Wiktionary:Grease pit/2011/September

= September 2011 =

Secure mirrors?
What is the Secure mirror of Wiktionary? Any edit to one gets mirrored on the other. But if you edit the same article on both at the same time the second edit wins with no edit warning message. SemperBlotto 10:42, 4 September 2011 (UTC)


 * As it is using HTTPS I'd assume it's just Wiktionary served up with encryption (so that nobody eavesdrops your password in a cybercafé, or what not). Equinox ◑ 10:52, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

Hiding top-of-screen messages
Is there a simple way to permanently disable those messages at the top of the screen, like "The results of the image filter vote have been announced" or "Nominate yourself for some MediaWiki position you've never heard of"? I've been here about 3 years and it has never shown anything I cared about. Closing it with the fake JavaScript "X" button doesn't persist across sessions. Equinox ◑ 20:35, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Add #centralNotice{display:none} to your css. --Yair rand 21:05, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Where is my css? Equinox ◑ 21:09, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
 * User:Equinox/common.css. --Yair rand 21:10, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Bot task; de-linking form of templates
I was considering using MglovesfunBot to de-link form of templates, such as to this was however exclude things like which isn't impossible, it's just a bit more complicated as you have to check both words are the same (house, house). Thoughts? Nb see Template talk:count page. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:30, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I think it's a good idea. I think AWB allows you to insert backreferences into regular expressions, so if the first house is represented by something like ([^#|\]]), then you can represent the second with $1, which will always match the first one if it's the same and give no match if it's different. —CodeCat 10:56, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The code already exists in User:Mglovesfun/vector.js, I'd simply need to update to include all form of templates. In reality, it might be quicker just to do one context label at a time, for example the number of transclusion of is so massive it'd take the bot something like 72 hours straight to do the whole lot! --Mglovesfun (talk) 11:26, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Re: "I think AWB allows you to insert backreferences into regular expressions you can represent the second with $1": [[w:Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Regular expression]] doesn't mention this, and I don't have AWB so can't test; but I imagine that within a regular expression you would use \1 to refer back to the first subgroup, with $1 only being used in the replacement string. At least, that's how PCREs generally work. —Ruakh TALK 12:09, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Anyone object? Mglovesfun (talk) 09:26, 7 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Are you saying that we no longer need to add the page count template to entries (such as bot-generated verb forms)? If so, we need to update Wiktionary:Page count. SemperBlotto 09:32, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * According to Template talk:count page, from October 2011. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:38, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The code seems to be:

Which essentially works for every template ending in of apart from form of itself. Though it would de-link something like, that is, only if there is a single wikilink with no text outside of the wikilink. So wouldn't be de-linked. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:52, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I think it would also be good if the scripts were updated to no longer insert links. The accelerated links definitely still do. --The Evil IP address 14:33, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

special "create all conjugated forms" button
Is there a button I can press to automatically create all conjugated forms of a certain verb?,It would work if I go to jechać and press a button (automatically create pages with all the conjugated forms properly formatted) and all the red links turn blue with all the information from the table. If not, how would I create one? --Pofficer 10:08, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid not, but several people have set up bots to do this automatically instead. One of them is User:MewBot. You could try making your own bot if you are able to, or ask someone else. —CodeCat 10:45, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I already have one, . --Pofficer 16:19, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

What's going wrong?
I tried to make what I thought was a trivial change to ; adding if templates so that the preterite and conditional tenses display only when needed, rather than by default as they did previously. This is what the offending bit of code looks like now:

 

The bit in the middle used to work so I assume it still does, but when you try and use the template on a verb entry the parameter pret=1 has no effect. Is it something to do with nested #if templates and all the pipes? Cheers, BigDom (t • c) 17:12, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

Collapsible "Compounds" for Chinese / Japanese entries?
I quite like how the Translations and Quotations sections folds up out of the way when not in use. I deal a lot with Japanese entries, and the Compounds sections for Japanese and Chinese pages can get quite long indeed. Would it be possible to make these collapsible the same way that Translations are? If so, what would I need to do? -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 20:40, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't know why we consider, and so on to be different templates, they all do exactly the same job, right? I mean there's no need to create  or anything, just use ,  and  as they all do an identical job. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:46, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks Mglovesfun, I'll give that a go. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 21:02, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, using the template arg "Compounds" works to prevent the default "Derived terms" from displaying, but this means the header "Compounds" is repeated, which looks a bit clumsy. Is it more acceptable to 1) delete the header, and just have "Compounds" as the caption in the collapsed table?  2) use a single space as the arg value, so the table has no caption?  3) suck it up and have the header and table caption say the same thing?  -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 21:11, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * We should probably let the header and table-caption say the same thing ("Compounds"). Look at German verbs, which have "Conjugation &lt;br> conjugation of gehen". - -sche (discuss) 21:16, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes; however, is notably less cringe-worthy than the example now on display at  -- whereas the German example includes multiple kinds of information under the "Conjugation" heading, the Japanese example here is purely redundant, which makes me want to change something.  Still, if that's the best way to go about it, then that's what I'll do.  -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 21:31, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

