Wikipedia talk:Village pump (technical)

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Village pump technical talk post

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Please note that the Village pump talk pages are rarely used, but might allow to archive relevant discussions.

[edit] Archive policy

Can I put a notice that the archive policy applied at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Miscellaneous_archive also applies here? Currently, there does not seem to be a clear policy. If I don't get any objections within a week, I'll do it. JesseW 04:55, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Part of page lost

The section Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Unwatch from watchlist has a stray signature of mine, which was part of a discussion about Javascript and diffs. Somehow part of the page seems to have been lost and the sections ended up being merged. --cesarb 21:27, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Rename Article

What's the best way to change/edit the name of an article I created? I thought I would solve the problem of a non-uniquely named poet by titling the article using the middle name. This creates more confusion, so I'll learn how to create a disambiguation page. Meanwhile, taking baby steps, I need to rename the article from Tom Poeller Mandel to, simply, Tom Mandel, the non-unique name. Many thanks, Gaelyn

Click on the "move" tab at the top of the article page. This moves the article contents and history to a new name and leaves a redirect in place of the old title. EncMstr 22:36, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why Not Archived If There's No Time Stamp?

Why are sections not archived by Werdnabot if there's no time stamp?100110100 09:07, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Because Werdnabot doesn't know how old the section is unless it has a timestamp. — Werdna talk criticism 09:11, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

This is only an issue if neither the question nor the response have timestamps (right?). I imagine it's pretty common for questions not to have one, but responses should always be signed and timestamped so I'd think this would very rarely come up. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:37, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Why can't Werdnabot check the page history, then?

By the way, take a look at User talk:Angie Y.. I tried to get this page Werdabot-archived, but it doesn't seem to be working, even on sections that are timestamped. ~iNVERTED | Rob (Talk | Contribs) 20:58, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Refraction of the light

Moved to project page - 04:10, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Trouble with table

I was hoping someone could take a look at the table in Visible spectrum#Spectral colors and let me know why the final row "red" doesn't show up. Thanks! -AED 22:34, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

The template it was using only allowed a maximum of 5 items. I've changed it to allow 6 to make the red show up. Tra (Talk) 23:33, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Much obliged! -AED 23:43, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Head section

Tips given here should include :

Always tell what browser you use when your question is about what you see on your screen. This information shall improve help. People here are used to some details or bugs, or are able to reproduce your case in some of the most popular browsers. --82.227.17.30 19:23, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Disabled to edits???" from Talk:Michael Richards#Disabled to edits

Why does the page say what it says at the top and yet this clearly newly registered user had his way with the article? BabuBhatt 15:52, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

It is possible that the User:Curtisaallen account was registered some time ago but never utilized till today. When such accounts are layed away for nefarious purposes they are usually known as sleeper account on Wikipedia. (→Netscott) 16:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

What would it require for the program to be changed so that users with no edits so far would be treated as if they were brand-new? Wahkeenah 16:07, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, that's not a bad idea. My recommendation is to post it to: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). (→Netscott) 16:11, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Wahkeenah 16:15, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redirects

Try as I might, I can't figure out how to do simple coding, here, and redirects are no exception. I've read the pages on redirects, thoroughly, but to no avail. What I'm trying to do is redirect Meridian Township to Meridian charter Township, MI. Help! --Criticalthinker 03:26, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Done. Make sure you type #REDIRECT [[Meridian Charter Township, Michigan]] in exactly one line. Although you probably wanted to put this on WP:VPT, not its talk page... Tito xd^(?!?) 03:30, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

But, how does one do this? I'm still confused.--Criticalthinker 03:57, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Click Meridian Township (you'll be redirected to Meridian Charter Township, Michigan). At the very top, under the title, the words "Redirected from ..." appear, with a link that will actually take you to Meridian Township (without being redirected). Click this link and then "edit this page". This page's contents are a single line starting with #REDIRECT, as indicated above. To make another one of these, edit the article name you want to be a redirect and add just one line, like the one in Meridian Township. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:20, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Semi-protection recommended for this page

