Wikibooks:Reading room/Technical Assistance

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Welcome to the Technical Assistance reading room. Asks questions and get assistance with the MediaWiki software, the wiki markup language, or any other technical-related assistance, including user scripts accessible through the Gadgets tab of my preferences.

To facilitate ease of browsing and replying, please:

  1. Place your question at the bottom of the page;
  2. Title the question (by placing the title between equals signs thus: == title ==);
  3. Sign your name and date (by adding four tildes thus: ~~~~).

[edit] How do I trigger an email to an email list when someone edit the wiki book ?

I like to have the email mailing list users notified when book is edited. Is this possible ?

T.J Yang

[edit] Java question

hii i m sushil kumar topic-java programming

dear sir can u give me example of main mehtod overloading . because main method in java can be overloaded —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Sushilkumarbagi (talk • contribs) 01:26, January 15, 2008.

[edit] 8086 Microprocessors

Iam searching for a topic "hardware organisation of address space " of the 8086 Microprocessors. Any one have the exam oriented material please help me

[edit] Stable Versions BETA Test

Erik Moeller sent a message to textbook-l about final tests for the stable versions extension that is going to be added to our software eventually. He noted a few things that we as a community need to decide upon before that extension can be implemented here. For ease of testing, the test servers use the Wikibooks database since it's smaller then the Wikipedia one. That means that we wikibookians should be relatively at-home with these tests.

We as a community need to decide a few things about this extension and reach concensus on its use before it's activated here. It apparently has many options which can be set and changed, depending on our needs. Here are some examples of things we need to decide:

  1. do we want this at all?
  2. What page ratings do we want to have? These can be things like "unchecked", "unapproved", "good", "featured", "decent", "garbage", "stable", whatever we want.
  3. Who should be permitted to flag articles as being of a particular quality level? Admins and bcrats will likely have the ability by default. Do we also want to let our rollbacker/patrollers do this? Maybe this is something that all registered users could do?
  4. When a reader (a logged-out user) visits a page, should they see the current working draft by default, or should they see the last approved version by default? In either case there will be a link in the upper-right corner to take the reader to either the current working draft, or the current quality version. I'm pretty sure that logged-in users will always see the current working draft, by default.

I've got a few suggestions on these, but I want to see some feedback from others before i go preaching about it. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:54, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

  1. Yes we want it.
  2. Unless someone comes up with some better ideas, I think the page ratings should be "new", "abandoned", "redo", "useful", "stable" and "featured", to coincide with new pages/books, pages/books which have been abandoned and need work, pages/books which need work, pages/books which are useful but not necessarily stable, pages/books which are stable, and books which are featured.
  3. If page ratings are not accumulative then I think a new flag should be created such as "reviewer" and allow anyone with this flag to change the page rating of a page. If page rating are accumulative then I think any registered user should be able to influence the page rating.
  4. Readers should only see versions of a page with a "useful" or higher rating.
--darklama 20:20, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
Regarding patrollers and flaggedrevs... diff patrolling is rendered obsolete by flaggedrevs, as any sighted (or higher) version is marked as patrolled. So you'd want the usergroups 'patroller' and 'editor' to have the same permissions (or simply retire 'patroller' and replace it with 'editor'). But Wikibooks doesn't have diff patrolling; we have new page patrolling, and the documentation is currently unclear as to what effect there will be. I will try to figure this out shortly, but I suspect that the same will be true for wikis with new page patrolling. We'll want to retire the 'patroller' permission, and use 'editor' instead.  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 20:23, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
Who will be tasked with reading every page in every book in Wikibooks and deciding what rating they get? Do we all then check the rating every time a significant change is made to a page? Webaware talk 22:59, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
I am very excited about this extension as it lets us truly have editor review of our book projects. I personally will only use one flag on book pages, whatever it would be called, to mark that revision as being stable for book inclusion. This revision would then be included for PDF and printable version export. Dealing with other levels to me is just a waste of time and overcomplicated. Ideally I would want to be able to give access to certain users on a book level, but since that's not likely possible I think we should have rather tight control on this; I definitely don't want any registered user marking Muggles' Guide revisions as stable and will only permit myself and a small circle of trusted editors. I am thinking users should only see stable versions by default. Each active book editor should be tasked with flagging their book and if no active editor is available then I think we can use the most current revision as stable. In any case, the initial enabling of this extension will likely mark the current revision as some sort of stable version anyway. -withinfocus 02:23, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
I agree that we don't want a cumbersome set of validation levels. IMO, it'd be ideal if we can keep "patrolled" as-is: for new page patrolling and nothing more. On top of that, we can have FlaggedRevs with "stable" (for book inclusion, as described by withinfocus) and "featured" for featured books. Anything more complicated than that is likely to be too big a burden to maintain. When there is a stable or featured revision, it should be shown by default to unregistered users. Admins will have reviewer permissions by default. If we're not using "sighted" as a quality level (use "patrolled" instead) then we don't need the "editor" permission.
Alternatively, we could depreciate the "patrolled" status and make our patrollers into editors. If we do that, I'd want admins (reviewers) to give users the editor permission. The upside of using editor/sighted instead of patroller/patrolled is that we can vet pages of any age, not simply recently-created pages. However, I don't know that there is a way to list recent pages which haven't been sighted, which would be a problem.  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 14:31, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] revolving field theory for induction motor

This message will be archived normally

sir, please supply me the material for " revolving field theory for induction motor " as i am not able to find it on the net..

