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April 18[edit]

Zero width character[edit]

In Blueprint (book) there's a zero width space character I can't seem to remove that keeps generating an error. Can someone please explain how I can fix this? IntoThinAir (talk) 03:52, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've ran a few semi-automated tools over it and one of them seems to have fixed it. Otherwise, you just have to find where it is in the wikitext (I don't know of any better way than pressing the arrow keys until you find where you have to press it twice for the cursor to move) and then you can delete it like any other character. LittlePuppers (talk) 03:59, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The error message [1] said exactly where it was: "zero width space character in |title= at position 56". That means 56 characters into the parameter value. This was right after the last visible character. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:02, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for fixing this; I had tried to delete the character at the end of the title= text but I kept getting the error message for some reason. IntoThinAir (talk) 13:38, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Articles with no Talk page[edit]

How do I find all articles with no corresponding talk page? Is there a category for that? I can't find it.--- Coffeeandcrumbs 05:19, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Coffeeandcrumbs: I can tell you for certain that there isn't a category. I don't think there is an easy way to find those. It may be possible with Wikipedia:Database queries. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 13:54, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Coffeeandcrumbs, you can post a request at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks. It's probably quite easy to build it through AWB, although even quarry can easily get the job done. Lourdes 14:06, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Which infobox?[edit]

In the new article, Tima Shomali, a person with multiple roles in media; actor, producer, presenter, etc, the current "self-made" table should be a proper infobox, but which one? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:31, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Dodger67: {{Infobox presenter}} and {{Infobox writer}} exist, but the rest of her roles just point to {{Infobox person}}. The choice of infobox here isn't crucial. Compare the parameters and chose the one that has those you insist are important. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 13:49, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How to add information on the Info box?[edit]

Hi,

I am unable to edit the Infobox on the Wiki page.

Would like to add the CEO's name and list it under Key People on the Star Sports page. The CEO is Gautam Thakar.

Can we also add the founding year in this section?

Please help.

Thanks,

Saahil — Preceding unsigned comment added by Saahilk (talk • contribs) 09:45, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Saahilk - What was the article in question? Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 09:57, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I guess you refer to your edits to Star Sports (Indian TV network). You can only add parameters which are known by a template, in this case Template:Infobox television channel. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:06, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If you look at Template talk:Infobox television channel#Key people you'll see that it was reported (more than 8 years ago) that the key_people parameter in that template isn't working. It appears to be mentioned on the documentation page but not included in the code. If it were working, you'd need to remember that parameter names are case-sensitive and that the underscore parameter is apparently part of the parameter name. --David Biddulph (talk) 12:11, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Following on from the above, I see that the "key_people" parameter was added to the documentation page last year without it being in the code. I have therefore reverted the inclusion on the documentation page. --David Biddulph (talk) 12:18, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia and large data files[edit]

At Jimbotalk I made a suggestion[2] that we start hosting things like the existing 3D models of Notre Dame (my suggestion for a new URL wasn't serious; if we actually did this it would most likely be on commons). In a response the claim was made that the files would be to big for us to handle. Which brings up the question, what is the largest data structure (file or collection of closely-related files) that any WMF project stores? I am guessing that it might be a video file or perhaps the history of a page that gets a lot of traffic like WP:AIAV. Is it true that the existing 3D models of Notre Dame would be considerably larger than anything we currently store? --Guy Macon (talk) 13:51, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Guy Macon, anything bigger than 4 GB would have to be a split file. Anything smaller can be uploaded using Upload Wizard or an equivalent. The largest closely related category I found looking that way is only about half a gig though, give or take.

On the other hand, apparently the DBAs will upload a hard drive if you file a ticket with a good reason. Soo... Unless it's more than several TB it's not totally out of the question? Alpha3031 (t • c) 14:30, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The hard drive contained 15,000 discrete files, though. What's under discussion here is 3D laser scans of buildings, which are multiple orders of magnitude larger than a hard drive let alone an image file; to take the scan of Notre Dame that prompted this discussion as an example, it contains over a billion individual data points, and "If architects ask for the data, it would have to be delivered in person, as it is too large to be transmitted over the internet". Assume, conservatively, that we're talking about each file being 1–2 TB; to put that in perspective, the full database dump of the entire revision history of English Wikipedia is "only" about 12 TB. ‑ Iridescent 14:58, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That would be so different as to necessitate raising it as a new project I suspect - even if it were ultimately held within Commons, you'd need Foundation sign-off - at that cost, probably at a board level. 85.255.234.22 (talk) 15:12, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think the main argument against it would be that it'll be hard to use. Because even if we mail a hard disk to the datacenter, it's not going to be much use sitting there with nobody able to download it, and the WMF certainly can't afford to just mail a hard disk to anybody who asks.

