Help desk
< October 24	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	October 26 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Help Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current Help Desk pages.

October 25

Signature problems

I type four tildes and no link to my user page as you can see, it's plain and black. Same with the signature button. What's up with that? --Crackthewhip775 00:20, 25 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Crackthewhip775 (talk • contribs)

Uncheck the "Raw signature" field at Special:Preferences and leave the Signature field blank. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:22, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh wow, thanks. Silly me. --Crackthewhip775 (talk) 00:25, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Searching within categories

Neither Wikipedia nor Google seems to allow me to limit a search to pages within a category or categories. It would also be nice to be able to view a random article within a given category. Does anyone have any advice? Richard001 (talk) 02:34, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See tools:~erwin85/randomarticle.php Lego K^ontribs T^alkM 03:55, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See AltaVista's search syntax. You might be able to tell AltaVista to search for pages that:

Are on Wikipedia;
Link to a specific category page.

That might find some pages that are not actually in a category, but merely link to it, like this: Category:Wave power, but if it works correctly, it might also search pages that are in a category. However, when using any external search engine, note that Wikipedia's robots.txt file excludes some pages from indexing, such as article deletion debates. Also note that Google sometimes gives odd results because it doesn't understand Wikipedia's redirects, so it might continue to index a page under its redirect URL after a page move. That probably won't be an issue here, but you never know. Searching Wikipedia with external search engines is great when they work, but sometimes you will scratch your head and wonder why they aren't finding pages you know to exist. --Teratornis (talk) 07:31, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't seem to be much I can do then. If only Wikipedia would get decent searching capabilities itself... Richard001 (talk) 23:42, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Chart

Hello. On a certain article, I wish to create a chart that has the timetable column to the left and the event that happened to the right; there wouldn't necessarily have to be a title. But what code would I punch in to create the table?--Archeopteryx (talk) 03:25, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can start by looking at Help:Table. Thats as far as i know, sorry :P Monster Under Your Bed ^(talk) 03:28, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You can insert a table by simply clicking on the Insert a table button on the edit toolbar above the edit box. That's the second one from the right. You can add or remove rows or columns by adding or removing lines of the code. Wikipedia:When to use tables might also help you. Cheers. Chamal ^talk 03:35, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Will the table created fit the description I gave?--Archeopteryx (talk) 03:39, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For a table with two columns, the code will be this:

{| class="wikitable" border="1"

|-

! header 1

! header 2

|-

| row 1, cell 1

| row 1, cell 2

|-

| row 2, cell 1

| row 2, cell 2

|}

Since you don't need the headers, you can remove those lines. Replace row 1, cell 1 and the other lines with the formation you want. Add more lines by adding

|-

| data1

| data2

above the |}. Hope that helps. Cheers. Chamal ^talk 03:47, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We also have templates {{chart}}, {{horizontal timeline}} and {{graphical timeline}}. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 10:01, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bad news

For some reason, when I added "Ja:" to the Japanese article I was trying to go to, it would not let me go there. Can anyone give me some advice on why this is happening? Any info on this would be appreciated. Thank you.Kitty53 (talk) 05:00, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like the Wikipedia servers are having a problem right now. I keep getting the message "Wikipedia has a problem". Maybe you should try again later? Chamal ^talk 05:08, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Archive 40 problems

What is going on with Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Archive 40? Approximately, the last ten days have not been archived.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 07:06, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Question about editing Wikipedia

I have a quick question about a possible editing feature. I'm not sure what it's called, so I'll describe what I'd like to do.

I am from the Sicilian Wikipedia and am currently building a table of Sicilian words on my User Page. One of the columns of the table is for the pronunciations of the words. In attempting to be as comprehensive as possible, I've decided to use IPA symbols to transcribe the pronunciations. However, I must say that for the layman these symbols can be quite confusing, so I'd also like to include regular characters.

I am wondering if there is a way, in Wikipedia, to make it so that the user can click on the column heading "Pronunciation" in order to automatically change the transcription from IPA symbols to regular letters?

To better understand what I'd like to do, go here, or search any word on Dictionary.com. You can see, just after the word there is the pronunciation in brackets. Immediately followiing that, it gives you the option to click on "Show IPA Pronunciation". If you click there, the brackets will change to forward slashes and the pronunciation will change to IPA symbols.

