Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2010 July 5

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July 5

Login Problems

Hello, I seem to be having problems logging in. Every time I try to login it keeps saying that it "cannot contact the database server (unknown error)". Any idea as to what might be wrong? 98.227.232.84 (talk) 01:45, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

At the time you were having trouble, Wikipedia's servers were down due to a power failure. Everything should be back up and running now. Robert Skyhawk ^{(T C B)} 04:48, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Database error

Every time I try to access User:S-man/Userboxes, I get the message "A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was: (SQL query hidden) from within function "LocalFile::upgradeRow". Database returned error "1223: Can't execute the query because you have a conflicting read lock (10.0.0.241)"." What's going on? --S-man (talk) 02:31, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm getting the same error typing to get this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechanics

So is this a more widespread problem? 76.28.209.17 (talk) 03:05, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Could be connected to Wikipedia's server problem today. Wikipedia was down for a bit not too long ago; I can see how problems and errors like this might be a result. --S-man (talk) 03:09, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

That happened for me for a little while, but it seems all fine now. The whole of Meta's doing it for me though, and about half my watchlist on simpleWP. Wiktionary, Wikiversity, Wikinews and Wikibooks work, and so do zhWP and deWP, so I'm not sure whether there's a pattern. sonia^♫♪ 03:14, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Still happening for me; appears to be silliness caused by the recent outage. I suggest going to village pump (technical) if this doesn't resolve itself in a few hours. The real techies (developers and such) hang around there and are probably much more capable of answering your question. Xenon54 (talk) 03:17, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Everything works for me now, though the search is still bugged up. --S-man (talk) 03:23, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Hindi wiki

I am from hindi wikipedia. Today, 5 July, 0800-0930 IST when I tried to login various times, always a message comes with Database error. Somehow I managed to login via eng wiki, still a number of pages are not even opening, nor can I perform any operation here, same error is coming

"Block::purgeExpired" कार्य समूह से। आँकड़ाकोष की त्रुटि थी "1223: Can't execute the query because you have a conflicting read lock (10.0.6.28)"।

Kindly help me out, or that this is a temporary phase of a s/w problem & will clear on itself with time? --आशीष भटनागर (talk) 03:55, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

No idea, sorry. That's what's happening to me with most of simpleWP, and some of meta. Anyone else? sonia^♫♪ 03:58, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Most wikis were down at around 1:00-2:00 UTC today. It should be fixed now. Robert Skyhawk ^{(T C B)} 04:16, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Search box

I dunno, I'm not even getting a search box except where I have to scroll down an entire page. And I like the way it was much better. I don't know how this is an improvement? I really hope you change it back, it appears alot of people agree. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.88.196.234 (talk) 02:55, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

There's definitely something weird going on with the search box, as it will no longer find articles that I know exist. Maybe connected with the downtime that occurred a little while ago? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:10, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Here is an article from June 15, 2010 on the Wikimedia Technical Blog which may or may not provide information relevant to this question:

• http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/06/usability-why-did-we-move-the-search-box/

--Teratornis (talk) 03:49, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia and Twitter

Is there any way to combine the powers of Wikipedia and Twitter in one comprehensive service? That would be a big help for a lot of us. Polymathic Darko (talk) 04:40, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Please be more specific about which powers you have in mind. Wikipedia has many different powers; few individuals could claim to use all of them. I'm not familiar with Twitter so much, but I imagine it has some powers too. You might be interested in Wikipedia:Syndication if you want to receive continuous updates about various things. --Teratornis (talk) 07:04, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

And you could check us out on Twitter too. ♪ ♫ Wifione ♫ ♪ _―Œ ^{♣Łeave Ξ мessage♣} 11:55, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Changing fonts and adding backgrounds

On another wiki (DnD wiki) I have done a fair bit of editing and learned wiki code fairly well. However there are two things that I would like to do and I have not seen any help pages describing how to do them, or if they are possible.

My first question would be how do I change font styles? I would like to change a block of text so it is in handwriting. I could just use italics, however this presents a much better effect. Is this possible, and how can I do it?

My second question is possibly a little bit more complicated. I am wondering if it is possible to set a background image for the page. I don't mean change the actual background of the site, just change the background of the page where the text is (i.e. the white space). The only way I can think of to do this is to put the page together on word or paint, save it as a .jpg and then upload it as one picture onto the wiki and reformat the size to fill the entire screen. However that seems like a lot of work, and makes it very tricky to edit.

