Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

[[:|WP:VPT
WP:VP/T]]

Technical archive

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e-mail subject as an argument to Special:Emailuser

How can I make a link to Special:Emailuser where a subject at my liking is included pr default in the Subject field of the email form? Like the subject variable in the mailto link in html. Shanes 20:38, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Currently, all emails are sent with the title Wikipedia Email (or a similar variant). There doesn't seem to be any way to change it. There doesn't seem to be a bug for this, so I suggest you file one at Bugzilla as a feature request. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 21:20, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would caution though that e-mails sent through wikipedia should remain readilly identifiable as from wikipedia. So any user specified subject should probablly be appended to the standard subject, not replace it. Plugwash 22:15, 15 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, Wikipedia Email actually already is quite cryptic (it takes a while for me to figure out, "Oh, that's from Wikipedia!". It probably should be from wikipedia, with a reply-to set to the user who sent the email. Plus, there really should be a disclaimer appended to the bottom of the email. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 03:09, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My main motivation for wanting this is to be able to automatically include the IP of blocked users in the mail-link on MediaWiki:Blockedtext. The page does note that users need to include the IP given in any mail, but I receive quite a few mails from auto-blocked users who ask to be unblocked but forget to include the IP. So I thought it could save some frustration and mailing back and forth if we just had it inserted in the subject field in the form. The subject field could also contain a string "Unblock Request" or some such that could up the importance level setting in any e-mail filters admins might have. Shanes 10:57, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You're dealing with several different issues/feature requests at this point. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 23:51, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, I'm not. I don't understand why you think I am. Shanes 07:20, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rollback

I'm not aware if this has been brought up before. Simple question - why does this happen sometimes when rolling back? — FireFox • T • 18:24, 17 February 2006

Did you see if it happens only on some servers? (Look at the source of the page for a comment like  near the end). If it's happening always on the same servers, it would mean something is misconfigured. --cesarb 18:44, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't check, but next time it happens, I'll make a note and see if there is a pattern. — FireFox • T • 19:09, 17 February 2006

It's been hitting me too, and I've seen it many times. However, something I've noticed is that it gives this "Action complete" when I click on the rollback button, but someone else does it at the same time (usually RexNL) and their rollback gets first than mine. However, shouldn't it show me the regular "Action failed" screen, instead of telling me it went through? Tito xd^{(?!? - help us)} 00:02, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In the broad scheme of things, if you both do a rollback at identical times, the thing will be rolled back and it won't matter who did it, since the same action would be taken in both cases. When it's detectable, it's not a problem to throw up an, "oops, beaten" screen, but when things move fast, it does no harm to keep a lid on it. Rob Church (talk) 04:09, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ok I got the above thing happen today again - it says . — FireFox • T • 17:24, 20 February 2006

FIRST/LAST NAME LAST/FIRST NAME

I know it's elementary, but the first entries I made were LAST comma FIRST MIDDLE name

Is there a way automatically to redirect the hundred or so that I've already done so that whether the searcher uses one or the other method the article will be found?

Thanks,

Warren Allen Smith New York City [email protected]

17 February 2006 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wasm (talk • contribs)

You could probably get someone to run a bot for you. (By the way, you can sign your posts to talk pages automatically by typing four tildes: ~~~~) android 79 20:22, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I see no such entries; I see you've edited articles on three people, not hundreds. Perhaps the others you made were deleted, but I see nothing to fix here. --Golbez 20:26, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, you mean in your article? No, just spend the 6 minutes to go through and manually switch them around. --Golbez 21:12, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I will help fix problems like this, if asked on my talk page. Rich Farmbrough. 21:52, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some weird glitch

I just tried correcting this template by adding a redirect from [[Analogue signal] to Analog signal (no -ue), but, when clicking on the link labelled 'Analogue', it goes via Analgoue signal. Even though I've put the redirect there, I'm wondering how it got there in the first place. ZanderSchubert 07:14, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Analogue is a the correct spelling in some variants of English, if that's what you're asking. I'm not quite sure.--Cherry blossom tree 18:01, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Somebody made a typo when specifying the link destination. æle ✆ 19:47, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I swear that, whenever I saw it in edit mode, there was no typo, it was somehow going to an incorrect redirect... ZanderSchubert 06:41, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Category trees

Hi, I'm trying to order a messy category with its subcategories and I'm finding this pretty difficult. Is there a easy way to se the whole category tree all at once? If there isn't I think it should be developed.