This is exactly what I'd like to have happen in my table, the user clicks "Pronunciation" and it switches back and forth from IPA to regular, in the same way as on Dictionary.com.

Can you please tell me if this is possible in Wikipedia, or if there's something similar, and how exactly I can do it.

THANK YOU!

Micheli Scalisi - my page or <email address removed>

I have not seen anything like this on Wikipedia. If someone knows a way to do this, I will be impressed. But why do you want to make the table dynamic? Why not just make two columns instead of one, and show both pronunciations at all times? That would be more useful, because it would help people learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. If the table entries are single words, the columns should be sufficiently narrow that you could show both styles for pronunciation without making the table too wide. --Teratornis (talk) 07:39, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The table already consists of six columns: entry, IPA pronunciation, part of speech, Italian definition, English definition and etymology. It therefore already spans the entire page, and is large enough that I've shrunk the parts of speech using the small command in order to make more room. So there's now way I can add another column. I hope someone knows how to do what I'm asking. - Micheli Scalisi

I wonder if it might be possible to code both columns with one column always hidden, toggling which column is hidden by clicking on a link. I think Template:Hidden works like that. —teb728 t c 08:27, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please do not include contact details in your questions. We are unable to provide answers by any off-wiki medium and this page is highly visible across the internet. The details have been removed, but if you wish for them to be permanently removed from the page history, email this address. DendodgeTalk^Contribs 18:11, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Many pages on Wikipedia display tabular data with too many columns to fit comfortably into a single table. The standard (and only, as far as I recall) solution appears to be splitting wide tables into two or more separate tables, duplicating the first column in each table. See for example Comparison of wiki software, which has several separate sections with tables that list groups of attributes for the same set of wiki software entries. A basic principle of understanding technology is reverse engineering, which involves analyzing an artifact to see how it works, and trying to understand why its builders built things a certain way, and not in some other way. In this case the interesting question is:

Why did the authors of the Comparison of wiki software article create multiple tables instead of (or in addition to) one large table with groups of columns that the reader could interactively show or hide?

I can see some advantages to the dynamic table, for example when you want to compare multiple features that currently reside in different tables. It's hard to scroll between the tables and locate a particular wiki software package. There are several possible reasons why the authors did not implement a dynamic table:

The authors never thought of doing it that way.
The authors did think of it, but:
- They could not figure out how to implement it with the available MediaWiki software features and extensions.
- They knew how, but chose not to.

If you can't figure out how to do what you are trying to do, a next step could be to find articles where the authors could have made such tables, but did not, and then find out why they did not. Whatever the answer is, it should inform your next step. For example, if they never thought of doing what you are trying to do, maybe someone with more technical knowledge will like the idea and try to make it happen. Or maybe they did think of it but decided it wasn't a good idea, in which case you would want to study their arguments. --Teratornis (talk) 18:13, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

typo on the name of my article

Hi,

I created an article yesterday for "Forsvaret stabsmusikkorps". Unfortunately, in my haste, I spelled the name incorrectly. The band is called "Forsvarets stabsmusikkorps" -an S after Forsvaret. I read your page about how to change this, but really didn't understand what I was supposed to do to fix it. Is it possible for an administrator to help me with this? To confirm what I am saying, you can visit www.fsmk.no - this is our official website.

Thank you for your help!

Sincerely,

Marcia Titley—Preceding unsigned comment added by Mtitley (talk • contribs) ]

Please do not include contact details in your questions. We are unable to provide answers by any off-wiki medium and this page is highly visible across the internet. The details have been removed, but if you wish for them to be permanently removed from the page history, email this address. DendodgeTalk^Contribs 11:45, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The article has been moved to the correct page by User:Fuhghettaboutit. Chamal ^talk 11:46, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(e/c) I moved the article to Forsvarets Stabsmusikkorps, and note that I capitalized the second word. The full name is a proper noun, yes? If not, I can always move it again. By the way, it's not a good idea to post your email address here, which I removed. Also, posts to talk pages and discussion forums (but not to articles) should be signed. This is done by posting four tildes in a row (~~~~) at the end which automatically formats to your signature when you save. You can move articles yourself once you have made ten edits and your account is four days old, which places you in the user class autoconfirmed. Cheers.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:49, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The page with the second word's first letter in lowercase is also redirecting to Forsvarets Stabsmusikkorps now. Chamal ^talk 11:59, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Might want to delete the original misspelling now, then... Imperat§ r^(Talk) 14:31, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Graphical Timeline Template Not Editing Correctly

