User talk:Brooke Vibber

Brion, I just noticed you had italicized some of the words in the Bats article I wrote. Please note that only genus and species names should be italicized in Linnaean taxonomy, and not any other level of taxon.
-Aidan

Ach, very well. Brion VIBBER

Cool! Thanks Brion. What did you have to do to fix it? maveric149

Don't thank me too soon, the bug was my fault too. :) In the function that strips out unwanted HTML tags, there's a buglet that causes the whole process to stop dead if it found too many closing tags -- there was an extra </font> tag in there which set it off. D'oh! Hopefully Jimbo will install the patch soon, but until then just make sure you have at least as many opening tags as closing tags...

Fair enough. So all the text was still there in the edit mode then? If that is the case, then I owe you an apology - I should have looked first before I threw a temper-tantrum. I then would have realized it was a rendering issue, and not an actual deletion. maveric149

Quite all right, I'd be throwing temper-tantrums too if my baby came up that badly broken! --BV

I love the macrons in the rubi. Had no idea how one would do that. -- Olof

Ahh, the wonders of Unicode! If you have (lots of) spare time, take a look through the Unicode character charts. Most people with current computers should have fonts that include everything in Basic Latin, Latin-1 supplement, Latin Extended-A, Greek, Cyrillic, and some other bits. Hmm, here's a shortcut that lists just the characters in the default Microsoft fonts. --BV 2002/03/12

Are you sure that Soderbergh's Solaris is remake? I heard that this will be new adaptation of the book. That's why i decided to put two Solaris (movie), one for Tarkowsky (with future intention of added wikipedia contains spoilers etc) and second for future Soderbergh. szopen

Well, I consider it a remake in that it's another movie based on the same story. I consider the recent Tim Burton Planet of the Apes movie to be a remake, even though it's not really closely based on the 1968 film, but both are based (loosely) on the book La Planète des singes. Of course, even the first movie was a remake of the book, when you think about it. :) In general I think it's preferable to keep multiple incarnations of the same thing on the same page where appropriate, particularly when there's roughly zero information on at least one of them. If and when there's a reason to separate Soderberghe's version, we can do so. --BV

one more thing - could you possibly look at Stanislaw Lem entry? It seems there is something wrong with software - just look how it begins... szopen

Yeah, as I mentioned at the bottom of wikipedia:Bug reports, I accidentally broke that feature such that inter-wiki links with % signs (used for url-encoding as a hack until we move to UTF-8) are rejected. Until Jimbo installs my patch to fix it again, either ignore it (grrrr) or switch things to ASCII-based redirects. --BV

Incubus? Charm? I think I would have to disagree with you on this one... but it is pretty funny for those who speak Esperanto! It was incredibly hilarious to watch with other Esperanto speakers in Philly. Although I have to admit that the funniest experience I think I had at those things was on the New York subway when a guy asked us what language we were speaking: "Well, we're all really Americans, but we're speaking the international language, Esperanto!" and the guy replied, "What? Is this some kind of joke?!" :-) --Chuck Smith

Well, I've always loved those old Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes, and Incubus feels just like one, krom ĝia esperanteco. As well it should, having been made by the same people that did The Outer Limits. For a real hoot though, run William Shatner's commentary track on the DVD sometime. Sadly, the commentary's not in Esperanto. :) --BV

Nice Brion putting in the main page a link to Slovene Wikipedia. As for now I am the only one Slovene wikipedian and I do hope this will change soon, 'cause Wikipedia really means something. I just want you to correct a typo mistake if it is possible. It is not slovenkso but slovensko. Thank you in advance, man. I can give some assistance on Wikipedian's geographical maps in non-English if it is needed. --XJam [2002.29.03] 5 Friday (0)

Oops, gess i cant spel... Fixed it. Help with the maps would be great! Get me a list of the country names and whatever other text belongs there appropriately translated and I'll happily put up a slovene version. --BV

I've finally move the incorrect Slovene pages from http://si.wikipedia.com to http://sl.wikipedia.com . I hope this will make things clearer about Slovene and Sinhalese languages. Brion, please correct once again the protected main page for the right link. --XJam [2002.06.03] 1 Monday (0)

Great, thanks! If you notice any other oddities in the lists, let me know (or just fix 'em). Brion VIBBER

Many thanks for the quick response on user 62.98.various. I really should get off my duff and write for a sysop password... your help is much appreciated. -- April

Hi Brion, God-of-Wiki-Tech :) Maveric said I should copy this note here because you'd be better able to help me with it. I have no idea why but I had a big problem with the Bug Report page:

