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.

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)

Layout the Quiz template to horizontal mode

In Puzzles/Odd-one-out , I saw the images used for Puzzles are quite good but however I see that the images are laid out vertically. Are there any way I can make the quiz pics to be lined up horizontally ?

Asked by Encik Tekateki (discuss • contribs) 14:54, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Apparently not. According to Help:Quizzes#Using images as answers, "Unfortunately there does not yet seem to be a way of putting these into a row or tabularising the layout." Now quiz use mw:Extension:Quiz and there does seem to be some requests connected with this listed at its phabricator board, in particular phab:T172593 "Add new parameter for Style in Quiz ". Unfortunately they don't seem to have got anywhere. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 18:18, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Ouch, if this can be done,Wikibooks can be more interactive . Thanks !

Encik Tekateki (discuss • contribs) 04:51, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I really want to develop a dialog-based alternative to the quiz extension. (Yeah, yeah, it's taking way longer than it should.) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:12, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Problem with reviewing

Well I've been doing some reviewing, but I am continually getting an error message when I try to do so:

"There seems to be a problem with your login session; this action has been canceled as a precaution against session hijacking. Please resubmit the form."

I've tried: (a) logging in and out again; (b) clearing all by browser data; (c) updating my browser; but it doesn't seem to help very much. I use Firefox on Windows 7.

Resubmitting a review few times I'm eventually successful, but its a bit of a pain having to do this. Is anyone else having the same problem? --Jules (Mrjulesd) 13:49, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

@Mrjulesd: Historically, I've sometimes gotten that error if I'm editing a page (for real, using an edit box; I never touch that VisualEditor abomination), spend an especially long time on the one display (not requesting a preview or diff), and then directly tell it to save. Several years ago I asked bawolff about it and he said iirc that that error should never happen. I've gotten that error twice this morning when editing, and I wasn't being slow about it (nor have I done very much editing yet this morning). So I'm guessing the devs deployed something just recently (perhaps overnight) that wasn't really ready for prime time yet. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:22, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

@Pi zero: thanks for your reply. I don't think its a coincidence that we've both got that message recently, obviously something is up somewhere (!) Anyway it might be a short lived problem, so I'll see how it goes. I have had problems in the past that somehow just seem have gone away. At one point borders around boxes weren't rendering, but strangely it seemed to be device and browser dependent, so was rather strange; but not recently. But anyway I might open a bug at some point, but I'll see how it goes for the time being. --Jules (Mrjulesd) 20:52, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

I just did a review with no problems. Also using Firefox. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:19, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Justin I've just tried too without problems. Maybe that's the end of it (for the time being at least). --Jules (Mrjulesd) 21:30, 12 February 2020 (UTC)