I recently tried to edit the graphical timeline template: Template:Timeline of MacBook Family Models by simply updating dates and models. I have performed dozens of simple edits to timeline templates and have created them as well. Suddenly, even minor edits, such as changing the date of an item results in an empty bargraph with no superimposed text. i.e. the colored bargraphs are there, but not the delineating text links. This is not limited to just the example above but all Timeline Templates. Has something changed in the software on the Wiki servers?

As for me, I'm using a Macintosh computer running OS X 10.4.11, Safari 3.1.2 and Firefox 3.0.3. The problem persists on both browsers. Unfortunately I have no other computers or browsers to test this on.--Mac128 (talk) 16:50, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

First, try editing different pages rather than timelines. If that still doesn't work, Wiki's having problems. =D Imperat§ r^(Talk) 17:28, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, no problems editing pages. It's only the graphical timeline templates that aren't previewing or saving properly. Doesn't mean WIki isn't having problems though.--Mac128 (talk) 17:35, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

You are at least asking the right question: "Has something changed...?" The first "something" to check in this case would be the {{Timeline of MacBook Family Models}} template and any other templates it transcludes. The last edit to {{Timeline of MacBook Family Models}} itself was on October 14, 2008. When was the last time you were able to use this template correctly? It's common for people to edit templates and break them in ways that they do not notice at the time, because they only tested some other features of the template. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but that's the first thing to check. --Teratornis (talk) 18:22, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, wait, I misunderstood the problem. The {{Timeline of MacBook Family Models}} template takes no parameters, and thus one only edits the template itself, rather than editing the code that transcludes it. That might make isolating the problem more difficult. I suggest copying the template code to a user subpage, and see what happens when you edit the subpage. That way you can play around without having to worry about breaking the real template and thus messing up the pages that transclude it, and you can also create a test case that illustrates the problem, so other users can verify it. By the way, the template title does not follow the Wikipedia convention on title case, which applies primarily to articles, but is still nice to follow elsewhere for consistency. --Teratornis (talk) 18:33, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Looking further at the template's edit history shows that two other users edited the template after your last edit to it on June 22, 2008. Try copying your your last revision to a user sandbox page (for example: User:Mac128/Sandbox) and see if you can edit successfully from your last revision. --Teratornis (talk) 18:39, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

←I'm having the same problem - see my post below. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 19:53, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Time to archive...

Hello. if you go to my talk page, you'll see a vast accumulation of new sections. How would I get those sectons archived into "Archive 1" and clean up?--Archeopteryx (talk) 18:29, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

WP:EIW#Archive. --Teratornis (talk) 18:34, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)Two different ways. Either (1) move the entire page to User:Archeopteryx/Archive 1 and then start a new page at User talk:Archeopteryx, or alternatively (2) copy and paste the current contents of your talk page to the archive page. Either's fine - with the former the entire history is moved along with it, with the latter the history of your talk page stays with your talk page (your archive would only have one edit). I do the second method (eg. User talk:Gb/Archive 14, etc.). There are bots which can do it automatically, but I can't remember which one it is off the top of my head... _Gb^T/c 18:35, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

For automatic archiving, use this:

{{User:MiszaBot/config
|algo = old(48h)
|archive = User talk:Archeopteryx/Archive %(counter)d
|counter = 1
|maxarchivesize = 250K
}}

