Wikibooks:Reading room/Technical Assistance
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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[edit]
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[edit]
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)
Increasing character limit in edit summary[edit]
Currently, only 200 characters can be entered in the edit summary. While this is fine in most cases, there is one instance where fitting info in 200 characters is difficult.
When rejecting changes, the edit summary gets prepopulated with info like (Rejected changes by <user> and restored revision by …). While with an IPv4 address I can fit in (mostly) a comment briefly explaining the rejection, I'm finding it virtually impossible to write anything when the user is an IPv6 address (due to the sheer number of characters in the summary). And I'm that admin who prefers to briefly explain the reason when it is not perfectly obvious.
Is there a way that users can somwhow fit in say 250 characters in the summary - at least sysops?
Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 08:48, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
Neutral But it would be better for anyone. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 12:22, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
Comment My impression (formed some time back and not re-tested recently) is that when the wiki platform generates summaries for various mop-and-bucket tasks, it trims the summaries to fit in the available field width. In other words, they've designed the platform on the [adjective omitted] assumption that nobody will want to add anything to their uninsightful summary. In some cases (with page deletions, iirc) they deliberately pad their edit summary as much as possible, which actively messes with admin additions to the summary. I've lost irreplaceable bits of my life to manually trimming automatically generated cruft from summaries; lately I've taken to contorting my procedures to use Special:Nuke as often as possible, just to minimize the manual customization. I wouldn't be surprised if increasing the permitted summary length, if that's possible, merely caused the platform to pad out to the greater length; granting, not all cases are padded this way. (Hopefully, most such automatic generation can eventually be taken over by community-grown dialog-based assistants.) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:31, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
- I would definitely be for that. Current on Wikipedia | edit summaries are 250 characters long. This is defined by the | sql table. Just to note, | there IS a gadget that can be used to increase edit summaries, however it seems to have problems with firefox and hasn't been updated since 2009 so your mileage may vary! Necromonger Wekeepwhatwekill 15:06, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
Neutral But it would be better for anyone. 
Comment My impression (formed some time back and not re-tested recently) is that when the wiki platform generates summaries for various mop-and-bucket tasks, it trims the summaries to fit in the available field width. In other words, they've designed the platform on the [adjective omitted] assumption that nobody will want to add anything to their uninsightful summary. In some cases (with page deletions, iirc) they deliberately pad their edit summary as much as possible, which actively messes with admin additions to the summary. I've lost irreplaceable bits of my life to manually trimming automatically generated cruft from summaries; lately I've taken to contorting my procedures to use Special:Nuke as often as possible, just to minimize the manual customization. I wouldn't be surprised if increasing the permitted summary length, if that's possible, merely caused the platform to pad out to the greater length; granting, not all cases are padded this way. (Hopefully, most such automatic generation can eventually be taken over by community-grown 
