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If you wish to contact me, please send an e-mail. I will not be checking messages regularly in the next while.

Thank you. Wanderer57

Sections older than 14 days are archived by MiszaBot.

It is currently 15:59 ( UTC), Monday, April 29, 2024 ( Purge)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Living people

Appreciated

The Barnstar of Diligence
For one of the most helpful, yet concise, copyright problem reports I've ever seen. Moonriddengirl (talk) 10 October 2008
I owe you additional thanks for fixing my misspellings of the lady's name! Thank you. :) Here I thought I had it. :/ -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 11 October 2008
The Guidance Barnstar
thank you Ann weller tagge ( talk) 29 October 2008

Format for an article protection request

Name of article goes here (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

  • This needs to be viewed in Edit mode.

Format for an article protection request. Probly la = lock article

(The request has to be put on the proper page. This page is: Wikipedia:Requests for page protection

Misc Links

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate Tool to summarize Wikipedia edit history

Report Vandalism

Warning codes

Caution Messages

Discussion re vandal work

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents

Wikipedia:Editor assistance

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion

Category:Wikipedia administrators who will provide copies of deleted articles

Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia

Google Wikipedia search tool

Confusing Diffs

[ |Users, Admins, other species]

Wikipedia:Layout

Wikipedia:Template messages/Sources of articles

Help:Images and other uploaded files

Information about scripts is here:

User:Misza13/Scripts

User talk:Wanderer57/test 2

Also swiped from User:Jayjg

User talk:DGG#A chance to use your librarian tools

Cheat Sheet

user talk:wanderer57/subpage

The Transhumanist's tutorial on page design

Notes re vandalism

The Futility of Vandalism, Discussed by a Poet

A Guide to Wikipedia, Written by a Poet - - - Why didn't I find this stuff sooner??!!

Improving Articles

Editing Test

User:Durova/The dark side

User:Filll/homeopathyscales

User talk:Wanderer57/Problem with Homeopathy Discussions

User talk:Wanderer57/Spanish

User talk:Wanderer57/Birthday Greeting + Dove of Peace

User talk:Wanderer57/Tables

User talk:Wanderer57/Links borrowed from User Sceptre

User:Wanderer57/monobook.css

User:Wanderer57/monobook.js

Strange and Interesting Links (a Miscellany)

User:Remember (the links are on this page; not that the user themself is necessarily strange or interesting - though they may be)

Advice on finding old material

Is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Help_desk&oldid=189626143

in the section: How to Keep Track of Answers

- - - Discussion re Copyright issues is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Fuhghettaboutit#Antebellum_Bulldogs

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:Fuhghettaboutit&oldid=188685042

in the section: Antebellum Bulldogs

Manual of Style (Dates and Numbers)

Excerpt:

  • Wikipedia has articles on days of the year, years, decades, centuries and millennia. Link to one of these pages only if it is likely to deepen readers' understanding of a topic. Piped links to pages that are more focused on a topic are possible ([[1997 in South African sport|1997]]), but cannot be used in full dates, where they break the date-linking function.

Templates - borrowed from Robert K S

Here's how to use templates to cite sources:

Here's how to use templates to quote:

Here are some useful template messages:

Useful Wikipedia links - borrowed from Robert K S

  • The Wikipedia Manual of Style, for when you want to know whether periods and commas go inside or outside of quotation marks (outside!), or how many spaces to leave between sentences (one or two, it doesn't matter!)
  • Wikipedia:Purge, for instructions on how to purge cached pages and images
  • Wannabe Kate tool, to check your number of edits.

Sample userbox code

Creation is good This user does not create his or her own userboxes.

.

.

.

Tools

Swiped from User:Jayjg

RfC and RfA links

Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration#Request for the Matthew Hoffman case to be closed with no decisions, FoF, etc.