Make sure it's all on separate lines. DendodgeTalk^Contribs 18:40, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah. That's the one. ;-) _Gb^T/c 18:46, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Re: off the top of one's head - when answering questions on the Help desk, one should not rely solely on (or off) the top of one's head, redoubtable though it may be, but also look up the answers in the friendly manuals. In this case, everything the questioner needs to know is in the links under WP:EIW#Archive. We can retype chunks of it here for the user to be nice, but in the long run everyone is better off if every user gets in the habit of referring to the friendly manuals, where users can find the most canonical instantiations of our instructions, avoiding the telephone game dangers of imperfect recall. --Teratornis (talk) 18:50, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that. Can I get your high horse some hay? :-) _Gb^T/c 18:58, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'll never be a diplomat, but check out Eric Steven Raymond sometime. He'd be the first to get thrown from a crowded lifeboat. Most of what I know, I learned through being corrected by others, and occasionally I can just manage to feel thankful for that. Wikipedia takes this process to a whole new level - it's like a giant correction machine. It would be nice to have some real sangfroid. Most likely, I have failed to benefit from some corrections by failing to control my emotional brain - why do we have emotional brains that constantly guard us from any possibility of improvement? (My question is rhetorical, of course, because I think evolutionary psychology explains our ego-defensive impulses pretty well.) --Teratornis (talk) 19:56, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Uploading images

Even after thoroughly reading over the directions and even attempting it myself, I still do not understand how to upload images. Could someone walk me through it please? -- Ray-Ginsay (talk) 20:38, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Is the image currently in a folder on your harddisk? Starting at Wikipedia:Upload, can you say where your attempt stops? Is the problem to give an appropriate license? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:08, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(e/c) Also it might help if you were more specific about what you are trying to do. What kind of image is it? Where did you get it from? Who owns the copyright on it? And under what license does the owner allow it to be used on Wikipedia? —teb728 t c 22:13, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Adding a photography studio to the list under Photography Companies > Sub catagory Photography Studios

Aloha! I tried the edit option but that didn't look right...Anyway, there are only 15 Photography Studios listed in this sub category. I would like to add a Photography Studio to the list. How do I do this? Onceuponadime (talk) 21:38, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

First you would have to create an article about the studio (assuming of course the studio meets our notability guideline (which most studios do not meet)). The you add [[Category:Photographic studios]] to the article. —teb728 t c 21:58, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) You can only add existing Wikipedia articles to a category and it's done by editing the article and not the category. See more at Help:Category. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:01, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

How to HIDE a COLUMN in a TABLE

I posed a question here and one of the possible solutions to the problem was to "hide" the column. However, I have no idea how to hide only one column of a table.

A copy of the table can be seen on my user page. What I would like to do, ultimately, is enable the user to click on the Sbeddu heading in order to change the entire column from IPA symbols to regular characters. To understand better, you can go here. After the entry, "hello", the pronunciation is written in regular characters within brackets. If you click on "Show IPA Pronunciation", the brackets will change to forward slashes and the regular characters will change to IPA symbols. I would like something similar in my table.

In case this isn't possible, I'd like to try and add a hidden column like someone suggested. But I do not know how to do this. Keep in mind, the table is on the scn.wikipedia, so I'm not sure if certain templates will work or not, of if they'd need to be created, and how. If someone could help, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Micheli Scalisi —Preceding undated comment was added at 22:56, 25 October 2008 (UTC).[reply]

This is an outline of how a hidden column might work, but I don’t know the details: I should think there would be a way to apply a style to a table column. If there is, applying style="display:none" to a column ought to hide the column. If this so, I should think it would be possible to toggle the hidden style with javascript. —teb728 t c 08:27, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

But then the hide/show-column (or toggle-column) javascript would need to be incorporated into the site-wide xxx.js file. Interesting idea though - readers could toggle imperial/metric units, for one thing. Franamax (talk) 08:35, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, HTML tables don't have "columns"; there are "rows" of "data" elements. It's possible to do as TEB728 and Franamax suggest but each element has to be modified. I've done it but it required pre-processing and reformatting the table elements, and currently, dynamically hiding a column is not worth the trouble. Saintrain (talk) 18:01, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed deletion

There is an article, Yves Lamoureux, which I question over wether it should be deleted. I think it does have a little chance of doing so for it 1.)cites no references and 2.)has practically no importance. What are the chances of it getting deleted, or at least a tag placed on?--Archeopteryx (talk) 22:57, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It has a speedy delete tag placed on it. An admin will decide. Likely, based on the lack of references, it will be deleted. DavidWS (talk) 23:41, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It looks to me like it has no reason of being deleted, unless the guy is made up. Mac Davis (talk) 00:50, 26 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]