Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2011 January 6

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January 6

Information pages

I've done a draft of an essay and I'd like to get it commented on, improved and, in due course, given the status of an Information Page. However, I can't find any process or guideline for achieving that. Does anyone know? --FormerIP (talk) 02:10, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

If the answer exists, we would like it to be listed under WP:EIW#Essay. --Teratornis (talk) 05:07, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

website design

Hello,

I'm a regular reader of Wikipedia but I have to say over the years this website didnt improve very much in terms of design. It's the same old design year after year despite all the money you manage to raise.

I hope something can be done about it because after all the content is user generated and it would be nice to present it in a better way.

AB —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.219.43.186 (talk) 09:32, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm glad it is still the good old design. Organizations which drop millions into useless new designs (Vista comes to mind) TICK ME OFF! I'd prefer ANYTHING ELSE over a new design.

Peace. 217.254.167.101 (talk) 10:26, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

You can choose from a wide selection of designs if you log in. Kayau Voting IS evil HI AGAIN 11:15, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Why do you want to have a new design??? It is OK so, I don't see any problems with it. Just can't understand people who wants every time newer and newer things...-- ♫Greatorangepumpkin♫ T 12:21, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

If there are particular improvements you would like made, discuss them at The Village Pump (though it would be worth searching the archives to see if they have already been discussed. But you have already seen typical responses to "I just want it to get better" with no specifics.

Another point to bear in mind is that almost all the money raised by Wikipedia goes to keeping it going: very little goes towards developing and improving it, as these are mostly done by volunteers. --ColinFine (talk) 19:29, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Please define "a better way". Note that you can customize your view of Wikipedia, and even start your own Wikipedia mirror with any customizations you can program to show the rest of the world. Also note that what is better for one person might not be better for someone else. The design of any popular site will invariably involve compromises between the demands of different users, with everything constrained by the available resources. --Teratornis (talk) 22:02, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Silverfish or any related, can they cause bodily harm to humans?

I ask this because I woke up one morning and had a knot under the skin on my leg and it was humpted up, inflamed. I though it might be a spider bite but later in the day I pulled my bed covers down and found what looked like a Silverfish. I had to go to the emergency room two days later, they told me it was probably a spider bite and they gave me a shot or Levaquin and a prescription for 500mg Levaquin tablets. I took them for 10 days and the knot moved down the leg about 5 inches, I had to go back to the doctor and he gave me another prescription for 10 more days. I'm on my 4th day and the knot moved back up my leg a couple of inches. It is real sore and red and I don't understand what is going on or what it is. I didn't tell the doctor about the silverfish or what ever it was because I didn't think they could bite or cause bodily harm. Do you have any knowledge of anything like this? Are they poisonious, can they harm the body? 98.66.218.147 (talk) 09:33, 6 January 2011 (UTC) F. Pearson {{subst:notmed}}

I'm sorry, but Wikipedia cannot give medical advice. Please consult a physician. Gonzonoir (talk) 10:03, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

And when you do, tell them everything. Since your asking here about whether it's relevant, you didn't know whether it was when you made the decision not to disclose it.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:33, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Silverfish#Ecology says "Although they are responsible for the contamination of food and other types of damage, they do not transmit disease." That sentence seems a bit odd, since it's hard to imagine how contaminated food would not transmit disease or cause some other health problems. Also, unless you are a trained entomologist, "what looked like a silverfish" might have been something else. You might want to capture a specimen if possible and show it to an exterminator. --Teratornis (talk) 20:50, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Top of page "Aufruf" etc.

Dear Team, you're doing a great job. Thank you. I was just wondering why you don't put the ad/request on top of the page in the language the actual page is opened in, i.e. if I'm reading an article in English, I'm still only getting the ad in German. I'm lucky to know some German, but I'm also glad I didn't relocate to China. Many thanks. Kind regards, DG —Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.104.123.131 (talk) 11:40, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

The language of the fundraising banner you see if based on your IP address. Your IP address geolocates in Germany, so you see it in German. --Mysdaao ^talk 13:32, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

What happened to WikiBlame?

