me message."), 0101LEEyy, 0101CHANmw, 0101LAMsy, etc.) on similar topics (and they usually only have contributed to one new article, or articles by the similar IDs), and suspect a class project ala the Dartmouth debacle, and would like to be able to find them all. The good news is that, unlike many of the Dartmouth articles, so far they seem to be about very valid subjects (so far mostly people active in mainland China journalism, politics, and activism), but the formatting is clearly not by an experienced Wikipedian, and while the language of some, like the first one I found, Dai Qing is pretty solid, some of the others need some help with grammar, and could use some English terms for things currently only given using, um, oh, I forget the proper term for Asian language characters. It's great to have the articles, since they help make Wikipedia less US/West-centric, but it would be nice to have the formatting a bit more standard, etc. Niteowlneils 02:21, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

FWIW, I've left a positive inquiry on 0101LUIkw marco's Talk page (he'd been previously welcomed by Meelar). Niteowlneils 02:49, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The "class project" assessment appears to be correct. A long chain of stuff short, the available information leads to Fuzheado (aka Prof. Andrew Lih), who appears to be running the project. Fuzheado's done this in the past, and without the problems of the Dartmouth project (as far as I know). -- Cyrius|✎ 03:01, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'll do one better - there is a master list of all the articles they are working on, and you can do a "Related changes" on it to track all of them. Check it out here [3]. We have not seen quite the problems of the "Dartmouth project" perhaps because we provide more well defined project guidelines and choose notable article that are sure to survive VfD. Fuzheado | Talk 03:21, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Great, thanks for the link. I shouldn't have even mentioned Dartmouth, since this is clearly a much better guided project, with significantly better overall results. Niteowlneils 03:42, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Impressive investigative work! zoney ♣ talk 10:16, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Underlined liks in MonoBook

I too am having difficulty with underlined links in MonoBook. My preference has always been to have underline off, and that is how it is set. Starting a few days ago, however, MonoBook does not recognise that pref setting; switching to Cologne, oddly enough, resolves the problem. If anyone has suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them. Denni☯ 01:56, 2004 Oct 7 (UTC)

I looked at it a few days ago and it looks like MonoBook is the only one having the problem. But I don't have any idea why. —Mike 04:27, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

You need to use your custom stylesheet to turn off link underlining in monobook. Go to User:yourname/monobook.css and add the following:

a {text-decoration:none;}

You might also need to add

#bodyContent a.external {text-decoration:none;}
#bodyContent a.extiw, #bodyContent a.extiw:active {text-decoration:none;}

depending on what's going on with the main MediaWiki:Monobook.css page. Angela. 04:44, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

I have had several strange and sometimes intermittent problems with both IE6 and Mozilla, which all seem to have gone away now that I'm using the classic skin. I might try cologne! I prefer the functionality of monobook to classic, but my suspicion is that monobook is not stable, especially on smaller screen resolutions. I can't go bigger than 800x600 on my current hardware, what resolution are you using? Andrewa 20:38, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

1024*768. I think the links have changed again recently. Are you still having problems with it? Angela. 07:47, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

Does keying Direct To Flash via USB leave record on XP PC?

I want to keep confidential info on usb and have no record on PC - My flash device allows keying direct, does it leave any record of contents on the PC?

Brian Yench

P.S.

It might. XP uses virtual memory, which could potentially result in disk records of parts of memory, keystroke loggers may be in use, it depends how paranoid you are. In practice, saving directly to a flash disk is probably fairly secure for most day-to-day purposes. Intrigue 20:34, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Assigning {{PAGENAME}} as a default value of a template parameter

I've been trying to add a parameter to Template:Wikisource full, known by the name "Wikisource full parameter" (meaning that the template will be called by: {{Wikisource full|Wikisource full parameter=value}}), the default value for this parameter being {{PAGENAME}}. For this purpose I have created a Template:Wikisource full parameter, whose contents are: "{PAGENAME}". Naturally, this doesn't work. It there a way in which this can be accomplished? -- Itai 19:00, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Not to my knowledge, under the current software. If you haven't seen this already, you might want to take a look at m:Extended template syntax, which is one place for template junkies (like myself :-)) to hang out. • Benc • 21:46, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Heh. Thanks for the plug! — Gwalla | Talk 02:47, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

An image that isn't there, and won't go away.

The image, Image:Scuba-flag1.jpg, doesn't seem to display. But I can't delete it either. What gives? – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 00:34, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

There's a known bug in the software that causes this. Sometimes it can be fixed by uploading and immediately deleting a dummy image with the same name. Other times, you have to add it to WP:IFD#Broken images that can't be deleted and wait for a developer to get rid of it once and for all. In this case, I was able to get rid of it using the upload/delete trick. • Benc • 21:59, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

See also: Category:Image pages with missing or corrupt images. • Benc • 13:09, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC).

This should be fixed now, please try deleting such images. --Brion 08:41, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Strange edits

I'm seeing very odd edits by User:69.69.47.126 on articles such as I Love Lucy. I'm running Safari on an Apple iBook, using the Monobook skin . Could someone else look to see if the issue is the edit itself, or just how it's displaying on my machine? Joyous 23:07, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)

It appears the user is, either intentionally or by way of some sort of virus/spyware on their machine, added javascript based advert links to an external site. It looks like the change has been reverted. -- Chuq 23:51, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This user has made lots of edits like this - although it looks unintentional, since otherwise their edits have been ok. Paul August 18:02, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

This has happened in the past. It's usually because the editor's computer has a spyware program on it. Once they clean up their computer, this problem goes away. RickK 08:33, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

Category whitespace & alphabetizing

Two questions here:

1. Adding an article to multiple categories adds extra whitespace to the bottom of articles. Is there any reason why the whitespace can't be eliminated like it is for inter-language wiki links? (NOTE: This may only be a problem with the Classic skin I am using).
2. Is it possible to alphabetize categories so they can be added in any order? Or is the un-alphabetizing of categories a feature?

Just curious... — Frecklefoot | Talk 14:49, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)

1. I switched over to Classic from Monobook and saw the white space. It may just be a leftover from the way categories show up in Monobook (at the bottom). But I'm no developer; this may not be true.
2. categories are displayed at the bottom of the article in the order they come up in the wikicode. to the best of my knowledge, they do not automatically sort. --Whosyourjudas (talk) 23:57, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Who removed underlines on article hyperlinks?

If you're going to put a style on hyperlinks so they are not underlined then the colour contrast between ordinary text (black) and hyperlinks (light blue) must be improved.

I always use bold blue on my websites.

The distinction between ordinary text and hyperlinks now that some helpful soul has decreed that underlined hyperlinks are verboten, is far too subtle. PatrickDunfordNZ 07:08, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Does someone keep messing about with links? Earlier today they were all underlined but now they are only underlined when I hover over them. Personally I can't distinguish any red links on pages now. [[User:Dmn|Dmn / Դմն ]] 15:52, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

And now they're back.. [[User:Dmn|Dmn / Դմն ]] 16:04, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Underlined links in Firefox

Since this week, the links in Wikipedia are underlined, even though I have that option disabled in my preferences. It worked fine until this weekend, and I haven't changed or upgraded my browsers's versions (Firefox 1.0 and 0.9). It appears to be working well in Internet Explorer (6) at the same machine. Jeronimo 06:31, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I had the opposite problem for about half a day recently, links disappearing on certain page loads (continuously for a couple of hours). Also in Firefox with no modifications at my end, previously worked fine, and has worked fine since. zoney ♣ talk 09:48, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I find that hard refreshing a page usually solves the problem. violet/riga (t) 09:59, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Reloading indeed works, thanks (and it also explains that I didn't have these problems sometimes, probably after a reload). Still I'm curious about the origin of the problem. As I didn't change browsers, I would seem likely that Wikipedia is the cause of this problem. Jeronimo 19:09, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Moving categories

Is there some technical reason why category pages cannot be moved the way that pages in the main namespace are? Most of the issues filling up Wikipedia:Categories for deletion would probably not be there if users (or sysops) could simply move pages. (I know that the links in the individual articles would still probably need to be hand-edited to point to the new category) --Rlandmann 00:54, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

You really answered your own question here. Moving categories involves editing every single member article; that's just the way MediaWiki works. If you're renaming a large category, you might ask for bot assistance at Wikipedia:Auto-categorization.

I suppose it's technically possible for the developers to write a piece of code to do these mass article category updates on the server side, but I doubt that's going to happen any time soon, if at all. There's too much room for abuse, and our edit histories are plenty long as is. • Benc • 13:07, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The solution wouldn't be to do "mass updates" on the server side. The solution would be not to store the category information in the articles in the first place. Categories were designed extremely poorly, and I'm afraid this may take a really long time to fix. anthony (see warning) 16:33, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That's a solution, not the solution. Currently, categories are attributes of articles. You're proposing that articles be aggregated by categories via some undefined system. The way it's set up now is the simplest way to implement it from the perspective of the average editor, and that's the way it will remain for the time being. Or can you think of a better interface for assigning articles to categories? • Benc • 06:56, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

You're proposing that articles be aggregated by categories via some undefined system. Not really. There's already a category table, so that's already defined. I'm just suggesting that we don't also store the information in the article itself. If you want the redundancy, for backup purposes, the much more appropriate place to store it would be in the category text, not the article text. The way it's set up now is the simplest way to implement it from the perspective of the average editor I can think of a lot of simpler ways. For instance, there could be an "edit categories" button. But I wasn't talking about interface anyway, I was talking about backend implementation.

Or can you think of a better interface for assigning articles to categories? The interface should be separated from the implementation. If people like adding [[Category:Whatever]] to articles, that can be kept (personally I don't think it's very intuitive, and would prefer an "edit categories" button). But at the same time you should be able to add Article:Whatever to the category page. As it is now, when someone wants to create a new category (say Tennis players), they have to edit the hundreds of articles of the tennis players (and this issue comes up often enough we've even added the kludge of requesting bots on Wikipedia:Auto-categorization). Under the alternate interface, when someone wants to add such a category, they can just edit the [[Category:Tennis players]] page and add all the names. In addition, this method allows you to add red links, which is one of the key missing features of categories. But again, I wasn't talking about interface, I was talking about implementation. anthony (see warning) 20:17, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC) (this page is not a tennis player. nowiki'd. Me at work 20:35, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC))

Any other Mozilla user having problems?

The English Wikipedia has appeared down to my Mozilla 1.7.2 browser for a couple of days now, the pages appear to start loading but never actually load. French Wikipedia and the Meta are slow but usable.

I've only recently discovered that the problem doesn't occur at all on MS-IE6. This is a bit ironical as I mainly installed Mozilla as a workaround for Wikipedia's problems with IE (or IE's problems with Wikipedia if you prefer). Are any other Mozilla (not Firefox) users having any similar problems? Andrewa 03:49, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've switched to Firefox 1.0PR for navigating Wikipedia, and have noticed no such problems... --Golbez 03:59, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

Firefox is not Mozilla. Andrewa 05:22, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Pardons; you said "Mozilla (not Firefox)" and my eyes saw "Mozilla (or Firefox)". Sorry. --Golbez 05:38, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

No, thanks for the reply, and sorry if I was terse! Your comment is both relevant and helpful. But I'm far more interested in Mozilla (browser), since I know there's no problem with IE, and terrified that people will confuse Mozilla (the browser part of the Mozilla suite) with Firefox as they're both from Mozilla Foundation (the organisation). IMO the differences are big enough to consider them as different browsers for the purposes of this exercise. Just to make the water even muddier, Mozilla was originally the name of a version of the Netscape Navigator browser!