I'm actually from the spanish wikipedia (same username), but I think this issue concerns all wikipedias, maybe even all wikis, and I'm more likely to find support here due to the huge amount of english wikipedians.Thanks in advance--Rataube 17:08, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Try Category Tree Browser Should work for other wikis as well. --Salix alba (talk) 02:43, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Could "Recent Changes" show the percentage change of text?

This idea just popped into my head: wouldn't it help those who are reviewing Recent Changes to be told how much a percentage increase/decrease there was in the article text? I believe this figure could help in analyzing whether certain types of vandalism are occurring. Any thoughts? — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 22:31, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC, one of the CVU bots already does that. --cesarb 04:04, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not percentages, but rather the number of bytes added or deleted. Adding percentages would require direct access to the article databases (perhaps through the toolserver, but that has not been done yet. That said, if you see someone taking out 90,000 bytes from Adolf Hitler, you have a clear idea of what's going on. Tito xd^{(?!? - help us)} 01:08, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Browser keys

I pressed ALT-F which is the shortcut in Firefox (on Linux) to select the file menu. The browser would not open the File menu and jumped rather abrubtly to somewhere else on the page. If anyone knows why it did this, and whether it is normal (i.e. a "feature") or is a bug with Wikipedia (I have occasionally found this to happen on other sites but only rarely, thank goodness, as it is quite annoying) do please write a reply about it.

Thanks,

Kelvin McNulty

Not a bug. ALT+F takes your cursor to the search box. Take a look at Wikipedia:Keyboard shortcuts, for more key combinations and how to disable them, if you don't like them. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 23:34, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for reply, I can see from the extensive list of shortcuts that your regular users must rely on them... I have found that keys that I use a lot get to feel like they are programmed into my hands, I don't have to think anything except "Open New Browser Window" (Alt+F then N) to do the action so it is a slight shock when it does something completely different. I have always found the mouse to be very slow to use and having to use the mouse a lot causes trouble (pain in shoulders, wrists, forearms, eyes etc.)... have not figured out the disabling method, though, have not got a "kelvin/monobook.js" anywhere that I know of... but I will not worry, I can use CTRL+N to open new window, CTRL+F for Find, CTRL+C for Copy etc. Wikipedia is a great resource, many thanks. Kelvin 62.69.32.111 01:50, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

To use a monobook.js, you have to register an account. See Wikipedia:monobook.js. Superm401 - Talk 03:46, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Massive Error Slight Mistake

The MonoSkin (default) presentation with its obscure little search box at the left margin is a prime example of ~~inattention to detail~~ a slight oversight. It seems that the overall look has been advanced over function. Geesh - one peek at Google's site should give somebody a clue as to the importance of prominently displaying the search box. Our little search box, cuddled as it is at the left amongst the miscellany of its neighbor links makes little sense to some of us, it's one of the reasons for my using the Classic skin with its big search box at the upper right and another big one at bottom center (not an unusual place to be when needing a search box). That's my rant (for today), but if a developer happens across this well then perhaps my keystrokes will hit a resonance. hydnjo talk 23:31, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Google is a search engine, so it's not surprising that they give their search box great prominence.