User talk:Durova#My attempt at assuming good faith

Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Adam Cuerden##Arbcom

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:B&oldid=181068615

rechercher Whig

Block of Whig

Tough questioning

User talk:Bearian#Re Anthon01 & Homeopathy blocks

[ [1]] Houdini


Who did this and when did they do it?

(Copied from Help Desk)

How do I find out the IP address or logged in username of something added/edited quite awhile ago? I found an unsigned comment and thought I'd add the unsigned template, but I couldn't find any information in the history about who added or last edited it.. I couldn't even tell _when_ the particular article section was last edited. Is there anything that will tell me this? Thanks! -- Silvaran ( talk)

Copy some text from the post. Go the articles history and expand it to five hundred posts. Go about halway and click on a date which will take you to the version of the page that existed on that date. Use your computer's find function and check whether the copied text exists on that verision. If yes, the edit was added after that date; if no, the edit was added before that date. Depending on which is true, go the approximate midpoint in the history before or after what you just tried depending on which is the case and check again. Using this method you should be able to locate where the edit was added in short order.-- Fuhghettaboutit ( talk)
The binary search algorithm described above is perhaps the most efficient manual method. You can also try the WikiBlame tool if you want to let a computer try to do the grunt work. -- Teratornis ( talk)

To Someone Well-deserving

The Barnstar of Diligence
For ensuring article accuracy and civil consensus on a very controversial and important article. Eustress ( talk) (Received March 2008)

CSS Coding

Underlining changes in diffs

Hello Davidgothberg:

I saw a note about the new code and it sounds like a very useful thing to me. I waste too much time looking at diffs, wondering what is different. However, when I copied the code into my file User:Wanderer57/monobook.css nothing happened.

Probably the problem is that I am missing other code that is required, Because I do not know the syntax of the css, I am stuck. I would appreciate if you would take a quick look and then tell me if there is an article that i should read to learn what I did wrong (or did not do)

The problem was solved after I logged out and back in.

Please what would be the code to make links more prominent. So that for example, I would see Adam instead of Adam?

What I should really ask is where I can find basic instructions about CSS coding in Wikipedia.

Thank you, Wanderer57 ( talk

Wikipedia uses the normal W3C standardised CSS since that is what the web browsers understand. So you can learn more at www.w3.org. Check out their menu on the left side. There you have "CSS" which points to a page with another menu with "Learning CSS" and "Specs 2.1". One of the best ways to learn CSS is to code your own web pages locally on your hard drive. Since then you don't have any of the caching problems. Just change the code and reload the page from disk. You will have good use of the "CSS Validator" (W3C main page left side menu again). If you don't already know much about HTML coding then you need to start with that. See their main page, left side menu again: "HTML" goes to a page with a menu to the right with the specs "HTML 4.01" and "XHTML 1.0", and learning stuff below that. Also check out the "HTML Validator" (main page left side menu again).
There are several ways we code CSS for Wikipedia. The easiest one is to use CSS in the style="" tags of things, especially when we code templates. Another is to create CSS classes that are used in class="" attributes. Or even to code CSS code for classes and situations that already exists, like for what you asked above to make all links bold. Then you often have to view the source code of a page (using "view - page source" or so in your browser) and study what markup and what classes MediaWiki produce so you can write the correct CSS code for that. Thus you need to be able to at least partially understand the XHTML you see there.
If you are seriously going to code this stuff for Wikipedia or for your own web sites then you also need to install several different web browsers so yo can test that what you create works in most browsers.
Expect this to take some months of study.
-- David Göthberg

Thank you. I will set limited goals and hope to make some progress.

The .diffchange code that I put in my monobook.css to underline the changes works fine. Am I correct in thinking that that code is overriding other code stored elsewhere?

If that's the case, where is the "other" code? Are there multiple locations? (I understand that I should not even think about editing that code. It might be informative to look at it.

One more question, then I'll go away. What does "monobook" stand for?