Nobody is going to be buying a 100 TB hard drive, but a regular archival drive is 2 to 12 TB. If you have 1 mm^3 resolution on a 1 km^3 model that's still 20*3 bits. Use 64 bit ints instead, and that's still only 24 bytes. Add some full HDR colour and that's 30 bytes per data point, meaning if you had 20 billion of them it'll still only be 0.6 TB. Building ~ hard drive.

But you wouldn't download a car. (much less a building) The only way this would be useful is if we could download a portion of the model and get some use out of it. Alpha3031 (t • c) 15:48, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Very enlightening. I will ask again when 100TB/S internet connections and 100EB storage devices become common. :)

"There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing" --Eric Schmidt, (2013)

--Guy Macon (talk) 15:59, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I saw the thread on Jimbo's talk page and didn't respond there although some thoughts were running through my head. I have enormous respect for the contributors who are pointing out that this is not a little deal it's a big deal. I appreciate that but I think it's worth pursuing, even though pursuing it requires quite a bit more work than simply adding a few servers. To pick up and expand on the point made by Alpha3031, with some rare exceptions, we shouldn't ever have to download the entire file. (Arguably the current situation comes closest to that exception but those people will be dealing with financial resources that are considerable.)

Why might one be interested in a laser scan of Notre Dame? One can imagine many situations but let's just pretend for a moment that some architectural student is interested in one of the many gargoyles. That student could achieve their goals by downloading a tiny portion of the entire file. While it might be a fairly large file in its own right, it would be a tiny fraction of 1% of the entire file and plausible to do over an Internet connection. What this means, of course, is that one cannot have a single contiguous file containing all of the information — there has to be some organized way of breaking it into components that make up the whole, but which can be individually identified and downloaded in part.--S Philbrick (Talk) 19:50, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Use cases for free (as in free speech) data is not limited by one's imagination, but by the internet's. For instance, I would assume a significant fraction of people with 3D printer access would be interested by having all sorts of buildings scans etc. available (though maybe not at millimetric resolution).

That being said, it is not our job (or the Foundation's) to design protocols for 3D scan file handling. Either they already exist, or they do not. If they do, it becomes a technical and economical question for the WMF, not for us the community, and especially not for us the Help Desk. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 08:23, 19 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not suggesting that it should be the responsibility of the foundation or Wikipedia editors to design such a protocol. It's my belief virtually anyone interested in such a large data file will (with rare exceptions) be interested in a small subset of the full file, whether that be a small specified location or a lower resolution of the entire file, so the creators of this dataset will almost certainly have to grapple with protocols for delivering meaningful subsets. Assuming that protocol is created, it means that while the problem of storage space will have to be addressed, the problem of pipe size and speed for downloading will not be a problem.--S Philbrick (Talk) 13:19, 20 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization of article names that are also filenames[edit]

The page title at ads.txt is lowercase, but Security.txt is capitalized. Should they both be capitalized or both be lowercase?

robots.txt, sitemap.xml and favicon.ico are redirects, but if they ever became page titles the same question would apply.

Also. when you click on robots.txt, the page says [ (Redirected from Robots.txt) ] followed by [ "robots.txt" redirects here ], so it gives you both versions. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:51, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I went ahead and lowercased security.txt because pages describing it seemed to use lowercase. Technically, all titles start with a case insensitive letter that defaults to uppercase. robots.txt has been lowercased, not that you can tell without going to the redirect page with redirect=no or whatever. Basically I think the typical style is to do it the way RSes do it or the official way to do it. Alpha3031 (t • c) 16:13, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! In the specific case of filenames used on case-sensitive systems (which includes most web hosts) the usual result is that only one spelling -- capitalized or lower case -- works. This almost always results in most of the sources using the spelling that works, but if we ever run into a stuation where most of the sources use a spelling that doesn't work when typed in as a filename, we should ignore the sources and use the "official" spelling if we know what it is.

Not sure what to do if an article title is the same as a filename on a case-insensitive system. We use the titles AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS even though DOS will happily accept config.sys, Config.sys, or cOnFiG.sYs. That's probably OK for DOS, where all upper case is traditional.