I have to suggest semi-protecting this article. We have a open-proxy or sock puppet user that is vandalizing this article and other one (this message is posted there as well). The edits include ones like 02:57, January 5, 2007 (Good-bye clowns: U.S Feds stop propagandizing on Wikipedia. You're not wanted here. half trillion $ annual budget can't defend us from 19 guys with box-cutters 'cause you waste too much time here). These posts are always identical. I suspect it may be a bot that moves onto a new IP everytime it is blocked. Will (Talk - contribs) 09:11, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Absolutely disagree. Anons may have legitimate technical questions that they need to ask. Occasional reverts are no problem. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

When I posted that, the user was posting every few minutes. As soon as they found their text had been reverted, it was back. It took longer when they found they had been blocked, but only a couple of hours. So it would have been more than a "occasional revert". Will (Talk - contribs) 00:28, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Extremely slow tools.wikimedia.de

I find that any link to tools.wikimedia.de has an extremely slow response time, I think minutes to tens of minutes. (I haven't measured it lately; it takes too long to bother waiting.) This didn't matter so much when it was just Kate's tool, but now the geographic coordinate links have moved to t.w.d as well.

It seems to me that others must be getting reasonable response times, or no one would have accepted the migration. Can anyone explain why t.w.d is responding so slowly for me? I'm using Mozilla on Debian stable. I recall once long ago getting a reasonable response time from Kate's tool on t.w.d, when accessing it from Windows. --Trovatore 20:05, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Just a hunch: try disabling ipv6 in your browser (its in firefoxes about:config somewhere). Plugwash 02:37, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I can't find it in about:config (Mozilla 1.7.8). Thanks for the suggestion, though. Could you give me an idea why you think it might help? --Trovatore 06:00, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I have found network.dns.disableIPv6 in 1.7.13. But I don't think that's the problem, I have it set to false and I don't have problems with the toolserver. Tizio 15:30, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Picture Placement

Hi, how is it I can choose where on the page I'm editing where the picture I want to add is placed? Whenever I try to place one, it always appears at the top of the text, not in the desired location. Cheeseah (talk • contribs) 21:08, 19 March 2007 (UTC).

You might want to take a look at Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Images and Wikipedia:Extended image syntax; Wikipedia:Picture tutorial might also help. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:32, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Request for direction.

What is the difference between this section of the Village pump and the MediaWiki space? I would like to have a discussion on managing conversation sprawl, but I would like to make sure that I am using the right channels for such a discussion. --Aarktica 13:04, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

The MediaWiki talk namespace is for discussing a particular interface message (for instance, if you want to change the wording of the warning below the edit box); WP:VPT is for general technical comments, questions, and discussions (such as asking questions about how to achieve something complex in wikimarkup, asking about a particular sort of login problem, or wondering whether a particular proposal is technically possible). --ais523 15:42, 27 April 2007 (U T C)

Thanks for the feedback. Just so that I understand, the proper course of action is WP:VPT -> WP:VPR -> MediaWiki ? --Aarktica 15:17, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

No. Pick the most applicable page, and expect to get an answer. If you don't, or if a knowledgeable editor suggests you post elsewhere, do so. The only reason to plan to go to multiple places is if you're checking about the technical aspects of a proposal before proposing it elsewhere. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:37, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Finding out if articles are watched

Adding this here as well since feedback at Help:Watching pages is slow:

From a maintenance/anti-vandalism point of view, it would be helpful to know how many people, if any, are watching a given article. Is there any way to ascertain this information? I can find nothing on Help:Watching pages suggesting it is. If there isn't, I think it should quickly be added as a feature so that editors can locate unwatched articles to help maintain the quality of the encyclopedia, as unwatched articles have little defense against drive-by vandalism.

