Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 2

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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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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Remote Loading of third party wiki

I have a small but highly used wiki being used by my company. I need to find out how to display a current wiki page on other documents that I am creating. Documents that are pulling the wiki are on the same corporate WAN as the server for our wiki, but are NOT served by the same server. Documents being created are (at this time) html only, though I am looking for ANY way to do this. I have tried many codes of javascript and html as well are pre-loaders and even went so far as creating a gateway page that would be accessed by my apache server to create the pages. So far the closest I have got to it actually working is an IFrame (of all things) but the wiki page is forcing no frames (though the html dose not contain the code for it ??????) Any Help? Nevet

By the way, Thanks to all those who created this 'program.' —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.145.253.1 (talk) 20:40, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Try pulling a copy of a page with action=render, for instance, //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=render; that just gives you the HTML for the page, not any of the scripts or user interface. (The framebreaking effect is there because editing from inside a frame can cause chaos sometimes, if I remember correctly; however, you should be fine when using action=render because that's a read-only view.) --ais523 08:00, 23 October 2007 (U T C)

Just want to say thank you. I knew after about 20 hours of work trying multiple different display systems it would be something as simple as that. I was pulling URL/Page name instead of URL/index.php?title=page name. Thank you for your help and for the &action=render, working great. Nevet —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.145.253.1 (talk) 13:26, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Hiding that scrolling graphic in header

Perhaps a silly question, but how can I hide that? I gave at the office and that scrolling text is incredibly distracting. • Lawrence Cohen 22:54, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Even worse for me: it's triggering migraine. Please make it go away NOW. --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ —Preceding comment was added at 22:58, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Concur. What happened, they decided they needed something even more annoying than <blink>? Ugh. Kill it now, please. (And for what it's worth, there's some info on meta about it over here. But only that they planned to do it. I haven't found how to make the hurting stop yet. --Bfigura ^(talk) 23:03, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

This thanks to Ariel. Kill it with div#siteNotice {display:none} in your monobook. --Bfigura ^(talk) 23:06, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

That may have been premature. It didn't work for me. See here for a parallel discussion. --Bfigura ^(talk) 23:08, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

This works: .fundraiser-box { display: none; } -- don't forget to refresh your pages. --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 23:17, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Oh thank god that worked! --Coaster geekperson 04 23:58, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

We should not be forcing registered users to modify their monobook.css pages in droves. This marquee is distracting at best and far too obtrusive. Do we need to appeal to someone at Meta to have this removed or altered? Can't sleep, clown will eat me 23:28, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Exactly. it's awful. Tacky, distracting, annoying. bogdan 23:32, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Firmly agreed. This should be disabled, and a dismiss tag should be added. I *have* donated and I have no further need to see it, and I don't see why it should be treated differently to any other announcement (especially in its present form). We're going to drive good contributors away if we're not careful about this. Orderinchaos 13:20, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Why the heck is this not in English on the English Wikipedia? This is terribly implemented. It says "What you don't know about Wikipedia..." then scrolls complete garbage that nobody wants to read. Ugh. --- RockMFR 23:39, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

A more targeted option: marquee { -moz-binding: none } for Gecko-based browsers, or marquee { display: none } for everyone. That will kill only the most evil part, leaving the rest intact. --cesarb 00:13, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

The Ads

Thos new ads messed up my userpage! And I though that there were so many issues about ads before, and that wikipedia was an ad-free site! Since the space on top have been taken up, my userpage is ruined! As well as many other templates! Well this sucks. --Coaster geekperson 04 23:01, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

GAH!!! Who thought offering an 18 MB video to every single reader was anywhere near a good idea? It's stalled an sapping bandwith from everyone. Can't we at least host it somewhere other than upload? Publicola 23:25, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

No doubt. And the scrolling thing slows editing down – grr. Someone complained at Meta and was told that wasn't the place to complain about the English Wikipedia. So where do I complain? – Scartol · Talk 23:28, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

That person was wrong (and me). EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:25, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I've put up with fundraising promotions before, since they're usually just an unobtrusive line of small text. But this is a full-fledged banner ad, nothing less; it doesn't matter that it's for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is supposed to be ad-free. Period. Get it off of here. Now. -- BlastOButter42 ^See Hear _Speak 23:56, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

What ad would this be? I see nothing. HalfShadow 23:57, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Someone's youtubed it here: [1]. Cheers, --Bfigura ^(talk) 00:26, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

RfC on Sitenotice

I opened an RfC about the Sitenotice here. This is to get everyone's opinion about whether it should be disabled or not. Bushcarrot ^Talk _{Please Sign!} ^{Let's go Lightning!} 01:00, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Also Wikipedia:Fundraising redesign. Squee23 11:30, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Accessing irc://irc.freenode.net/ with MS IE

Please see talk:Internet Relay Chat#Accessing irc://irc.freenode.net.2F with MS IE.