One possible conclusion, as I've had no other replies, is that there are few other people using the Mozilla suite, they've all gone to Firefox and perhaps so should I. Another possibility is that those using Mozilla suite are not seeing this message, either because they just assume that Wikipedia is down or because they have no access to another browser or both. Andrewa 09:20, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm not having any problems. I'm using Mozilla 1.6 on Mandrake 10.0. I use Firefox on another machine sometimes, without any problems there either. I use the classic interface, if that matters.-gadfium 21:30, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thank you! Just a hunch, based on a question below... what screen resolution? I'm 800x600 and unable to go higher than that on current hardware. Andrewa 22:21, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

1280x1024. I'm on an LCD screen, which looks horrible in any other resolution.-gadfium 22:34, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I think the resolution just became a hot suspect! Andrewa 22:42, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Curiouser and curiouser... It has now come good, sometime since my last post. I can only assume there has been a change somewhere, it has not been at my end AFAIK. Andrewa 06:22, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

...and it's now broken again. No problem with IE6, but Mozilla loading the same page just hangs. Andrewa 11:44, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The same happened to me when I was using Mozilla, but it was a few weeks ago. Pages would take about 5 minutes to load even when they opened instantly in IE. At first, deleting my profile solved it, but then it happened again and deleting the profile had no effect, so I changed to Firefox. Angela. 04:41, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

This morning, I used Firefox 0.8 on Windows with a 800x600 resolution, on broadband (but while other things were downloading), and Wikipedia took a very long time to load. In particular, while the majority of the main page displayed promptly, I didn't get the side bar so I couldn't check my watchlist for many minutes. Maybe Firefox is affected by the same problem at this resolution.-gadfium 05:08, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for all contributions.

It's something to do with the way Mozilla handles CSS, and caching at some level and screen resolution are also implicated.

I had a go at replacing my personal monobook.css with an old version of the complete stylesheet that I thought was trouble free. Results were strange, even after immediately clearing both my local caches (Mozilla and IE6) it took some time for the change to take effect. But the reults seemed to be to immediately fix Mozilla, although I was getting the unchanged skin! I have now changed it back, and the results: IE6 is currently using a back level of my monobook.css, and working perfectly. Mozilla is using either the current level or the version two back (they're identical) and is busted again, pages that load immediately on IE6 take >30 minutes on Mozilla.

I can probably fix this by going to Firefox. I resisted that before only because I wanted reliability with Wikipedia and the Firefox offering was a beta release, ironical isn't it. But no other site has given me any trouble with either Mozilla or IE. As this is our default skin, I really think we need to make it a bit more robust.

My immediate suggestion is either we get someone to design a new skin, a really simple one that is a lot more robust, specifically to be the default, or we put a notice on the main page saying that the site is designed and tested on Firefox and may not work on other browsers. Many other sites have such disclaimers (but none so popular as Wikipedia AFAIK).

It's just a suggestion. I know the developers are volunteers too, and without you there'd be no Wikipedia. But I think I need to call it as I see it fall.

Further down the track I'm sure we'll have a default skin that's both robust and intelligent enough to take advantage of things like larger screen sizes and features offered (and properly implemented, same thing surely) by particular browsers. But that's a bit more work.

I also can't help wondering how much the skins we currently have cost in overall site performance. But that's real heresy, isn't it. Andrewa 06:33, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Swapped to classic skin and no more problems. I wonder whether this should be our default skin? People come to an encyclopedia for content. It's not good IMO to be denying even a small minority access to this content in order to provide high-end users with better appearance, which seems to be the current policy. Andrewa 20:25, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Images not found on articles

I can't view any images on Michael Moore. Visiting the image pages also does not work, for example Image:Mmoore.jpg Rhobite 19:40, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

They're loading for me - try hard refreshing? violet/riga (t) 19:46, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Strange, they work in IE but not FireFox. So it's probably on my end, never mind. Rhobite 20:14, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

The pic. loads OK in my version of Firefox (v1 preview release)Jerry 15:36, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Stacking images

I've been working on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article, and I added the CBC's logo history to the CBC article in the form of stacked images. User:Radagast proceeded to edit the article to properly render the stacked images in his browser, but it messed up the captions in my browser (Mozilla 1.5). Apparently, stacked images seem to be getting rendered properly in only one type of browser at a time, and out of whack on all other browser types. Could you report on how stacked images are rendered in your browser? Denelson83 04:15, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The article looks ok here on Safari v1.2.3 —Mike 10:13, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

Um, your edit has problems on initial load with Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.7, and Firefox 0.9.2 (refresh or resize makes the problem go away) in the "Programming" section--his version moves the problem to the "Overview" section. Anyway, I'll look into it some more. Niteowlneils 23:30, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

OK, I've moved the images a bit, and can no longer repro any text/image overlap problem on any of the 5 browsers I have available. How does it look for you? Niteowlneils 23:51, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Looks good in Firefox, at least; I hope Denelson83 is now satisfied with the caption layout... Radagast 13:04, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

Why does Wikipedia appear so different (and less nice) on Netscape than IE?

i'm a hard-core Mac guy and i generally hate Micro$hit and nearly everything they make. anyway, why can't wiki look the same for my (sorta old) Netscape browser as it does for IE? r b-j 03:13, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Probably poor CSS support. Update your netscape or use Mozilla Firefox. —Morven 03:30, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

it's what my wife hears when we complain to M$ about her windoze machine (upgrade your windows OS). my Mac is quite functional but not real new (G3, OS 9.1). newer versions of Netscape actually performed poorer and buggier when i installed it. i presume that if i buy a new Mac with OSX i can get a Netscape or other browser that will draw wiki the way it looks on IE, i just do not understand why it was ever necessary. anyway, thanx Marvin. r b-j 05:45, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps you could be more specific as to what's wrong? --Golbez 06:00, Oct 3, 2004 (UTC)

well, it doesn't look the same (with tabs on top for "Main Page", etc.) no matter what skin i use. some skins (e.g. the something "Blue" one) do not work at all. i'm using the Classic skin and any underlined links that are to the right of the "standard" links on the left column do not work. so any wiki page that i am reading, if i put the arrow over such a link, it does not change into a little finger as it should. r b-j 05:39, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

And what version of Netscape? Netscape 7 on OS9 looks fine to me. Netscape 4.75 looks like crap, but that is true for many newer Websites for that old a version Netscape, whether Mac or PC--many sites simply block any Netscape before 6.01. Niteowlneils 00:05, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

okay, i'll get a newer Netscape. version 6 (i think it was that one) was buggy and 4.75 seems to work fine on nearly any website i happen to go to. i didn't even know there was a version 7. i'll admit that i'm still dial-up here and i shudder to think about the download time. r b-j 05:39, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Funnily enough I came to this page to post a question about why Wikipedia loads much more quickly in Mozilla Firefox than in Explorer. I discovered this by accident - Explorer was loading wikipedia incredibly slowly - sometimes stalling completely - even though I'd deleted the cache files and tried other fixes which various people had suggested. For reasons unconnected with this problem, I downloaded Firefox and discovered that page loads are much quicker, not only for wiki but also other sites. Also the layout looks exactly the same as on IE - at least it does to me. Have also tried Opera but that isn't so fast and, on my machine at least, crashes from time to time. Based on Morven's comment, I assume the problem with IE could be to do with CSS? Jerry 15:28, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

sorry about the ignorance, but what the hell is "CSS"? r b-j 05:39, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Cascading Style Sheets. The right way to put style markup in a web page. (The wrong way is using horrible kludges like <font>.) {Ανάριον} 09:03, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The old Netscape 4.x is so incredibly buggy that it's virtually impossible to support both it and any other browser at the same time. The best compromise is to simply disable most of the styling on Netscape 4.x, so pages should usually be legible even if they're not attractive. However Netscape 4.x will still sometimes muck up pages with formatting, or even crash on table layouts it doesn't like, and will eg not allow editing long pages and many other problems. --Brion 06:35, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Upgrade to Opera 7.54; better engine, better support less buggy. Free (almost), in short -- an amazing browser. [[User:Nichalp|¶ ɳȉčḩåḽṗ | ✉]] 19:47, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)

How to edit mediawiki so only the contents of a page is shown

I would like to know how to do this i.e. which files to edit and how. I only want the page to contain the contents - none of the headers/footers, just the text that someone inserts into the text box.

Hope you can help.

If you're asking how to edit the PHP scripts, you'd probably get a better response asking on the Meta-wiki or the mailing list. See also: m:How to become a MediaWiki hacker and its talk page. Alternately, would Special:Export do the trick? It's XML, but that's fairly trivial to parse. • Benc • 13:01, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

special characters turning into question marks

I stumbled across two instances where edits had somehow inadvertently turned special characters (dashes, apostrophes and quotation marks) into question marks. The original reports are here and here. I have no idea what these two cases have in common. It looks like a bug, but it's not clear whether it's a bug on some users' machines or in the WP software. It seems important that we find out. If you've come across this phenomenon, either while editing or in the form of strange question marks in articles, please give as many details of circumstances, browser, operating system etc. as you can below. Perhaps we can identify a pattern. (If this is well-known and/or solved, feel free to remove this post.) Fpahl 18:42, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This kind of problem was invoked once before; see here and here. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 18:51, Oct 2, 2004 (UTC)

I know at least some of what's going on -- it seems to be a problem with "smart quotes". As best as I can figure, some people are doing their editing with editors that replace simple apostrophes, ASCII 27, with a non-standard "smart quote" character, ASCII 3F. Then some browsers, such as the one I'm stuck with on my downstairs computer, render those characters as apostrophes when showing the article, and when showing the text inside an editor box, but when saving the text, doesn't. I presume something similar's up with dashes and quotation marks. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:30, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why the same browser is also introducing space errors, that seem to insert arbitrary returns into the wikitext in strange places, is something I don't even have a theory for yet. -- Antaeus Feldspar 16:55, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

This is the code that Internet Explorer sees , starts complaining about line 3

/* generated javascript */var skin = 'myskin'; var stylepath = '/style';/* MediaWiki:Myskin */ <Myskin.js&gt

This symptom started within the last hour.Ancheta Wis 13:46, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Is this still going on? --Brion 06:36, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Arrows at the end of external links - now gone?

Has anyone else noticed that the little blue arrows at the end of an external link are no longer there? Does anyone know why? I think it's useful to be able to distinguish an external link from an internal one. Paul August 20:26, Oct 1, 2004 (UTC)

You can still distinguish them by color; external and interwiki links are a lighter blue than internal links. Goplat 20:52, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That difference in color is very subtle and perhaps my eyesight is failing or perhaps my monitor is less than optimal, but I find the colors are nearly indistinguishable unless I look really closely. I think it is a really bad idea to remove the icons (or in the alternative, at least make the external link color more noticably distinct). [[User:Bkonrad|User:Bkonrad/sig2]] 21:09, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

My question is who decided to make that change? —Mike 21:49, Oct 1, 2004 (UTC)

I second that question. Could we look for consensus first? – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 21:39, Oct 2, 2004 (UTC)

I can't tell the difference on the poor LCD screen of my laptop. violet/riga (t) 20:25, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well the arrows now seem to be back. Paul August 17:16, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

Image cut off

Look at Tarija and look at the map of Bolivia - look at the lower left. The black border doesn't reach around there. Right? Now click the image, and you see that it does, in fact, reach around. My browser here is IE6 - Is this a known issue? Seems an odd issue, but here we are, it seems to be lopping off the lowest one or two lines of the image. --Golbez 22:14, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

The problem wasn't happening with Mozilla, but I could see it using IE6. I tweaked it (forgetting to sign in in the IE window, of course), and it seems better. (both browsers miss a tiny bit of the right border) Niteowlneils 02:39, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia Logo

What's wrong with wikipedia logo? Everytime I glide the mouse pointer over it the logo reloads. It wasn't like that before and it's very annoying. What's going on? Wareware 03:01, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• Same was happening for me, for a couple of days. I assume somebody altered the Javascript with an unanticipated consequence. Seems OK now. A couple of months ago I had problems with severe image breakup when two or more instances of the Wikipedia page were open, but that too seems OK now. --NathanHawking 21:34, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)

Database problem?

When attempting to edit earlier versions of various articles, I encountered this message:

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "Petrel,oldid=6156053".

This is usually caused by following an outdated diff or history link to a page that has been deleted.

If this is not the case, you may have found a bug in the software. Please report this to an administrator, making note of the URL.

Anyone know what's going on? Ðåñηÿßôý | Talk 02:29, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I don't know what's going on. I've seen the same thing happen on the Wikimedia: site a bit, but it doesn't seem to be reproducible since I can access Petrel&oldid=6156053 without an error. You might want to report it to MediaZilla: if you see it again. Angela. 08:00, Sep 26, 2004 (UTC)

These can happen when one of the slave database servers is too far behind the primary database server. Mentioning it to me in a private message in IRC is the fastest way to get it looked at if I'm around, otherwise a mention in #mediawiki will do the job. It happens that I also changed the error message a little while and it now suggests trying again in a couple of minutes. That's usually more than enough time to catch up - even a couple of seconds will usually be enough. At around the time of this problem report there was an unusually large delay because of page move vandalism, fixed by temporarily switching to only using one server. The next version of the MediaWiki software is expected to have a big improvement in the area of page moves, making them almost instantaneous and no longe a possible cause of lag. It's possible that this sort of query will be changed to make it wait up to a few seconds for the slave to catch up to the master. Jamesday 14:31, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I wrote the code to fix this and various related problems, months ago. -- Tim Starling 00:32, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

Wikimedia image problem

I don't really know where else to put this; I already tried on meta.wikimedia.org several days ago and have received no answer.

