Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2019 January 6

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January 6

Yet Another Gallery Question

Hi Folks, its that time again. On this page at Similarity system of triangles, I am trying to make the image bigger within the gallery, to a sizeable chunk each I think. There are quite small in size at the moment but I would like them bigger, so the detail can be seen. Thanks. scope_creep^Talk 00:08, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi, @Scope creep: I enlarged them with Widths= and Heights=, you can re-adjust them to any size if you want. –Ammarpad (talk) 07:02, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Ammarpad: I think I had them at one point, but I must have spelt them wrong, or spelt one of them wrong. I couldnt get it. It is perfect now. Ideal size to see the text. Thanks. scope_creep^Talk 10:02, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

​ Yeah... I think, you had them right at this revision but what made them not work was because you didn't define the mode= parameter before the vertical bar after opening <gallery. And here after you added the mode=, you also removed the widths in the same edit, and incidentally it was also needed for resizing to work effectively. You can read the documentation on MediaWiki for more options available. –Ammarpad (talk) 16:18, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

@Ammarpad: Thats looks like better documentation that the other stuff I looked at. I'll bookmark it for later use. scope_creep^Talk 16:28, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

How do I use Wikipedia Visual Editor to change the color of table cells?

The question is as in the title. How do I use the Wikipedia Visual Editor to change the background color of cells within a table? Namely, I am trying to see how to use the Editor to change or apply colors (party shadings) to electoral results tables, such as the one found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidential_election_in_Alabama#Results_by_county. I am not sure whether or not the Visual Editor allows for one to do so. Any help with this would be appreciated. --The Empire of History (talk) 00:32, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

@The Empire of History: Visual Editor has many limitations; and this is one of them. You cannot add that color shading with VE because it cannot parse the template that adds them properly. It must be done with the source editor. –Ammarpad (talk) 07:57, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Name search

If I do a Wikipedia search in the name Kraabel I get three hits but not A Thomas Kraabel when there is a good Wikipedia article on A Thomas Kraabel. Why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lokikraabel (talk • contribs) 05:13, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

@Lokikraabel: The page is at A. Thomas Kraabel. A search works for me with or without the punctuation, as does a Google search for the name as supplied by you. Please remember to sign your posts on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~). Thank you. Eagleash (talk) 05:48, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

@Lokikraabel: If you enter "Kraabel" in Wikipedia's search box then it automatically goes directly to a page with exactly that name: Kraabel. This is not a search results page with hits but a manually edited wiki page. I have added A. Thomas Kraabel to it. You can do a search instead by entering "~Kraabel" in the search box. See more at Help:Searching. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:39, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Chernobyl 1986

is it possible to add information or reference a book written by Svetlana Alexievich " Voices from Chernobyl" the oral history of a Nuclear Disaster? the official estimates of death caused by Chernobyl are grossly underquoted ( from officials there) , according to the people who are interviewed in this book, which won a Nobel Prize. The world needs to hear these people. thank you Alison paice — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1.127.109.232 (talk) 07:46, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Hello, Alison Paice. The place to discuss this is Talk:Chernobyl disaster. It is certainly possible that material could be added from that book, but we would need to be very careful about reliability: the book may very well be a reliable source for the fact that so-and-so said the figures were such-and-such, but not necessarily for the figure itself. I'm afraid that "the world needs to hear these people", while a laudable aim, is specifically not one of the purposes of Wikipedia: please see Righting great wrongs. --ColinFine (talk) 11:45, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

"In December, 2018, Brian Dunning investigated the case and reported his findings on the Skeptoid podcast."

How is this statement consistent with the unacceptable date styles of WP? Thank you.2605:E000:9149:8300:2506:42B1:2001:39BA (talk) 08:21, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

I have removed the comma after December if that was your point. —teb728 t c 08:31, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

I can understand that but it seems that there are a few in WP that insist that how it was originally is the correct way which according to the table of unacceptable styles that is not what is represented. It seems that, and maybe it has something to do with using as an ID my IP address designate, that these unusual or obscure styles or policies seem to be advocated but are not reflected in WP. I just wanted to get a third party flow on this particular example as, and even within some WP articles, the two styles can be found. One person went to the trouble of saying that somehow everyone else that has written a day/month/year date style without a comma has done it wring although after I have reviewed "January 2019" that out of the 12,000 hits that came up there were less than 100 "January, 2019". Where ever this "January, 2019" style as being acceptable I could not find.2605:E000:9149:8300:2506:42B1:2001:39BA (talk) 11:08, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

The editor who reverted you had misinterpreted MOS:DATECOMMA. MOS:DATESNO is clear. You were right. --David Biddulph (talk) 11:41, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Odd reference link

I noticed in Concepcion de Ataco the first reference is to a rather strange page, that might be trying to load malware. Can someone check it out? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.245.209.170 (talk) 19:00, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

I've removed it, since a wiki isn't a valid ref anyway Jimfbleak - talk to me? 19:12, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Creating a pseudo table row in HTML markup

I'm working on creating table code in lua with HTML markup and I'm not sure which attribute to use for this case. As an example, look at Lost (season 1)#ep24. The first column has a divider between the 24 and 25 numbers. In the page code they used <hr />, but I'm not sure what is the correct way to go about this. hr? tr? or something else (also take into account the look, as "tr" will probably create a complete line). Thanks. --Gonnym (talk) 22:55, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Not quite sure what you're asking, Gonnym. <tr> and <hr> are entirely different in almost every way. <hr> creates a horizontal rule (a straight line) within the text, so if you are inside a table cell, it will be inside the text of the a cell, and will not be the full width of the cell (unless the padding is set to 0). <tr> is part of the structure of a table, and doesn't intrinsically output anything: it begins a row of table cells, which you must then insert individually with <td> or <th> tags. --ColinFine (talk) 00:22, 7 January 2019 (UTC)