Thanks for any help in advance! Best regards · please email me · Gangleri · Th · T 13:54, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Template:jct is broken! Affects highway articles

I just stopped by to look at a page and I see that Template:Jct has been broken (probably one of its subtemplates actually) to include the sandbox into the freeway infoboxes (e.g., see Interstate 210 (California)). This is a mess! I spent a few minutes trying to figure it out, but it's not obvious to me and it affects probably zillions of articles, I'd guess. I have to leave now; can someone fix it? Or is there a highway project somewhere who could be notified of the problem? Thanks. Elf | Talk 16:05, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

There's been some heavy experimenting. I've reverted to the last good version. — Edokter • Talk • 16:13, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Much appreciated. Elf | Talk 18:30, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

is this thing safe?

importScript('User:VoA/monobook.js');

//[[Category:Wikipedians who use RC script]]

Please let me know. --Kushal^t 20:21, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that is 100% safe. :-) —METS501 (talk) 20:57, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, 95% safe :)). It's primarily written and maintained by a MediaWiki developer, so it's likely much safer than most user scripts out there; however, as with all user scripts, there exists the possibility that an admin may get a wild hair some day and screw with it (oh beans...). I certainly wouldn't worry about it though. AmiDaniel (talk) 21:00, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Admin rollback in watchlist and RC

Is this possible? -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 21:26, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Nope, as you need a token that is uniq for each diff. _→AzaToth 22:59, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Editing mywikipedia

How does one edit the navigation, interaction, toolbox, etc. blocks on the left? I have my own wiki and wish to customize it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Svanslyck (talk • contribs) 22:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

See MediaWiki:Sidebar AmiDaniel (talk) 23:49, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Need to put special character in article title, but not in URL

Hello, I am trying to figure out how to implement something that is in use at two articles. For reference, please visit Natto and I Heart Huckabees. The URLs, respectively, read as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natto and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Heart_Huckabees, but the page titles are Nattō and I ♥ Huckabees. The special character is used in the page title, but not in the URL.

I would like this to be implemented at We Love Katamari, with the heart symbol visible in the page title, but not in the URL. As visible in the image in the article, "We ♥ Katamari" is the correct spelling of the title of the game. If you could explain how to do this, rather than just doing it for me, I would greatly appreciate it. If the process requires administrator tools, please feel free to go ahead and do it. If you have time, I would still like to hear how it is done. Thank you very much! Photouploaded 15:59, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

The true url to I ♥ Huckabees is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%E2%99%A5_Huckabees, I Heart Huckabees is a redirect to the true article title. So basically an article can use any Unicode characters, and for convenience a redirect page can be made. 1 != 2 16:07, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I am sorry, I don't understand. Is it just a simple redirect? Photouploaded 16:09, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, those are simply redirects; look at the top of the page, you'll see a small notice syaing "Redirected from...". So the special characters are in the URL, with a non-special URL redirecting to the actual article.

You can move a page to a title containing a ♥ (which is however discouraged), and a redirect will automatically be created. — Edokter • Talk • 16:14, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it is. However, reviewing that article's talk page reveals that the page used to be at We ♥ Katamari and was moved after overwhelming consensus on the talk page. Moving back to We ♥ Katamari would require restarting a discussion there and obtaining consensus for the move back. —bbatsell ¿? ✍ 16:14, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I did respond there. Now I am aware of the issue. Currently, some article titles are permitted to have special characters, and others are not. If you would like to weigh in on this inconsistency in the interpretation of Wikipedia policy, please visit Talk:We Love Katamari#Accuracy dispute. Photouploaded 16:29, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

For reference, changing the titles so that they look different is done by using {{wrongtitle}}. This has been used in the articles iPod and Long s, for example. (It changes the title of the page using javascript.) ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 23:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Actually, iPod uses DISPLAYTITLE magic word (note that {{lowercase}} is preferrable way to do the same). In Long s javascript doesn't change the title since it's too different. The javascript now is only needed for several articles such as CO2 bomb ∴ AlexSm 01:56, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

hundreds (thousands?) of admins..