Thank you very much. Wanderer57 ( talk) 1 May 2008

I'll answer this in backwards order compared to how you asked, since that is a better order:
MonoBook is the default skin for Wikipedia. Look in your user menu (usually at top of page) - "My preferences" - "Skin". There you'll see the default skin is MonoBook. Try some of the other skins and you'll see what "skin" means. And prepare to be somewhat chocked at first.
Those skins are mainly specified as different .CSS files. But there are also a little Javascript involved.
First a number of MediaWiki default CSS pages are loaded, those can only be edited by the MediaWiki developers or so. Then MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Monobook.css are loaded, and those can be edited by us admins and thus we can override and extend the default MediaWiki CSS. And last your own monobook.css is loaded where you can override all the others and add your own new classes. That means you can customise your skin and test new classes.
If you look at the top of the talk page MediaWiki_talk:Common.css there is a box listing the CSS pages for the different skins, and a link to Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes. That catalogue is not complete, but it covers most of the files and classes involved.
The same system applies to the javascript pages, they are also listed in that catalogue.
The default .diff classes are specified in en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/common/diff.css. That CSS file is only loaded when viewing diffs. (I just discovered that file was not listed in the catalogue, so I fixed that.) And you are kind of right that the .diffchange code you have in your monobook.css "overrides" the .diffchange code in the default diff.css file. But since the default class specification did not have any borders you are technically not overriding but instead adding to or extending that class. That is, the diff view will still have bold red text.
If you use Firefox you can get the add-on named "JSView" from the Mozilla website. (Firefox menu - Tools - Add-ons - lower right corner: Get extensions.) It is a tool that gives you a little status bar icon where you can click to see and list all active CSS and Javascript pages when you are looking on some web page. Very helpful. I think there are similar tools for other web browsers too.
MediaWiki adds a class name to pretty much every object it renders on the pages. Not all those classes are used in the CSS files and many are not yet listed in the catalogue. So do view the source code of a page to see what classes are on what objects. And off course, different kinds of pages on Wikipedia use different classes. For instance the .diff classes are only used in diff views.
-- David Göthberg ( talk)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you wish to contact me, please send an e-mail. I will not be checking messages regularly in the next while.

Thank you. Wanderer57

Sections older than 14 days are archived by MiszaBot.

It is currently 15:59 ( UTC), Monday, April 29, 2024 ( Purge)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Living people

Appreciated

The Barnstar of Diligence
For one of the most helpful, yet concise, copyright problem reports I've ever seen. Moonriddengirl (talk) 10 October 2008
I owe you additional thanks for fixing my misspellings of the lady's name! Thank you. :) Here I thought I had it. :/ -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 11 October 2008
The Guidance Barnstar
thank you Ann weller tagge ( talk) 29 October 2008

Format for an article protection request

Name of article goes here (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

  • This needs to be viewed in Edit mode.

Format for an article protection request. Probly la = lock article

(The request has to be put on the proper page. This page is: Wikipedia:Requests for page protection

Misc Links

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/Tool1/wannabe_kate Tool to summarize Wikipedia edit history

Report Vandalism

Warning codes

Caution Messages

Discussion re vandal work

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents

Wikipedia:Editor assistance

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion

Category:Wikipedia administrators who will provide copies of deleted articles

Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia

Google Wikipedia search tool

Confusing Diffs

[ |Users, Admins, other species]

Wikipedia:Layout

Wikipedia:Template messages/Sources of articles

Help:Images and other uploaded files

Information about scripts is here:

User:Misza13/Scripts

User talk:Wanderer57/test 2

Also swiped from User:Jayjg

User talk:DGG#A chance to use your librarian tools

Cheat Sheet

user talk:wanderer57/subpage

The Transhumanist's tutorial on page design

Notes re vandalism

The Futility of Vandalism, Discussed by a Poet

A Guide to Wikipedia, Written by a Poet - - - Why didn't I find this stuff sooner??!!