Maybe you can help me? I'm getting very frustrated by things that don't work today and I don't know if it's because I'm doing it wrong or not... I tried to search for 'May 23' to see if anyone else had done a birthdate fill-in, but I got a Boolean error because 'May' is less than four letters long!' So I thought I'd report it on the bug reports page, only when I loaded the screen and hit 'edit' it loaded the appropriate window - but then it wouldn't let me add any new text to the page! It it locked? Or at maximum length? Maybe somebody who knows what they're doing needs to make a 'Bug Reports Page 2'... or maybe I've just totally screwed up because I'm an ignorant newbie! Also, when I typed 'help' into the search box to see if there was another help page to give me a clue, I got no results... I find it hard to believe that no articles anywhere in the entire Wikipedia use the world 'help' in them! I'm bewildered... KJ

As far as searching, there are some problems with the search function (short words break, and some words just don't come up with any results) and we're working on fixing that. After the next upgrade, it should automatically fall back to a slower, but more thorough, search method if it doesn't get any results.

As for editing long pages... what browser, what operating system, and what version of everything are you using? The longer pages seem to be particularly troublesome for some people; there've been some reports about Internet Explorer 5.5 on Mac OS giving some kind of beeping noise when trying to edit (unfortunately I can't test this, as I don't have a Mac), and there are known problems with Mozilla 0.9.9 (can't submit long pages) and in general (editing is very very slow when the sidebar is enabled, especially for longer pages).

For the Mozilla problems, you can work around it by upgrading to a nightly build that has the submit bug fixed (see http://mozilla.org/, down in the right-bottom corner) and by disabling the sidebar in your Wikipedia preferences for the slow-edit bug. For the Mac IE bug, I don't know. :( For anything else, I also don't know yet! But I'll try to help... Knowing exactly what the problem is should help with that; does your browser refuse to let you type text? Or can you type, but saving your changes doesn't work? Brion VIBBER, Sunday, April 7, 2002

I'm using Netscape and I think the problem MIGHT have been with my computer. I had a similar incident with my diary a few hours later, where keyboard apparantly stopped responding. I restarted netscape and it was fine. During the problem I couldn't type any text into the textbox. Hopefully it won't recur! I just worked with a wiki page that was every bit as long as the bug reports screen and it worked fine. KJ

Hey Brion -- Do you know if there is a way to prevent Google from indexing and displaying wikipedia edit-links in google searches? As it is right now, even these pages (which shouldn't really exist -- right?) are indexed by Google and presented in search results. Not sure if this is a bug, mis-feature or even a feature in somebody's mind, but this may be the main source of many of the "Describe the new page here." pages come from (which has been a major maintenance issue that is eating up the time of several sysops). I’ve been tracking many of the IP's that create these pages and most never return. So I don't think that these people are purposely creating these pages as a kind of vandalism, they are just understandably confused when they click on a link from google titled Editing California State University and are presented with a text box with the words "Describe the new page here." -- hell, I might even have hit the Save button a couple of times in my pre-wiki days. Any help would be greatly appreciated. --maveric149

Yeah, that's possible... Okay, the issue is that currently the edit links look like this: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/User_talk:Brion_VIBBER&action=edit. A web search crawler has no way of knowing that that's a dynamic page that it shouldn't be messing with. If we used the full URL, ie http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Brion_VIBBER&action=edit, it might be clearer... maybe. Leastwise, looking in google, I don't see edit pages showing up in my google searches when checking the perl-based wikis, where the URL is like http://eo.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=edit&id=Brion_VIBBER/Priparolu. On the other hand, ?-ed URLs for viewing articles do show from both on the perl- and php- wikis (look for things on the meta wiki, it's still running on all-explicit URLs without the /wiki/ alias); perhaps google is playing some kind of guessing game, where "something=edit" in a URL with a query string gets ignored? I don't know... arrrgghh... Brion VIBBER, Friday, May 3, 2002

You could probably help things by putting ".../wiki.phtml..." in wikipedia.com's ROBOTS.TXT file. --LDC

Hey Brion,

I got into a bit of trouble awhile back by accidentally deleting The German Ideology from the database. This page was created as a blank page by a newbie back when the server was moving VERY slowly. I hit delete several times over the period of an hour and kept getting timeouts. Apparently, somebody was actually working on the article at the same time, saved, and then I deleted that version without knowing somebody spent time creating an article out of the blank page. Is there a way to recover deleted material that was deleted within minutes of being created? --maveric149