URLs are an interesting variation. The domain name is never case-sensitive, but the rest of the URL might be. (But watch what happens when you cut and paste the following link into your browser: http://xahlee.info/unixresource_dir/_/filecasesens.html ) In general, Windows filenames are case-preserving but not case sensitive, but sometimes they are.[3] I would have to check, but IIRC HTML is never case sensitive but parts of XHTML are.

I think we need a general rule: if you type it into a computer and it works no matter what the case, use the case that most sources use. If you type it into a computer and it only works if you get the case right, use the case that works no matter what the sources use. If you don't know, go with the sources. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:43, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(Slightly OT) There is a nasty little "gotcha" that some versions of Samba can catch you with. If you have a *nix server which is case sensitive, then it is reasonable to have two files, say MyData and mydata, both in the same directory. If this directory is exported over Samba to a Windows box (nominally case-preserving) the Windows box will always select the one it finds first, regardless of case. In my last job this exact issue arose and caused considerable chaos for a while. Moral: ensure all users of networked directories assume case insensitivity! Martin of Sheffield (talk) 19:23, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The Secrets of Jesus[edit]

Hi,

i received this message from you: AmigoUfo, I would like to request that you not continue to add the Secrets of Jesus to the list of Christian video games. I have specified numerous reasons on the page, but if you have any trouble understanding them, or don't agree with my logic, please message me here.

This is a fourth warning, and Wikipedia has a four warning policy before someone should be reported to administrators for page vandalism. I'm cautioning you to not add your game to the list again, considering multiple people have taken it down. I understand personally the struggle of getting a word for your game in the public, but Wikipedia is not a page for personal advertisement. If you have any questions, contact me.

Sorry, i didnt see your message and i thought there is an error and therefor i added every time my game. But i still dont understand why? Could you tell me why?

Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by AmigoUfo (talk • contribs) 16:02, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@AmigoUfo: The editors who reverted the addition of your game explained in the edit comments whey they were removing the game. By the way, I started a discussion on the talk page related to the notability of the games, which may affect the one you are trying to add. TimTempleton ^(talk) ^(cont) 21:42, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

From draft to article[edit]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Evgeny_Konnov — Preceding unsigned comment added by Musicallive2019 (talk • contribs) 18:17, 18 April 2019 (UTC) Good morning! I created a page of a famous musician, now he is in the Draft status, does this mean that the page has already been passed to people from Wikipedia for consideration, or should I send a request for it in order for the page to become public available under the Article status? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Musicallive2019 (talk • contribs) 18:15, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Musicallive2019: Add {{subst:submit}} to the top of the draft to submit it for review, and then someone will take a look at it in somewhere between a few hours and three months. Please check back periodically, as there's a good chance there will be things that whoever reviews it will want you to address. LittlePuppers (talk) 18:22, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@LittlePuppers: Thank you very much, your advice has saved my time!

Paul Newman.[edit]

Some morons have been editing Paul Newmans (actor)page with disgusting comments. Can someone please deal with this and poss block the IP address of him/her responsible ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.129.253.73 (talk) 19:33, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've asked an admin to look at this. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 20:04, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Logo Update for WWOR-TV right away[edit]

Here is the Updates that still needs to get done right away On The Web Site at www.en.wikipedia.org On The WWOR-TV Page The Old former my 9 Logo needs to get taken off right away thats because it has been outdate it for years & years already & The New MY9NJ.com Logo thats On The Web Site at www.my9nj.com thats on the top left needs to get put on right away & Branding my9 needs to get change right away to my9nj needs to get put on right away & Would you please keep these in mind & don,t forget to get these fixed right away & don,t forget to take care of these right away & don,t forget to let me know when they are all set & done with & don,t forget to get these problems fixed big time right away & don,t forget. Please Write Back to my New E-mail address is [removed] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:192:102:34F9:D8C8:57F6:240F:257E (talk) 21:15, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

- this same request was made as "/* Digital television */ Logo Update for WWOR-TV" here on 7 April 2019 - WWOR-TV has been protected for persistent disruptive editing 18 April 2019‎ - Epinoia (talk) 21:42, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Most Rev valerian okeke[edit]

I wanted to start a talk about this page. I was told it is blocked to avoid vandalism. Kevinchuks (talk) 05:49, 19 April 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kevinchuks (talk • contribs) 23:13, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Kevinchuks: Are you referring to Draft:Valerian Okeke? It was deleted twice due to copyright. If you are asking about a different page, please provide a link. RudolfRed (talk) 23:34, 18 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]