Anyways, thanks a lot for the help and I look forwards to seeing a reply. :) --207.161.100.12 (talk) 07:03, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

"there are two things that I would like to do" - where? On Wikipedia, we don't monkey with fonts much in articles, except to display foreign language characters mostly. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (text formatting). Some users like to monkey with fonts in their signatures and user pages. See the links under WP:EIW#Custom, WP:EIW#Sign (such as User:Athaenara/Gallery), and WP:EIW#UserPage (such as Wikipedia:User page design center/Style#Font Families). I don't know a nice way to put a background image on a page; again, we generally don't do that in articles (but see meta:Help:Composite images for something similar). Maybe someone has done it on a user page. I can't imagine why you need it. If you want to run your own wiki, you can customize MediaWiki any way you want. See mw:Manual:Wiki on a stick (to set up your own personal wiki running on MediaWiki) and mw:Manual:Gallery of user styles. See meta:Help:Contents for the MediaWiki Handbook. If you're going to edit entire pages as images, don't use a raster format like JPEG, use a vector format like SVG, for example you can download Inkscape. Then the result will look nice at any zoom level. --Teratornis (talk) 07:38, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Editing old revisions using custom tabs

I am having difficulty editing old revisions of . When I open an old revision of a page and click "edit", it opens up the current version of the page for editing rather than the old one.

For example, when I click "edit" on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julian_Assange&oldid=341390918 I get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange?action=edit rather than http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Julian_Assange&oldid=341390918&action=edit [note the use of ? rather than &].

I use a custom interface which adds extra tabs and stacks some of them in drop down menus. My monobook is here; I think the scripts responsible are Wikipedia talk:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Add LI menu (stylesheet) and/or Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Compact Navigation.

Does anyone know how to isolate and fix this issue? Skomorokh 10:38, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Daddy Long Legs article issue

 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.101.219.186 (talk) 11:14, 5 July 2010 (UTC) 

Can you give us more specific information about this issue? What is the exact title of the page you are concerned about? Daddy longlegs? That is just a directory of many similar-named articles. I don't see anything offensive in it...which specific entry or section is the problem? DMacks (talk) 11:20, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Hi DMacks, the IP corrected stuff on his/her own here. Self explanatory. ♪ ♫ Wifione ♫ ♪ _―Œ ^{♣Łeave Ξ мessage♣} 11:48, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

1989 car craft conversion

what quarter glass was used on the 1989 fleetwood car craft conversion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.37.215.100 (talk) 14:21, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Have you tried the Miscellaneous section of Wikipedia's Reference Desk? They specialize in answering knowledge questions there; this help desk is only for questions about using Wikipedia. For your convenience, here is the link to post a question there: click here. I hope this helps. TNXMan 14:29, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Sploofus

Can you ascertain where the site, Sploofus has gone? Your link does not work nor does any in any search engine. Perhaps it has shut down and your article will need to be changed to reflect the fact that there WAS a site called "Sploofus". Thank you. Mary-Anne Fabok —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.150.14.253 (talk) 15:54, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

The site does seem to be temporarily unavailable. If we can find independent confirmation that the site has been shut down, we can certainly update the article. However, it may just be a temporary thing. The article is here for anyone who wants to check it out. TNXMan 15:58, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Google Books reference, with or without highlighting?

When giving a reference to Google Books, it appears that some people give the URL that includes the search term that they used to find the entry. This causes the search terms to be highlighted. Is this prefered, discouraged or OK either way. For example, if I wanted to reference where Phoenix Life Insurance Company of Minot, North Dakota had it's principle office, I could give the url as either http://books.google.com/books?id=DCYbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA237&dq="minot,+north+dakota"&hl=en&ei=5gAyTPjKD8GC8gbrg5DJCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22minot%2C%20north%20dakota%22&f=false which would cause Minot North Dakota to be highlighted when the URL is clicked on *or* I could simply have http://books.google.com/books?id=DCYbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA237 which would go the same page without the highlighting. Is there a preference either way officially in Wikipedia? Suggestions on where else to ask this question would also be welcome.Naraht (talk) 16:01, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

I remember a discussion of this but it was years ago, maybe 2006. The upshot was that shortened URLs were preferred, which is what I've always used, and I've used many hundreds of these in references. Giving the page where you took information from is certainly enough for verifiability—providing a URL at all isn't required for a print source, though I think you always should when the print source is online. By the way, the shortened URL should end at the page number (no "&dq") as in your example is needed). I also remember that there was, at least at one time, a bot that would go around shortening such URL's for various citations. If you want to bring this up somewhere for extended discussion, I think WP:VPM and WT:V are good places. Cheers.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 16:31, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

