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.

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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)

I cannot reviewe pages anymore

Is this a bug? PokestarFan • Talk • Contributions 00:14, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@PokestarFan: Hi. I had to look this up in the user rights log. It seems QU removed your reviewer rights on 12 December, with log comment "Removing reviewer flag. Repeated bad edits being autoreviewed and needing subsequent fixes". --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 00:39, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

That's right. With hundreds of semi automated bad edits still waiting to be fixed, I removed the flag to prevent further damage. Your bot like activities were accepting previous vandalism edits requiring hand fixing and you were unresponsive to requests to stop.

I was considering blocking you actually but settled for damage limitation. If you agree to not use automated edits via your account then you can have the flag back. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 21:44, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

@QuiteUnusual: Ok I will promise not to do bot-like activities. PokestarFan • Talk • Contributions 15:51, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

I like to bring an example. There were few chess articles that had a backlog in special:pendingchanges and were edited by you after a few ip edits. That range of IP users, now globally blocked, had entered malware links amid other, although somewhat decent, edit. You're edits was an impediment from my outright rejecting the (pending) malware edits. I had to go into the history, reject the Ip edits, and accept your.. That was a bit of a trip. Artix Kreiger (discuss • contribs) 17:27, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Or examples like this where pointless edits were made requiring review. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 17:03, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Internal Links within a Chapter

Somehow I cannot figure out how to do internal links. I have added a short subsection : https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/Proxies_and_Jump_Hosts#Transiting_a_Jump_Host_Which_Has_Multiple_RDomains_/_Routing_Tables

At the end of that, I would like to link to a subsequent section : https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Cookbook/Proxies_and_Jump_Hosts#ProxyCommand_with_Netcat

I though that the format would be more or less this: ProxyCommand with Netcat

However, that gives me a "redlink" rather than a link to the existing subsection.

What have I missed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Larsnooden (discuss • contribs) 03:59, 14 April 2018

Looks as if you've omitted the Cookbook part of the page name, in between OpenSSH and Proxies and Jump Hosts. This should do it:

[[OpenSSH/Cookbook/Proxies and Jump Hosts#ProxyCommand with Netcat|ProxyCommand with Netcat]]

which produces

ProxyCommand with Netcat

--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 04:49, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

That was it. Thanks. I'm not sure how I omitted that and didn't notice. Larsnooden (discuss • contribs) 04:58, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Citation formats

How can I include the URL in the citation? I notice that the citations in the Print Version don't include actual URLs of the sources cited. The Help:Print_Versions page doesn't mention how to toggle that. e.g. notice the first four citations here : https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Print_version

A more general question would be if there is a way to have the references in the Printed Versions conform to a specific citation style? The main three would be APA, MLA, or Chicago as the important ones to cover. Larsnooden (discuss • contribs) 08:09, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Do you have at least one example of this please? As far as I know, the actual URLs of the sources have always been included, like the following one from your last edition: "The Secure Shell (SSH) Authentication Protocol" into OpenSSH/Print version.

Maybe you've encountered a server cache problem, in this case you can always refresh the print version manually by saving an edition of OpenSSH/Print version without changing anything into it (a null edit in the jargon). JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 16:03, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

If we look at the beginning: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSSH/Print_version

There are four references in the forward. The text is hyperlinked, but the URLs are not displayed when printed. When printed via LibreOffice it looks like this:

...

Jump up ↑ "OpenSSH". www.openssh.org.

Jump up ↑ "Statistics from the current scan results". OpenSSH.org. 2008.

Jump up ↑ "SSH-2.0 Search Results". shodan.io. Retrieved 2017-04-08.

Jump up ↑ At that time, 56% was 8,005,413 out of 14,229,807 machines. Dropbear made up 15% and then a long tail filled in the rest. OpenSSH is also found on non-standard ports in Shodan.

The hostnames or domains are listed if they are recorded as Publisher, but the URLs for the title document itself are missing if I copy-paste the document or save it as HTML and then import it into LibreOffice for formatting before printing. I add indexes and work with the some of the page breaks and add a title page before setting to paper.

I missed it earlier but I see now that the URLs are there in the print preview. Very cool. That's nice CSS work, can it be made to show the URLs also in some other optional circumstances? Or is there a way to read that into LibreOffice but not as PDF? Larsnooden (discuss • contribs) 17:29, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

When I print this book in PDF from Firefox, I've got that:

1. "OpenSSH". www.openssh.org. http://www.openssh.org/.

2. "Statistics from the current scan results". OpenSSH.org. 2008. http://www.openssh.com

/usage/ssh-stats.html.

3. "SSH-2.0 Search Results". shodan.io. https://www.shodan.io/search?query=ssh-2.0+port

%3A%2222%22. Retrieved 2017-04-08.

4. At that time, 56% was 8,005,413 out of 14,229,807 machines. Dropbear made up 15%

and then a long tail filled in the rest. OpenSSH is also found on non-standard ports in Shodan.

If I open this PDF in LibreOffice Draw, I've got them too, but a lot of the book pagination is dirty and we can't fix that from here. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 00:19, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, that's the output I'm looking for but in HTML or ODT so I can indexes and tweak pagination and other layout issues. PDF is terminal-stage data format, not for editing. I am working with the HTML produced by Wikibooks and importing (yes) that into LibreOffice writer to get an OpenDocument Format file and then working with that for the pagination, adding indexes, and other fine tuning. I see the CSS class "printonly" applied to the SPAN element surrounding the URLs, blocking them from visibility in my use-case. Is there a way to have an option to produce an HTML page that uses the same CSS as would have been used to produce a PDF? I think that would address the main problems in the first question. Larsnooden (discuss • contribs) 03:39, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

You could try to copy MediaWiki:Print.css into User:Larsnooden/common.css before the HTML creation, and remove it after, but I can't guarantee the result. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 09:17, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I couldn't get contents of User:Larsnooden/common.css to show up in the Print_version page. Maybe it is a cache issue. However, after all this trouble I finally noticed this link which shows more or less what I want: https://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=OpenSSH/Print_version&printable=yes

So we can mark this one solved. Thanks for the patience. Larsnooden (discuss • contribs) 14:31, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikitext highlighting out of beta

Wikitext syntax highlighting, also known as CodeMirror, has been moved out of Beta Features and is available in the 2017 Wikitext Editor on all wikis. Syntax highlighting helps you see problems in your wikitext before previewing or publishing text. Please try out the tool if you did not do so while it was being developed, and feedback is welcome. - Keegan (WMF) (talk)

18:55, 4 May 2018 (UTC)