Stepper motors use a revolving magnetic file. Also, three-phase motors use a revolving magnetic field. See wikipedia: three-phase, wikipedia: three-phase electric power, wikipedia: stepper motor, Practical Electronics/Stepper Motors, Basic Electrical Generation and Distribution. --DavidCary (talk) 03:22, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] CPP highlighter has a bug

User:Ikarsik reported a problem with the CPP highlighter... in C++ Comments using the Wiki highlighter <source lang=cpp> it results in:

// This comment will also comment the following line \
std::cout << "This line will not print" << std::endl;

I have gone around it by using <font color="red">
// This comment will also comment the following line \
std::cout << "This line will not print" << std::endl;

Probably we should report this problem. Any one knows where or can do it for us ? Txs --Panic (talk) 23:01, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

This involves Extension:SyntaxHighlight GeSHi, so I think the bug lies with GeSHi, not with the extension. You might be best making a bug report in bugzilla [1]and with GeSHi [2].  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 23:17, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
I have reported the bug to GeSHi at sourceforge, after checking up the BUG list present on the source code (that doesn't mention this case), will post any useful reply here if any. --Panic (talk) 23:50, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm the GeSHi maintainer. This bug is a known limitation of the stable branch. The developement branch already handles this correct, but is not yet an option for productivity use. For more detail on the problem: The stable releases only check for // and \n rather thean a line ending without preceeding \, thus one would have to introduce this behaviour first. But since this is already handled in the developement branch I will not reimplement it for the current stable branch. --17:17, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] wikitable

Where can I find information/documentation on class="wikitable"? ChessCreator (talk) 23:40, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

G'day, you'll find most CSS styles in MediaWiki:Common.css. The code is the documentation, as they say... Webaware talk 05:07, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
Okay, well maybe to but it more clearly. I'd like to change the purple heading colour from this.
1 2 3 4 5 6
Sicilian Defence e4
c5		 Nf3
d6		 d4
cxd5		 Nxd4
Nf6		 Nc3
a6		 Be2
e6		 =
Ruy Lopez e4
e5		 Nf3
Nc6		 Bb5
a6		 Ba4
Nf6		 O-O
Be7		 Re1
b5		 =
King's Indian Defence d4
Nf6		 c4
g6		 Nc3
Bg7		 e4
d6		 Nf3
O-O		 Be2
e5		 =
Queen's Gambit Declined d4
d5		 c4
e6		 Nc3
Nf6		 Bg5
Be7		 e3
O-O		 Nf3
Nbd7		 =

to more subtle grey shading found in the table of this article.

If you want to customise the look just for yourself, you can either modify your own User:username/common.css file, or use the per-book CSS gadget - but I suspect you want to change it for all readers, in which case you will need to specify the background colours for each cell, like this:
! style="background-color: lightgrey" | Queen's Gambit Declined
You could wrap that up in a template for ease of use, but ultimately that's how you'll need to do it. Webaware talk 03:52, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Our wikitable class was once that subtle grey color. I don't know when or why it changed. I use a custom skin, so I didn't see it change. Given the option between the two, I would probably prefer the grey version instead of the current one. However, it would be trivial to create a second class, "greytable" or something like that, that uses the old colorscheme. If we created this second class, would that be good for your project? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:03, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Confirming email

I'm new and just set up the account last week. Now I'm trying to learn how to use this and in going through 'my preferences' I saw that my email hasn't been authenticated yet. I clicked on 'Confirm your email address', it told the code may have expired so I sent another Confirmation email and clicked on it within a few minutes and get the error "Invalid confirmation code. The code may have expired."

Retrieved from "http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:ConfirmEmail"

What am I doing wrong or what do I need to do?

