Project:Support desk/Archive 17

= Resolved Topics = Feel free to browse these for ways to make articles better.

[RESOLVED] new wiki: two directories (akin to /w/ and /wiki/ here)
I'm going to install a new wiki soon.

I know that Wikipedia and MediaWiki have some articles in a directory "wiki" and other pages in a directory "w". I've heard this helps with writing robots.txt, so I would like to know how to do this for my own wiki.

How do I do this? Thank you.

(Also, as a side note, is there any purpose for this practice other than robots.txt?)

Smaug 04:42, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * All the files for these wikis are in /w/ (the pages themselves are in the database, and are retrieved through index.php). They then used an alias in apache to redirect /w/index.php?title=xxx to /wiki/xxx (see Manual:Short URL). The two main purposes of this are 1) to have prettier URLs, and 2) the ability to prevent robots from using any actions (like action=edit) which revert to the ugly URLs. Please note that if you want to set this up in your wiki, make sure that there is no folder named /wiki/, it WILL mess things up if there is. As for the Robots.txt they use, the basic one is for the user agent *, you disallow /w/, /wiki/Special:Random and /wiki/Special:Search (as those two special pages should'nt be indexed). --Skizzerz talk [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  21:54, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much! Smaug 17:50, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

[RESOLVED] Vertical Scroll Bars
I've been trying to find code that limits the height of formatted text areas and then add vertical scroll bars. I've seen it created elsewhere on the Gentoo Wiki (http : // tiny url com / 2fv3gx), but for the life of me I just can't figure it out myself. I've searched the MediaWiki help sections to no avail.

Could someone please lend me a helping hand!!!

Cheers,

ak.


 * From that site's MediaWiki:Monobook.css:


 * and they have a template to generate that box. You can tweak it as you like. Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 02:54, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Reply:

Thanks so much for that. I now have my Box File template working. Is it possible to do this for all formatted text without having to "Box" it in?

You should be able to do that by using:

That makes it so you don't have to wrap the &lt;pre&gt; sections in &lt;div&gt;s. Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 04:01, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

[RESOLVED] Custom namespaces and orphaned pages

 * MediaWiki: 1.11.0
 * PHP: 5.2.4 (cgi-fcgi)
 * MySQL: 4.1.22-standard-log

I created a custom namespace called Manual:, and since then a few pages have been added. One of these pages has now become orphaned (no links pointing to it). I checked the page's 'what links here' to make sure nothing linked to it. But when I went to Special:Lonelypages, the page wasn't listed. What's the catch? Something I forgot to configure?

—CodeCat 21:55, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * There is no such thing as Special:Lonelypages. -PatPeter, [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  23:39, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Huh its a special redirect, you really meant Special:Orphanedpages. -PatPeter, [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  23:40, 17 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I guess, but both links lead to the same place, and the link in Special:Specialpages says Lonelypages. --CodeCat 01:32, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


 * PatPeter: It's Lonelypages. Special:Orphanedpages redirects to Special:Lonelypages. See MediaWiki 1.11 release notes.


 * CodeCat: I have a hunch that "orphaned pages" only counts pages that fall within the criteria of $wgContentNamespaces. Try tweaking your settings so Manual: is considered a content space and see if it shows up. Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 05:21, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I was wondering the same thing, but I just checked and it already has  $wgContentNamespaces[] = NS_MANUAL; , with NS_MANUAL defined as 100. So that can't be it. --CodeCat 12:18, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Hmm, there's not a lot of documentation on that special page (that I can find) either. Maybe "it's not a bug; it's an undocumented feature." :P


 * Seriously, though, I'm out of ideas. :( Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 00:18, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I looked in the source files, and found this in includes/SpecialLonelypages.php:
 * So it seems that the whole thing is in fact hardcoded into the source. Worth fixing in a next release? --CodeCat 01:27, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
 * So it seems that the whole thing is in fact hardcoded into the source. Worth fixing in a next release? --CodeCat 01:27, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


 * You got a Bugzilla account? I think this page is a good candidate for the namespace picker such as seen on Special:Contributions. I hope that thing's just a reusable module. It would take some tweaking, but it would make a good enhancement request. Or perhaps it should just use ; I think the chooser is better, personally. If you don't have a Bugzilla account I'll be happy to report the bug for you (unless you want to do it yourself). Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 04:10, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Posted it myself: link. Thanks for the help though. :) --CodeCat 13:17, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

[RESOLVED] Wikipedia
How is it that on some non-English editions of Wikipedia talk pages have a colored background and rounded "article", "discussion", "edit" and "history" buttons. Is this a feature of older versions of MediaWiki or is it a customization (if that's the case, how would I go about doing it?). Also, some Wikipedias have a feature that when one replies on a talk page using the colon indent the text appears in a box like on [this http://gl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversa:Portada] page. Can anyone help? --58.169.232.209 09:08, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The coloring, rounded corners, and boxes are all tweaks to the site CSS. I've rounded corners in my own account on en.wp (see w:en:User:Voyagerfan5761/monobook.css), and you should be able to easily find the code that does it -- I've commented it well. Of course, it looks kind of bad (frankly) in Internet Explorer 6, so perhaps the WPs you've seen are using different code. (Can you post the language of one that has rounding? I'd like to make it so my account doesn't blow up at the library. ;-) )


 * The backgrounds on the responses are generated by this rather lengthy code in MediaWiki:Monobook.css:


 * All talk spaces are odd-numbered, which is why the  selectors don't affect articles. Does that help? Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 09:25, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you, that helped quite a lot. Excuse my poor English. A few Wikipedias have the rounded feature, these include the Bosnian, Italian, Romanian, and Esperanto Wikipedias. --58.169.232.209 10:06, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Also, how would I view the monobook "main.css" file of different language editions? I am trying to steal the code for rounding from the Spanish Wikipedia. I have tried "es.wikipedia.org/skins/monobook/main.css" but this gives me the standard file that comes with a fresh MediaWiki installation. The above code adds the feature nicely, but does not change the background color. Thank you so much for your help and patience so far. --58.169.232.209 10:36, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Don't worry about your English; I've seen much worse writing from English Wikipedia newbies who write from India or another Asian country. Sometimes I can't even figure out what they mean. :D Your writing, I'm not having trouble with.


 * So, I found the code for rounded corners on Pagina principală:


 * I'm guessing the header means "corner rounding", but I don't know Romanian. If you want the corners to be smaller, just adjust the em values to be smaller (like 0.5, for instance); making them bigger is similar.


 * The different styles you see aren't in main.css; they're located in either MediaWiki:Monobook.css or MediaWiki:Common.css. In the corners' case, the styles are probably in Monobook.css, since not all skins have the same elements whose corners would be rounded. Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 00:32, 19 January 2008 (UTC)