I don't know if it still works this way, but a couple of weeks ago I found that if you recreated a deleted page (for example, if you were to go to The German Ideology and just type in random junk then save it), the history link would then allow you to access the prior history of the deleted page. I'll test and see if that's still the case... Bryan Derksen, Saturday, May 18, 2002 -- Nope, sorry, doesn't appear to work any more. Bryan Derksen, Saturday, May 18, 2002

There's not an explicit 'undelete' function yet, but the delete function is set up in anticipation of one; the deleted page is still (or at least, should still be) kept in the old versions table, but unlinked so it doesn't show up in the regular page history list. Poking around in the old table, I do see a "Describe the new page here." page for The_German_Ideology dated April 21, but I don't see a more recent version (or one with content). If there was in fact a more recent version saved, it seems to be gone now, sorry. Brion VIBBER, Saturday, May 18, 2002

Thanks for the info -- maybe the article wasn't saved correctly in the first place because of the ridiculously slow performance of the server that day (there was much weirdness going on that day). Perhaps I did only delete the "Describe the new page here." page like I thought... Perhaps some of the performance issues caused something unexpected to happen with eithe the save or delete... Perhaps... Anyway I tried. Thanks again for your help. --maveric149

What do I need to remove an uploaded file that shouldn't be here? Specifically, a user called Mushroomhead whose user page is blank and who has no record of working on any articles, has uploaded a file called "ACDC - For Those About To Rock.mp3"; even if ACDC doesn't object, Wikipedia isn't an MP3 server. Vicki Rosenzweig

If you have been declared a sysop, you can click "delete X" from the list in special:Upload (the list is in filesystem order, so you might need to search for the filename to find it). If not, just create a blank file with the same name on your computer, and upload it over the objectionable material. It can then be completely deleted later. (About this file specifically though, see my comment below.) Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Deleted. For some reason that file hadn't shown up on the Uploads page yet so I typed http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/special:upload&removeFile=ACDC - For Those About To Rock.mp3 which seemed to work. --maveric149

The file also didn't show up when I tried to access it directly -- I don't believe the upload went through in the first place. (The uploads page is really in need of a rewrite; it says "upload succeeded!" and logs it without actually checking to see if it succeeded. Ditto on deletes - try deleting a random file that doesn't exist, and it'll happily tell you it did it.) Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Hey Brion, I just had an interesting idea (well, at least I think it's interesting) about how we could track IPs after they are removed from the block list or on some kind of "warning list". We could place the offender's IP into a "probation list" such as the one I've started at Wikipedia:IP probation watchlist. My question is this: would it be possible to change the way IP numbers on such a "watchlist" would show up in RecentChanges? As it is right now, there really is no practical way to have such a watchlist -- unless you are a phycho like me and compare IPs on my own list with ones on RecentChanges (I don't like blocking IPs, and when I do I try to limit the time period of the block which means I have to periodically check the IPs contribs). A lot of IPs seem to have been kept blocked for longer than really are warrented by the limited damage that was done (well, that's my view anyway). This is especially troubling since so many IPs are dynamic and change after a few weeks (if not the next time the person dials-up to their ISP). Just wondering if this would be possible, I'm not advocating it yet. --maveric149

Sure, I suppose that could be done pretty easily. Particularly if you're only concerned about checking the author of the most recent edit (assuming that any vandalism would have been removed by the next contributor). --Brion VIBBER

Cool! Do you think this is something we should bother the list with? (I'm leaving town for 4 days starting tomorrow so I won't be able to be part of the any policy discussion) --maveric149

Probably should, since this means adding a sysop-level function (or else, letting anybody add to the "ip probation" list...) Brion VIBBER

I'll do this first thing after I get back. Thanks! --maveric149

Thanks for the info about the changed Stats - I looked at the diff linik you gave, but the headache seems to be fading now :) user:Verloren

Thanks for the info on the / page deletion workaround. BTW, do you think it would be possible, or even desirable, to write a script that automatically removes entries from the "Votes for deletion" page when a listed entry is deleted? --maveric149

Sure, sounds reasonable to me. There's a potential to eat up extra text if the page has been manually misformatted just so... But, if the old version is maintained, that can be corrected if/when it happens. --Brion VIBBER

Cool. It's not particularly important -- just would be nice thing to have if you or another developer decided to do it. Thanx again! --maveric149

