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 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)

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)

Edit history error

The edit history of Pinyin is wrong. The book is created before 2013, and the creator is not User:Artoria2e5--Efex3 (discuss • contribs) 22:24, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

@Efex3: The earliest revision of the book main page is by that user on that date. If there was an earlier version, it appears not to have been history-merged with the current main page of the book. If there's an error, it would seem to have been an error of procedure in 2013, rather than an error of wiki database integrity. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 00:12, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Here is the oldest history. Could you help to fix the problem?--Efex3 (discuss • contribs) 00:43, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@Efex3: I think I've got it fixed. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:21, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

@Pi zero: Thank you very much.--Efex3 (discuss • contribs) 01:31, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

Links in presentation of a sub-page.

Hi,

A question about presentation of a sub-page.

This page provides an example.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Oberon/S3/2003-01-05/

Mediwiki presents the title "Oberon/S3/2003-01-05/".
Below the title are two links appearing as this.
< Oberon‎ | S3

My question: why not a third link "2003-01-05"?
The line below the title would be this.
< Oberon‎ | S3 | 2003-01-05

Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 16:31, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

@PeterEasthope: The wiki platform, when it displays a page, provides at the top those links to ancestor pages. The page is not an ancestor of itself, so the platform doesn't list it. In my experience, if the "grandparent" page Oberon existed but the "parent" page Oberon/S3 did not, it wouldn't list a red link for the latter, but would simply only list the grandparent. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:22, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Correction: the example I should have given is this page.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Oberon/S3/2003-01-05/Compiler.Mod

The title is consistent with the page URL but the links below it are

< Oberon‎ | S3

whereas

< Oberon‎ | S3 | 2003-01-05

would be consistent with your explanation. Correct?

Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 05:53, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

@PeterEasthope: Hazarding a guess, the moral may be, don't end a page name with a slash. The platform probably considers the parent of Oberon/S3/2003-01-05/Compiler.Mod to be Oberon/S3/2003-01-05, whereas Oberon/S3/2003-01-05/ would be just a sibling page, as would be, say, Oberon/S3/2003-01-05/Compil. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 06:32, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. Assuming I've committed no further blunders, pages are displayed as intended now.

According to https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Help:Editing#Links , subsection "Subpage links", the table, row 2, a page name ending without a slash, produces the page with the fully qualified title. Whereas row 3 shows that when the name ends with "/", the title is displayed without the path. I'm not sure that is correct. For example https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Oberon/S3#Module_Sources_and_Tools_in_S3_(ETH_Oberon,_PC-Native) now has markup "[[../S3/ATADisks.Mod/|ATADisks.Mod]]" whereas the target has the full title "Oberon/S3/ATADisks.Mod" as intended. Also the ancestor links are shown correctly. Thanks again, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 18:45, 9 December 2018 (UTC)