I installed a Wikimedia wiki on my personal computer as a sort of PIM. It's working very well, except that any image I put into an article is left- and bottom-aligned. I've tried many possible remedies and nothing seems to work. Does anyone know why this is happening, and more importantly how to fix it? Thanks in advance. -Branddobbe 10:20, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

Option to preview changes?

Apologies if this should have gone to MediaZilla but I took a look and it intimidates me. ^^; Not to mention that it only mentions bugs, there, and makes no mention of feature requests.

The way MediaWiki works right now, you can push a button while making an edit to show a preview of the page as it will look after your edits. Then, once you've saved your edits, you can go to the history and ask for a comparison between the version you just saved and the version that's there now.

Why not a preview option that combines the two: one that shows you the difference between your proposed version and the current version before you save? For certain kinds of edits, this would be absolutely invaluable; for instance, I just moved a number of entries on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention from the History subsection of Computer and Information Science to the actual History section. Merely seeing the preview of the page as it would be wouldn't tell me if, for instance, I had accidentally slipped up and deleted an entry I was trying to move. I would have to wait until I'd finished saving and then ask for the comparison, and then go back and re-edit. Someone who didn't do that sort of double-checking wouldn't spot the problem, even if they did preview during the editing. -- Antaeus Feldspar 18:40, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Antaeus Feldspar's suggestion actually is a good one for almost any kind of nontrivial editing. Surely it's a good idea when you edit to decide, before you commit, whether the changes you made really are appropriate; we all have half-baked ideas that we think better of after a few minutes. AF's proposed technology would make it possible to check your own work more effectively. Opus33 02:18, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that with these problems happening to some users (not just myself) it would be even more valuable. Even if you use the preview button religiously, if you're editing a long article, it's murder to go back and try to figure out, without any clues, whether your browser introduced any changes other than the one you intended. -- Antaeus Feldspar 16:48, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

My apologies to everyone. Had I navigated MediaZilla correctly on the previous occasion, I would have known that this feature request had already been made. -- Antaeus Feldspar 20:51, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

¯

Why not Soundex searches?

As I was trawling through a chunk of All Pages, I noticed yet again the large number of redirects such as Cheeleaders, Chem Trails, Chaykovsky, etc. that seem intended to help with misspellings or variant spellings. Although there are many such entries, they are unsystematic and don't even come close to covering the range of reasonable possibilities. For example, we have Cheeleaders but not Cheerleaders, Chem Trails but not Chem trails, Chaykovsky and Chaikovski but not Tchaikofsky or Tchaikovski or Tchaikowski, or Tchaikowsky, etc. We don't have Neitzsche or Nietsche or Nietszche.

It seems to me that it would really be helpful to have some kind of fuzzy matching capability, particularly on the Go command.

Why not Soundex lookups, for example? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 00:44, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Not a good idea; every homonym would map to the same article (e.g. poor, pore.) Maybe an extra "sounds like" link in the search results would be best--it's not like the soundex algorithm would tax the MediaWiki servers. However, the real problem is what to do for non-english languages. --Ardonik.talk() 02:31, Sep 11, 2004 (UTC)

And Soundex is a rather poor algorithm with too many collisions. -- orthogonal 04:23, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

"Sounds like" searching wouldn't be a bad idea, and there are several alternatives to the Soundex algortihm that aren't quite so English-biased. The New York State Identification and Intelligence System (NYSIIS) code was developed in 1970 or so to cope with just that problem, and produces a computable and storable result, unlike string-comparison algorithms (e.g. Jaro-Winkler and Levenshtein distance). Such codes could be stored with the article itself and searched for, just like any other term. It sure beats the heck out of polluting an encyclopedia with typographic error redirect pages. (Oh, and Cheerleaders now exists, created by User:Golbez yesterday :-) ) RossPatterson 17:03, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Although redirects are necessary for variant spellings, having a redirect for every misspelling is a bit ridiculous. I have to wonder if the redirect for Cheeleaders wasn't just a typo by the person who created it. —Mike 01:47, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)

I think that's the likely cause for a lot of these. If you use Move to rename an article, the old name becomes a redirect. ←Hob 06:18, 2004 Sep 22 (UTC)

I just checked, and it doesn't appear from the history of the two pages that started this topic that any move occurred. Not that that isn't the cause of lots of others. RossPatterson

MediaWiki already has a feature for searching for a "fuzzy search" on titles using Levenshtein distance, but it was disabled on the live site because it was too slow. -- Tim Starling 15:28, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)

I am against Cheeleaders-type "typo-redirects", because it means we are "feeding" the web with typos. If I am redirected, I assume my spelling was a variant, not a mistake. For typos, there could be a "did you mean" page, but these - necessarily unsystematic - redirects are less than elegant, if not harmful. dab 10:04, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

What do you mean by "feeding the web"? If there's no link to a redirect, it's invisible and doesn't get indexed by search engines - no? ←Hob 06:18, 2004 Sep 22 (UTC)

hm, true. I'm still against them. (a) because it's necessarily unsystematic, and (b) if it's a common misspelling, there is a good chance that it is linked to (i.e. by the same misspelling in a different article), and the mistake will not be discovered as easily. dab 11:44, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

You are challenging a long-standing policy here. That's not to say it's right, but changing it is not a quest for the faint-hearted. (;-> Andrewa 14:58, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Newsfeed

My browser (Opera v 7.45) has just begun notifying me via a newsfeed of the latest changes to Wikipedia. Since last Sunday there have been 800+ of them. I don't recall having signed up for this within Wikpedia, but there is a box for it on the list of newsfeeds with comes with Opera, so I clicked it. I can't find about this newsfeed service on Wikipedia itself, but I am sure I am looking in the wrong place. Does anyone know where it might be? Its a brilliant idea. Apwoolrich 15:01, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

If you go to navigation on the left, and click recent changes there are feeds in rss and atom that you can put in a newsreader. [[User:Cohesion|cohesion ☎]] 18:30, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Klingon interwiki?

I just noticed that the Klingon interwiki links don't work. I mean when you put them in all nice they appear at the bottom of the page and not at the side. I don't know anything about Klingon so I don't know if this is a problem they know about. It doesn't seem to work for any pages. I am not so concerned about it because it is not my problem. However, if they have problems, what other lesser language is not getting representation? --[[User:Sunborn|metta, The Sunborn ☸]] 00:15, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Only Klingon. This really should be mentioned somewhere, but I think it was a compromise between the bureaucrats of "real" languages and Klingon. They will allow Klingon interwikis, but they won't be included along all the "real" languages. (Real must be put in quotes because Esperanto and Interlingua are on there, and they're constructed along with Klingon - the only difference is scale and inspiration). So, you can interwiki to Klingon, but it is kept at the bottom of the page, instead of on the sidebar. So far as I know, the only other language with a similar problem was minnan (?) and I think that's fixed now, that was a genuine bug. --Golbez 00:50, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

No, as I understand it, you aren't supposed to interwiki link at all. We have a wiki in klingon, but you aren't supposed to link to it. →Raul654 22:26, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

My recollection matches Raul's -- the agreement was (after long debate) that the objections to the Klingon thing boiled down to the fact that links to a Klingon WP would fuel our critics' fires, but if the thing couldn't be linked to, then no one minded if it happened to use Wikimedia server space. So any Klingon interwiki links should be removed according to policy, I believe, though goodness knows where that's written. I don't have any personal passion to remove them, anyway. :-) Jwrosenzweig 22:54, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Excepting the single external link from Klingon language and interwikis on talk pages, I hope? The Klingon Wikipedia is stupid silly, but if hard-core Trekkies want to build it, why not? • Benc • 22:56, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It is no more silly than the Esperanto wiki, more people speak Klingon than Esperanto. But if that is what has been agreed on, then I don't care one way or the other. It is not like I am going to learn either language.--[[User:Sunborn|metta, The Sunborn ☸]] 21:10, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

More people speak Klingon than Esperanto?! I'm afraid I don't buy this for a second. There are thought to be as many as 2 million moderately fluent speakers of Esperanto, and over the last century a considerable body of literature has emerged. The Klingon language article doesn't appear to give a figure for the number of speakers, but I hardly think it comes anywhere near Esperanto. The article does say that only three books have been published in the language, a tiny figure. — Trilobite (Talk) 09:52, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well, yea, I don't see a reason not to link from Klingon language. (Actually, personally, I'd love to see that as a main page featured article ;) )→Raul654 23:06, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

Here is a the announcement of the decision and a brief mention of the discussions that led to it. The decision at least probably should be better documented, although this post is not hard to find if you look at talk:Klingon language.

It's probably not good to reopen this debate IMO. It will happen one day I guess, as the compromise seems to have been brokered between a very few people compared to the large number interested, and it's a rather strange one IMO. In a nutshell the result of some people wanting to give Klingon less prestige and prominence has been that it's received unique treatment and become very prominent indeed. Life's like that sometimes. Andrewa 03:05, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Table with solid borders?

Why no td bg?

1 2 11 22

How do you make a solid border table when global css is turned off and this doesn't work?

<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td style="font-size:20px;"><strong>Why no td bg?</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#660000">
<table border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="2">
<tr bgcolor="#EFEFEF">
<td>1</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#FFFFCC">11</td>
<td>22</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

This may be one way where an extra blank row (tr) is added: List of bridges by length

Page move request

Could an admin please move Fianna Eireann to Fianna Éireann (the latter of which is currently a mistaken redirect)? And also, someone who is familiar with the needs to develop this article - it's very one-sided in its stubness. --Kwekubo 19:47, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• Move is done, see Talk:Fianna Éireann. Andrewa 21:29, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Error/Bug on the main page

I don't know where to post this but my time is short and this seems like as good a place as any. There is a weird bug on the main page and I think it is against policy. When clicking on the wikisource iceberg, it redirects you to the main german wikipedia. The link at the bottom of the image works fine, the picture link is acting strangely. It is very weird and the redirect information is somewhat useless. I don't know what is going on, it is definiately interesting. --[[User:Sunborn|metta, The Sunborn ☸]] 21:19, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I get this too. The iceberg takes me to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and the link below it takes me to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page:English, not to Wikisource. I've had a quick look and I'm not competent to diagnose or fix it. Andrewa 21:49, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It's not a bug on the main page or on the image. The image Image:Sourceberg.jpg is a redirect to Wikisource:Main Page. Wikisource: inter-wiki links go to the old URL http://sources.wikipedia.org which is now an HTTP redirect to http://de.wikipedia.org . You can still go to Wikisource with the new URL, http://wikisource.org . This could be fixed by changing the interwiki URL or restoring sources.wikipedia.org but both of these require divine intervention. Goplat 00:49, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There was a temporary problem where lots of addresses were redirecting to the German Wikipedia, but this has now been fixed. Angela. 13:04, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)

Fixed! But I needed to manually clear my Mozilla cache for the fix to take effect, mere reload was not effective. Andrewa 20:25, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Page move request

Could an admin please move RC4 (cipher) to RC4? "Primary topic" disambiguation is more appropriate here than "equal" disambiguation. — Matt 15:40, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Will do. The history of the current RC4 although extensive is all disambiguation page maintenance, and doesn't need preservation. Andrewa 19:11, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Done. Discussion on both pages seemed to have reached consensus that this was the best thing, and has been consolidated at talk:RC4. Any problems comment on my talk page for the fastest response from me. Andrewa 19:27, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

delete Image:7. Organizovanost privrede u opstini, strana 315-318.pdf

Is somebody able to delete Image:7. Organizovanost privrede u opstini, strana 315-318.pdf? It is a foreign language pdf file linked to nowhere. I tried deleting it, but without any sucess. I also overwrote the file with some smaller dummy file to see if this helps deleting the file, but so far i could not delete it. -- Chris 73 Talk

Blocks not working

I've tried to block 203.173.8.18 four or five times now, but none of the blocks seem to be taking. Does anyone have any idea why? —No-One Jones ^(m) 23:21, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Template change

Could someone add a blank line to the templates Template:GFDL and Template:PD-USGov? Both templates are tables, beginning with {|... markup. Previously, the wikicode

Foo {{GFDL}}
Foo {{PD-USGov}}

would insert a newline after Foo. Now this does not occur, causing the table markup to be inserted in a position that causes the template to be corrupted (i.e., not at the start of a line). For example, Image:Rotor-assembly.jpg. I'd do this myself, but the templates are protected. Thanks! — Matt 12:38, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

In the meantime you could always add the extra newline to the enclosing article yourself, as I have done for your example. It is good practice to have template inclusions on a separate line anyway (NB IMNSHO) HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 14:12, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)

A comment has been added to both of these templates which should now force a linebreak. Angela. 15:50, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)

Post-move cleanup merge request

The article Fatima's hands (updated the original article ref BACbKA 12:38, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)) has been replaced with a redirect to a new one. Discussion wasn't moved, history is rotting at the old (now redirecting) page, and also the links to the old one weren't checked (one of them is a redirect). Since then, active editing and discussion has happened at the new location, Hand of Fatima. Can an admin please merge the broken pieces together and complete the move? TIA, BACbKA 11:52, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This doesn't require any admin action as far as I can see. The histories are fine as they are, in fact an attempt to merge them would result in an unusable mess as they overlap (and the mess would then need to be sorted out manually by a developer as history merges are not reversible). Discussion can be moved by anyone if you wish to consolidate the talk pages, but a pointer might be a better idea. Double and other unsuitable redirects can be fixed by anyone, including admins of course and I've just fixed the double ones. Andrewa 21:07, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Slow page access times from UK

Greetings from over the pond.