I think that many of the people who include the search terms are simply copy/pasting the content of the address field in their browser and are unaware that all that stuff is unnecessary. I know that was true in my case before I had an "Aha!" moment and started removing it when adding references to articles. It's possible that I was the only ignorant one, though. Deor (talk) 02:18, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Location for debate with other wikipedians

Is there any? --Chemicalinterest (talk) 16:38, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Two of the more prominent venues would be the mailing lists (predominantly Wikipedians) and Wikipedia Review (predominantly critics of Wikipedia, and rather toxic). Skomorokh 16:41, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

It really depends on your interests. There is IRC, which I can believe can be used for general chatting, and the options listed by Skomorokh. TNXMan 16:42, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Depending on what you are looking to discuss there is also Wikipedia:Village_pump. Unomi (talk) 16:59, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

They don't want debate on the ref desk but sometimes religious discussions get out of bounds. I was wondering whether there was any place that didn't have a rule against it.--Chemicalinterest (talk) 23:32, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Can't Move New Article Out Of My UserPage - What Now?

I've been registered since 2007, and have done about 100 edits, so I thought I had permission to move a new article out of my User Page. I've read articles and other questions on how to do this, I clicked on the Move button, filled in the reason for the move, and all that happened was I changed the name of my article from (I believe this is right) User:Karenthewriter/Meg Duncan Mysteries to Meg Duncan, but it's still in my User Page.

Could my computer be the problem? I've got an old iBook laptop that I take to the library or other free wireless internet sites. I don't have a mouse, and I think the instructions mention hovering your mouse at one point.

I'd like to request permission to move the page, but the waiting list is for contested or problem moves, and I hope I have a nice safe article. It's about a children's series of books from the 1960s, I did research, included references, so I should be good to go. I started with a template from a page about starting new articles (I forget the exact name of the article I was at) so it should be properly formatted.

Should I put my article on a contest articles list, or is there a place to put an uncontested article that I can't get moved on my own?--Karenthewriter (talk) 17:24, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

No, you moved it correctly to Meg Duncan. I've just been in to remove the "draft" notice from the top, since the "move" doesn't do that automatically. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:28, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Thank you John of Reading. In less than 5 minutes you rescued a Damsel in Distress--Karenthewriter (talk) 17:47, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

All part of the service! And now Tnxman307 is busily improving the article. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:58, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Uploading Images

Could you please just give me an example of a complete form for uploading a file to the commons area. It is a jpg photo that I created and I give unlimited permission for anyone to use it. I tried to do this and put {Public domain} for permissions and Own work for source. I can see the file on the http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Transverter_power_module_HT2000.jpg page but it does not come up on the edited wikipedia page. there is just a box where the photo is supposed to be. It is looking like I didn't upload the photo.

A simple example would help. Thanks Heart141 (talk) 18:31, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the image appears just fine on Transverter on the right hand side of the page. Did you try purging your cache? TNXMan 18:38, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Bank of Montreal

Hello,

There is a mistake in Bank of montreal's page that keeps reappearing: Ezekiel Hart is listed as a founder of the bank, and he is not (Information can be verified in the Canadian Biographical Dictionnary, or with BMO's archives service directly).

I corrected the article myself three times already, and last time I put a mention of this error in the "talk" page... To no avail, the mistake reapearred.

I want this mistake fixed, but I seem to be unable to beacause somebody "corrects" or undoes my corrections all the time.

What should I do now? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.96.180.245 (talk) 19:03, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

It was fixed by user:DMacks. You have a much better chance of having your edits stick if you leave an edit summary along with the edit, explaining it, and much moreso if you verify the information you are adding by citing to a reliable source when you make your edit.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 19:17, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

There actually was a WP:RS in the article, whcih is how I was so easily able to WP:V and figure out who among several years' worth of no-edit-summary editors was right here. 198 was good to start a talk-page section about his dispute once simple editing didn't stick, I agree that a quick edit-summary "not listed in given ref" or something would make others less likely to see "anon removing info without giving reason, that's a sadly common type of vandalism" and revert it. DMacks (talk) 19:27, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Template:Userspace draft

Further to the confusion generated by the move of Meg Duncan, a question or two up from here:

I see that the documentation for Template:Userspace draft says "If the page is in article mainspace it shows {{New unreviewed article}}" - and, yes, this is obviously a good idea, and the template has some code that is trying to do this.

But immediately after the Meg Duncan page was moved, it looked like this with the template continuing to claim that the page is a userspace draft. Can a template expert have a look at this please? -- John of Reading (talk) 19:13, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

There have been two other instances of this problem reported to #wikipedia-en-help ^connect today; assistance would certainly be appreciated. Skomorokh 19:16, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Sorted. AJCham 22:27, 5 July 2010 (UTC)