Most visitors to Wikipedia come from some external search engine; the internal search is not as central here. --Brion 01:42, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I arrived via Google and have done a few times. But (after going there when I tried to open a new browser window - see above) I know where it is now. Kelvin 62.69.32.111 01:57, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Would there be any objection to adding to Mediawiki:Monobook.css:

#searchBody {background-color:#F7F7DF;}

which results in this look:

I think that this might be something to consider. Any thoughts? Ral315 (talk) 05:49, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There is a straw poll, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Usability/Main Page/Draft/Search box poll, underway where about half of the voters are expressing significant concern about the MonoBook search box to the extent that they are voting for a second larger search box in the upper upper right of the Mainpage header. You may want to review some of the comments there as well as taking a peek at the two draft proposals, one with and one without the extra search box. hydnjo talk 18:34, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There are also 2 additional Color Design options in the Highlight left-hand searchbox thread. --Quiddity 20:35, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

#searchBody {border-color:#FABD23;}

#searchBody {border-color:#0000CD;}

Suggestion: Name variations

It would be nice if the Wikipedia search could automatically try variations of names, such as Jimmy->James, Bob->Robert. There should be redirects for this, but there aren't always - a recent example I ran across was Cliff Stein for Clifford Stein. If there's support I could enter this at Mediawiki Bugzilla. Deco 02:05, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It would be nice if Wikipedia's search could do a lot of things, but (as far as I can tell), it never will so I use Google site search. Superm401 - Talk 04:04, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And this Google search box is WP specific with all of the nice stuff like spell check suggestions. hydnjo talk 18:38, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WP:SB Project page fouled up

The WP:SB project page, maybe the whole thing is fouled up. Got a really bad graphics mess all over the place. Martial Law 07:05, 20 February 2006 (UTC) :([reply]

There is a link in the header that says Click here to reset the sandbox which cleans the sandbox and makes it a sansbox. :-) hydnjo talk 18:47, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Forgot my password

Hi, I had created an account under the username User:Dada some time ago but I forgot my password. How can I use that username? Would it work if I created a new account and then I redirected to User:Dada? You can easily verify that there are no contributions for that user yet. Another problem is that I did not give any email when creating the account. Thanks.

you didn't provide an e-mail adress I assume? If you didn't, you'll just have to make a new account. Broken Segue 17:01, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Patent challenge resolution

Good day,

If an inventor's patent is challenged by another entity, how can one obtain information to resolve such a dispute by determining who received the patent first (perhaps even location where said patent was obtained is vital?) Folajimi^(talk)

You may want to post your question at one of the Reference Desks. hydnjo talk 18:50, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the timely response; I shall follow up based on your reccomendation. Cheers. Folajimi 14:46, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Flag of Nepal (possible bug in image resizing?)

On some occasions, images are resized just one pixel too small. For example:

[[Image:Flag of Nepal.svg|50x50px]]:

(size: 40x49)

[[Image:Flag of Nepal.svg|20x17px]]:

(size: 13x16)

[[Image:Flag of Nepal.svg|20x18px]]:

(size: 14x17)

I've only seem this happening with svg images which are higher than wide. Any ideas on this? I suppose it's some kind of rounding error in the code. --Mx2000 21:05, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thumbnails are indexed according to width. When you include a box size, a thumbnail small enough to fit inside that box will be made, but it may well be shorter than the given height if that's what the width turns up. --Brion 18:22, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I thought so too initially, but that doesn't work out: The last thumb (with a screen size of 14x17) would fit perfectly in the box of the second one (20x17), yet Mediawiki produces a smaller thumb, even though the correct one (14px wide, instead of 13px) exists. --Mx2000 22:16, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a non-issue to me. Why is this a problem? -- Tim Starling 01:29, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I initially spotted it on 2006 Winter Olympics#Participating_athletes. Of course it's not a big issue, but I'd still consider it a bug. --Mx2000 10:38, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The issue is actually even weirder than that. For example, the first image above is actually 48 pixels tall, but the <img> tag specifies a height of 49 pixels, causing the image to be scaled up by one pixel in the browser. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 11:58, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I've seen this happen with PNG images too, and also in cases where only the width of the image is specified. I'll post examples if I find them. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 11:59, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK, User:Ilmari Karonen/Image gallery#Graph theory has examples of PNGs being improperly scaled. Note how 120px-Klein_4-Group_Graph.png, despite its name, actually has 119x119 pixels. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:10, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have noticed this too, in this image, there renders a 1px bar at the left

_→AzaToth 18:47, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Whatlinkshere is actually still broken