I've only recently come across wikipedia, but have found that page access times are slow (i.e. over 30 seconds - sometimes nothing downloads at all) at certain times of the day, particularly between 10.00 and 12.00 UTC. Is this due to overloading on the wiki servers or is it possible that the problem is at my end. Jerry cornelius 16:04, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

An update to this post - I've disovered that the slow download times only apply when I'm using a dial-up connection to my main ISP (Ntlworld.com). I have access to a couple of other ISPs and wikipedia accesss seems fine when I use them,however they cost me more to use. Generally page access times on Ntlworld are fine, so is it possible that this ISP is blocking or inhibiting access to wikipedia? Jerry cornelius 10:47, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I use ntlworld.com as well, on broadband. The delay may be due to when the first wave of North American users start hitting the servers. Are you talking weekends/weekdays or all the time? [[User:Noisy|Noisy | Talk]] 08:49, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Take Shroud of Turin/temp live

Could someone move Shroud of Turin/temp to Shroud of Turin? User:wetman has already moved the whole Talk page to the temp page, so it should just involve deleting the current page and talk page and then performing a move. (Unless there's a better way of course.) The temp version (produced by myself, Eloquence and JDG, primarily) has existed for about a week, with no comments in opposition to bringing it "live". Thanks. Mpolo 14:17, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

Done. You might need to do a hard reload of the history page to see the merged history. --mav 17:06, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Fundraising

There seems to be a problem with the fundraising page. Whenever I go to look at it the amount of money collected seems to have gone down. It currently says $17,000 has been collected. JOHN COLLISON | (Ludraman) 00:48, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Are you looking at the correct side? The green bar is how much has been collected (currently $22369.61) and the pink bar is how far we still have to go. Angela. 03:41, Sep 26, 2004 (UTC)

It's when I follow the "Donate here" link from the text at the top of all pages. JOHN COLLISON | (Ludraman) 07:51, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to be going down to me. It now says $23,969.50. What does it currently say for you? It's possible you're getting a cached version, but even that would not make the total go down. Angela. 07:55, Sep 26, 2004 (UTC)

It seems to have ironed itself out now. Thanks. JOHN COLLISON | (Ludraman) 08:27, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

What links here

When a link is made by transclusion of a template (or indeed any other article containing links), is it attributed directly to the article containing the template? In other words, would it be possible for the "What links here" special page to show links via templates in the same way as those via redirect pages? --Phil | Talk 14:26, Nov 26, 2004 (UTC)

WikiMedia projects - Universal sign in and sign up

Are there any plans to have the ability to sign in into multiple WikiMedia projects? I would like to have the ability to be signed into Commons automatically if I was already signed in for the English Wikipedia.

It is discussed for a long time already, see e.g. Bugzilla #57 or Single login on Meta. It's a bit tricky as for the transition there may be name conflicts, which are not easy to resolve if its the same person or only the same name. andy 18:12, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia circa 1969

Wikipedia circa 1969

Wikipedia circa 1969

In the history of Beautifly, yes a Pokemon character that I saved from the Speedy Delete, and I'm sorry for that but, in the history, it comes up with this message for any of the archived versions.

I didn't know Wikipedia was around in 1969. (see screenshot) Editors then didn't really go for articles that talk about current events. -- user:zanimum

P.S. I feel insufficient. It says to report this to an admin, but what do I know differently, than anyone else who gets this message.

• Heh. This sorta things happens when the database is having hiccups; it usually cures itself (or at least, that's how it looks from this side of the screen.) The 1969 date would actually be 11:59:59 PM, December 31 1969 -- one second before Zero Unix time. In other words, the hiccup says the time is -1. --jpgordon{gab} 04:11, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Obscuring e-mail address on Wiki pages?

I'm starting to add a lot of e-mail addresses at http://projects.isss.org , and it occurred to me that I should find a way to make sure that spambots aren't picking up the e-mail addresses. (I actually want, and have been crawling of the content, but don't want to increase spam to people who volunteer for things).

Any suggestions? Has someone already handled this?

[David Ing, Acting Webmaster, International Society for the Systems Sciences]

MediaWiki has an "Email user" feature, located at Special:Emailuser/putusernamehere. If a user puts his email address in the appropriate box in the user preferences, other users may use the email-this-user feature to exchange emails without revealing their email addresses (to each other or to spammers). Rdsmith4— Dan | Talk 19:37, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, but I'm actually coding "mailto:user@domain.com" -- reducing the number of HTML pages on our site (which have a misleading string on it) to Wiki pages.

As a quick-and-dirty way to get around this, I've been using the tip at http://www.brettglass.com/spam/paper.html#WebPageHarvesting to recode ASCII as HTML codes. The character translator at http://www.web-geek.com/utils/characters.html#box as been helpful.

Of course, I'm doing this as a Webmaster, so I can figure out codes. It would nice in MediaWiki if I didn't have to do this. My searched turned out EProtect for PMWiki at http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/EProtect , which would seem to do what I want ... except, of course, it's for PMWiki. (I'm only the administrator / moderator, not the code geek!) Any other suggestions would be welcomed.

[Second reply posted by David Ing]

Ugly font

It is some time ago I visit Wikipedia. Today I did and saw that the font has changed. The text is bad readable now. The letters are very ugly. I hope this is due to a technical problem and not due to a new design. Wikipedia should be readable at least. I use Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6.

Is wikipedia complyed with semantic web?

Is wikipedia complyed with semantic web ideals?

This is a two fold question:

1. Can a computer understand wikipedia articles (or at least the direct information inside the tables) like, on Goya's article, can he understand the year of his birth? In Guatemala article, can he tell what is it's capital city? Can it read when texas was founded?
2. can one acess wikipedia through RSS?
3. Should we care? Or it's better just to wait AI to be smarter?

--Alexandre Van de Sande 20:51, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

1. Nope. Wikipedia is not set up to be computer-readable. Categories are, to an extent, however.
2. Recent changes has an RSS feed, but it's like trying to drink from a firehose.
3. A philosophical question. I'd say no. Wikipedia's primary purpose is to produce an encyclopedia for humans, not an information source for computers. It'd be great if we could do both, but it's not that easy.

-- Cyrius|✎ 22:51, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Look at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) for my proposal for a Semantic Wikipedia, which is not so much to do with the Semantic Web, but more to do with making the information on Wikipedia easier to access and organize. I should ponder a second draft. I'd enjoy comments. --Golbez 04:56, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

Skin / Quickbar

I made an edit to my preferences (my first), changing how my name was displayed. When I saved it, I discovered that my skin had somehow been changed.

I'm currently using Classic, with the Quickbar fixed on the left, and this is (I believe) how it always was (on my preferences, that is). Previously, however, I had a much thinner bar up top, everything on one line, including a link for "My watchlist" and "my contributions." It had tabs below it to go to a page's Talk or History. I also had the search bar to my left, instead of below, where it is now. On the left Quickbar there were "Main Page," "Recent changes" and "Random page" (among other links), but no watchlist, contributions or page discussion.

What's odd is that the skin I have now is the one that is shown in screen-shot for Classic Skin in m:Help:Preferences, so I assume that I am now using the standard Classic skin.

My question is: what was I using before, and how can I get back to it? I can't find any combination of Skin and Quickbar preferences that gets me back there.

Thanks! — Asbestos | Talk. 17:10, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The skin with the layout you're describing is called Monobook. It would have looked something like the screenshot at Image:WPmain1024768NewTheme.png. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:56, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Ah, that's exactly it. How on Earth did I miss that one..?

Thanks for your reply, — Asbestos | Talk 22:57, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

vfd addition not showing up?

I've tried to list Vidraru for deletion on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. The last two articles I listed there showed up fine. Vidraru is just not showing up on the page, even though when I hit the edit button it looks like my additions are still there. What's going on? --Woggly 11:12, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Solved. I failed to list headers correctly. Boy is this deletion process complicated. --Woggly 11:36, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Okay, different day, same problem. This VFD thing is driving me NUTS. Either I'm defective, or the procedure for listing articles on VFD is waaay to complicated. Either way, I'm just not going to do it anymore, until the procedure changes. In the meantime, I'd appreciate if someone can clean up my attempt to add Camp cherith to VfD. I still can't figure out what I did wrong. --Woggly 20:43, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

• In my experience, VfD nominations only complicated if you try to 're-invent the wheel' every time. See this page for how I avoid that. Also, the current process is MUCH simpler than some previous methods that have been tried. Niteowlneils 21:00, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

PS Near as I can tell there was nothing wrong with the way you posted Camp cherith--if it wasn't showing up for you, I'd have to assume it was a caching problem. Niteowlneils 21:00, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

main page bug?

Sometimes, when I load the front page, the header on the top right (the bar that contains login/logout, prefrences, my talk, ect.) shifts to the far left. This happens every 1 in three times. Is this just me (i.e. my web browser is mad at me) or is anyone else seeing this? --Ptolmey 09:50, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)

An article on PHP development methodology

I thought this might be a helpful article for our heroic development team -- an overview of one teams PHP development methodology. (A Development Infrastructure for PHP, by Tony Marston.) There is probably much that doesn't apply to what we're doing here, but if it can help us streamline our software a bit or spot any security holes, it'd be worth reading. Is there a better place to mention it -- meta, mailing list, etc? [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 02:32, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Fixing Votes for deletion: A technical proposal

I've got some ideas about Votes for deletion that I'd like interested people to take a look at and comment on. Please see Fixing Votes for deletion: A technical proposal. Shane King 23:20, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC)

Faulty geography statistics from the Census Bureau

Almost every US city article contains geographic statistics referenced as being from the Census Bureau. In two instances I have noticed that these statistics are wildly incorrect - Malibu, California (fixed) and Santa Monica, California. I don't know how the errors arose, but it seems possible that there may be a systemic problem with how the statistics were obtained. Has anyone else noticed a problem? Willmcw 22:33, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

copied from Talk:Santa Monica, California

What about http://tinyurl.com/3zdb9 this map? It looks like the city is going into the water by quite a bit. I know that's not the best map, but perhaps this is how area is calculated in census area calculations. -- Ilya 00:55, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I think that you have found it. Moving west, I see that Malibu, just a narrow strip of land, is shown with borders extending far out into the ocean, explaining its 84% water statistic. (Not knowing the best place to initiate this discussion, I also posted to the Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Let me copy your reply there so that others can see it. I suspect that the area and water% are wrong for every coastal community. Willmcw 01:50, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I may have harvested the data for the article from the census bureau, but that's where my role in the data ends. At least the attributed data says "According to the census bureau". If better statistics are found, feel free to remove them and put better data from a different source. Or put both sources, whatever seems best. I would wonder if the water is actually in the legal domain of the city or if it is just arbitrarily chosen by the census bureau. -- Ram-Man 02:15, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)