Isn't it a huge risk to allow wikipedia admins to edit MediaWiki:Common.js? All they'd have to do is add a line sending the user's cookie to an external server, compromising the user's account.. --⁪ffroth 04:17, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

That's why the process to become an admin is quite complicated. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 04:45, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Some time ago I had an idea that only bureaucrats would normally be allowed to edit global js and css files (mostly because of some ignorant admins), but such proposal isn't likely to get much support ∴ AlexSm 01:38, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

help with editing a page that Sam says I should be able to edit but cannot

Hi. Sam says the 'Superman' article is semiprotected that so it cannot be edited by those who are not signed in, but as I explained to him, even though I am signed in, there is nothing for me to click on so I can edit. I am going to all this trouble because at one point someone typed in the redundant phrase 'revert back' rather than use the word 'revert' alone. What do people think the prefix 're-' means? It's a very ignorant thing to do, as is saying 'reflect back' or 'return back' or 'report back', and looking at that redundancy is spoiling the article for me. All I want is five minutes so I can go in and excise that one word. Sam suggested I post the problem here. Argentarthropod 22:23, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

If you're signed in using an account more than 4 days old, you should be able to edit the article. Are you sure you were logged in? Do you see a "view source" button where you would normally see an "edit button"? Have you purged your cache, which for some reason often solves all sorts of little bizarre Wikiproblems? --barneca (talk) 22:38, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

If you are looking at the page history, then the words you are objecting to are probably in an edit summary, and cannot be changed by anyone.-gadfium 00:41, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Superman does indeed say: "This cancellation saw The Adventures of Superman revert back to the Superman title." Maybe you need to bypass your cache (which may have stored the page before you logged in) but you can also click this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Superman&action=edit. PrimeHunter 01:44, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Fixed. Adrian M. H. 01:51, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Please ban user 68.104.130.225 !

Please ban user Special:Contributions/68.104.130.225 ! — Chesnok 20:53, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism reports are best made at WP:AIV. Furthermore, users are only blocked if they continued to vandalise, after being given a final warning. This editor has only been given a level three warning. Thanks for reverting vandalism, and making the Internet not suck! Puchiko (talk • contribs • email) 17:12, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Exporting all files in category as HTML.

In our organization we use MediaWiki and is shared by many teams. Each team has a separate category for own. Now due to some requirement we want to make a zip file of all contents present in a Category. How can we do it? Using PDF export we can export one page at a time only. I want to maintain the structure of sub-categories too. Thanks. --Veetrag 09:09, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

You could get the MediaWiki source code for each of the pages by using the generator functions of the API, if you have it installed (that link goes to Wikipedia's API version, but they can all show the help text). I don't think there's currently a way to automatically get the rendered HTML though. --ais523 18:22, 25 October 2007 (U T C)

For something as simple as grabbing the files in a category you can use a download manager. My pick would be GetRight or FlashGot- they can grab the links and download them to a folder. I know GetRight can be setup to automatically download on a schedule. — Gadget850 (Ed) 19:07, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Donation page displaying incorrectly in IE 6.0

If you still have IE 6.0 installed, can you try this out - go to [2] and see if the various donation forms are displaying correctly. --- RockMFR 12:36, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

The entire form is gone in IE6 except for the currency select. -- Prince Kassad 13:11, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

It's a known issue, being worked on. Meanwhile, the link here has been changed to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising , which will work in all browsers.--Eloquence * 13:59, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Link Colors

Hi, does anyone know if there is a way to change the color of all wikilinks on a page. Basically, I want to se a red background on my talkpage, and want to change wikilink color to silver for visibility. The code I'm trying to use is at User:Sasha Callahan/Sandbox. Thanks SashaCall ^(Sign!)/_(Talk!) 05:45, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

You'll have to add <span style="color: #fff;"> (or whatever color you want) and </span> inside each link, as there's no way to mass-change the colors in your userspace. For a talk page, this is a near impossibility, but is something you'd have a lot more control over for your user page. EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:51, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. SashaCall ^(Sign!)/_(Talk!) 05:55, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

What redirects here

Is there a way to find this out for a page beside paging through thousands of of links in the "What links here" tool?--BirgitteSB 21:56, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, you can filter only redirects in the backlinks query with the API. Look at the blfilterredir option. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:29, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

What is the API?--BirgitteSB 03:26, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

This link lists all redirects to Wikipedia:Be bold: [3]. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:38, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Tank you!--BirgitteSB 16:56, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Rendering a bit too much

See my full userpage and then see this. It shows the coding that does not include it's main coding, looking a bit awkward. --Coaster geekperson 04 04:31, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

That's just a function of the way section editing works - there's no way around that, I'm afraid. You could always disable section editing for your page by including __NOEDITSECTION__ somewhere in the page... Nihiltres^(t.l) 15:51, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Blue links/red links

Does anyone know what section of Wikipedia to go to for a discussion about the default font colors? There are five default font colors:

Unlinked text is black
Valid WP links that have not been visited recently are blue.
Valid WP links that have been visited recently are lavender.
Non-existent article links are bright red.
Non-existent article links that have been clicked-on are pale red.