Unregistered users should not be able to see this information as it would help vandals locate unwatched pages and make a mess of them. Only established (semi-protection criteria) users should be able to view this information.

Hopefully those of you here will be able to give me a quick response. Thanks, Richard001 00:15, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Already exists, but it requires admin status Special:Unwatchedpages. dr.ef.tymac 00:20, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick reply. Could you specify to what extent it exists for administrators? Can they tell who watches the page as well as how many?

I think this needs to be extended to all users that have held an account for a few days. It's harmless to let people know how many are watching an article without specifying who they are, and helps people identify unwatched articles so they can better focus their efforts. There is the risk of higher vandalism from those few cunning vandals though, so I don't think it should be applied to non-account holders. Is there any harm you can think of in extending it to account holders? Richard001 01:04, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, it lets admins know what the first 1000 unwatched pages in alphabetical order are, and not how many people are watching watched pages. (As it only goes up to 1000, it's kind-of useless; I wonder if this is a bug?) --ais523 12:50, 2 May 2007 (U T C)

Re extending this to all account holders: Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Create a counter of people watching a page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:33, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WP:CSD template

Hey! When did we discuss, and agree, to change the CSD warning template from pink to white? And if we did not agree, can we change it back ASAP, please? --Anthony.bradbury^"talk" 17:35, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

See WP:TS. --Golbez 17:43, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Trouble with wikilink

I wanted to wikilink Joseph M. Scriven (there is an existing article on Wikipedia under that name) in this article He Is Beautiful. I was not able to get Joseph M. Scriven to be recognised as a link (in blue) until I copied the heading Joseph M. Scriven from the original article's heading and pasted that into the article He Is Beautiful. This does not make sense to me except for the fact that Joseph M. Scriven appears as Joseph M. Scriv-en in the wiki tab and address. How could this happen and is it a common problem? Address will need fixing.
--User:Brenont 19:35, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I have no idea what the problem was or why it occurred, but moving the page to its own apparent name appears to have solved the problem. Nihiltres^(t.l) 20:12, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

There is in fact a character in the middle of the old title; a soft hyphen. Software that makes use of them will not display them unless it needs to put a line break in the middle of the word, but you can see it if you copy and paste it into a more naive text editor like Notepad. It may be that the article was created not by typing the name in, but by pasting it from a word processor, or perhaps from an online article at a website that likes to right-justify its text and so uses hyphens to make them come out looking better. TCC (talk) (contribs) 20:54, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

(conflicted) I was going to say the same thing. I suspect that it was some other article that was created in that way, and someone later clicked a redlink there to create the Joseph M. Scriven article. Anomie 21:17, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I can't use the buttons above

For some strange reason, I can't use the buttons that are above when editing on a page. I can't make the text bold, cursive, or sign my nickname, unless I do it by manually typing the script. This seems to be a problem on this computer, only. Does anyone know if I need to change something? When I move my cursor over the buttons, a textbox appears with the explanation for what it means, but I just can't click the damn thing! Ugh! -- User:Anittas —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 17:31, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

What browser are you using? There's some code in place to fix problems with image transparency in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6, and there were some reports that it interfered with the toolbar in those versions. I thought those problems were fixed, though; try bypassing your cache, and if the problem goes away, then that was the reason and the cache bypass will have applied the fix. --ais523 17:35, 10 October 2007 (U T C)

Wee, now it works. Thanks! It seems that I was using IE6. I now installed 7 and everything is fine. :) --Thus Spake Anittas 18:19, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I thought we had that fixed for IE6...but in any case, IE7 will work a lot better for you with Wikipedia. It will actually load pages faster and in general work better than IE6. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 21:05, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

For the record, it turns out that we did have them fixed, but the script was improperly modified (without being tested) and it broke the editing toolbar again. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 00:36, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Arabic text

Not for the first time I've run into problems trying to edit articles which contain Arabic text. On this occasion I've been trying to add the date of death (1992) into the brackets in the first sentence of Youra Eshaya. The preceding Arabic text interfers with the Roman text in the edit box - try it if you want to see what I mean. PS I'm currently editing with IE 7. Any ideas? Greenshed 20:02, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