TfD has been operating on the assumption that this notabug was no longer a problem, and noone has screamed following deletion of templates recently. Whatlinkshere has shown a satisfying number of inclusions for templates and I know of at least several whose inclusion-counts jumped dramatically in the wake of Tim Starling's messages to bugzilla:4549. However, Template:Journal reference claims no article-space inclusions in Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Journal reference as of my time-stamp and yet this version of Kingdom (biology) uses it. Is there a known status to this issue? Bugzilla:4549 has just gone quiet with an unanswered question. -Splash^talk 00:54, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

At this time the links tables do not update automatically for including pages when a template is changed. --Brion 18:21, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That particular one was the separate problem with <ref> contents not being recorded in the link tables. (bugzilla:5042, now fixed.) --Brion 23:07, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There have been many bug reports related to link tables. Bug 4549 was closed when I fixed the cause of that particular report. Other link table bugs should be reported separately. -- Tim Starling 23:46, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How do I add pages to categories?

How does that work? It's driving me CRAZY!!!! Jeb 05:32, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You add [[Category:Whatever]] to the end of the page. It usually goes right before the interwiki links, but it really doesn't matter where it goes. If you actually want to link a category, you have to use the syntax [[:Category:Whatever]].

I would like to take this opportunity to note that the category syntax seems to be counterintuitive to new users, and its freeform placement is quite odd. Why not have some kind of listbox where categories can be added and removed with Add and Remove buttons? The same for interwiki links. The information could be stored in a separate database field as well, which would be helpful for all sorts of queries. Deco 06:12, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Er... listbox? Do you have an idea of how long it would be? --cesarb 16:05, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A separate textarea, though, sounds nice. Would drive people crazy when cats are added via templates (not that I find the latter practice a good idea). Circeus 19:15, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much Deco, I am learning how to set them up. I have 7 MediaWiki wikis of my own and I was going stir raving mad crazy yesterday. I have modified my initial entry down to a dull roar lol. Jeb 16:58, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Stark raving mad? :) ~MDD 46 96 17:36, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at Wikipedia:Categorization -- Samuel Wantman 23:20, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Request for help with a template

Could an experienced wiki-coder set up the {{sample box start}} template so that the alignment can be set(with a default value of right if it's left unset). Thanks!--Urthogie 18:53, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean you want the whole box to show up in the right by default and on the left otherwise, right? - Liberatore(T) 18:56, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I misunderstood your request. I reverted by last change. I will check it at the sandbox. - Liberatore(T) 19:08, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Captcha

Why are some Wikipedia sites using Captcha registration techniques ?

It's currently an experimental method to handle automated vandalism attacks. Shimgray | talk | 21:50, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Unsafe browsers and special charachters

Hi. I know theres a workaround in place for IE - when you edit it says at the top "WARNING: Your browser is not unicode compliant. A workaround is in place to allow you to safely edit articles: non-ASCII characters will appear in the edit box as hexadecimal codes." im having the same problems in safari with mac 10.2.8. if i edit anything with korean interwiki links they just come up as question marks and french accents get replaced with a diamond shaped box with a question mark in it. can a similar workaround me made for safari? have a look at this diff to see what i mean. whats odder is that it doesnt happen with every edit - it didnt happen on the previous edit (which was also mine. the second edit was trying to fix a mistake i made!) BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 22:09, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What's the User-Agent header it sends? The workaround is keyed on the User-Agent. Also, check for any proxies which could be causing it. --cesarb 22:29, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Safari doesn't have this problem. Can you confirm details of the configuration? --Brion 23:02, 21 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

mac 10.2.8, safari 1.0.3. so yes it does - i only ever use safari. and sorry i havent a clue what a user-agent is. there done seem to be any proxies listed that might effect it either. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 04:16, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It definitely shouldn't do that; I suspect a configuration problem. I'll see if I can install a 10.2 test partition on my laptop to test... --Brion 01:27, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I've installed Mac OS X 10.2.8, with Safari 1.0.3, and edited Category:Science_fiction_films. There's no apparent problem there.

