Wikibooks:Reading room/Technical Assistance

Welcome to the Technical Assistance reading room. Get assistance on questions related to MediaWiki markup, CSS, JavaScript, and such as they relate to Wikibooks. This is not a general-purpose technical support room.

To submit a bug notice or feature request for the MediaWiki software, visit Phabricator.

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There are also two IRC channels for technical help: #mediawiki^connect for issues about the software, and #mediawiki-core^connect for WMF server or configuration issues.

Survey (proposed direction for Wishlist)

You are invited to voice your opinion on a new community-proposed direction for the Community Wishlist. Thank you! MediaWiki message delivery (discuss • contribs) 03:07, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

A location in a page.

Hi,
A location in a page can be specified with empty span such as <span id="location"></span>, although not tidy. Can someone suggest another possibility or two, please?
Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 13:22, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

... <a id="location"></a> is a little more compact than span. Thx, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 01:56, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

<a doesn't work but <div id="location"> works as in Oberon/System_Variants.

Thx, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Template usage.

Hi,
(1) A template declared in my account namespace works. Declared in the book namespace it doesn't work. Both cases are demonstrated in my User:PeterEasthope/sandbox. Declaration in the book is more direct; better not to depend upon an individual account. Ideas? Thx.

(2) If the desktop browser window is narrowed or the sandbox is viewed on a smartphone, the display is as illustrated here. How can the black perimeter frame be shrunk automatically to fit the background color boxes?

Thx, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 15:35, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Viewing unreviewed changes, and recent changes, for a particular book

I've recently started editing Chess Opening Theory after a long hiatus. Two things

• How can I view recent edits, for this book alone. I'm aware of Watching All Pages in a Book, which was well hidden on the page on editing, rather than on tracking changes (since rectified), but the advice there is unhelpful. Option 1 is entirely impractical, as one cannot add hundreds of pages one does not know about, and Option 2 simply doesn't work. For example, at this moment, there are 12 relevant edits listed in the main Special:RecentChanges page (which goes back to 9 July), but the suggested Related Changes only lists pages directly linked from the top level.
• Similarly, how can one see the unreviewed changes for this book (or even all the books, where I can at least manually filter). I noticed a whole lot going back more than a month and approved most of them, but this was only through some tedious digging around through user contributions and page histories.
  • Partially answering this question myself, there's this page. Which brings up a followup question. My contributions page doesn't list the changes I've approved (only the one I declined). Is there a way to see these? Greenman (discuss • contribs) 21:38, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Greenman (discuss • contribs) 21:29, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

At the risk of sounding pedantic, a hack for the first problem whereby Special:RecentChangesLinked/Chess_Opening_Theory only shows changes that are linked to the top page of the book directly and not all sub-pages or sub-sub-sub-pages, etc. is to just make them all linked from the top page. This can be done with a template that may make it a little more pretty or discreet than a huge list of links. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:53, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, but this doesn't really help. Besides having to add thousands of links to the front page, which certainly shouldn't be displayed there, when someone adds a new variation (which is what a large portion of the edits are), the new entry won't appear on Recent Changes until specifically linked from the front page. Greenman (discuss • contribs) 17:23, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

@Greenman I think using the book categories at Special:UnreviewedPages might be helpful here—is this approximately what you're looking for? —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 18:24, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

@Greenman I think you're also looking for Special:Log/review. Cheers —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 18:32, 16 July 2026 (UTC)