User talk:Charles01/Archive 30

VisualEditor newsletter—April 2014

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on performance improvements, image settings, and preparation for a simplified citation template tool in its own menu.

• In an oft-requested improvement, VisualEditor now displays red links (links to non-existent pages) in the proper color. Links to sister projects and external URLs are still the same blue as local links.
• You can now open templates by double-clicking them or by selecting them and pressing Return. This also works for references, images, galleries, mathematical equations, and other "nodes".
• VisualEditor has been disabled for pages that were created as translations of other pages using the Translate extension (common at Meta and MediaWiki.org). If a page has been marked for translation, you will see a warning if you try to edit it using VisualEditor.
• When you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor, the full protection notice and most recent log entry are displayed. Blocked users see the standard message for blocked users.
• The developers fixed a bug that caused links on sub-pages to point to the wrong location.
• The size-changing controls in the advanced settings section of the media or image dialog were simplified further. VisualEditor's media dialog supports more image display styles, like borderless images.
• If there is not enough space on your screen to display all of the tabs (for instance, if your browser window is too narrow), the second edit tab will now fold into the drop-down menu (where the "Move" item is currently housed). On the English Wikipedia, this moves the "Edit beta" tab into the menu; on most projects, it moves the "Edit source" tab. This is only enabled in the default Vector skin, not for Monobook users. See this image for an example showing the "Edit source" and "View history" tabs after they moved into the drop-down menu.
• After community requests, VisualEditor has been deployed as an opt-in feature at Meta and on the French Wikinews.

The drop-down menu is on the right, next to the search box.

Looking ahead: A new, locally controlled menu of citation templates will put citations immediately in front of users. You will soon be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) is being developed. In-line language setting (dir="rtl") will be offered as a Beta Feature soon. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Monday, 19 May 2014 at 18:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this on your own page, subscribe at Wikipedia:VisualEditor#Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Humblers

Hi Charles01. I have been investigating Humbers and it crossed my mind that it would be useful (to me) to have a nice spreadsheet like on here on this Humber page where at present it says Main models. If you agree, would the columns as used at Austin be appropriate or should there be amendments? yrs etc., Eddaido (talk) 11:54, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

It would be a good thing to do, I think. Certainly when I have attempted this sort of thing in the past (1) sometimes I have given up before daring to go public but (2) yes, copying and then adapting something that someone else has done for another similar job is the way to go. The Austin table on which you landed looks ok. I don't know if there is a better one anywhere, but presumably you already looked. It MIGHT be possible to try and combine the best features of more than one such table.

My only other thought - more time consuming and liable to throw up other questions if you do it, is that a time-line style chart might - or might not - be useful as well or instead. Here are a couple with which I have tampered (though not very recently: memory at a detailed level may be less than total regarding what went wrong along the way...). The Peugeot one in particular highlights how fiddly it gets with too many cars, especially where for some of the early ones only two or three cars ever got built.

Peugeot

Opel

M-B

Anyhow, reflection tempts me to think that maybe I am dragging you over to a discussion where you have no need (and probably should have no wish) to tread. Better to stick with the simpler table format for the early Humbers, maybe, and worry about any time line exercise (if at all) as a subsequent exercise.

Our Toyota sounds as though it is about to need a fourth turbo in just over 140,000 miles. If ever you were tempted to buy a Toyota.... bad idea.

Success Charles01 (talk) 13:24, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

I like those timeline charts when in full flower with links to articles for each car. All I can expect to achieve for Humbler is a list of the various models they made linked to articles (where they've been written) or to images (where they are are held in Wikimedia). Of course that's just the Humblers, the Super Snips are largely covered aren't they? I fixed on that Austin table because I dreamt it up - not that I think its unique - and now I'm inclined to think the column for body (not my idea anyway) is superfluous which leaves space for diff info or a better way of listing body-types.