Improving Articles

Editing Test

User:Durova/The dark side

User:Filll/homeopathyscales

User talk:Wanderer57/Problem with Homeopathy Discussions

User talk:Wanderer57/Spanish

User talk:Wanderer57/Birthday Greeting + Dove of Peace

User talk:Wanderer57/Tables

User talk:Wanderer57/Links borrowed from User Sceptre

User:Wanderer57/monobook.css

User:Wanderer57/monobook.js

Strange and Interesting Links (a Miscellany)

User:Remember (the links are on this page; not that the user themself is necessarily strange or interesting - though they may be)

Advice on finding old material

Is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Help_desk&oldid=189626143

in the section: How to Keep Track of Answers

- - - Discussion re Copyright issues is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Fuhghettaboutit#Antebellum_Bulldogs

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:Fuhghettaboutit&oldid=188685042

in the section: Antebellum Bulldogs

Manual of Style (Dates and Numbers)

Excerpt:

  • Wikipedia has articles on days of the year, years, decades, centuries and millennia. Link to one of these pages only if it is likely to deepen readers' understanding of a topic. Piped links to pages that are more focused on a topic are possible ([[1997 in South African sport|1997]]), but cannot be used in full dates, where they break the date-linking function.

Templates - borrowed from Robert K S

Here's how to use templates to cite sources:

Here's how to use templates to quote:

Here are some useful template messages:

Useful Wikipedia links - borrowed from Robert K S

  • The Wikipedia Manual of Style, for when you want to know whether periods and commas go inside or outside of quotation marks (outside!), or how many spaces to leave between sentences (one or two, it doesn't matter!)
  • Wikipedia:Purge, for instructions on how to purge cached pages and images
  • Wannabe Kate tool, to check your number of edits.

Sample userbox code

Creation is good This user does not create his or her own userboxes.

.

.

.

Tools

Swiped from User:Jayjg

RfC and RfA links

Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration#Request for the Matthew Hoffman case to be closed with no decisions, FoF, etc.

User talk:Durova#My attempt at assuming good faith

Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Adam Cuerden##Arbcom

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=User_talk:B&oldid=181068615

rechercher Whig

Block of Whig

Tough questioning

User talk:Bearian#Re Anthon01 & Homeopathy blocks

[ [1]] Houdini


Who did this and when did they do it?

(Copied from Help Desk)

How do I find out the IP address or logged in username of something added/edited quite awhile ago? I found an unsigned comment and thought I'd add the unsigned template, but I couldn't find any information in the history about who added or last edited it.. I couldn't even tell _when_ the particular article section was last edited. Is there anything that will tell me this? Thanks! -- Silvaran ( talk)

Copy some text from the post. Go the articles history and expand it to five hundred posts. Go about halway and click on a date which will take you to the version of the page that existed on that date. Use your computer's find function and check whether the copied text exists on that verision. If yes, the edit was added after that date; if no, the edit was added before that date. Depending on which is true, go the approximate midpoint in the history before or after what you just tried depending on which is the case and check again. Using this method you should be able to locate where the edit was added in short order.-- Fuhghettaboutit ( talk)
The binary search algorithm described above is perhaps the most efficient manual method. You can also try the WikiBlame tool if you want to let a computer try to do the grunt work. -- Teratornis ( talk)

To Someone Well-deserving

The Barnstar of Diligence
For ensuring article accuracy and civil consensus on a very controversial and important article. Eustress ( talk) (Received March 2008)

CSS Coding

Underlining changes in diffs

Hello Davidgothberg:

I saw a note about the new code and it sounds like a very useful thing to me. I waste too much time looking at diffs, wondering what is different. However, when I copied the code into my file User:Wanderer57/monobook.css nothing happened.

Probably the problem is that I am missing other code that is required, Because I do not know the syntax of the css, I am stuck. I would appreciate if you would take a quick look and then tell me if there is an article that i should read to learn what I did wrong (or did not do)

The problem was solved after I logged out and back in.

Please what would be the code to make links more prominent. So that for example, I would see Adam instead of Adam?

What I should really ask is where I can find basic instructions about CSS coding in Wikipedia.

