Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26
Welcome, newcomers and baffled oldtimers!
Your questions answered here
Editing talk pages: Is there an easier way to contribute to ths talk page than editing it directly? --User:jacobgreenbaum
- Yes, use an off-line editor like NotePad to compose your contribution first. Then copy and paste into the talk page (there is no append function). --Ed Poor
Mailto broken:How come my [mailto:[email protected] Tom Parmenter] that worked with the old software no longer does? It used to be "hot", now it just sits there. See bottom of my user page.Ortolan88
- Because you had an extra space -- [mailto: [email protected] Tom Parmenter] instead of [mailto:[email protected] Tom Parmenter]. --Ed Poor
Wrap text around pictures: How do I get text to wrap around a picture? (Copied from Talk:Dwight Eisenhower to promote the idea of this village pump page.)
- Easy way: <div style="float: left">[[image:Eisenhower.jpg]]</div>
- Hard way: use a table (shudder). --Brion VIBBER
Of course, the table works in older non-CSS browsers, too.
- So does ASCII art.
Gutenberg link looks awful: How do I link to the uncopyrighted ASCII text maintained by the Project Gutenberg? I copied a link and it just looks awful?
- Text copied from Talk:Robert Louis Stevenson to make it more accessible and to promote this village pump page).
- You can't just look up something in Project Gutenberg and cut and paste the link. If you do, you end up with a dog's dinner like something this (broken into two lines for "readability"):
&ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/
- The wiki software can use it to link, but apparently wiki can't get rid of all the excess characters no matter how much you try to mark it up. However, if you edit the link down to this
- wiki takes you to the same place but is clean.
- There are several forms available, use "edit this page" to look at the coding:
- Enclose the bare URL in single brackets:
- Treasure Island Project Gutenberg text: [1]
- Enclose the bare URL in single brackets:
- Enclose URL in single brackets, but after the URL leave a space and add explanatory text before the closing bracket:
- Simply run the URL in text without any brackets:
- Treasure Island from Project Gutenberg -- http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120
- Simply run the URL in text without any brackets:
- The last form is less desirable, but since you see that kind of URL in the wikipedia all the time, I thought I should show it too.
The advantage of the last url is that if somebody prints out the wikipedia entry, they get a usable URL that they can type into their browser later, rather than just seeing the name of the link. KJ 21:08 Aug 5, 2002 (PDT)
Please note this on bug report 583234. A workaround until it gets fixed someday is to manually change the colon that appears in the compound link to %3A, like this:
- [http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp%3A//ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/ Gutenberg text]
- becomes Gutenberg text
Uhhh, okay that doesn't work either. Time for more bug reports. :) --Brion VIBBER
Editing individual year entries I stumbled across Tarquin's style guide for the layout of contents of these pages, but I wondered whether there was any particular commonly agreed restriction on content for these. For example, can one just check on pages which link to a year article and slap the events in (with discretion over omitting particularly boring events!) Mazzy
- In the absence of some robot spider doing the same thing with limited intelligence, I have been adding to the various "day" and "year" pages as I go along. Very few of them are thickly populated, and if the only thing that happened in 864 was "Khan Boris of the Bulgarians is baptized an Orthodox Christian", then that tells you something, either about 864 or about the state of the Wikipedia.
- So, it seems to me you should go ahead and add to the "day" and "year" pages. Wiki on. Ortolan88
I added an HTML comment to a page I was working on (for a semi-good reason) and it munged up the editing process in Konqueror - the existence of the comment caused it give up before finishing the textarea. I assume it doesn't affect (at least some) other browsers, since someone else went in and removed the comment and it was fine after that. Is this a known bug? -- Bth
- This sounds like it's probably a bug in Konqueror. All "<" and ">" characters are turned into &< and &> before they're put into the textarea, so they can't possibly be interpreted as actual tags or comments. (By the way, you'll find a link to our bug-tracking system at Wikipedia:Bug reports; if you find what seems to be a bug, please report it there and we'll be able to keep track of it better.) --Brion VIBBER