Eyeballing it, it looks like they may have gone out to the three-mile limit. But I don't think anybody else in the world would calculate the area of a city that way. The problem is that these statistics have been added to every coastal town and city in the USA. There must be a thousands of entries like Malibu's that are not just a little wrong, but extremely wrong. It would be better to have no area statistics at all in those articles than to leave these erroneous stats while waiting for a better source. Is there possibly a way of programming the Rambot to clean up this mess? Willmcw 02:25, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

About your statement "nobody else in the world would calculate city area like that", take a look at Vlissingen. The area of this Dutch municipality is about 350 sq.km., 90% of which is in the North Sea. Eugene van der Pijll 18:12, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You are correct--the urban boundaries of cities along water bodies usually extend well out into the water. Speaking as a GIS department manager who deals with this issue all the time, we usually handle analyses on this kind of data by clipping coastal towns at the shoreline, since you cannot get meaningful population density or land use statistics any other way. Unfortunately the US Census TIGER data does not have these clipped for you, so any automated routine that uses their unprocessed data will produce faulty area statistics for incorporated areas on the coast. To get better results in Wikipedia, you'd have to process the data first. (Ugh!) Antandrus 02:28, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

We have the amount of area of land, so it would be fairly straightforward to calculate the population density based on land area only. If that is the major concern, that might be an acceptable workaround. It wouldn't be difficult to state that. I'm assuming that the population density stats are not already calculated by land area only. -- Ram-Man 13:33, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with this workaround. We'd have to check to see if the stats are already calculated based on land area, as you say, by spot-checking a couple of towns with large water areas and small pops, for example. Antandrus 16:22, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Spot checking won't be required because I can easily write a SQL query to check every record of the source data to check it for accuracy and to update them with the new values. Then the rambot can very easily replace the old data with the new data. Maybe we need some sort of threshold for which articles should have the data replaced. Do we do it for all articles above, say, 20% water area? I don't know which cities are coastal (and contain lots of water) and which are not. -- Ram-Man 16:42, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)

I would think a lower threshold... maybe replacing every one. Unfortunately, this is never as black-and-white as we'd like to think--where I live (Santa Barbara) there are quite a lot of people living on boats in the harbor, and they are quite literally living within the "area of water." The same might be true for a lot of high-rent coastal cities. So if we recalc the pop density by land only, it will be misleading in the other direction. The results for a town like Venice, CA might be even more extreme. Welcome to the muddy waters of GIS ... :-) Antandrus 16:54, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The stats are already calculated based on land area, so there is nothing to change there. The only thing that has changed in the Malibu is that the water area has disappeared. The other statistics have stayed the same, except for the land area in sq. km. which has been removed. Instead of the census office, there is now another source for the land area, probably secondary (that is, they got their data from the census office, so we're still publishing the census office figure, indirectly). Not an improvement, IMHO. Are you sure the city of Malibu does not contain any area of the ocean? Eugene van der Pijll 17:13, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm quite sure that Malibu is not 101 square miles, 80% water. The same problem is found all along the coasts, including Florida. Luckily, lakes don't seem to be a problem, just the oceans. (In California, land ownership ends at the high-tide mark.) Willmcw 17:22, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Land ownership does not define the extent of a City or County (if it did, privately owned land could not be part of the city). So while the land ownership ends at the high-tide mark, the jurisdiction of the City may not. Eugene van der Pijll 18:05, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

OK, using ArcView I have clipped the official Malibu boundary with the water boundary, and I get an area of 51482606 m^2 (51.482606 km^2) for land area only. I converted the US Census TIGER shape file (decimal degrees NAD 83) to CA State Plane zone 5 NAD 83 for accuracy. It looks like about 3/4 of the "official" Malibu city is Pacific Ocean. Btw, the area I calculate is 19.87 sq mi, which matches the City-Date.com figure on the Malibu, California article. HTH! Antandrus 17:36, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The official City of Malibu is defined by its incorporation document, which can be seen at the website of Malibu; the first pages are all about the land border, but on page 7 it says "...thence continuing southerly... to the boundary of the County of Los Angeles (in the Pacific Ocean)... thence westerly along said last mentioned boundary...", so the Ocean part of Malibu extends all the way to the boundary of the county. On page 8, there is a map which makes it very clear that the official City of Malibu is indeed three-quarters ocean; so the census data is correct. Eugene van der Pijll 18:05, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You are quite correct.In Santa Monica's case, they describe themselves on their city website as having 8.3 mi² of land. The wiki article says 15.9 mi² (8.3 mi² land, 7.7 mi² water). Willmcw 03:23, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

What kind of processing are you refering to? I have the databases from the Geographic Names Information System (See Geographic references), but I have not yet processed them for usage in Wikipedia (and I don't remember what kind of data is even contained in them at this point, since its been a while). The only databases I've used so far have been the U.S. Census Bureau statistics and FIPS information. I can perform processing, I just need to know what data to use and what kind of processing is required. -- Ram-Man 03:27, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)

You need ArcView, ArcGIS or something equivalent, and you need to clip the boundaries of the US Census incorporated area shape files (tgrxxxxxplc00.shp I think is the naming convention for the 2000 set) to a shoreline boundary; then you need to recalculate the area of each place name record within each shape file. It would be a lot of files. This is the only way I know how to do it, offhand. Antandrus 04:55, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

That doesn't seem even slightly simple, but I suppose that means it is possible. -- Ram-Man

If new data is difficult to obtain, is it at least possible to create a query to identify the coastal units that are most affected? As you suggested earlier, a certain water percentage could be a red-flag. Long coastlines could another criteria if you have that info. Then the most incorrect information could be deleted until a practical replacement is found. (BTW, at least communities on Lake Michigan don't seem to have this problem.) I realize this must be an enormous amount of work, but these numbers are off by an order of magnitude in some cases. - Would it be possible to leave the land component and take out the water and land/water ratio? The land figure seems to be correct, at least for Santa Monica. Willmcw 03:23, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Clones,Snapshots & Feeding them

Can you tell me whether the Wikipedia couldn't require the free cloning users or the makers of snapshots of it to accept an in-built requirement to continue same as a giant RSS feed , with a delay ( say a week )that enables the Wikipedia imprimatur or quality control to effect itself(ie thereby be edited ( watched as the Wikipedia also puts it)? Ok, so that would be akin to a contract term of use interposing but hardly irksome, and wouldn't necessitate payment , and if the clones aren't using the snapshot- or go out of business, then they drop out of the contracted software. Why do this is a different question and not under technical- I'm asking about software design to achieve optimum quality .Is it going to be possible technically ? Flamekeeper 21:43, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

No, we could certainly not require that, as a) Wikimedia doesn't own copyright on the material, it's owned by its contributors and b) the license under which material is contributed to us doesn't allow us to add such a requirement to downstream licensees.

As for whether providing a more or less live update stream is technically feasible, the number of updates combined with the complexities of page renaming and deletion makes it non-trivial to implement in an efficient way. But it would be nice if it could be done, and certainly in theory it could be done, if someone has the time and inclination to put in the work. --Brion 02:20, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Formatting of royal/noble titles?

Right. I'm asking here because I'm not sure about standard - well, common, anyway - formatting for names with associated titles - specifically, Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, whose name is formatted such that it becomes confusing whether his title is "Baron Gros" or if it is merely a title. As well - if the title is changed, the article should be moved to a different page, since - again - the title is confusing. This would, however, entail a good chunk of work, and I really don't care about neoclassical French painters enough to do it myself.

See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles). [[User:CatherineMunro|Catherine\^talk]] 02:25, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The article is still kind of ambiguous, and the references I've seen haven't been consistent in the use of Baron... Kelvin Palm 08:09, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Wiktionary

I am trying to have a specific word in a wikipedia article be directed (if requested by the user, as in to look up the word) at wiktionary. How abouts do I do this without creating the {wiktionary} box - (I know its double {{}} I just did not want to create a link) but anyways, if I was to have this:

• X refers to a feign by Y

and where I want the word feign to be a link to the definition at wiktionary, How do I do this?
PEACE....RoboAction 06:39, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The method for this is simple: you use an InterWiki link like [[wiktionary:this]]. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 09:30, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC)

Mirroring Wikipedia?

I've contributed a small bits and pieces to Wikipedia (though from an "anonymous" account, not this account) over time and have used it for a great amount of research. Truly first class stuff.

As a small-time network operator, I'm interested in donating server space and bandwidth to mirroring Wikipedia publicly. Before committing to such a thing, I've got a few questions about the overall system:

1) What sort of resources would be needed?

a. How much disk space is presently used, and how much would be needed in the predictable future?

b. How much bandwidth is presently required? Are there any noticeable spikes in bandwidth usage, or is the use fairly stable (albeit always increasing)?

c. How much CPU is required?

2) What sort of credit, if any, could be given? Anything from a little "Hosted by..." line at the bottom of the pages to a portion of the donations that go to operational expenses? I'm not doing this to make gobs of money, but am merely curious.

I can presently offer a dedicated, managed system with a P4 2Ghz CPU, 1.5Gb of RAM, and 2x36Gb hard drives, though any/all of the components can be upgraded if needed. The hardware is relatively inexpensive to upgrade, though bandwidth can be rather pricey, hence my inquiring.

Cheers!

Hello,

1/ a) Actually the database disk usage is about 100GB. You can probably just use lastest version of en: and images, roughly 10GB I believe. b) Bandwith usage for output is around 35MB low, 70MB high. Traffic certainly doubled in the last six months. c) Cpu usage depends. You can probably generate a set of static html pages which will probably fine with the cpu you have. If you plan to use mediawiki it might not be enough.

2/ All content of wikipedia is published under the GFDL, most mirrors just put a backlink to the wikipedia article and that seems fine.

Hashar 02:12, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You may wish to look at meta:wikimedia servers. 64.222.150.218

You mention that it would be possible to generate static HTML pages of WikiPedia. Could that be done automatically by WikiPedia at regular intervals? How big would it be then? It would be cool to have a Debian package of a Wikipedia snapshot that can be installed in a laptop for off-line use. It should come with a search script... I have most of one done in Perl, based on Swish++ and File::Cache for meta data that I wrote to index RFC's. Ideally, the static pages would have edit links that link to the real Wikipedia, to avoid a hairy synchronization problem.

--karlheg 08:10, 2004 Nov 24 (UTC)

Removing Abuse

My talk page has been unfortunately vandalised with an abuse by a user named Haha, and edits by registered users can't tbe removed. Was referred by Wikipedia guides to seek help here, can anyone help? - Mailer diablo 22:26, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Personal attacks certainly can be removed; I've done so. — Matt 22:52, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Matt! :) - Mailer diablo 22:56, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

No problem. You could, by the way, have edited the page yourself. Anonymous user or not, to some extent you're pretty much free to do what you like with your user pages; have a read of Wikipedia:User page. It's usual, though, to keep most "User talk:" comments, and archive whenever the page gets too full. I believe it's also considered poor form to remove criticism (presuming it's expressed politely, of course!) — Matt 23:16, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

My sentiments exactly, WikiStress goes up when seeing such offense out of the blue. I was thinking earlier along the lines of '&bot=1' (which I could if abuser isn't registered), but now I suppose that it's a norm to remove abuses while leaving the History. Still a newbie, learnt something new today I guess! :o) - Mailer diablo 23:45, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Renaming an image?

I've uploaded an image, and the system automatically gave it the same silly name it had on my computer. I tried using 'move' to a new name, but that didn't work. How do I rename the image? The image is currently called [[Image:Scan0007.jpg]] , and it is a picture of Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. --Woggly 08:47, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You can't rename an image currently. Upload it under a new name, then delete the original. --Brion 10:06, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Next question: how do I delete the original? --Woggly 10:36, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If the two are identical, put a {{delete}} tag on one of them and explain where the new version is. There is a also an Images for deletion page. Angela. 13:51, Nov 21, 2004 (UTC)

Searching - Clusty

Why do we recommend using this relatively unknown search engine? [[User:Dmn|Dmn / Դմն ]] 01:38, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Clusty has a Wikipedia-specific search. Apparently some people find this to be a useful way of searching for materials on Wikipedia when our internal search is down for reindexing. --Brion 10:06, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Cool [[User:Dmn|Dmn / Դմն ]] 12:51, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Japanese kana

I've been doing some work on a Japanese topic. Naturally, I thought I might find some additional information on the Japanese version of Wikipedia. Here's the problem - though I can read Japanese, every kana appears as no more than a little box. How can I get the characters to display properly? Adam Marx 00:59, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Can you read other Japanese web sites? Make sure you have appropriate fonts installed. If you're on Windows, check in the 'Regional and Language Options' in Control Panel, or the extras available in Windows Update for some older Windows versions. --Brion 10:06, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I keep getting justified paragraphs and non-underlined links.