About that fourth inadequate turbo it is not long since it was inserted in your machine, is it. I'd want to find out what was going wrong in the opinion of whoever installed it. Do you have a Consumer tv programme? Would that tell you if you were just one of many many unhappy owners of similar vehicles? The other thing I might do is ask Stepho the Toyota expert to suggest ways to get Toyota's attention to the situation in a useful-to-you way. Thanks for your Humber charting thoughts. Eddaido (talk) 05:20, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Rochet Schneider Berliet

I need your assistance, I found this old photo of a Rochet-Schneider car RS 20HP When I checked the stocks of images of this vehicle in Wikimedia I found a lot of Berliet trucks among them. Do you know if this is an accident or are the trucks made by the same people? Should I upload the image? The tyres look stupidly modern to me as if the passengers wanted some minimum level of comfort. Best wishes, Eddaido (talk) 13:50, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Rochet-Schneider and Berliet were two prominent automobile producers in the Lyon area. Lyon was a second automobile industry hub - along much the same lines as Paris - but the Lyon hub was of course much smaller. And there were lots of automobile makers in the area through the 1920s which by the mid-1930s had disappeared. Rochet-Schneider was among the disappeared. Berliet, of course, struggled through the 1930s, albeit with some particularly bitter labour disputes and lock-outs around 1935. By the time war broke out Berliet had given up on cars and were only making trucks. After the war there was that period of recrimination and Marius Berliet was accused of collaboration, but as far as I remember he was not deprived of his factory like Louis Renault.

Anyway, your direct question has a very direct answer. Rochet-Schneider was indeed acquired by Berliet.

The slightly tougher question is when. I can tell you that they had their own stand at the Paris Motor Show in October 1931. There was no Rochet-Schnieder stand at the Paris motor show in October 1933. Logic suggests that this might have been when Berliet acquired the business .... somehow. In fact wikipedia says the acquisition of Rochaet-Schnieder by Berliet only took place in the early 1950s. The date comes from Nick Georgano's admirable compendium of (almost) everything you ever wanted to know. Georgano writes that Rochet-Schneider continued to make commercial vehicles after they gave up on passenger cars, and were acquired by Berliet only in 1951. It would be nice to have some corroboration, but one source is very much better than none.

Now you mention it, the tyres on that well maintained (well rebuilt?) R-S in that picture do look more 1950s than 1920s, but even if that is the case, I'm not sure if, on its own, that's a reason not to value the image. Total authenticity can be pretty elusive. Success Charles01 (talk) 15:23, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

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VisualEditor newsletter—May 2014

Did you know?

The cite menu offers quick access to up to five citation templates. If your wiki has enabled the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" menu, press "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" and select the appropriate template from the menu.

Existing citations that use these templates can be edited either using the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽" tool or by selecting the reference and choosing the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Insert" menu.

Read the user guide for more information.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor team has mostly worked on the new citation tool, improving performance, reducing technical debt, and other infrastructure needs.

The biggest change in the last few weeks is the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". The new citation menu offers a locally configurable list of citation templates on the main toolbar. It adds or opens references using the simplified template dialog that was deployed last month. This tool is in addition to the "⧼visualeditor-dialogbutton-reference-tooltip⧽" item in the "Insert" menu, and it is not displayed unless it has been configured for that wiki. To enable this tool on your wiki, see the instructions at VisualEditor/Citation tool.

Eventually, the VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for these citations. When this long-awaited feature is created, you could add an ISBN, URL, DOI or other identifier to the citation tool, and VisualEditor would automatically fill in as much information for that source as possible. The concept drawings can be seen at mw:VisualEditor/Design/Reference Dialog, and your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted.