Jplbookreviews (talk) 16:26, 21 April 2008 (UTC)Lee @ Joplin Public Library

That's a strange error, and I have to admit that I've never seen it before. My suggestion to you is to change your email address and try to confirm that way. Or, change it and then change it back to try and "reset" the values stored in the software.
When you get the confirmation email, make sure you copy+paste the entire URL into the browser. Sometimes when you click on a long link in an email, URLs can be separated up and not loaded correctly. Copy+paste the whole URL into the browser, and double check to ensure it doesnt have any spaces or anything in it. Let me know if that works. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:07, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
This is apparently a bug introduced by SUL. I imagine it will be fixed quickly.  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 15:09, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Feature Requests Chatroom

we were talking with some developers on IRC yesterday, working on some of our "wishlist" development items that we had discussed in the past. It came to light that while there are many things that we Wikibookians seem to want, we don't really have a single, codified vision for what kinds of features we want to see in the software around here. Without a unified vision, it's difficult to make decisions in the short-term because we don't know if decisions we make now will be helpful in pursuing our long-term goals.

To that end, we've created a chatroom at Wikibooks:Reading room/Feature requests. What we want to do is, as a community, lay out a comprehensive list of all the features that we do want in the software here, and the relative importance of each. Ideally, we can start approaching some of the big items incrementally, and satisfy some of the smaller items along the way. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:14, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] wikibook functionality with plain mediawiki

Hi, I'm at a site that has mediawiki installed and I have a book I'd like to put on that wiki. I don't have any special privileges and I'd like to structure my wiki entries like books are here on wikibooks (i.e hierarchically w/chapters etc).

I suppose it's impossible for me to do that, but I wonder if others have tried using the normal mediawiki functions like categories and navigation tools/templates to get something like a book structure.

I'm just learning this stuff and thought I'd ask here since I'm sure some of you must have given this a lot of thought! Thanks --A jtim (talk) 19:45, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi there! Wikibooks is using almost vanilla MediaWiki - we have a few extensions installed, but they're largely the same one every other project has. You shouldn't need anything special to get a book structure... in fact, there isn't any. If you want to use subpages, you need to have the software configured to do that. But even without subpages in the mainspace enabled, you can still have a good book structure. If you see the section above, it points to a new discussion area where we're trying to figure out what changes to make to the software in order to handle books better (after all, the MediaWiki software was written for Wikipedia originally).  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 20:46, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi Mike.lifeguard! thanks for the info--we do have subpages enabled so maybe I'm in business after all. I'll explore more and try some experiments. Thanks again for the quick response. Wikibooks is cool! --A jtim (talk) 13:30, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Green on Black Style

Hi, can someone create a green(fond) on black(background) style that is better for intensive reading. Thanks for your attention and hope someone can help!

Hi: I am not sure that I like the colours but the usual way would be to put the whole page in <div></div> tags, and to include a style expression for the font. If you copy this code line into the sandbox and Preview it, it will give the result below...


<div style="background:black;color:green">All the text of the page goes here...</div>


All the text of the page goes here...


...a bit tough to read maybe...also, the Opera browser has choices of syles for viewing, and if it is just for your own viewing, they say that you can make your own stylesheet in Wiki. If I got your intention wrong , just add a comment below. All the best.}} Armchair (talk) 12:17, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
I'd also recommend the style features in Opera. The above text is probably not great for intensive reading but I'm sure other combinations would work. --ЗAНИA talk 21:43, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
You can edit your .css to create a custom style. The CSS book has info you may find helpful in doing so.  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 23:36, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Automatic Book Outline Tool

I've been hard at work for the last few days (as any RC patroller will probably tell you) working on a new JavaScript-based tool for designing and outlining new books. User:Mike.lifeguard did a quick beta test for me yesterday, from which I got a lot of good feedback. I have made a lot of improvements, and would like to get more feedback from a wider audience. Eventually, if things seem to work well, I would like to turn this into a gadget and actively promote it as a way for new users to easily and methodically create new books.

To install the gadget, add the following three lines to your personal monobook script:

import_script('User:Whiteknight/gadgetscore.js');
import_script('User:Whiteknight/categorize.js');
import_script('User:Whiteknight/designer3.js');

Once these lines are added, do a hard reset in your browser (probably by pushing ctrl + f5, or similar), and go to User:Whiteknight/Visual Book Designer. This is the page where the form is located, although I have it set up as a template so it could be transcluded into other pages as well if desired.