This is driving me crazy. Suddenly for no obvious reason, I still start seeing every page rendered as if the "underline links" box in my preferences were un-checked and the "justify paragraphs" box were checked.

It happens to me both in Safari on a Mac running OS X 10.3.5 and on IE on a PC running Windows 2K, so it isn't a browser issue.

As of right now (Safari, Mac OS X 10.3.5)

It only occurs when I am logged into my own account. If I log out I see the normal default appearance.

When I am logged into my account and select Preferences, Misc. Settings I see "underline links" checked and "justify paragraphs" un-checked. I have just tried all of the following:

a) Change both of these settings, click "save," change both of them back, click "save" again. b) Check "disable page caching" in Preferences and click "save. c) Delete all cookies on my browser. d) Empty all caches on my browser. e) Command-R until the cows come home. f) Edit a page, replace the word "edit" in the URL bar with the word "purge" and press return.

I am still seeing non-underlined links (which I could tolerate) and justified text (which drives me plumb bananas).

Any ideas? I've completely run out of ideas for things to remove or purge or delete. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 21:29, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

P. S. I'm using the Monobook skin. I see un-justified text and underlined links when I change to the Classic skin, but they changed back to justified text and non-underlined links if I change back to Monobook. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 21:33, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

P. P. S. Hmmm... I tried one last thing. I am no longer experiencing the problem. I went into Preferences. I CHECKED "Justify Paragraphs." I left it checked. I pressed command-R. No longer justified, and the checkbox was no longer checked. I don't say this is cause and effect. I do say... WTF? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 21:35, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There's a known problem with the way some of the preferences are currently implemented; the wrong version can easily get stuck in the browser cache and it's hard to get it to update consistently. We're hoping to fix this up... --Brion 10:06, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Until it gets fixed, do you know any effective workaround? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 21:17, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

What version of Wikipedia is this?

I need to cite this website in a bibliography but I can't find what version this is. Can someone please help me?

See Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia. Wikipedia has no "version", so what you want is the date of last revision. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:30, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Implementation of wiki

I have implemented my own wiki using the mediawiki and I have been having problems with 2 things.

1) I have a page that is quite long 30000-40000 words. When I update the page and check the history to get the diff, it just hangs than just gets a plain white screan (in the browser). How can I fix this?

2) How can I change the navigation, and layout of the mediawiki?

thanx

This belongs more on MediaWiki help, and not on Wikipedia. Sorry. --Golbez 02:41, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

The help guide might answer your question. If not, try the Mediawiki-l mailing list. Angela. 21:05, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Edit Specialpages

Hello!

How can I edit the Specialpages (e.g. Special:Lonelypages)? In the german Wikipedia, we want to set a link on de:Special:Lonelypages to a more actual List of orphaned pages. Thanks, [[User:Rdb|rdb]] 16:18, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You can't edit special pages, but you can edit MediaWiki:Perfcached which will appear at the top of all special pages while caching is turned on (which it usually is). Angela. 21:04, Nov 18, 2004 (UTC)

Image with 'white bleed'

On Template:Province Utrecht, the flag graphic has white space to the left and bottom of the image. This is misleading about the flag (which is mostly white in the top half), and I tried some fixes by preview (in particular, the div tag style often used on main page templates). I still haven't found a method that reliably removes the white space while keeping the same basic presentation it has now. Any advice? Radagast 13:34, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

Some flag images on Wikipedia have a very faint grey border on white areas. Adding such a border may or may not be acceptable to those concerned (as such an addition is not part of the actual flag). zoney ♣ talk 13:48, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Got it working now... I used the table markup to position it, instead of the 'right' in the image markup. Radagast 17:49, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

Erroneous tooltip in the sidebar

The tooltip for the Related changes link in the sidebar (in Monobook) is in error. It reads:

Recent changes in pages linking to this page [alt-k]

when in fact Special:Recentchangeslinked shows changes to pages linked from the page. How can this be changed? —No-One Jones ^(m) 06:37, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've fixed this in MediaWiki:Monobook.js. (May take a bunch of cache flushing to get the change to show up for you.) Probably needs to be fixed on the other wikis as well. --Brion 07:02, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Strange Editing Problems

I am having editing problems with Fyshwick, Australian Capital Territory. If you look at the diffs [4] and [5] you can see JackOfOz's addition gets reverted by my next edit but doesn't show in the diff for my edit. Very strange... Martyman 02:11, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If I'm reading the diffs correctly, JackOfOz deleted some words, you added a category tag, then you undid JackOfOz's change with the comment "redo changes made by JackofOz that wouldn't hold???". --Brion 07:08, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Ok... You are right. Maybe I should pay more attention in future. I was sure JackOfOz had added those words not removed them. No wonder I confused myself when they had dissapeared. Oh well, I might revert it back to his version.. Thanks. Martyman 12:57, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Pre-emption of fancruft?

To head off misunderstandings, let me state I'm not using "fancruft" in the pejorative sense, only in the sense of "a level of detail that would be appropriate for a wiki about the series itself but inappropriate for a general-interest encyclopedia." With that said... I've been seeing an explosion of fancruft, and I suspect one of the sources is someone who compiles a complete "list of X from series Y" and creates red links for every minute detail -- for an example, I present InuYasha special items and attacks, which doesn't just create a wikilink for every "special item and attack" -- in some cases it creates separate links for the Japanese name of the attack and the English name.

What I would like to see is some VfD-like mechanism for such lists that allows the community to say "This is just far too much detail; we don't need separate articles for every single item on this list." Right now we are faced with trying to spot these excesses as they're generated; if we try to eliminate the red-links before they generate the cruft, we're attacked for doing so without consensus. -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:42, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

On the same subject, may I suggest adding "Wikipedia is not a strategy guide" to Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not? -- Antaeus Feldspar 20:00, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

This kind of stuff should really go on Wikibooks. [ alerante | “” 13:58, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC) ]

Move or copy photographs to Commons?

I have nearly two hundred of my own photographs (all GFDL) that I would like to move or copy from the English Wikipedia to the Commons, and if possible, along with the image pages. Is there a fast way to do this? Fg2 10:23, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

Gerrit has a bot which can upload images on the Commons. Perhaps this could be adapted to copy/move images from en as well. It might be worth asking on the Commons:Village pump or asking Gerrit directly. Angela. 12:14, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

Editing glitch

In my hasty move of Chirality (chemistry) from Chirality, I forgot to remove the heading. When I edited the page to remove the heading, nothing changed. The change appears in page history, but the errant heading is still displayed. --Smack 01:00, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Likely a caching problem, looks fine now. -- Cyrius|✎ 18:09, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

level of page protection

What do folks think about instigating a new level of page protection that would allow only logged in users, to edit pages. Presently, sysops can protect a page and edit it, but some controversial issues should really be edited by people who can be held accountable, but don't meet any of the crierion for protection. So, sysops would be able to half-protect a page. Any thoughts on this? Dunc|☺ 15:40, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

How do you avoid people then claiming that every page needs this sort of protection? Would it lead to anonymous users not being allowed to edit articles at all? Angela. 11:57, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Falcons 1998 99 season record

Moved to Talk:Atlanta Falcons

Upload summary

Seems like the summary field on the upload page is asking for more information than can comfortably be put into a single-line field. Why not make a multi-line field? ;Bear 22:39, 2004 Nov 11 (UTC)

I have uploaded a video to the Wikipedia !!!

With the assistance of User:Robert Merkel, I have uploaded a video in the Ogg Theora video format. The file is located at Media:Hypertrophic_Cardiomyopathy_-_Echocardiogram_-_Sam.ogg, and is linked into the article on hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Any assistance in getting the file to play automatically when loading the page would be much appreciated. Ksheka 01:31, Nov 11, 2004 (UTC)

I'd advise against that. Not everyone has high-speed/DSL/cable stuff. Let users click to play, anything else will just hurt older systems and weaker modems. -- user:zanimum

The nice thing about the video I uploaded is it's relatively small size: 613 kb. I may be able to cut that in half (by showing two or three cardiac cycles instead of four and by cropping a bit closer to the actual image) if it's possible to play automatically on page load. No point in optimizing otherwise.Ksheka 02:11, Nov 11, 2004 (UTC)

It's possible to tweak the ogg compression a bit higher to reduce the filesize as well. However, I don't think loading video automatically is a good idea - it tends to be browser and platform specific (particularly considering that Theora is not yet universally distributed), and it's a big imposition on dialup users on slow pipes (my Dad, for instance...). What would be better is for a well-chosen frame from the video to appear as a picture in the article, and a "click to download video" button. --Robert Merkel 04:37, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I don't want it automatic on my crappy dialup connection. ;Bear 22:43, 2004 Nov 11 (UTC)

Okay. How about this as a goal: 1. Show a selective frame of the video. The caption should include something like "select image to play video". When the image is selected, the video should play within the browser (as opposed to spawning a new media player window). While I've seen this sort of thing done with windows media files, I'm not sure if this is possible with ogg theora formated files. :-( Any suggestions? Ksheka 16:38, Nov 13, 2004 (UTC)

International nuisance

As mentioned before by me in "Weirdness with an IP" and by an anon in Wikipedia:Village_pump#This_is_it.2C_I_want_final.2C_complete.2C_answers.21, the IP address thing in MediaWiki is pathetic. People whose IPs aren't 64.12.117.7 have been getting this really dynamic address.

It's appeared for users in Austria, Austria, Canada (5 of 13 provinces), Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States of America (10 states). That's 16 countries, not including Wales and Scotland.

Although some have enjoyed this "New United Nations", or even "New World Order", since they can "talk to a whole bunch of people around the world", it really has been a complete turn off Wikipedia for others. Many are getting aggrevated, asking "what the hell is this about", and "why the fuck was this new message sent to me of all people", and yes, they linked to that article.

Although I know the developer have better things to be doing, this is getting silly. Personally, I like this international wall for graffiti of sorts, but many may just be leaving as soon as they get this page. -- user:zanimum

Osnabrück, Germany (a new country), Acton, Massachusetts and Buffalo, New York have been added to the list since I posted this. This is quickly snowballing out of control. -- user:zanimum

That IP address is an AOL proxy server, so it gets a lot of use. Additionally, there was until recently a bug which sometimes caused pages showing the "you have new messages" to get saved in the cache and re-sent to other users who are not using that IP address; due to AOL's situation an AOL proxy address has a great chance of a) receiving messages about vandalism and b) that message getting displayed frequently and c) thus getting saved and re-sent to other people due to the bug. This bug has, I sincerlely hope, finally been squished as of a couple days ago. There may still be some remaining cached pages showing the message, but they should get flushed out fairly soon. --Brion 07:15, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

An odd user name

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=2001:770:102:1:205:5dff:feee:959b. How was this User ID generated and why is there no link to a User page? RickK 07:18, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

It's an IPv6 IP - i.e. an anonymous user. — Kate Turner | Talk 07:33, 2004 Nov 9 (UTC)

OK, the IPv6 article is all over my head, does this mean that the address can't be linked back to a particular site? Should it be blocked as an anonymizer? RickK 07:49, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

It's just another type of IP address. AFAIK, it should be treated the same as a normal anon. JesseW 08:13, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Cool. First time I've seen one of these in the wild, outside a telecommunications lecture! zoney ♣ talk 12:24, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Experimental support for them was added by Kate Turner a couple of weeks ago. For a while wikipedia had a AAAA record pointing at it, but apparently there's been some connection reliability problems so it was removed. -- Cyrius|✎ 16:15, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Very cool! :). I have promised myself to play with IPv6 when I have the time... Thue | talk 16:18, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm a new registered user, & I have a Talk page. After I add comments on the Discussion pages, how do I post that link to my Talk page.

Math rendering borked?