I am working with large lists (~12,000 people), checking to confirm that the blue links are directed to the correct article, and am having difficulty distinguishing between the colors selected for (2) and (3), because the colors are too close to each other. I am using Firefox and am able to manually change the colors (Click "tools", "options", "content", "colors"), but doing so prevents WP from distinguishing between (2) and (4), and also (3) and (5). I'd like to find the appropriate discussion page on WP where I can propose a change to one of the default font colors. Any idea where I could find people who are interested in that technicality?--Appraiser 20:51, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Edit your monobook.css (or the corresponding css file for your skin) to include the following, changing the color numbers to your preference:

a { color:#002BB8; }
a:visited { color:#5A3696; }
a.new { color:#BA0000; }
a.new:visited { color:#A55858; }

Anomie 21:07, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I found a scheme that works for me. --Appraiser 22:01, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

URGENT: Need help!

I know this is maybe posted in wrong place. But Wikipeda Bahasa Melayu is now in need of help. A user vandalise the whole project, probably with bot. And right now they only have one sysop in charge. Does anyone know what we should do about this?219.83.0.240 Hariadhi 12:47, 27 October 2007 (UTC)12:43, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Help sorting category listings

I've spent quite a bit of time in the last few weeks sorting the listings logically in Category:World War II amphibious warfare ships of the United States. Basically what I've done is list all the "meta" articles - that is the articles that relate to the ship classes etc rather than the ships themselves, under the asterisk symbol (*) so that they list together right at the start of the page listings.

It all works perfectly except for one crummy article, Landing Ship, Tank. For some oddball reason this one won't list alphabetically with all the other articles listed under the asterisk, it always lists on top of all the others - when it should be listing last!

I just can't figure out why this one won't list alphabetically like all the others, can someone with a good grasp of cat listings please show me where I'm going wrong? Gatoclass 06:19, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Never mind, I think I've worked it out, it lists capitalized names before uncapitalized ones, bah. Gatoclass 06:33, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

See WP:MOS#Article_titles -- Boracay Bill 10:29, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Similarly USS LST-999 comes before USS La Grange (APA-124) now, perhaps that also has to be changed.--Patrick 12:17, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I didn't notice that, you are correct, strictly speaking they shouldn't be listed that way. I guess the sensible thing to do then would be to make all the sorting strings lowercase, but I'm not sure if that would be practical as a rule for categories generally. Gatoclass 12:53, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

On second thoughts, that won't work either, because I just found out the cat. software treats "L" and "l" as entirely different listings, so if you put "LST" in lowercase you will just end up with them listed under a small "l" heading instead of the capital "L".

That means that either someone has to deliberately list them all as "Lst", or we just have to accept this is how the software works and forget about it. Gatoclass 13:10, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, a sortkey all lower case except the first character seems fine: {{ucfirst:{{lc:{{PAGENAME}}}}}} (except that in this case it is without "USS ").--Patrick 13:49, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I honestly don't think that's a viable solution, because then everyone has to know that you must use a capital letter as the first letter and lowercase for the rest, which is unlikely to happen. So I think it's probably best just to leave the listing as it is. Gatoclass 14:46, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

I am talking in general, if it is not worthwhile to change in existing tags it may be worth considering when setting up a new category. With regard to the problem of coordination, that everyone has to know the system, it is just like knowing that "USS " is left out of the sortkey.--Patrick 15:24, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Do you know you've got to leave the squiggles out of the sort keys, too. Just the unadorned 26 letters of the English alphabet. And everything is sorted; spaces, punctuation marks too. It isn't any special command that puts some articles at the top of the category listing, before A and before the numbers. It's just that the space, at Unicode number 32 decimal, is pretty much the first thing in the Unicode number order we have in our rudimentary sorting software. Gene Nygaard 23:34, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

source lang="perl" bug

Where do I report a bug with Mediawiki's perl source syntax highlighting? It should ignore quotation marks in regular expressions, but it doesn't. --Slashme 08:40, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Our source highlighter looks suspiciously like the one available here. Doesn't seem to give you a place to report bugs though. I'd try http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org anyway. MER-C 12:23, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

It's the Highlight extension (mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight GeSHi); bugs can be reported using the 'Highlight' option in 'MediaWiki Extensions' on bugzilla:. As the name indicates, it's based on GeSHi. However, I couldn't find a place to file an upstream bug (i.e. a bug with GeSHi rather than the way MediaWiki uses it) with a quick glance at their website. --ais523 18:19, 25 October 2007 (U T C)

It also has problems with regular expressions and quotes, in lang="javascript". --Splarka (rant) 07:15, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

/* comment */
var foo = 'a string with a "quote" in it';
alert(foo.search(/\string/i) + ' ' + foo.search(/\"quote/i));
/* comment */

There's also a problem with hexadecimal integers:

// Java
public static final int CATEGORY_TALK_NAMESPACE = 15;
public static final int ALL_NAMESPACES = 0x09f91102;

// Javascript
var a = 15;
var b = 0xFFFFFF;

By the way, it's http://qbnz.com/highlighter/faq.php#q_6 for bugs and feature requests. MER-C 08:18, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Javascript forms copied to text field?