• There is a new Beta Feature for setting content language and direction. This allows editors who have opted in to use the "Language" tool in the "Insert" menu to add HTML span tags that label text with the language and as being left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL), like this: <span lang="en" dir="ltr">English</span>. This tool is most useful for pages whose text combines multiple languages with different directions, common on Right-to-Left wikis.
• The tool for editing mathematics formulae in VisualEditor has been slightly updated and is now available to all users, as the "⧼math-visualeditor-mwmathinspector-title⧽" item in the "Insert" menu. It uses LaTeX like in the wikitext editor.
• The layout of template dialogs has been changed, putting the label above the field. Parameters are now called "fields", to avoid a technical term that many editors are unfamiliar with.
• TemplateData has been expanded: You can now add "suggested" parameters in TemplateData, and VisualEditor will display them in the template dialogs like required ones. "Suggested" is recommended for parameters that are commonly used, but not actually required to make the template work. There is also a new type for TemplateData parameters: wiki-file-name, for file names. The template tool can now tell you if a parameter is marked as being obsolete.
• Some templates that previously displayed strangely due to absolute CSS positioning hacks should now display correctly.
• Several messages have changed: The notices shown when you save a page have been merged into those used in the wikitext editor, for consistency. The message shown when you "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cancel⧽" out of an edit is clearer. The beta dialog notice, which is shown the first time you open VisualEditor, will be hidden for logged-in users via a user preference rather than a cookie. As a result of this change, the beta notice will show up one last time for all logged-in users on their next VisualEditor use after Thursday's upgrade.
• Adding a category that is a redirect to another category prompts you to add the target category instead of the redirect.
• In the "Images and media" dialog, it is no longer possible to set a redundant border for thumbnail and framed images.
• There is a new Template Documentation Editor for TemplateData. You can test it by editing a documentation subpage (not a template page) at Mediawiki.org: edit mw:Template:Sandbox/doc, and then click "Manage template documentation" above the wikitext edit box. If your community would like to use this TemplateData editor at your project, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.
• There have been multiple small changes to the appearance: External links are shown in the same light blue color as in MediaWiki. This is a lighter shade of blue than the internal links. The styling of the "Style text" (character formatting) drop-down menu has been synchronized with the recent font changes to the Vector skin. VisualEditor dialogs, such as the "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-savedialog⧽" dialog, now use a "loading" animation of moving lines, rather than animated GIF images. Other changes were made to the appearance upon opening a page in VisualEditor which should make the transition between reading and editing be smoother.
• The developers merged in many minor fixes and improvements to MediaWiki interface integration (e.g., edit notices), and made VisualEditor handle Education Program pages better.
• At the request of the community, VisualEditor has been deployed to Commons as an opt-in. It is currently available by default for 161 Wikipedia language editions and by opt-in through Beta Features at all others, as well as on several non-Wikipedia sites.

Looking ahead: The toolbar from the PageTriage extension will no longer be visible inside VisualEditor. More buttons and icons will be accessible from the keyboard. The "Keyboard shortcuts" link will be moved out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Support for upright image sizes (preferred for accessibility) and inline images is being developed. You will be able to see the Table of Contents while editing. Looking further out, the developers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments. VisualEditor will be available to all users on mobile devices and tablet computers. It will be possible to upload images to Commons from inside VisualEditor.

If you have questions or suggestions for future improvements, or if you encounter problems, please let everyone know by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Thursday, 19 June 2014 at 10:00 UTC. If you'd like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at meta:VisualEditor/Newsletter for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) 22:16, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Pop pop, pop pop pop