Anyone know what happened here? I tried about a dozen different formatting options, and none worked. Scroll down to $\aleph _{1}$. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 02:32, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

Section headings are notoriously sensitive as to what can be put in them. Try it now, see if that suits. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 10:08, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)

good users on a banned ip

My school's IP has understandably been banned from Wikipedia because acts of vandalism have sadly been committed from it. But surely I, a constructive Wikipedian, when I log in there, should be allowed to edit, even if though I am using a banned (public) IP. I'm suggesting that the software be changed so that a trusted user can edit from a banned IP. This would prevent Wikipedians being blocked at public IPs, such as libraries, schools etc. Of course, to stop vandals exploiting this, banned IPs would need to be blocked from creating users.

This is a marvelous idea, one of those "why didn't they think of it sooner" sort of things. If this is at ALL technically possible, it should be implemented post-haste. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 02:33, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

The idea isn't new, IIRC I read it here before. And it is already listed on Bugzilla as a feature request: [6] andy 10:48, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The cursor in the search box

Just on an extremely pedantic note, I find it a lot more convenient if, when first opening up a search-oriented page such as wikipedia, the cursor is placed in the 'search' box. This allows one to immediately type the query without using the mouse. (google, merriam webster, etc have this feature)

Uploadf file format

I used to upload OpenOffice.org *.sxd source files of my drawings so that others can easily manipulate them. However, this is no longer possible, and I get the suggestion that ".sxd" is not a recommended image file format. Can this be changed back or is there a way to upload these files? Same for the commons. Thanks. -- 14:42, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)

Incorrect message

When an edit screen for a new Talk page is opened up (the Talk page does not currently exist), Wikipedia displays "Wikipedia does not yet have a page called xxx". It should say "Wikipedia does not yet have a page called Talk:xxx". The "xxx" page DOES exist. RickK 07:20, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)

I've changed this in MediaWiki:Newarticletext. It will now say "Wikipedia does not yet have a Talk page called..." Angela. 08:38, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)

Search only picking up old articles

I already asked this at the Helpdesk, but I thought I would try here to see if I got a different response. Why is it that using the wikipedia search feature I am unable to find any article that was created since October 6th? Is this just the normal rate at which new pages are indexed for searching or is something wrong? Martyman 02:36, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

What Wikipedia search feature? <KF> 19:29, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

Maybe it's the Google search of wikipedia space that is in questino here. Guaranteed to be at least a little behind. ;Bear 22:49, 2004 Nov 11 (UTC)

It was the normal "type the word in the box at the left and click search" Wikipedia search feature, not the google version. I just got back from holiday today and the search is picking up the articles in question, so either it is now fixed or there is always a month or so delay between page creation and search indexing. Martyman 07:43, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

AFAIK, there is indeed such a delay in the indexing. I remeber one time Wikipedia was slow and one of the developers said it was because they were updating the search index. JesseW 02:32, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Ceres page move request

Can an admin move Ceres (mythology) to Ceres? Not receiving any disagreement, I moved the disambiguation page to Ceres (disambiguation). —Mike 20:36, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

Wait. This contradicts all the other ancient gods. See Jupiter, Mars. Don't we already have a convention on this? Rmhermen 00:11, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

I agree, we should just follow the existing practice. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:23, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I can't find the practice written out. But I recall we were going to move pages from foo (mythology) to foo (god) lest we insulted anyone. The ones listed on Roman mythology are still listed under three different forms. I would suggest standardizing on foo (god). Rmhermen 00:32, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

I can understand if there is a major planet by the same name, but in this case there isn't. You can also take a look at Quirinus, Minerva, and Lares for other examples of gods without the "(god)" or "(mythology)" disambiguation in the article's title. —Mike 04:20, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

Unfortunately, 1 Ceres is an odd case. Because there's no solid definition of just what a "planet" is, the solar system is left with many objects that are clearly not simple asteroids, but are historically not considered planets either. This category includes Ceres, 4 Vesta, and the recently discovered Sedna and Quaoar, among others. Many people think Pluto belongs in that category with them. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:42, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Current practice is a mess.

When a minor celestial object (or software program or anything else) is named after a mythological/religious entity, the original mythological/religious entity should surely have the undisambiguated title as it is the original after which the other was named. Currently this is not consistant. Compare the different treatment of Apollo and Juno. As to Jupiter and Mars, one can strongly argue that treatment of the deities should be under the undisambiguated article titles rather than under Jupiter (god) and Mars (god). If a name has muliple meanings, normally one at least should be the undisambiguated meaning, and here it should be Jupiter referring to the god, since that is the original. As the name of the planet is so common, it would be reasonable that the Jupiter page about the god would have two disambiguation links above the lead paragraph, one to Jupiter (planet) and one to Jupiter (disambiguation) for other meanings. This seems to me to be a rule that could be universally applied to all gods and mythological and legendary personages.

Another possible rule is that in cases where it seemed that a reference to something other than the deity is more common, then a disambiguation page would be the main target. The difficulty with this rule would be establishing which use was more common. Which use of Jupiter is most common? Probably here a case for the planet can be made. But what of Juno or Europa or Eros or Hercules and many others where it is probably impossible to tell which is the most common usage. Following the other rule avoids needless argument and makes Wikipedia usage consistant. Enter the divine name alone to get to an article on religion and mythology. Add "(planet)" or "(asteroid)" or "(constellation)" or "(satellite)" to get to the celestial objects. Or standardize an official list of celestial names which are considered of equal value to their mythological counterparts, ones where it is likely that more searches will be for the celestial references than the divine references. Such a list might be: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Vesta, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Sedna, Callisto, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Orion, Andromeda, Cassiopeia. For the rest, mythological and legendary articles get undisambiguated priority.

Use of "(mythology)" for deities has always been bad, especially so for Roman deities that don't have any known mythology. Vesta is not the goddess of the hearth in Roman mythology especially, but more generally the ancient Roman goddess of the hearth. Accordingly, in most case "(god)" or "(goddess)" is better when disambiguation is needed. But it shouldn't be much needed.

Jallan 22:54, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

When a user looks up Jupiter, they'll expect information about the planet, not the god. Shouldn't the primary page should follow majority usage, not original source? In cases of roughly equal usages, disambiguation pages would be primary. Kundor 06:19, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

But for many cases you cannot know what majority use is and it's way too much trouble to attempt to find out. That's why I suggested a general rule of going with the origin name as the primary name, except in cases where you can make a good case that the secondary usage of the name is far more likely to be sought than the original usage. I provided what I think is a good exception list of such names for celestial objects, including the name Jupiter. I think the rule should be, to go with the origin name rule, except for the small number of cases where a strong case can be made that this should be an exception to the general rule. And stick such names into a list in the guidelines when they come up. There won't be many. Jallan 22:24, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wait a minute -- these indents have gotten out of hand. That said, the thrust of my two cents is that we must always keep in mind a basic question: how is anybody gonna find it? Always make sure there is _something_ at the basic level, like Ceres -- regardless what is on that page. In the case of Jupiter, the overwhelming usage is about the planet, and a tag line at the top can direct one to the disambig page. In the case of Ceres, my call would be for the mythology entry to have the main slot, and a redirect from Ceres (mythology). Ask (in your mind) the man on the street, and also keep in mind that in thie wikiworld a single usage constitutes a pattern -- if Ceres (mythology) exists, then Jupter (mythology) must also; a visitor will see an item and infer a pattern and use it. ;Bear 16:29, 2004 Nov 12 (UTC)

Automation script

Lately I've been using a script I wrote myself to perform repetitive Wikipedia tasks such as cleanup, votes for deletion, and adding tags. The script runs Internet Explorer, performs the necessary keystrokes, and follows the necessary links. For anyone interested, I've stored the script at:

• User:Poccil/Automation.js

All discussion should go to User talk:Poccil/Automation.js. The script is meant to be run with Windows Script Host.

[[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 06:13, Nov 30, 2004 (UTC)

New (Old) Look?

In the last day or so, Wikipedia has begun loading differently on my browser. The background color, fonts, layout...everything is loading as it did several years ago (yellow), as opposed to the more modern look (white). I didn't switch my computer off, let alone change any settings; so I assume this has been a software change on the site. I'm not complaining, because the old format always loaded faster for me; but I'd like to learn what happened. I didn't see an announcement. Thanks to anyone who can answer, or point me in the right direction. Cribcage 06:01, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Check your skin preferences. I've heard of a few cases of them spontaneously changing. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:09, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Weird, but you nailed it. I didn't even realize there were so many options. Thanks! Cribcage 06:17, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I keep seeing little squares instead of a maths or other font character - why please?

I often see small squares in simple maths formula where I would expect to see for example a multiplication sign. I would see q "little square" p where I would expect to see q x p or something similar. I also see little squares instead of what I expect is chinese or japanese script, and in place of other more unusual characters.

In the Buckingham Pi Theorem article

"The Buckingham π theorem is a key theorem in dimensional analysis.

The theorem states that the functional dependence between a certain number (e.g.: n) of variables can be reduced by the number (e.g. k) of independent dimensions occurring in those variables to give a set of p = n "LITTLE SQUARE" k independent, dimensionless numbers. For the purposes of the experimenter, different systems which share the same description by dimensionless numbers are equivalent.

This theorem describes how every physically meaningful equation involving n variables can be equivalently rewritten as an equation of n "LITTLE SQUARE" m dimensionless parameters, where m is the number of fundamental units used." and so on.

However when I copy the text to Wordpad it appears to display correctly, although not in Notepad. It also displays correctly in this editing page.

Why is this and what can I do to see the correct characters please? I expect I am missing a font. If so, what is it, where do I get it, and how do I instal it please? I am using Windows Me with IE6.

Thanks,

fred2

Different programs on your computer are using different fonts. Some of these fonts have the relevant characters, others don't. You probably don't need new fonts, you just need to make sure that all of your programs use suitable fonts. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:26, Nov 30, 2004 (UTC)

I agree that different programs must be using different fonts, but I am still wondering how to get the correct characters to appear in IE rather than the little squares I see. As a start, could anyone tell me a) what font or character set and b) what character code, the characters where I see little squares are in the Buckingham Pi Theorem article above please? Thanks, fred2.

Difficulty of finding articles if you can't remember the exact name

Anyone else find that, despite categories, search engines, and Wikipedia global search when it running, it is quite hard to find articles in Wikipedia? I'm referring specifically to articles that you know you've seen, but can't remember the exact name of.

In the service of being specific, I expose my own stupidity and frivolity. The last article I looked for and could not find was "List of molecules with unusual names." As I write this, Wikipedia is in its Google/Yahoo search mode. Using the Google search option, I tried "List of compounds with unusual names", "List of chemical compounds with unusual names", and "List of chemicals with unusual names." No dice. Then I was sure I would hit paydirt with searches including one of the unusual names, namely "arsole." In fact I tried searching simply on "arsole." "Your search - Arsole - did not match any documents."

Incidentally, this points up the fact that Google is not equivalent to a full global search, even though it is so good that it tempting to get into the habit of thinking that it is.

I then tried http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Allpages&from=List , and, of course, not realizing that I had to go all the way to "M", gave up on that. "List of compounds" exists but did not reference what I was looking at.

(Eventually I had the sense to realize that I'd added an item to this list myself and found it by looking in my own contributions. And then struck myself sharply on the forehead with the base of the palm of my hand.)

In the wake of Victoria Snelgrove's death, I looked for an article on "Nonlethal weapons," didn't find it, and started one. About two paragraphs in, I was trying to get information on _specific_ nonlethal weapons and noticed that we had many such articles, on "Rubber bullet," for example. One of them had a link to "Non-lethal force," which turned out to be the article I had thought had not existed. Fortunately there wasn't a great deal of duplication and I was able to merge most of my material into that article, i.e. it hadn't been a pure waste of time.

(And yes, I added a redirect from "Nonlethal weapons" to "Non-lethal force.")

