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Your questions answered here

Umm.... sorry, erasing the past so my browser will let my type in here. See history for old questions.

is anyone else getting php errors? Is there a story on this? Graft

I'm starting to hear more reports of congestion problems lately. I suspect that some server settings need to be expanded to accommodate greater traffic on the foreign-language wikis. --LDC

I've been seeing PHP errors that don't immediately suggest congestion. It looked to me like somebody temporarily mislaid a PHP document used for config. - Khendon 15:59 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

The error reported to me most recently was "can't load include file" because the system limit on number of open files was maxed out. That happens specifically when people access many of the foreign wikis at once, even if total congestion on the server is otherwise low. --LDC

Ah, okay. I retract my naive comment then :-) - Khendon 16:18 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

BTW Lee, last night I noticed the German, etc wikis weren't having the php files cached (no *_apc files), as the directory permissions didn't allow apache to write to them. I've chowned the 'w' directories to apache, and they all seem to be caching now. That may help, or hinder. Who knows. :) --Brion 21:02 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

This has probably come up before, so if I'm repeating tired old arguments, or worse still inadvertently walking into a minefield, apologies, but I think it would be nice to have a simpler, more wiki-ish markup for subscripts and superscripts, rather than relying on raw HTML (it was really starting to piss me off while doing the notation example in electron configuration). Something a bit TeXy, perhaps, like ^ and _ (though that leads to ambiguity over exactly what wants sub/superscripting so it might be best to use paired symbols ^2^ and _2_, or perhaps even ^2_ _2^, so that ^ meant go up a level and _ meant go down a level) --Bth

It has come up before, but it's well worth mentioning again! Something like ^^2^^ might be safer. It's also been suggested that we could use TeX itself to generate PNG images, thus: [[math:some TeX expression in here]]. I like this idea a lot, even though I'm of the age of WYSIWYG and I fear TeX -- Tarquin 22:10 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)
The problem with the suggested syntaxes is that (one way or another) they don't allow scripts within scripts. My suggestion in the past has been "^{...}" and "_{...}" (which follows TeX even more closely) on the assumption that "^{" and "_{" will rarely or never occur naturally together. We could still double the "^" and "_" if that assumption proves mistaken, but we'll still need some sort of asymmetric bracketing; unlike other wiki syntax, scripts don't simply toggle. — Toby 10:32 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)
(But TeX is lovely ...) The thing is, nice though it would be to have some sort of swish automagic mathematics-generator, I think this is a slightly separate (though related) issue: sub/superscripts are possible within HTML and they occur frequently enough (and not always in mathematical contexts) that it'd be nice to be able to do them wiki-style. --Bth
Yes, TeX is quite lovely; I use it all the time, even for writing letters to friends. After discussing possibilities for implementing it ad nauseam on the Wikipedia:mailing list, I eventually decided that it would only make editing harder for the uninitiated and thus shouldn't be done. But y'all may have fresh ideas that we didn't have before, so feel free to bring it up there again. — Toby 10:32 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)
I think we should bring it up again. TeX would only be used for fairly complex equations; so most people who will come face to face with it will be mathematicians of some sort. Those (like me) who don't know tex already can probably handle the learning curve. -- Tarquin 10:45 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)


What is the thing to do when all links to a previous disambiguation page has been resolved? Is the disambiguation page just left there for future links to the page, or removed?

The former. --Brion 00:43 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)
Great, thanks Brion. Carl

I just made an article titled I'noGo tied but the link is from a lower-case "i" at the beginning, and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be, at least according to my source (even at the beginning of a sentence, so I assume it's a pronunciation thing in Inuit). The system automatically switched it. Is there anyway around that? Not really a huge deal, I guess; it's still in lowercase in the article itself.--User: Tokerboy

You can link to it with leading lowercase, but you should talk to LDC about whether there's anyway to make it display the title with leading lowercase. --KQ
There isn't one, but you could talk with him about making one. --Brion

I'm not sure how the images are linked/stored but the Japanese flag is either mislabeled or just plain missing.... Japan Vik-Thor 05:04 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

White rectangle with a big red circle in the middle? Looks fine to me, both in Mozilla 1.2a and IE 5.5 (Win2000). --Brion 05:13 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)
OK, I'm going to be quiet now... I swear, it was coming up with the Montana state flag, even after refreshing... Vik-Thor 05:31 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

Guys,

Several issues.

A recent bit of expanding of Olivia Newton-John had me adding her date of birth at the start of her name in this style: (September 26, 1948- )

A certain astronomer then proceeded to change this to read (b September 26, 1948)

Which format is correct - and is there a correct format? I has a look in FAQ but found no help there.

Whilst we're at it, let's expand some more and ask : are there any standards as regards displaying peoples' dates of birth and death? There do not appear to be any. Some biographies start with just the years , often not in tag form (eg Fred VII (1654-1700) was a merry old soul); others do not start with a date of birth and/or death at all ( eg Luke VIII was a king of England who hated termites ...) ; others still use tags at the start ( Rodney II (June 15, 1936- October 31, 2001). Which format, if any, is standard? I prefer the lattermost myself.

One other thing. Whilst going through lists of the most popular pages, I was surprised to see one dedicated to someone called Aria Giovanni - some 4800 or so hits. When I investigated it, I was initially amused and then annoyed to discover that she is a Penthouse Pet.


I suspect that some of those 4800 hits were due to people looking for grubby pictures. Thanks to the tag at the bottom, that links to a site that, according to its own disclaimer, "contains explicit sexually oriented material" , they have access to them. (Oh, I should add, I did not look at this material...)

Seriously, though, is there any reason as to why the Asia Giovanni article should not be taken out? This website is not a referring service for porn, is it?