When I try to access the WikiBlame tool, I get a 403 error. —teb728 t c 12:46, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Apparently it's a security vulnerability; see this thread at WT:WikiBlame. GiftigerWunsch [TALK] 13:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

It appears to be back up and running. – ukexpat (talk) 14:39, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2010 December 31

Could I have an administrator's assistance for this review? It appears that the consensus is to reverse the deletion of the article, so I need to get that done. A suggestion has been made to place the reinstated article into my user space for revision. Pkeets (talk) 14:28, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

You'll probably get a response here soon enough anyway, but the quickest way to attract admin help is to use {{adminhelp}} on your talk page. Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)} 14:49, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Pkeets (talk) 14:56, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

More about SUL usurpation

A bureaucrat on the Russian Wikipedia accepted my usurpation request, so now I have an account with this username there as well. However, there is still an account with this name by some other person in the Danish Wikipedia. I have left a message on that user's talk page, and the SUL usurpation page, on the Danish Wikipedia a week ago, but nothing has happened, and I haven't even got any replies. What can I do now? JIP | Talk 15:16, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Like the English Wikipedia, the Danish Wikipedia is staffed by volunteers, who may miss things. My best suggestion is to drop a note at the Danish equivalent of WP:AN gently reminding the admins there of your outstanding request. --Jayron32 15:24, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Also, the user there who seems to be the one handling usurps is: HERE, so maybe a note on his local talk page may be worthwhile. Arakunem^Talk 15:26, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Visited link

Hi.

I very often read an article and I click on a link within the article. When I get back to the original article I was reading, after I read what I wanted to read on the link I clicked on, I have troubles finding the line that I was in the article I was reading before I clicked on the link.

Previously the visited link was purple and this was a great help to finding the line you were reading before you clicked on a link. Now the visited link is almost the same color as the link itself, meaning that finding where you were in the page is a rather time wasting process.

Any change that I can change the color of the visited link in my preferences?

Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entropy1963 (talk • contribs) 16:08, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Visited links are purple for me just fine. Can you provide an example of an article where this happens? JIP | Talk 16:15, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree with User:Entropy1963 there is almost no variation of colour on the Vector skin in IE. This makes Wiki-Gnoming in long search lists (e.g. mis-spellings) difficult, especially as, having corrected a mis-spelling and returned to the list, it is often in a different order, so you can't just work your way down the list.
Arjayay (talk) 16:23, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Link color#Making links appear a different color just for you. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:49, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

The section on link colours looks very useful, but says

"You can also customize link colors by editing your CSS file"

So I click on the second half of the link, to discover I do not have such a page. Although it will create the page for me, it is then blank. Do I just paste the whole of the "Standard link colours" section in and edit the colours? or does the page need other information?
Arjayay (talk) 18:21, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes, and it will even figure out what your current skin in. You may have to do a purge to get it to use that as a style sheet though. You may want to take a look at my css page as an example. I actually commented them out because I use link classifier (set from my javascript page) which has some addition features like showing links to disambiguation pages in a different color. My css page is at User:Naraht/vector.css, my javascript page at User:Naraht/vector.js.Naraht (talk) 20:36, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Update for my original post:

Steps to follow in order to change your css and give any color you want to links:

a) login b) My preferences c) Appearance d) Assuming that you are using the default skin Vector click on Custom CSS e) Click edit f) In the editable box enter the code for your links or for whatever else you would like to change in the appearance of Wikipedia (you can actually change everything by copying into this box the “main-ltr.css” file and then editing this css) g) Save the page and reload

When you browse Wikipedia you must be logged in at all times in order for the custom css to be effective.

That’s it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.132.106.207 (talk) 11:05, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

convert pdf to wiki

My company has hardcopy reference books with both graphical and textual information. Aside from scanned Acrobat versions, electronic versions do not exist. We would like to make this reference material available throughout our company's intranet via a wiki. This would permit updating and managing the information as well as making it generally accessible. Some of the books have over 1,000 pages, so search is useful. While we can extract jpg files of the pages and place them in the wiki, the text is not searchable. When placing the pdf files in the wiki, they display as a link, not as an image. Even though they have searchable text, they cannot be searched in the wiki but only after they have been opened. Google searches have been futile. Any help in solving this issue is appreciated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Steveinsunnyvale (talk • contribs) 17:46, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

PDF is like a container. It can contain text. It can contain images. What you describe is a PDF containing images - no text. You need an OCR program to convert the images to text. Then, you can search the text. -- kainaw™ 17:54, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