No problem here, using IE6. — Edokter • Talk • 21:33, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

But if you were to attempt to change "(born 1933, died 1992)" to "(1933 – 1992)" (in line with the MOS?) then I think that it would all go wrong. Greenshed 23:23, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

If you are using Windows XP, you might need to install complex script and right-to-left language files. Windows Vista I know comes with all this built-in, and I'm sure that Linux and Mac OS X would also have it. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 23:34, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I use Windows 2000/IE6 and only had the "Japanese" font installed once. Since then, most languages requiring unicode display just fine. I had no trouble editing the first line. — Edokter • Talk • 00:09, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Oops, I see what you mean; editing numbers makes the numbers jump around and reversing. — Edokter • Talk • 00:17, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Fun with bi-directional text. The Arabic name starts a right-to-left context, and when you remove the word "born" (which begins a left-to-right context), the remaining punctuation and numbers inherit the Arabic's right-to-leftness. One easy solution is to insert the character U+200E just after the name; this invisible character has the strong left-to-right property that is needed to prevent the punctuation from being interpreted as right-to-left. Anomie 01:37, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Accessibility testing

Could you please give me some scenarios for doing accessibility testing.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Banunaik16 (talk • contribs) 09:54, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Accessibility. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:14, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Links question

how can I make a link to a specific paragraph of some other article? For example a link to the paragraph "Tampa Jook Music" of the article "Music of Florida" from a different article.. Thanks--Lykantrop ^(Talk) 14:35, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

See Help:Link#Section linking (anchors) - or maybe you only have to see how I made that link! PrimeHunter (talk) 14:55, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Nice one! thanks..--Lykantrop ^(Talk) 15:27, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Image problem

I have been trying to make the image in the infobox in this article Flores, Buenos Aires display properly. The image is off commons (Image:Flores-Buenos Aires map.png) and should display in the same way as the image used on Floresta, Buenos Aires. The image seems to work perfectly well on Spanish wikipedia (es:Flores (Buenos Aires)). Neither myself nor another experienced editor see to be able to figure out what the problem is. Does anyone have any ideas? English peasant 21:05, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. The thumbnail was corrupted. I just purged (and again) the caches to make mediawiki regenerate the thumbnails. JackSchmidt (talk) 21:18, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

The image still doesn't seem to display in the infobox here Flores, Buenos Aires. English peasant 21:25, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Because you have already visited this page today, you need to clear your browser cache. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:31, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Cheers,sorry for being dim! English peasant 21:47, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] HotCat Gadget bug

I'm not sure if this is the place to report it, or if it has already been reported, but HotCat breaks on "view source" pages (example), causing all my other javascript to break also. The exact error is "document.editform has no properties", for obvious reasons. — Bob • (talk) • 22:32, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Speak to TheDJ? I know how to fix it (if(document.editform) //blah else return;) but there's probably a better solution, one TheDJ would likely know. x42bn6 Talk Mess 22:46, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

(editconflict) The place to report would be at WT:HOTCAT :D I'll fix it right away. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:47, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[ecx2]I'm assuming it's a permissions problem; as an administrator with the script installed, I don't have any problems with it. EVula // talk // ☯ // 22:49, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Problem should be fixed now, but you might have to trash your browsercache in order to get the latest version. Thx for the report. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:02, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

It works now; thanks! — Bob • (talk) • 15:52, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] merging account and usernames

Hello, I own the Username Ataraxie on the french wikipedia. It's taken here by someone who has not contributed for quite some time. Would it be possible to rename it in order for me to merge accounts ? Thank you.--Ataraxiel (talk) 13:54, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Try asking at WP:CHU/SUL, that's where the English Wikipedia handles all SUL-related rename requests. --ais523 14:13, 9 June 2008 (U T C)