Where a browser has an encoding problem (like Mac IE) it would always show the problem, not just on some edits; so if you only saw a rare occasional problem it's probably not the browser at all, but something else like a weird transient server bug. If you've seen in more than once, can you supply some additional information, such as if you saw any error messages, odd or slow behavior, if you copied-and-pasted the text into another program to do editing, etc? --Brion 07:51, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose ive had this problem about a dozen times in all. usually i notice it and fix it right away since it only effects french accents but this time it mixed up the korean interwikis as well and i had to get help. theres never any error message. it just saves and then i notice all the glitchy charachters. other than that the saves were exactly the same as normal - same speed, no error messages, and no copying and pasting (i did all the editing in the edit window). in fact i did two edits of the science fiction category in exactly the same way within a coupla minutes. the first one went fine, the second caused the glitch (have a look at the cat's history to see). BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 00:42, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally, is it really necessary to display this message when the article contains only ASCII characters? 207.176.159.90 01:53, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Upload.Wikimedia.org server seems to be down, and our photos aren't appearing as a result

Will someone fix this problem asap? thx. — Rickyrab | Talk 04:36, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's not down. Try restarting your browser if you had an old DNS lookup cached (especially if you are using Mozilla or Firefox). --Brion 07:43, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What if...

...edits to Wikipedia were so frequent, that the recent changes tab essentially becomes unusable? That is, it would not be possible to actually track every single edit as it comes up? --HappyCamper 12:13, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've considered this. The trick is, everyone monitoring refreshes at a different times so edits aren't missed that often. Also, watchlists fill in the slack. Superm401 - Talk 13:11, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think it already happened. --cesarb 16:52, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What if... Wikipedia got so many articles, you couldn't read them all? Yeah, we're over this bridge already I'm afraid. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 16:55, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's why we have WP:CDVF — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 23:43, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Signature

I have a signature that I am rather fond of on a user subpage (/sig) because the nickname field says it is invalid html. Would someone enlighten me as to why this doesn't work as a raw signature?

—WAvegetarian•_{_{CONTRIBUTIONS}}^{^TALK}• ^{^EMAIL}•20:58, 22 February 2006 (UTC) [reply]

You had a bunch of misclosed and plain unclosed tags. I've fixed it on your subpage for you. See Wikipedia:How to fix your signature for more information. --cesarb 21:59, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How do you hide the arrow?

I need to hide the arrow in the following link:

Ancient Greece

How do you do that?
--Go for it! 23:26, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, this almost works, but the punctuation marks are percent-escaped; Special:Search?search=Ancient+Greece&fulltext=Search, or with a piped link: Ancient Greece. Anyone know how to get around that? —Michael Z. 2006-02-22 23:57 Z

Those 2 examples resulted in the error message "No such special page." --Go for it!

You can't. Well, at least, not by normal means. You could amend the CSS file so that a special class would nix the icon, but that would present an enormous possibility to be abused and wouldn't be a good idea. Alternatively, if you figured out a way to turn that into an interwiki link, the arrow would disappear. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 23:41, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Use <span class="plainlinks">...</span>. That's the standard method which is used on the main page. Here's what it looks like: Ancient Greece. Note that you should only use this in special cases. Individual articles should respect the site defaults regardless of whether you personally agree with them. -- Tim Starling 04:53, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template:prod and external links

When I nominate articles for deletion, in this case websites, I usually link to Alexa and Google to back up some claims I make. However, if I add an external link into the prod box which includes an equals sign like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Mountain+Poutine%22 it won't show up. Looking at the talk page of the template, it says that the only way to insert an external link with an equals sign is to use the code:

{{prod|1=http://www.example.com/?foo=bar}}
{{prod|concern=http://www.example.com/?foo=bar}}

Now the code above will only allow the external link and nothing else to be shown as the prod reason, which I also don't want. I want to be able to do things like this within the prod box. Now, I could use subst, and then edit it manually for it to work in my specific case, but that's not exactly the best solution and I'm not sure how the automated prod lists would handle that. So if anyone can fix it or find a workaround, it'd be great. - Hahnchen 00:07, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I just tested it. You can put any wikicode you want after "concern=", not just a bare link. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 07:30, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Indo-Aryan IAST transliteration