Coldest May day here since 1976, almost 0 centigrade so changed viewing material, see common or garden smaller person. I cannot decide whether I understand every word he says or absolutely none of them. But its all good, have a look (first one only). Eddaido (talk) 07:14, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Hmmmm. So it is possible to progress without being pushed and it is possible to turn a corner. But it is not possible to do both at the same time. Still, the enthusiasm is engaging. Sorry it's cold. Not exactly warm here, but at least I don't think the weather in England is breaking any records which is good. Slightly depressing election results here, now that the generation of political leaders determined to avoid a rerun of World War II have fallen off their perches to be replaced by a lot of third rate dodgy power cravers, and we are afforded the depressing vision of post democratic western Europe fragmenting into a patchwork of squabbling mini states driven by the old fashioned tribal instincts that already turned everything horrible sour during the first half of the twentieth century. A recipe for peace and prosperity it ain't. NZ sounds almost civilised by comparison, but the word they mostly use here for NZ is "dull". I think for me dull could be rather good, but this is not a universal view. Happy days. Charles01 (talk) 18:50, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Ah, so that's what he was telling me. I watched the Breakfast TV news this morning and there was no mention of those election results. (I know about Nigel, I often watch a BBC tv programme called Dateline London which lets me believe I know some of the issues over that way.) That is interesting in itself, the non-reporting. Not so long ago the main shopping street in this city was only active five days a week and in office hours (that's the hours the shops were open). Now it throbs for almost 24 continuous hours seven days a week filled with Chinese. Our biggest export customer once Britain is now China, for milk products. We are under their sway already as they switch on and off their pipeline from here (more threat than action) sucking the stuff up. Chain-rattling - the one that ties us to them. We aren't going under pig manure, here its cow manure polluting all the streams. If there wasn't an EU . . . Civilised? almost? you're probably right. Its changing too of course. Dull? yeah and I'm not feeling too bright myself (joke!) Must now go see reports on what happened in your election and I only recently suggested you yourself should stand. Best wishes etc Eddaido (talk) 00:53, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

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VisualEditor global newsletter—June 2014

Did you know?

The character formatting menu, or "Style text" menu lets you set bold, italic, and other text styles. "Clear formatting" removes all text styles and removes links to other pages.

Do you think that clear formatting should remove links? Are there changes you would like to see for this menu? Share your opinion at MediaWiki.org.

The user guide has information about how to use VisualEditor.

The VisualEditor team is mostly working to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

• They have moved the "Keyboard shortcuts" link out of the "Page options" menu, into the "Help" menu. Within dialog boxes, buttons are now more accessible (via the Tab key) from the keyboard.
• You can now see the target of the link when you click on it, without having to open the inspector.
• The team also expanded TemplateData: You can now add a parameter type "date" for dates and times in the ISO 8601 format, and "boolean" for values which are true or false. Also, templates that redirect to other templates (like {{citeweb}} → {{cite web}}) now get the TemplateData of their target (bug 50964). You can test TemplateData by editing mw:Template:Sandbox/doc.
• Category: and File: pages now display their contents correctly after saving an edit (bug 65349, bug 64239)
• They have also improved reference editing: You should no longer be able to add empty citations with VisualEditor (bug 64715), as with references. When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to replace it with another reference instead.
• It is now possible to edit inline images with VisualEditor. Remember that inline images cannot display captions, so existing captions get removed. Many other bugs related to images were also fixed.
• You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the "Page options" menu, rounding out the full set of page options currently planned.
• The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler.

Looking ahead

The VisualEditor team has posted a draft of their goals for the next fiscal year. You can read them and suggest changes on MediaWiki.org.

The team posts details about planned work on VisualEditor's roadmap. You will soon be able to drag-and-drop text as well as images. If you drag an image to a new place, it won't let you place it in the middle of a paragraph. All dialog boxes and windows will be simplified based on user testing and feedback. The VisualEditor team plans to add autofill features for citations. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for viewing and editing hidden HTML comments and adding rows and columns to tables.

Supporting your wiki

Please read VisualEditor/Citation tool for information on configuring the new citation template menu, labeled "⧼visualeditor-toolbar-cite-label⧽". This menu will not appear unless it has been configured on your wiki.

If you speak a language other than English, we need your help with translating the user guide. The guide is out of date or incomplete for many languages, and what's on your wiki may not be the most recent translation. Please contact me if you need help getting started with translation work on MediaWiki.org.

VisualEditor can be made available to most non-Wikipedia projects. If your community would like to test VisualEditor, please contact product manager James Forrester or file an enhancement request in Bugzilla.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback or by joining the office hours on Saturday, 19 July 2014 at 21:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas and Pacific Islands) or on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 9:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East, Asia).

To change your subscription to this newsletter, please see the subscription pages on Meta or the English Wikipedia. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:59, 25 June 2014 (UTC)