Part of another VP discussion [4] involves whether there could be a fill-in-the-blanks citation form on screen whose text could be copied into the edit text. Similar to how clicking on a special character copies it into the edit text. Can Javascript copy from text form fields? (SEWilco 15:19, 27 October 2007 (UTC))

Sure it can. AmiDaniel (talk) 19:19, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

HTML Table Background Tag

Hello everyone :)

Im currently busy with creating a new user page to replace the ugly, nonfunctional one i have now. I decided to write the page in HTML, as i am more proficient at writing complex code in HTML as in the wiki scripting language. Currently im converting the page to wiki script, since not everything works as intended with pure HTML. The work is almost done, but im currently running into an issue i cant seem to fix.

The HTML [Design]of my new user page contained a table which, in turn, contained the menu bar for my user page. The table itself had a table-wide background image in it, that was automatically stretched/shrunk depending on the browsers size. I cant seem to get this functionality with either the wiki script or with pure HTML. So my question is: Is this possible to achieve on wikipedia? And if so: How?

Here is the HTML code i used:
<table height="88px" background="Ex_Sky(loop).jpg" style="-moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; width: 100%;"

Kind regards,
--Excirial^{(Talk,Contribs)} 15:36, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, it is not possible to have table background images. Doing so requires an URL and MediaWiki does not allow embedding image URLs (or is set not to allow them). — Edokter • Talk • 16:17, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Toolserver

Is the toolserver down, or is it just me? -Reuvenk_{T C} 18:32, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

If it's not down, ~~then it's running very slowly.~~ Nope it's defiantly down.--VectorPotential^Talk 18:34, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

I just looked on meta's Metapub, and no mention of it there. Is there any further information on the topic? -Reuvenk_{T C} 18:44, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Worksforme. They did do some changes to the ts entry point; they may have had to reboot or shut down apache at some point while doing this. In any case, it's online now. AmiDaniel (talk) 19:16, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Confirmed, seems to have only been down for about 15 minutes. --VectorPotential^Talk 19:19, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

any work on the incredible sluggishness of deeply edited articles?

it's becoming quite troublesome. trying to edit an article with an exceptionally deep history takes forever. for example, George W. Bush. it seems to map pretty directly to how deep the diff is for the article. try editing, say Gimbal, and the editor comes right up, and not just because it's a smaller article. i suppose it's just the poor old mysql db crunching through so much data associated with a given article - but sometimes it pushes into causing page timeouts. again - i can open another tab, and edit another article without a deep diff history, at the same time as the article with the deep history - the latter will open in a second or two at most. the former, ten seconds, fifteen seconds....okay - yeah, i'm ranting. it's frustrating! Anastrophe 00:49, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

oh - and this applies not just to opening the editor, it applies to saving your submission as well. and getting 'history' is often pretty sluggish too under the same circumstances. Anastrophe 00:50, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I've been seeing incredible sluggishness too of long biographical articles, but I've been assuming it's due to heavy use of the {{cite}} template for 200 references for more and the time it takes to parse them. For example, as Nancy Reagan has been worked on for FA recently, it's gotten noticeably slower to load and render as more cite template references have been added. The problem seems even worse when Firefox is being used as the browser and multi-column references being specified. Wasted Time R 03:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

good point - i hadn't thought about the templates. whatever the cause - it's frustrating. and it happens in both IE and firefox for me - but it does seem slightly worse in firefox. i only use FF for wikipedia so i can use Twinkle - but i frequently open WP in maxthon when not editing, and it is a *little* faster. Anastrophe 03:37, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

The extra delay is undoubtedly due to the size of the article, about 110 KB for George W. Bush but only about 3 KB for Gimbal. Whatever browser you use probably isn't the problem, although Firefox is generally faster than Internet Explorer. Anyway, articles are only supposed to be about 32 KB long in order to prevent editing problems like this. The George W. Bush article should be split up into 3 or 4 smaller articles, with summaries in the main article, so that the total article size of each article is about 32 KB. See Wikipedia:Article size. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 03:42, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

You didn't look at the Bush article closely — it already is in WP:SUMMARY form, with many subarticles, and the same is true of the other biographical articles in question. There are certain subjects that are just going to have long articles no matter what, and with sentence-by-sentence citing, the 32KB goal limit just isn't realistic. Wasted Time R 11:40, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