Thank you, Wanderer57 ( talk

Wikipedia uses the normal W3C standardised CSS since that is what the web browsers understand. So you can learn more at www.w3.org. Check out their menu on the left side. There you have "CSS" which points to a page with another menu with "Learning CSS" and "Specs 2.1". One of the best ways to learn CSS is to code your own web pages locally on your hard drive. Since then you don't have any of the caching problems. Just change the code and reload the page from disk. You will have good use of the "CSS Validator" (W3C main page left side menu again). If you don't already know much about HTML coding then you need to start with that. See their main page, left side menu again: "HTML" goes to a page with a menu to the right with the specs "HTML 4.01" and "XHTML 1.0", and learning stuff below that. Also check out the "HTML Validator" (main page left side menu again).
There are several ways we code CSS for Wikipedia. The easiest one is to use CSS in the style="" tags of things, especially when we code templates. Another is to create CSS classes that are used in class="" attributes. Or even to code CSS code for classes and situations that already exists, like for what you asked above to make all links bold. Then you often have to view the source code of a page (using "view - page source" or so in your browser) and study what markup and what classes MediaWiki produce so you can write the correct CSS code for that. Thus you need to be able to at least partially understand the XHTML you see there.
If you are seriously going to code this stuff for Wikipedia or for your own web sites then you also need to install several different web browsers so yo can test that what you create works in most browsers.
Expect this to take some months of study.
-- David Göthberg

Thank you. I will set limited goals and hope to make some progress.

The .diffchange code that I put in my monobook.css to underline the changes works fine. Am I correct in thinking that that code is overriding other code stored elsewhere?

If that's the case, where is the "other" code? Are there multiple locations? (I understand that I should not even think about editing that code. It might be informative to look at it.

One more question, then I'll go away. What does "monobook" stand for?

Thank you very much. Wanderer57 ( talk) 1 May 2008

I'll answer this in backwards order compared to how you asked, since that is a better order:
MonoBook is the default skin for Wikipedia. Look in your user menu (usually at top of page) - "My preferences" - "Skin". There you'll see the default skin is MonoBook. Try some of the other skins and you'll see what "skin" means. And prepare to be somewhat chocked at first.
Those skins are mainly specified as different .CSS files. But there are also a little Javascript involved.
First a number of MediaWiki default CSS pages are loaded, those can only be edited by the MediaWiki developers or so. Then MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Monobook.css are loaded, and those can be edited by us admins and thus we can override and extend the default MediaWiki CSS. And last your own monobook.css is loaded where you can override all the others and add your own new classes. That means you can customise your skin and test new classes.
If you look at the top of the talk page MediaWiki_talk:Common.css there is a box listing the CSS pages for the different skins, and a link to Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes. That catalogue is not complete, but it covers most of the files and classes involved.
The same system applies to the javascript pages, they are also listed in that catalogue.
The default .diff classes are specified in en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/common/diff.css. That CSS file is only loaded when viewing diffs. (I just discovered that file was not listed in the catalogue, so I fixed that.) And you are kind of right that the .diffchange code you have in your monobook.css "overrides" the .diffchange code in the default diff.css file. But since the default class specification did not have any borders you are technically not overriding but instead adding to or extending that class. That is, the diff view will still have bold red text.
If you use Firefox you can get the add-on named "JSView" from the Mozilla website. (Firefox menu - Tools - Add-ons - lower right corner: Get extensions.) It is a tool that gives you a little status bar icon where you can click to see and list all active CSS and Javascript pages when you are looking on some web page. Very helpful. I think there are similar tools for other web browsers too.
MediaWiki adds a class name to pretty much every object it renders on the pages. Not all those classes are used in the CSS files and many are not yet listed in the catalogue. So do view the source code of a page to see what classes are on what objects. And off course, different kinds of pages on Wikipedia use different classes. For instance the .diff classes are only used in diff views.
-- David Göthberg ( talk)

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