I should also point out that there is something patently ridiculous about a Penthouse Pet having a page that has a length compatible with, say Walter Burley Griffin, or is longer than , say, Aage Niels Bohr, two far more historically important individuals.

Arno

Yes, there are standards. They are outlined on the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, and yes, you guessed it, some are still being thrashed out, in typical wikipedia style ;) The correct style for dates, however, is decided on. YOu'll be pleased to know that your preffered style is the standard: ( Rodney II (June 15, 1936- October 31, 2001). For the not-dead-yet, we use (born June 15, 1936). -- Tarquin


To answer your other question; We are not a porn referral service and if you see another pointless link to a porn site in the future then feel free to delete it. However, there are soft porn sites that can add to the value of certain articles. For example, in our surprisingly good article nude celebrities on the Internet there is a link to "The Case Files of the Fake Detective" which is a website that analyzes more than 300 faked nude photos of celebrities. It has side-by-side images of the fake, the original of the clothed celebrity, and the original of the nude model. But at one time there was a link to the Lair of Lux Lucre which only has the fakes. I removed the pointless Lux link. --mav

Additional talk on this issue has been moved to Talk:Aria Giovanni.

hi, been playing over the new phpwiki site and found their sidebar very useful...http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/demo/en/RecentChanges?days=3 any one know where i could find thesame for moz 1.2a for wikipedia? thanks

oh, and for evangelistic purposes .ideas. I'm sending pages to friends that I know have an interest in the material and inviting them to edit/update the materials...If we 'all did that' I think we'd get a lot of page churning, especially if we target those academic types. --Denny

It may be the browser I'm using, but I don't see a sidebar on that page. Unless you call their logo at the side of the page a 'sidebar', but then Wikipedia has it too, just somewhat more extensive. Andre Engels

I am unable to access the following areas:

I get various errors, all php related. Some are missing files, others are too many files open, and the like. The Clermont County one has been like this for days. What is happening here? -- Ram-Man

This is probably due to general heavy traffic loads from readers and very heavy edit load from me and especially you. ;) --mav

Shouldn't this clear out? Why has it been hours or days (in the case of Ohio) like this? -- Ram-Man

Clear your browser cache, hit reload, try again. Especially if you're using Internet Explorer, which seems to jealously preserve failed page loads. --Brion 03:18 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)
I concur. Although I am using a Netscape version rather than Explorer, I too find that the error messages comes back if I go to the same page again, but then disappears when I hit 'Reload'. Andre Engels
Clearing the cache fixed my problem. Thanks! -- Ram-Man
Incidentally, one way to force Infernal Exploder to refresh is to hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the refresh icon. Which reminds me of a joke: "Only women refresh; men reload." -- NetEsq 20:10 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Perhaps the problem here is that, although we normally send pages set to expire immediately, so that there will be no caching, perhaps no such expiration is set when we send errors. Well, we generate the errors here on our server, so surely we can send such expiration commands then too? Programmers: Am I right? — Toby 05:26 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

If you're getting one of the errors described above, our script probably isn't even getting a chance to run; if it does, the error messages usually come up before we have a chance to output the custom headers, and you can't output headers after content has started. So, um, prolly not. --Brion 05:31 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Following my earlier query about how to name articles about pieces of classical music (the responses to which I'm very grateful for, and still chewing over), I've got another problem in that area: I want to write an article about the John Cage piece 4'33", but it looks like article titles cannot have quotes in them, so 4'33" doesn't work. Is there any way round this? There are alternative names for the piece (it could be spelled out in words, for example), but this form is by far the most common, and I'd like to use it if at all possible. --Camembert 18:22 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

How does 4'43" (coded as [[4 43|4'43"]]) strike you? Ortolan88 18:44 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)
Yes, I know I can use a pipe, and if it comes to that, I will (though I'll probably point it to Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds rather than 4 33). But what I was really trying to ask, in a round about way, was: is there any way to use a " in an article title? --Camembert 23:20 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)
How about 4'33'' as a quick cheat, with two ' for a " -- Tarquin 23:29 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)
It might just work that, it might just work. Rather amusingly, however, if you try to surround the link with two 's to italicize it (as those tyrants at the Manual of Style will say you should, hem hem), it breaks the link, and italicizes one set of brackets instead. And I would be a bit worried about people trying to link to the article but not being able to work out that it's two 's rather than one ". But I can use html tags to italicize, and I don't see anybody else round here writing about John Cage, so... --Camembert 00:23 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

Special:Randompage seems to be no longer working, I get:


Warning: open(/tmp/sess_e3b9b5e8f5afa9cce2aa0066fca4a143, O_RDWR) failed: Too many open files in system (23) in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 7 

Warning: Failed opening 'Setup.php' for inclusion        
(include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in  
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 12

Fatal error: Undefined class name 'outputpage' in 
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 14

Warning: open(/tmp/sess_e3b9b5e8f5afa9cce2aa0066fca4a143, O_RDWR) failed: 
Too many open files in system (23) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the  
current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line   
0

Jeronimo 18:50 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)


This has been happening on any page lately. Maybe a FAQ entry from one of the technically-minded wikipedians would help?

We passed the 50000 article barrier yesterday. Does anyone know which article was the 50000th? (Not that it really matters, just idle curiosity on my part.) --Bth

I wouldn't put too much stock in that headline figuew. There are more than 15,000 "articles" with less than 500 characters. --mav 01:21 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

I'm having trouble with the character encoding on my brower - it's mozilla 1.1 and the default encoding is iso8859-1. It makes any accents or unusual characters turn into rubb!sh and make a mess of the edit. Anyone know about this? User:andrewthorne

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