We've been having similar problems with the Reference Desks, suggesting that this issue isn't just confined to the particulars of one article or another. Rather it seems to be targeting pages with horrendously long page histories, which the GWB article, and the reference desk both have in common. --VectorPotential^Talk 11:51, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Is there any bug report about this at bugzilla? Lupo 12:25, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I suspect it is more to do with transcluding templates, mostly the citations. I had noticed this bogging while working Harry S. Truman to FA and looked into it. If you check the HTML output displayed in your browser you will find the article is about 137k. There is apparently some overhead when templates and wikimarkup are rendered to HTML. See Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance and Wikipedia:Template limits. --Gadget850 ( Ed) 13:46, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I will confirm that it is categorically not possible for the number of revisions that a page has to affect the time it takes to render the page. There is no reason to look at any revision other than the revision you're rendering, and in point of fact nothing does look at any revision other than the one you're rendering. The problem is simply the length of the text, including the length of all included templates and any additional processing done within those templates. WP:RD/S takes over forty seconds to load ― unless you remove the header, in which case it takes under ten. You can confirm that revision history has nothing to do with it by visiting a carbon copy of George W. Bush with no history ― look at User:Simetrical/Slow page with no history.

Anyway, you could easily cut down George W. Bush to under 32 KB. You just have to be more aggressive and less compromising about what gets left in the main article. Info about George Bush could be cut down to three sentences if necessary, or five words, all depending on how much concision you want. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 17:59, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

um, WP:CIVIL? Anastrophe 18:12, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure "Don't be ridiculous" is uncivil, but you're right (if that's what you were referring to) that it was unnecessary. I've removed it, sorry. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:59, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Also, another counterexample to the idea that this has anything to do with number of revisions: try Wikipedia:Sandbox, which I believe has the most revisions of any page on Wikipedia, but renders immediately. And note that massive slowness at the Reference Desk was averted by removing a troublesome template; see Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Houston, we have a problem. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:04, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it apparently has nothing to do with page histories, and everything to do with the depth/complexity of transclusions. Most likely this is tied in with server performance issues, and should hopefully go away once the annoying-animated-donation-bar-with-built-in-flash-video goes away.--VectorPotential^Talk 19:59, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the number of diffs. Nor simply the number of characters without templates. For reference, I was doing some tests on User:Nil Einne/Sandbox but never came up with much except ruling out a pure article size or diff cause. You may want to compare it to this version [5] which is 1.8mb but performs much better on editing and other stuff. I'm pretty sure it's predominantly to do with the processing time on the servers which is affected by the size and more importantly complexity and number of the templates I suspect. BTW, I'm not aware or any 32K goal. Wikipedia:Article size says 6000 chars to 10000 chars or around 30k-50k of prose... 32K may have been necessary at one time but it no longer is.Nil Einne 14:38, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

It does have some relation to total number of characters parsed (although this includes characters in included templates). If you write up 1.5 MB of wikitext-rich prose with no templates, it will probably load very slowly as well. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:04, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

okay - thanks to everyone for the clarification/correction to what i had speculated was the issue. i should have approached it differently i think: viewing/editing/etc on some pages on wikipedia has become dreadfully, painfully, hair-tearing-out slow. is there anything that can be done to improve this, short of gutting large article and limiting transclusion? wikipedia's growth is not likely to abate. i'm primarily hoping that there will be technical solutions to what seems to have the potential to become a catastrophic problem eventually. Anastrophe 20:08, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

I address this somewhat at Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Houston, we have a problem. Unfortunately, the problem is not very easy to fix by programming, for a variety of reasons, and it's almost certainly impossible to fix by getting new hardware. The solution for now is essentially to avoid excessively fancy and complicated templates, if you want fast page load times. Normal programming optimization strategies apply: you don't necessarily have to remove functionality, but you have to at least simplify the way it's implemented. Very complicated constructions including many auxiliary templates might in some cases be possible to circumvent entirely by rethinking things a bit. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:14, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

My feeling is that the culprit is heavy use of the {{cite}} template, which is one of the basic templates, nothing fancy (from the user's perspective, I haven't looked inside the template itself). And since WP:BLP and FA rules and whatnot now effectively dictate citing every sentence in an article, and sometimes individual clauses within sentences, we have literally 200 or more cite templates being used in an article. Just optimizing parsing or rendering or whatever the bottleneck is around this template, would be a big help. Wasted Time R 20:21, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Easy enough to test: try copying a slow article somewhere without the cite templates, and see if it's faster. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:44, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Watchlisting the entire contents of a category

Is there any easier way to add the entire contents of a category to your watchlist than opening all the links listed and clicking "watch" dozens or hundreds of times? Picaroon (t) 01:12, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

There is now a feature to edit your raw watchlist. If you make a list of all the articles you want to watchlist, you can paste them in all at once. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:15, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Don't forget about Related Changes, which can give this for example. Adrian M. H. 14:34, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Which invites the question:

Is there a way to get the text of all the article names in a category without having to page through 200 at a time? Preferably with and without subcats. I suppose that is a lot to ask for, but it would be useful. Publicola 13:30, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure that a script could do that. If there is no suitable script already available request one at WP:US. Adrian M. H. 14:34, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

You can do this with AWB. --☑ SamuelWantman 03:15, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Mapping tool broken?