Despite categories, redirects, and searches, I still have trouble finding things in Wikipedia—even when I know they are there. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 23:59, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree that this is an issue as well, though the only way i have found as a work around is creativity. I feel as you do in that this should be adressed. Ramius V. Schweitzer 00:16, Nov 29, 2004 (UTC)

What appears to be wanted is an analytical index to Wikipedia, rather like the one published for the 11th edition of Britannica. There was the regular alphabetical index to subjects, but in addition there was a classified table of contents.There were 24 main classifications, anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, biology, etc, etc ending with miscellaneous. Under each heading the individual articles were listed, and each section was ended with a list of the relevant biographical articles. I certainly find problems in finding articles, even those I have written myself, when I cannot get the wording of the titles exactly right. Finding stuff is only as good as the quality of the hyperlinking, of course. Using the regular in-built search engine does not give an overview of a field, and maybe this is an aspect of Wikipedia we should give serious attention to in the future Apwoolrich 07:30, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

And for images as well. I had the same problem when doing the Google Image search restrictive on the Wikipedia domain. It didn't produce a lot, and there wasn't a big selection... either the images have moved to the Commons or as it has been suggested, Google does not have a comprehensive copy of the Wikipedia to search from. --[[User:AllyUnion|AllyUnion (talk)]] 08:03, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

(It also should not be overlooked that the Britannica 11th has a damned fine just-plain index. I once read a book entitled "Indexing, the Art Of" which explained the issue. Contrary to apparently popular belief in the computer world, indexes cannot be produced automatically. Computers are good at alphabetizing terms and linking to the page numbers but are no good at selecting and organizing the terms to be indexed. Nor are laypeople (definitely including me!) good at this). [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 10:55, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Photo / Image Search

Is there a better way to search for images on the Wikipedia? --[[User:AllyUnion|AllyUnion (talk)]] 06:31, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Nevermind... apparently Google Image search with a restricted domain works. --[[User:AllyUnion|AllyUnion (talk)]] 06:35, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Small error on the preferences page

I just stumbled across an error on the preferences page. It says the following:

Note: After saving, you have to clear your browser cache to see the changes. Mozilla: click Reload (or press Ctrl-R), IE/Opera: Ctrl-F5, Safari: Cmd-R, Konqueror: Ctrl-R

This is somewhat incorrect, as Ctrl-F5 in Opera reloads all open pages. When editing this, it could also be cleaned up a bit, so I propose moving Opera and Konqueror to the Mozilla field (and adding a period at the end of the line):

Note: After saving, you have to clear your browser cache to see the changes. Mozilla/Opera/Konqueror: Ctrl-R, IE: Ctrl-F5, Safari: Cmd-R. Niffux 02:59, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Redirects

I would like that someone make a list of double redirects and of redirects to non-existent pages. It's about time that these redirects should be fixed. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 01:59, Nov 28, 2004 (UTC)

New versions of images not showing up?

I'm not really sure how to best express this question so I'll just relate my problems in the form of a narrative.

I uploaded an image, creating Image:Black_Apple_Logo.png. So far, so good. I realized when it came time to use the image in an article (ISO 8859-1) that it needed to have a transparent background, so I make the background transparent, cropped a little, and reuploaded a new image. However, the change wasn't reflected on the image page or in the current image file. What follows in the file history is an attempt to reupload the image, and then an accidental flurry of reverts, which can all be deleted by an administrator.

Furthermore, as far as I can tell, thumbnails made before the image was updated remain thumbnails of the old image.

I know for a fact that it's not my browser doing the caching. Anyway, will the image page and actual image file ever look like the version it really is (perhaps it is updated by MediaWiki after a few hours or days), or will it always show the first version uploaded? Is the problem really on my end after all? What am I missing? Any information is greatly appreciated. --Miles | Talk 22:21, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)

The new version is showing with different dimensions and alpha channel. Sometimes it takes a few minutes for the various caches on Wikipedia's side to update. -- Cyrius|✎ 23:27, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Wiki concept error

I've been spending the evening here reading a load of stuff about all sorts of policies to help with this that and the other - natably VfD and POV resolution. I've also (for better or worse) gotten myself in arbitrating a POV dispute on talk:Modern geocentrism.

I think that there is a simple technical solution to help scale up the existing processes. It seems to me that one of the problems with all of this is the idea of using a Wiki for the talk pages. The Wiki idea just doesn't work for discussions - it relies far too heavily on the discipline of the people having the discussion which is fine so long as tempers never get frayed.

A bulletin board with normal forums seems much more scalable.

I like the Wiki concept as much as the next person, but just because it's a great way to write an article for the encyclopia doesn't mean that it's a great way to talk about it.

Now when I monitor this I guess I'm going to get a load of noise from the other threads... Just one manifestation of the problem I'm talking about.

--KayEss 15:02, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've hit a wall trying to use files from the download page

([7]) I just want to be able to run queries on the current records. I have hit a wall trying to get MySQL to see the data. I assume the file 20041106_cur_table.sql.bz2 is a compressed version of the cur table, which at least Windows MySQL wants at cur.MYD. But if I just put it there, MySQL doesn't see the data, and if I try to build an index (i.e. CREATE INDEX cur ON cur (cur_user_text)) it changes the .MYD file to zero bytes. I've spent hours reading documentation here and on source forge, etc., and trying different things, and don't want to waste anymore time when I know other people have the answer.

So: Once you've jumped all the hoops to have an uncompressed table file, have My SQL running, etc. how do you make MySQL able to use the data? Niteowlneils 02:11, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It's a plain text dump of the table, not the actual table. You have to import it into MySQL, which I don't recall the syntax for at the moment. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:27, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Sure doesn't look like text to me. When I opened it in TextPad the first couple dozen characters are "%>ªà»fõ:~?³Z9Ry-î�[i>Ô¢&#131;Ø�+ná¦&#152;8" with nothing more sensible in sight. Maybe I need to take a step back and double check I used bzip2 correctly. I have the MySQL manual open in another tab, so I can lookup the import syntax easy enuf, if that's all it takes. Thanks Niteowlneils 03:33, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I must say the file name(s) are REALLY misleading--if they had an extension of .txt or .csv, instead of .sql, I could have figured out it wasn't getting decompressed myself, several hours of beating my head against the wall earlier. Niteowlneils 04:11, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Eh? Has a .bz2 extension for me, indicating that it's compressed. Perhaps whatever operating system you're using hid the bz2 extension. -- Cyrius|✎

Well, yeah, I knew that .bz2 was for the compressed files--since the file names all end .sql.bz2 the uncompressed results end in .sql. I did get a 1.7G uncompressed file, but when I tried to import the records (using LOAD INFILE...) it only found 8 thousand-some records. Sigh. The good news is that I was able to do one of the things I wanted (update the 'most active Wikipedians in the past 30 days) from the csv file, so I could get rid of the 'needs attention' tag (can't believe somebody considers updating it that high a priority, but that's another matter). Niteowlneils 01:42, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You can't use LOAD INFILE, as that uses a comma-separated (or tab-separated? or some such) format. These are SQL dumps -- files containing SQL statements which reconstruct the database. Either use SOURCE or just pipe the data into the mysql command-line client. --Brion 05:22, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Embedding templates within templates

Is there any reason why templates can not be embedded within templates more than one layer? For example: Template:stubs has templates which use a general template for creating stubs: Template:Metastub. But when you apply Template:stubs to a page, all you see is the Template:Metastub rather than the supposed text for the template. --[[User:AllyUnion|AllyUnion (talk)]] 11:22, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think you will find that the reason for this particular problem is that there is a hard-coded limit to the number of times a single template may be embedded in a single article. This was intended to avoid vandalism. I believe that the problem is in the process of being fixed. You are indeed allowed to embed templates within templates and I believe that there is no particular limit to that. HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 12:27, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)

I have noticed that redundant categories are not eliminated during the page display. That is, a page that has the same category at the top and the bottom of the content will display that entry twice in the categories box at the bottom. But I'm sure somebody is aware of that. — RJH 17:56, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

quick contact of wikipedia administrator

There needs to be some kind of e-mail address made available to the public about problems with Wikipedia. This is to help with issues like the TOTALLY INAPPROPRIATE image that is right now appearing on the Wikipedia front page, which seems to have been hacked into the feature article, Felix the Cat. I have been searching the Wikipedia site for someone to contact about this disgusting problem. I can't find any easy ways to contact anyone.

The image problem has been fixed. JesseW 02:43, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

• Addressing the original comment: problems like this aren't fixed by an administrator, they're fixed by the community of wiki contributors. This means you! Granted, the front page is complex; I tried once to track down an inappropriate front-page item (a thinly-disguised exhortation for Americans to vote a certain way, just before election day; in my book, potentially more damaging to wikipedia's image than a porn pic) and someone else had deleted it long before I figured out where was, ie, within about two minutes. Do you know of a help desk that acts on your e-mail that fast? I didn't think so. Sharkford 22:21, 2004 Nov 25 (UTC)

If anyone wants a free email address for the above purpose taking the form *****@gmail.com (ie a Gmail address) I would gladly offer one of my invites for free. We could publicise the email address and give the password to admins by email. Or, we could create a User:Wikireport or similar and have that as the contact address. Anyway, drop a note on my talk page if you're interested.--[[User:Gabriel Webber|Gabriel Webber (babble were rig)]] 17:20, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Special:Whatlinkshere does not show anything for images

I stumbled over a problem that I first thought of as a browser cache problem, but in fact, it is not. I have tested on several platforms and with several browsers, and the problems persists: When you link to an image, the link will not show on its "Special:Whatlinkshere" page. It shows on the image's page under the "File links" section, though. Is this a bug and if yes, what can be done about it?

timo 14:23, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think the cause is that the article actually links to the actual image file, not the "Image" page that has the pic plus license tags, etc. Thus it's probably not a bug, and having 'what links here' add these as a special case would constitute a 'feature request', tho' I am reluctant to suggesting it be submitted, as a) the functionality is already provided by the "file links" section, and b) there are bugs and (IMHO) more useful feature requests already in the queue, waiting to be addressed. Niteowlneils 18:38, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Stub threshold

I sometimes set my stub threshold to some amount, and then try and make a certain set of links blue. It is currently set to 1000 words, and I began to try and expand the articles in the Template:Arabmusic box, starting with music of Iraq. That article is now clearly longer than music of Lebanon, Palestinian music, music of Libya, music of Kuwait or music of Syria, but for some reason Iraq is still red while those others are blue. Cutting and pasting from the edit window reveals they are all below 1000 words. I would guess that the template messes up the wiki's word count for some reason, but the same template is in all of them. I've cleared my cache, and that didn't help. Does something other than the word count affect the stub threshold? If you have a stub threshold set, what is it and which articles are blue for you? Tuf-Kat 18:42, Dec 4, 2004 (UTC)

Weird, as soon as I edited this page, music of Iraq became blue. Nevertheless, the article only has 835 words, so I still wonder why it is not marked as a stub. Music of Libya has a mere 153 words, but it is blue too... Tuf-Kat 18:45, Dec 4, 2004 (UTC)

The value you set for your stub threshold is the number of bytes in the wikitext, not the number of words. See m:Help:Link#Stub feature. - 18:56, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC) Lee (talk)

Ah-ah. Thanks! Tuf-Kat 19:06, Dec 4, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia T-shirts

After making a donations i wanted to ask a question about wikipedia merchandising. But when i sent an email to the e-mail address listed in the donation conformation mail, donations@wikipedia.org, it bounced.

<donations@wikipedia.org>: host mail.wikimedia.org[207.142.131.207] said: 550

   <donations@wikipedia.org>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in
   local recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Reporting-MTA: dns; smtp8.wanadoo.nl Arrival-Date: Sat, 4 Dec 2004 12:07:34 +0100 (CET)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; donations@wikipedia.org Action: failed Status: 5.0.0 Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host mail.wikimedia.org[207.142.131.207] said: 550

   <donations@wikipedia.org>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in
   local recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Subject: t-shirts From: Arno Overgaauw Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2004 12:07:34 +0100 To: donations@wikipedia.org Received: from [192.168.1.94] (c537509c7.cable.wanadoo.nl [83.117.9.199]) by smtp8.wanadoo.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4A72D653A0 for <donations@wikipedia.org>; Sat, 4 Dec 2004 12:07:34 +0100 (CET) Message-ID: <41B19A76.4010008@zonnet.nl> User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7 (X11/20040615) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Enigmail-Version: 0.84.1.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hi, is there any t-shirts i can buy with wikipedia on it? Reg. Arno.

Check out m:Wikipedia_T-shirts.

User page questions

Is there such a thing? I added my test page i made to my watch list, but it doesn't appear in my watched list. How can I view the pages I've made? I'd like to get this down pat so I can make a "draft" page to store my stories before I post them. [[User:GregNorc|GregNorc|Talk]]

You could refer to the list of your contributions. —Mike 22:25, Dec 3, 2004 (UTC)

Hyperlink failure

former official site (Internet Archive)

Please advise. --SPUI 19:50, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Use "%3A" to escape the embedded ":" in the URL, like this: former official site. —AlanBarrett 20:29, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)