The tool uses a visual outlining interface. You start with the main page of the book, and you can add subpages or headings. To those headings and subpages you can add more subheadings and sub-subpages, etc. The tool recurses so you can add as many levels of detail as you can fit on your screen. This means you have the flexibility to make Book/Page, Book/Chapter/Page, Book/Section/Chapter/Page, ... Once you have your outline, the tool has the ability to convert the outline into wikitext. It also has an AJAX interface where it can open an edit window automatically to save the generated text to the specified pages. You can add categorization templates too. Basically, it has a lot of features, and I would like people to play around with them. I would love to hear any and all feedback about this. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:58, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I've fixed it up so IE7 works reasonably well. There are a few bugs in IE that I can't quite dig out yet, but you should be able to get the idea about what this script does. I've also tested, and it works 90% in Safari. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 01:30, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
Looks great to me. I wonder if we should consider pointing new users towards this tool from the welcome template/help pages etc. I think that as long as people can figure out how to use it properly, it'll result in books which are better structured, which is definitely a good thing.  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 23:35, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
I've already turned it into a gadget, which is the first step in making it usable. There are still a few issues to iron out when it comes to differences between browsers, however. I definitely intend for this, or some other similar tool, to become a primary landing point for new users. This is similar to some of the custom tools that Commons uses to faciliate it's new users. We have a long way to go before this is good enough for ubiquitous use, but it's a first step along that road. Thanks for the input, mike! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:20, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
WK, the basic idea is a very good one, I think this could become very useful (especially for people who have difficulty understanding the naming convention, this does it for them so that they'll learn what it's all about!). Is it possible to put a link to preview what the page will look like from the menu on the top? (next to edit, save, etc.) For someone who hasn't used it before, previews are nice to know what each function does / will look like when finished.
I didn't test it, but I presume that if you make a sub-page to a sub-page, those are all created too? I'd imagine it'd be pretty difficult to get those in a preview since the mediawiki software isn't set up that way.
I think it's also pretty confusing having two different "save" functions, one which saves the book 'for real' and one which is a temporary save; would it be possible to change the latter labels so that it is clearer that these saves aren't permanent? Just my three cents, overall though I'm impressed. Regards, Mattb112885 (talk to me) 23:47, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback matt! A preview button would be a nice addition, and I could probably add a button for it pretty quickly. You're also right that having two functions to "save" is probably not intuitive. Maybe I could include the temporary save/load functions in a separate menu?
I'm also working on a function to "automate", using AJAX to perform edits on all pages in the outline in one button click. I'm hesitant to add this feature until we get the "delete this book" function for admins. One mistake creating a book could leave a very large mess for admins to deal with otherwise. needless to say, there is a lot of work to be done on this. Thanks for the feedback! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:04, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
mw:Extension:Nuke would do that nicely. Also, there is a gadget for scripted deletion. I think there is somewhat less potential for disruption here than you think. Pages can be cleaned up easily, and first-time users of the script will likely be careful for fear of making a mess. I suppose malicious use to create many bad pages is a possible, but again easily dealt with. I wouldn't worry too much about holding back on TEH POWAAH with this script. If it's too much, we can restrict use later.  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 03:04, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Special:UncategorizedPages

Some fault here it now ends at MediaWiki Developer's Handbook/Add Button and goes into numbers. I've been checking this for a while for any Opening theory in chess and I found there is at least one page that should be shown but it is not, hence an error. [3] SunCreator (talk) 23:00, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

The listing of that and many other special pages are cached. Any recently changes won't show up in the list until the next update. --darklama 23:07, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
That's not the issue as page that was missing was created 3 May 2008 and cache shows 10 May 2008. SunCreator (talk) 23:13, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
In that case you should report it as a bug on bugzilla. --darklama 14:03, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
What page are you talking about? It's possible that the page is in a hidden category. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:51, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Go here Notice it's in alphabetic order you got UncategorizedPages beginning with the letters K, L, M on that page and A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J on the proceeding eight pages then after M it skips to numbers. Missing are all UncategorizedPages beginning with the letters N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z. SunCreator (talk) 14:06, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

I have reported this as bugzilla:14170.  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 14:11, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, I've created a test page that should show up when it's working. Opening_theory_in_chess/UncategorizedPage. SunCreator (talk) 07:16, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Opening a pdf file

I have tried to open the Blender3D: Noob to Pro.pdf several times on more than one computer and it won't open. I am just clicking on the icon to open it. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

That should work just fine. Can you please provide any error messages that you receive when trying to open the file?  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 14:04, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Double spacing

Is there a reason why Wikibooks doesn't show double spacing between the end of a sentence and the start of the next sentence? There should be double spaces after a full stop ('period' for Americans). This makes it easier to read a page especially one which is full of text. I have just tried to add extra spacing to an article but on making the changes I noticed that the spaces don't appear. --ЗAНИA talk 00:49, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I think that's a function of most browsers. Back when I was first learning HTML I remember reading that browsers collapse all white space into a single space. I could be wrong of course. --Jomegat (talk) 02:32, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
See w:Wikipedia:MOS#Spaces_after_the_end_of_a_sentence.  – Mike.lifeguard | talk 14:04, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Template column help.

I'm trying to extend the template Template:Chess Position so that there are some options below the diagram in 2 columns in the same way as shown here w:Template:Infobox chess opening. Problem is I don't understand how to align columns. I've tried putting in the top ! colspan="2" but then the column sections at the bottom are not neatly aligned, but rather stretch the box to the right. I've create a test version here(Template:Chess_PositionTest) , please experiment! SunCreator (talk) 10:23, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

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