When I tried the coord tool that places latitude and longitude in the upper right hand corner of an article page and then lets you click on it to get a map, I get an error message. Am I doing something wrong? The example I tried is at Bierley--Filll 20:56, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

I think it might be temporarily down. I checked one that worked yesterday and it's not working right now.--Appraiser 21:12, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Was just about to bring this up. I get the error "The tools by this user is deactivated. The author should email the roots." I e-mailed Magnus Manske about it, since it's his tool and he'll probably know what to do. the wub "?!" 21:13, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Magnus has had the issue reported on JIRA, too: [6]. Hopefully this will soon be resolved. Warofdreams talk 21:28, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Looks like he contributed too many good tools! In the meantime, I changed Template:Coor URL to another tool. Even if it's not in English, I think it's preferable to a dead link. -- User:Docu

N.B.: That script expects 8 parameters, so coördinates like (for example) those on Glasgow ( 55.858_N_4.259_W ) will not work; you will have to change it to 55.858_0_0_N_4.259_0_0_W , which BTW is compatible with Magnus' script. All types, scales and regions are supported. - Erik Baas 10:42, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

~~There's a list of articles containing incorrect coördinates on User:Erik Baas/Coördinates.~~ - Erik Baas 11:42, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that. The format depends on how Coor URL is used by Coord, Coor at dms, etc. To simplify things, I switch the URL to the one using Template:GeoTemplate/sandbox. -- User:Docu

Unfortunately, now the toolserver seems to be down... - Erik Baas 15:50, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

And likely because of the change to dispenser's tool. Magnus tools were disabled for a purpose: they were broken. Linking to a copy of a tool that was disabled because of brokenness is a very bad idea. Unfortunately there are no toolserver admins online atm to disable dispenser's tools as well. Please revert the change asap. -- Bryan (talk|commons) 18:42, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

The problem was that FastCGI is only enabled for selected tools. My map tool is based on the old version of Magnus with a few simple modifications. In the future tell owner that their tool is going to be used on a massive scale before he start receiving mail from a daemon that processes were being killed due to an over use of memory. —Dispenser 19:43, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Can someone please restore the GeoTemplate and the geohack.php to the versions of four days ago? What is so technically difficult with these relatively small packages of code? Cush 10:22, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

categories, tree or not?

I often see categories that are sub categories of some parent category but are included in the parent category as well. Is this appropriate? What is the purpose of sub categories if not to express so relationship between the memebers?

For example

Category: cars

sub categories: red cars, blue cars

Should articles about red cars be included in "red cars" only or "red cars" and "cars"? It's done both ways throughout Wikipedia.

--Rtphokie 22:28, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Logically, only under "red cars" in your example. I think it is unnecessary, messy and illogical to have such duplications. It makes sense to opt for the most precise/relevant categories that you can find, in my opinion. Adrian M. H. 23:24, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Logically, under the parent as well. There are a great many cases where people aren't going to be able to find things, because they won't know which of all those "most precise" categories they will finid it under. It is a real pain in the ass to have to look through 20 or 100 or whatever subcategories before finding what you are looking for; or even worse, not finding it after all that effort. Gene Nygaard 23:42, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories, it depends on the particular circumstances. Anomie 01:05, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Consider another example, a book about the 2000 US Presidential election. Does it belong in 1) "books about politics", 2) "books about George W. Bush" 3) "books about elections" 4) "books about US Government" 5) "books about the 2000 Presidential Election" and 6) Books about Al Gore or all of them. For this example all categories are sub categories of "books" and 5 is a sub category of 3. After reading Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories, I'm thinking this example article belongs in 2,3 and 6 and the #5 category should be eliminated for overcategorization.--Rtphokie 12:32, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

New gadget {Inputbox}

{{Inputbox}} will display a short line of text as if being the content of a basic input box. One use is to emulate the display of the edit summary box.

{{Inputbox|/* Heading */ my summary}}

/* Heading */ my summary

{{Inputbox|width=20%|overflow=scroll|This is gonna be too large for me, ouch! ouch! ouch!}}

This is gonna be too large for me, ouch! ouch! ouch!

{{Inputbox|width=40%|style=background-color:yellow; color:red;|My eyes! My eyes!}}

My eyes! My eyes!