These pdfs have been OCR'd, so they do contain text as well as images. Is there a way to make pdf files display in a wiki, not as a link, but as an image, while remaining searchable? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Steveinsunnyvale (talk • contribs) 18:14, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes. Anything can be programmed. There are as many ways to do it as there are programmers willing to do it. Wikipedia (and Mediawiki) don't auto-import PDF files. It would have to be something you programmed in-house. Note that Google auto-converts PDF documents to HTML. So, there's an example of what you appear to want to do. Also note that this is a "wiki", which implies that people will make changes. Therefore, you not only want to convert the PDF documents to HTML, you want changes converted back to PDF. -- kainaw™ 19:20, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Data conversion is the dark side of computing. Most information systems (whether based on paper or computers) appear to have been designed by people who assumed their system would be the only system their users would ever need. Few people seem to anticipate that users might want to take their data from one system to a completely different system in the future. Thus a lot of organizations are saddled with legacy information systems from which they cannot easily migrate their large volumes of accumulated information to newer systems. In fact this is probably the default case for almost everyone. On Wikipedia we solve the problem mostly by throwing vast amounts of volunteer human labor at it, by having users manually re-type, re-write, and re-format existing data from various print and online sources into the MediaWiki format. And someday, someone is going to struggle to take information out of Wikipedia and convert it into other forms. Anyway, to your problem. Few companies have hit on Wikipedia's clever formula to get millions of volunteers to work for free, so you probably would have to pay a lot of money for the labor cost if you wanted to manually convert all of your legacy data to MediaWiki format. This would likely be out of the question.

• A compromise might be to start your wiki with brief summary articles about each of your paper books. If a paper book contains a back-of-the-book index, getting that much onto your wiki would seem to be the first priority. If just the index is searchable on the wiki, users can at least see if they want to request the paper book from the company library. See the Editor's index to Wikipedia for an example of what is possible.
• You might look into what Google has done with Google Books. Somehow they have scanned a lot of paper books and made them searchable.
• Study mw:Extension:Contents. You might find a MediaWiki extension that does some of what you need. Go to mw:Extension Matrix/AllExtensions and do a Ctrl+F or ⌘+F to search the page for "pdf". For example I see a mw:Extension:Embed Document that might help (I have no idea as I have not tried that one on any of my wikis).

--Teratornis (talk) 20:02, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Also try searching the Web with Google for: make pdf files searchable. That finds some pages that might help. For example, there's an eHow page: "How to Make a PDF Searchable" that Wikipedia's spam filter won't allow me to link to. --Teratornis (talk) 20:18, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

The article has been shortened, but in the editting box, it's back to full size. What's going on?

List of songs about cities
Thanks.Civic Cat (talk) 20:05, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

You closed your inline comment with --!> rather than --> I fixed it —teb728 t c 20:11, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Oops!  Thanks. :-D  Civic Cat (talk) 22:16, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

question about border in tables

Is it possible to use images as borders in tables? Thank you.-- ♫Greatorangepumpkin♫ T 21:03, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Fixing an article name

I have stumbled upon the article Gregory S, Paul which should be Gregory S. Paul but that page is a redirect to Gregory S, Paul. I am not sure how to correct this situation. Should I do a copy of Gregory S, Paul and paste it into Gregory S. Paul? What about the talk pages? What happens with the history? I am asking for assistance, since I am unsure how to proceed. --DThomsen8 (talk) 22:17, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I have requested deletion of the redirect page- Then we can simply more the other page there - do it this way so we can transfer the talk history to. Moxy (talk) 22:22, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Hi, and thanks for coming here first rather than attempting to copy-paste the article over. Wikipedia has a function for renaming articles called 'move page'. Using this function, we can preserve the old page's history at the new title and move the talk pages/subpages to the correct title as well. If a redirect already exists at the target page, it is only necessary to add {{db-pagemove}} {{db-move}} to the target page. Intelligentsium 22:23, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Shouldn't that be G6 - Housekeeping? – ukexpat (talk) 22:30, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

It should be – I thought db-pagemove redirected to G6 (housekeeping) but apparently it goes to G3 (vandalism). The template I was thinking of was {{db-move}}, thanks for pointing that out. Intelligentsium 22:40, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Just as I thought, other editors are expert at this kind of problem, and I should leave it to them. Thanks for your efforts.--DThomsen8 (talk) 22:48, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Template:pufc transclusion

Hi, can anyone tell me why the template transcluded at Console packages is showing errors? RJaguar3 | u | t 23:40, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Look at Template:pufc and see the format for date; I've corrected that page for you. - David Biddulph (talk) 23:53, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I was copy-pasting the code generated from Template:puf, which was added by Twinkle. Does anyone know what changes need to be made to Template:puf to make the date output in the pufc code match the requisite pattern? RJaguar3 | u | t 00:00, 7 January 2011 (UTC)