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.

To get more information about the MediaWiki software, or to download your own copy, visit MediaWiki

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

Creating Book Pages

I am a new user and I am still not familiar with how to correctly create pages in a book. I received this as a comment: Pages should be created as a subpage - e.g,. "Book Name" and "Book Name/Chapter Name" and NOT as "Chapter Name".

It seems that the pages are fixed. Can I create /Chapter Name/ instead? Is this equivalent to Book Name/Chapter Name? --Rjbfigueroa (discuss • contribs)

No. If you create a page "Chapter Name", it ends up as a new book named "Chapter Name". If you create a page as "/Chapter Name/" it still ends up as a new book named "Chapter Name", but I suspect that the page you're actually working on will end up being named "" as a subpage of the book "Chapter Name", If you create it as "Book Name/Chapter Name" then it is a page in the book "Book Name". Basically, the slash is used as a way to show what this page belongs to. Chazz (talk) 22:52, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Renaming Book Pages

How do I rename a Book Page? When I change the name of the Book Page, it seems that the link to the old page is broken and I have copy the old content to the new page that was created as a result of renaming. TIA!

--Rjbfigueroa (discuss • contribs)

@Rjbfigueroa: Can you give an example of a page you wanted to move, and where you wanted to move it to, so we can see what happened?

Fwiw, here's how to move a page, if you're using Vector skin (in the desktop interface, rather than the mobile one): View the page you want to move (not its talk page). There should be a control bar at the top of the browser, and way over on the far right of it there should be a dropdown menu. The only option on that menu should be either "rename" or "move"; use that. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs)

Categories at the bottom of each page

What determines the word used to introduce the list of categories at the bottom of a page? It differs by namespace; in Cookbook it's "More", in Wikijunior it's "See also", in project space it's apparently either "Category" or "Categories" depending on how many there are. I've no problem with any of those. But in mainspace it's "Subjects", which was never quite right and now seems wrong. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:15, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

I can't find it either with the search engine. We don't have this particularity on the French Wikibooks and I don't think it comes from LocalSettings.php. So we might hack the code to find it. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 07:39, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

@Pi zero: See MediaWiki:Pagecategories. Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 14:47, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Awesome; thanks! --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:13, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Template / style help

Asked this over in admin and got no response...

The Muggles' Guide book chapter pages make use of a template Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Book/Page which is intended to show the page / chapter before and after the current chapter as links, which it does quite handily... but in the process, it overlays this forward / back text on top of the breadcrumbs, making it difficult to get back up one level to the book, or two or three levels to the project page. The issue is with all the book chapter pages, has to do with a template used on all of them. Example: Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Books/Deathly Hallows/Chapter 5. The template is used like this: {{Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Book/Page|prev=Chapter 4|next=Chapter 6|tab=5|title=Fallen Warrior}} The text that the template puts up overlays the breadcrumb link that allows the user to step up a level to the book overview page.

The book template {{Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Book}}, as used in Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Books/Order of the Phoenix, seems to also have a problem - possibly an unclosed style tag - because while it exhibits the same overlaying of the breadcrumbs, the text that is affected, and that vanishes if the breadcrumbs happen to win the race, is the entire list of chapters. And that list is also coming up in a smaller than usual font...

I've looked at the templates for these myself, but they in turn seem to depend on other templates, and I'm not prepared to go down that rabbit hole at the moment... are there any brave scriptmongers willing to take a look at this? Chazz (talk) 22:57, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Index pages not appearing on mobile version of wikibooks

I maintain the A-Level Computing wikibook and we have a lovely landing page that works on the desktop but is invisible on a mobile device:

https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/A-level_Computing/AQA/Paper_2 <- invisible https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/A-level_Computing/AQA/Paper_2 <- visible

I can't find anything about this in the template file? I'd obviously like to have the page working on both systems, but can't understand why it isn't rendering. Pluke (discuss • contribs) 09:02, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Something occurs to me, from some unpleasant past wrestling with mobile view. Mobile view hides some classes of boxes (via css afaik) based on assumptions that how those boxes happen to be used on Wikipedia is the only way of using them that matters. A while back on en.wn, I created an alternative to {{ambox}} called {{xambox}}, because mobile view was assuming that anything said in an ambox wasn't important to display in mobile whereas on en.wn many of the most important page notices on the project used ambox. Fixing it involved moderately deep magic impinging on templates, html markup, and css. That might, at least, offer a place to start looking for the cause of the problem. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 10:43, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

thanks, that pointed me in the right direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Navbox where it says: "This template does not display in the mobile view of Wikipedia; it is desktop only. Read the documentation for an explanation.". Will dig a little deeper... Pluke (discuss • contribs) 14:06, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Does Good (Quality revision) no longer work?

Went to mark a page as being a Good revision once another editor had changed it, selected Good, Accept revision, and found that the new revision came up marked as "checked revision" rather than "quality revision". There doesn't seem to be any way for me to mark it as a quality revision... and I haven't seen any documentation for this new "Spot checked" box that appears. Does that have some effect on things? Chazz (talk) 19:46, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

Images in text

Wondering if anyone can recommend an approach for a technical difficulty.

The Quenya book depends heavily on a tengwar font that is external to wikimedia, and seems not to have been available at the provided external link for several years. There is a set of wikimedia-internal images at Commons:Category:SVG single Tengwa glyphs. However, I'm not sure there's any way to embed images within a line of text, nor to make image size change with text size (in section headings, for example). Suggestions appreciated. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:48, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

I think that it's the same as for PNGs: we can't automatically change the image sizes when varying our browser window size. But it's possible to define a grid with Bootstrap, some ranges of window sizes in which the image CSS will be different. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 17:30, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Would it be possible to get a public-domain tengwar font uploaded to Commons? It seems to me that would be the simplest solution, no? Chazz (talk) 23:31, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Where do I go to start a wikibook ? I am not familiar with wikibooks ?

Dear Technical assistance team,

I clicked on " starting a wikibook " but it was not very helpful. Where do I click in order to start a wikibook ? How can I produce chapters, do I use my sandbox ? Please can you give me a link that will allow me to start my wikibook.

Regards --Sutton Publishing (discuss • contribs) 12:07, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

The best starting point is to read this: Using Wikibooks. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 14:37, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Can accidental rollbacks be undone?

I was reading the help page on editing Help:Editing, and I noticed that it mentioned that clicking the rollback button instantly reverts all of the edits applied by the most recent editor without any confirmation to protect against accidentally clicking the rollback button. I am worried that I may someday accidentally click the rollback button and lose all of my work. Can accidental rollbacks be reversed?

Thanks,

Math buff (discuss • contribs) 22:37, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

@Math buff: Not to worry; a rollback leaves a record in the page revision history, just like any other edit. So it can be undone. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:38, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Thank you for your clarification. Math buff (discuss • contribs) 01:31, 25 June 2019 (UTC)