(Default colors aren't hardcoded, they come from CLASS="messagebox". More at Template:Inputbox.) — Komusou ^talk @ 02:55, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Why?!? Per WP:REF#Scrolling reference lists we are supposed to avoid text that might not print. What purpose do these serve? What are they intended for? Publicola 12:37, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I think it is only for documentation involving the edit summary box (currently used on one help page and one doc page).--Patrick 12:58, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Publicola: In normal/default use, it is only intended to replace <PRE> for displaying fake examples of input w/o requiring a screenshot, and it works as good (or bad) as PRE, print-wise (i.e., you need to preformat the text so as to not be too long, else it'll overflow and make the page too wide). The rest (ugly scrollbar and colors) is only to demonstrate flexibility if some folks find other uses for it (on documentation or talk pages). Hm, let's manufacture an example that could be used on an article page:

Proper security require that password fields obscure their contents.

Login:	Komusou
Password:	********

— Komusou ^talk @ 20:01, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I've made some tweaks, hope you dont mind... — Edokter • Talk • 14:11, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, thank you, and I don't mind tweaking, but I think I can't keep the current changes. Please let me explain: your design is nicer, but it is entirely hardcoded with specific colors and device-dependent pixels. The original code wasn't rendering as nice, but it derived from CLASS="messagebox" to inherit the properties of the user's skin, and it tweaked them to add the border using the "inset" value that'll render according to each browser and OS, using the inherited colors — so, if a user has a skin with all pages and edit fields displayed as white text on black background, then the template would render like this too. You have hardcoded a black text on white background, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid. And you have hardcoded a 1px border (razor-thing and night invisible at high resolutions) instead of the 0.15em border that was displaying roughly the same visual thickness at any resolution. (Also but it's a detail, you removed the "padding:0.1em", which is required in browsers such as Opera, that respect "padding:0" to the letter and stick text to the border, pixel-on-pixel.) Coding using inherited classes and relative values gives less beautiful, average results (at my level of CSS, anyway), but it provides that average level to everyone on the web. Do you see my problem? — Komusou ^talk @ 20:01, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

If the purpose is to show an edit box example, I think it's best to render it as close as possible using the most used colors. At least that would make it most recognizable as one. If anyone has custom colors set for messagebox, it's going to look even less like an editbox. In any case, I was just experimenting a little. — Edokter • Talk • 20:34, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Special:Allpages is extremely long

I noticed the Special:Allpages is EXTREMELY long, and caused my browser to slightly malfunction. --KevinTraver 17:44, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Well what did you excpect? It's a list of ALL the pages on Wikipedia! -- THE DARK LORD TROMBONATOR 05:04, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Coordinates seem to be causing spurious LI

I am looking at all of the Vermont Town articles Vermont_towns, and they seem to have a tag in the 'External References' section that causes a div to be created with the coordinates to be displayed in the upper right hand corner. The issue is this also causes an extra LI tag to be output to the browser, which renders (atleast in FF,IE6/7) as a blank box with no link.

It looks as though some may have been removed, but specifically Cornwall, Vermont, Chelsea, Vermont, Randolph, Vermont and many others have this present. StanBrinkerhoff 02:03, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

"LI" is an HTML element, so I suspect you're referring to the list marker ahead of the Geolinks template in the "External links" section. The Geolinks template used to emit text and presently emits coordinates. These alterations, and cleanup of "External links" is under slow discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Geolinks-coord Issues. (SEWilco 17:14, 29 October 2007 (UTC))

Corrupt timestamps on diffs?

Does anyone have any idea what's with the dates on this diff? It's dated over 2 years prior to the preceding diff. Someguy1221 22:52, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

There was a server crash and some of the system clocks were reset. The same thing happened at this edit and this other edit, among other edits that really happened in March 2005. Graham87 00:47, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Redirect to subtopic

I've tried to make Banking Act of 1933 redirect to the appropriate subsection of Glass-Steagall_Act, but it doesn't seem to work for me. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? - Nunh-huh 16:52, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

It works for me. —EncMstr 17:15, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, that's good to know! Still not working for me, though, despite refreshes and flushes. As long as I got the syntax right and it works for someone, though, I'm happy enough. - Nunh-huh 17:22, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps WP:BYPASS might be helpful? —EncMstr 17:32, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

No, clearing the cache had no effect. I did try the page on two other browsers now, though: it seems it doesn't work with Safari, but works with either Opera or Firefox. - Nunh-huh 17:41, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Try upgrading to Leopard; last I recall it works in WebKit nightlies since ages ago, so may be functional in Safari 3. --brion 19:58, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll be upgrading, but I want to be the last on my block to do so, just to avoid problems. Plus it's annoying to have to upgrade my Adobe CS :( - Nunh-huh 20:47, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

If you don't want the leopard, there's always the fox. :) --brion 14:42, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

It works on Safari on WinXP for me. DuncanHill 17:09, 30 October 2007 (UTC)