To any admin, I request you to please insert some additional characters in the Insertbox in the edit page: r, h, t, d, m, n: each with a dot immediately below it. These are used for IAST transliteration of retroflex vowels & consonants in all Indo-Aryan languages like Sanskrit and Hindi. Its too inconvenient to search for these characters in another page and copy and paste them again. After all, you have a flood of god-knows-what characters in the insert-box, you can easily afford to bring in a few more. All articles related to India require them desparately. I dont know why you people reverted the earlier scheme which classified the inserbox characters as french, german, mathematics, IPA, etc. This kind of system still exists in French and German Wiki; I dont know why such step-motherly treatment to the Indo-Aryan languages.Cygnus_hansa 01:15, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Search getting old results

Not sure if this is a known problem or not, couldn't see anything in the bugzilla. Anyway on 10 December 2005 I did a search for zeland (common mispelling of Zealand as in New Zealand ) and fixed most of them. However when I do a search for the world now like this it still shows the pages from which the word has been removed ( like Official Opposition (New Zealand) and Joan Hammond ) . I would guess there is some problem with the search database not updating. IS this a known bug? - SimonLyall 10:27, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The search database is updated periodically. It probably just wasn't updated yet. --cesarb 13:56, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It seems a long time, Also if I do a search for Sago Mine it shos up lots of results from early January. - SimonLyall 01:05, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Revision navigation doesn't appear if a page is a redirect

This is copied from General complaints - I thought it was more likely to get a knowledgeable response here. Ta. --Cherry blossom tree 13:59, 23 February 2006 (UTC) [reply]

When searching through a page's History, if you choose a revision that is a redirect to another page, e.g. here and here, the revision navigation text, which reads like this:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Revision as of 08:48, 11 October 2005; view current revision
← Older revision | Newer revision →

...will not appear. Can someone possibly fix this, please? -- RattleMan 01:36, 23 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Finding edits by a range of IPs

Last night I was patrolling rapid vandalism by several anons on the same network. There didn't seem to be many patrollers and admins around, so the vandals weren't blocked and there are probably still some unreverted edits around. Trouble is, I don't know how to find them short of grepping the next database image. Is there a way to do this? Gazpacho 00:57, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Gallery Landscape Problems

I rebuilt my computer last week. Ever since, I have not been able to see landscape thumbnail images within galleries (including my own gallery). I can see portrait thumbnails within galleries just fine. I tested my own galleries on a different machine, and it (of course) worked fine. Obviously, the problem is with my machine. I'm using IE 6.0, and JRE 5.0 (just downloaded today). Has anybody seen this problem and know a solution? Rklawton 03:30, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More info: when I look at the HTML source code, the <img src tag is missing entirely for landscape images but not for the portrate images. Rklawton 07:36, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Try disabling ad blocking software, if you are running any. Symantec products in particular will sometimes mistake Wikipedia images for ads and remove them. Dragons flight 07:59, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with some Symantec ad-blocking software, and I believe with similar software from other vendors too, is that it blocks all images from a directory called /ad/. MediaWiki divides images up into randomly named two character directories, and a small proportion end up in /ad/. The solution is to configure Symantec software to always allow wikipedia and wikimedia images. I had this problem with earlier versions of Symantec software, but I don't think it occurs in the most recent (v 3) of Symantec Client Security.-gadfium 08:53, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Smoley hokes Batman! That totally worked, and I never would have figured that one out. I've been using PCs since the Apple II (and even some pre-PC machines). These machines get harder to use every year that goes by. Sheesh. Thanks a bunch! Rklawton 04:47, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(in)Valid URL broken rendering

The following, perserve looking URL is valid:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/1052-5173(2004)014<4:CAAPDO>2.0.CO;2

However Wikipedia renders it as

http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/1052-5173(2004)014<4:CAAPDO>2.0.CO;2

which is broken. It's a minor issue, but potentially worth fixing.