Hey Brion, you are probably already aware of this, but when a page is administratively moved the history of the moved page gets majorly truncated usually only leaving who created it and the person that last edited it before the move. Is this a feature or a bug? If it is a bug do you know when it will be fixed? Also, if it is a feature I would like to request that the entire history of pages be moved -- which only makes sense to me (esp. on pages that have extensive histories such as the improperly named Tables of Chinese Sovereigns -- I don't want to move this unless I can be sure that the complete history will also move over). Later! --maveric149

Yep, I was talking about the moved history. For example I just made a few edits to the improperly capitalized and pluralized Cigarette Cards article and then administratively moved it to Cigarette card. Here is a screenshot of the history before the move and here is a link to the histoy after the move. Minor edits as well as regular ones are lost inbetween the first and last edits. Notice that the creation and edit times have also changed (dates are also affected). For the mass majority of the articles in the database this isn't too important but for some that have alot of edit activity this may become an issue. --maveric149

As I just explained on your talk page and on wikipedia-l, the edits are not lost, only the dates. The items being missing from the history list is an artifact of the sorting used in retrieving items for display. Exact dates of older edits that have been munged by this bug can be manually restored, if and only if they're recorded elsewhere. (Eg, that screenshot; older database snapshots, etc.) --Brion VIBBER

Should I modify what I am telling the other sysops then? If so then go ahead and modify what I stated on Magnus' page and I will copy this onto the talks of the other sysops. --maveric149

Oh, what you're telling them is true enough. It shouldn't be used until the fix is installed! (BTW, I just fixed the dates on Cigarette card, though the accuracy is only to the nearest minute.) --Brion

Hmm, should I remove all that obsolete discussion of bugs or just leave it there with a disclaimer that the administrative move function is now happy and bug-free, and you should use it as often as possible? I think the latter. --Brion

Thanks for fixing my typo. :) --mav

Well, if Denmark then geography... but if not Denmark, then what? I knew that couldn't be right... --Brion

Hey Brion,

I just cam across an interesting bug for you and want to know if it is affecting anyone else; I tried editing User talk: Rlee0001 and got this error:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/Article.php on line 1003

Which is the exact same thing that pops up to anybody trying to edit a page when their IP is blocked (try it yourself, this version allows you to unblock your IP afterwards). Trouble is that it only has occurred for me on that particular talk page (your's too) - and no I didn’t have myself blocked at the time (but I did for most of the week for my work IP though… I'm currently at work). Weirder still is that nobody else seems to be having trouble editing that page. Also, replacing the 'R' of Rlee0001 in the edit URL of User talk:Rlee0001 with an 'r' provided me with an edit window (had to do the same thing here). But then I didn't have any problem editing user:the Anome's talk page or my talk page (both are user names that were created with lowercased starting letters) or any other one I tried. This may have something to do with my work computer so I will try to recreate this when I get home. --mav

Do you have any idea why the deletion log is now called the "article deletion log" and not the "page deletion log"? Why in the world would we ever want to delete an article? I know we don't delete articles but others may not. It is already difficult enough to explain the difference between a wikipedia page and an article. --mav 14:18 Jul 28, 2002 (PDT)

Thanks for fixing the minor league baseball table. -- Zoe

Brion, I was trying to say when Caribbean blacks, whose ancestors were brought from Africa centuries before today, immigrate to America, it makes sense to call them African-Americans. But maybe I'm going overboard on classification and categorization. I think I'll call it a day. --Ed Poor

Hi, I've uploaded the files holography-reconstruct-notext.png and holograph-record-notext.png which are text-removed versions of the images I made for holography. I've also uploaded the original Adobe Illustrator files, in case you can use them directly. DrBob

Thanks! --Brion VIBBER 23:23 Aug 10, 2002 (PDT)

Brion, could you take a look at the deletion log and at user:Andre Engels just to make sure I'm not being paranoid about the choice to delete? --mav

If I may butt in -- I've spent the last 1/4 hour following Andre, and I think he needs reining in. I left him a note at the deletion log, with a stern warning. Ed Poor 13:14 Aug 14, 2002 (PDT)

Yes, I have left him a note to. He saw it, replied and then ignored my request to stop deleting the Bible entries and then proceeded to start deleting stub orphans (a handful I was able to find cached on Google had decent definitions and encyclopedias are filled with decent definitions on minor players). --mav

Is there some time limit on how fast I have to get the image uploaded after I put its link in the article, please? I didn't think ten minutes was too long, but you deleted the link in Butt while I was uploading the image to go there. -- isis

Maybe it's just a weird thing I do, but I usually upload an image and then stick it into articles. --Brion