In the mean time, does someone have a table of URL encodings around here somewhere? Dragons flight 14:50, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

According to RFC 3986, angle brackets are not on the list of permitted characters in URIs, so they need to be encoded. Parentheses and semicolons are on the list of "reserved" characters, meaning that they are only supposed to be used for specific purposes specified in the relevant URI scheme, and encoded otherwise. Thus, your example is not a valid URI. *Dan T.* 14:57, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well specifications or not, IE and Firefox both accept it, so it is de facto valid. Dragons flight 15:25, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing says what IE and Firefox should do with invalid URIs, so both just go on and encode things. Other software (like MediaWiki) can do differently. --cesarb 22:20, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't you get the memo? The only real standards are what the dominant web browsers choose to do. Dragons flight 22:36, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Do the dominant web browsers convert a plain text link to a URL? If they do, will they work with that URL? --cesarb 22:52, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/1052-5173(2004)014%3C4:CAAPDO%3E2.0.CO;2 works. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:39, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Dragons flight 22:36, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What's wrong with this?
navsource.org: USS Essex
—wwoods 00:58, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Two spaces instead of one. --cesarb 14:22, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(A) What changed, to make this a problem?

(B) Can someone run a bot to fix the many pages with this problem?

—wwoods 17:43, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And now the problem has gone away. What happened?

—wwoods 03:52, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Single article WikiReader

I'm looking for some technical assistance in producing a "single-page WikiReader", as a trial to investigate how easily this sort of thing is to get done, the article in question being Marian Rejewski. What's the best way of going about this? I've tried saving a copy of the online article and then opening it in OpenOffice; however, the article looks awful! Any tips would be appreciated. — Matt Crypto 18:58, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Have a look at de:Wikipedia:PDF-Generator and the external links there. Another possibility would be a software like PDF Creator (*.ps → *.pdf)! You also could try to download the Wikipedia CSS files that are imported in the HTML file "Marian_Rejewski.html" (at the top of the html source code). Or you could save the html file with the full web address to the CSS files (main.css, monobook.css). Then you should get a better result with OpenOffice.org, too. --- Best regards, Melancholie 13:49, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

page linking template for military of sri lanka

i need help on creating a template for linking the diffrent branches of the sri lankan military. i need a similar template to the one in the army of india page. i need the specfic codes to create the template because i am not very proficient in creating articles.

Edit textarea cutting off

Um... For some reason I can't edit this in Firefox. If I view source, the entire text of the article is inside the textarea, but only the first 4121 characters show up in the edit window. Happens while logged off, too, but doesn't happen in IE. — Omegatron 17:58, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I don't understand what you mean. How is the "textarea" a different thing from the "edit window"? Anyway, I just added a blank link using Firefox 1.5.0.1, and it seems to work fine. If you're seeing weird problems in firefox but not IE, I'd suspect a rouge extension. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:06, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The textarea meaning the actual HTML code, and the edit window meaning the rendered, displayed text area. You might be right about extensions, though someone else had trouble editing it on the talk page, so I didn't suspect that. I'll check for any red extensions. ;-) — Omegatron 18:53, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. The latest version of linkification seems to have done it. — Omegatron 19:40, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Redlinks for Categories

In the last couple of days I have noticed that if you type in a non-existent category (eg typo or not sure of correct name) it no longer comes back as a redlink. This is very inconvenient. Is this intentional or merely a software glitch?--Mais oui! 20:39, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Deleted orphaned fair-use images: are there any logs available?

While I've been away, a bunch of fair-use images that I uploaded got orphaned and then shortly deleted. Contrary to the policy described at WP:IFD, deleting orphaned images doesn't require posting any notification to me. Additionally, I can no longer browse my deleted contributions using Kate's tool, so I can't even tell how many of those images got deleted.

Now the question is, how can I get a list of fair-use images I uploaded that got deleted as orphaned? Is that at all possible? --tyomitch 03:44, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Nope. Fairuse is not an integrated software concept, just a little template that those fairuse bots check for. I got hammered by this too (it's real annoying, because they don't care if the images were used on a talk page for fact checking or whatnot). — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 03:47, 26 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]