The template puts words into categories of the form "Italian noun diminutive forms". However, in Italian at least, proper nouns are more likely to have diminutives. (see Pina as an example) SemperBlotto 09:05, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * You can now do <tt>nocat=1</tt>. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:24, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Or given names can use .--Makaokalani 11:25, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

A language with lots of scripts
Could someone who is less intimidated by complex template syntax than I am please set up so that it accepts more than 4 scripts? Pali is written with at least six scripts (Devanagari, Khmer, Latin, Burmese, Sinhala, and Thai), but currently only four are displayed at Category:Pali language. Thanks! —Angr 16:57, 9 September 2011 (UTC)


 * ✅. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 17:13, 9 September 2011 (UTC)


 * תודה! (How do you manage to be both he-4 and he-2?) —Angr 18:31, 9 September 2011 (UTC)


 * בבקשה! The descriptions for he, he-4, and he-0 all talk about ability to speak/understand Hebrew; of these, I chose he-4, meaning that I'm a speaker of Hebrew almost as a native language. (I grew up speaking both Hebrew and English at home, and still speak both Hebrew and English with my family.) The descriptions for he-3, he-2, and he-1, by contrast, talk about ability to contribute in Hebrew, which in turn depends on literacy. My literacy in Hebrew is quite poor. At the time I chose my Babels, I felt that he-2, ability to contribute at an intermediate level, came closest. But that was more than four years ago, and since then I've read hundreds of news articles in Hebrew, as well as an adult novel, and have acquired various excellent resources to refer to; so I think I'll promote myself to he-4 + he-3! :-P  —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 17:32, 10 September 2011 (UTC)


 * The adult novel you read, is that adult meaning 2 or meaning 3? ;-) —Angr 05:33, 11 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Adult reading level, some adult content: it was the Hebrew translation of The Time Traveler's Wife. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 14:16, 11 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Note: Category:Pali language is not being automatically categorized into Category:Khmer script languages. --Daniel 07:30, 11 September 2011 (UTC)


 * It is now. Thanks for pointing that out. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 14:16, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Using &lt;abbr&gt; tags within gender templates
I've recently noted that all the gender templates, like or  all use spans, whereas I think they'd be the perfect place for the abbr tags. I was wondering, what's the attitude here towards backwards compability with IE6? --The Evil IP address 16:26, 10 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Doesn't abbr cause a really ugly underline? -- Liliana • 17:39, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, but that can be overridden, either in common.css or directly in the tag. --Yair rand 20:55, 13 September 2011 (UTC)
 * It's true, and I also thought of adding this to CSS as well as the italics. They currently use the i tag, which however isn't ideal for ideal for it, because the italics are really only for presentation. This is how it could then look like (<abbr title="male gender" style="font-style:italic; border: none;">m ., <abbr title="female gender" style="font-style:italic; border: none;">f . ), of course, the style attribute wouldn't be used inline, but via CSS files. --The Evil IP address 14:42, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The &lt;i> tag is only for presentation, so I don't see the problem with using it as such. (Perhaps you're confusing it with &lt;em>, which is not a presentation tag?) Also, it'd be masculine, feminine, not male, female. In any event, to address your original question, perhaps we should do use a hack to help IE6 folks. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 15:21, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Current number of entries
As I keep half an eye on recent changes (working offline on something else) I can see the "Current number of entries" falling although nothing is being deleted. Five minutes ago it was 2,614,015 and now it is 2,613,899 (and falling). SemperBlotto 16:04, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * It's WP's wikignomes. They've gotten hungry after all their hard work, so decided to come over here to eat. They don't, after all, want to eat away at their own encyclopedia. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 16:20, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I noticed this as well, and it's still going down. BigDom (t • c) 16:20, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * It's User:MglovesfunBot "removing unneeded square brackets from form of templates" SemperBlotto 16:27, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * This issue was recently fixed in the MediaWiki core (see 88113), but apparently it's not yet live. --The Evil IP address 18:01, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Well they are unneeded, apart from the official edit count, which is due to be fixed when the fix goes 'live'. That's my defense. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:10, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The fix won't be live until Mediawiki 1.19 is deployed. That's months away. --Yair rand 22:12, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Halted. --Mglovesfun (talk) 09:35, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Upload a zip file?
I have a zip file of a program (that needs tweaking if anyone's up to it; also needs to be mac compatible) that may be very useful to users here... is there a place I can upload it somewhere on wiktionary? sewnmouthsecret 05:50, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Wikimedia Commons is the correct place, I think. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:14, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Grazie. sewnmouthsecret 03:52, 19 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Zip is not allowed on Wikimedia Commons. Maro 20:37, 1 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Sourceforge might be a good place for it. - 23:27, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Unbalanced brackets
How easy or difficult would it be to get an abuse filter to signal unbalanced brackets such as {[etyl|la|en} } or {etyl|la|en} }? --Mglovesfun (talk) 09:34, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
 * To be able to do that, filters would need to process pages recursively. Regular expressions can't do that, so I don't think so. —CodeCat 09:24, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
 * In a full solution yes, regular expressions aren't powerful enough. But simple ones (like those MG mentioned) can be handled. Can we come up with some simple (no bracket nesting, of any kind), common ones that would be helpful? A first try is
 * for catching "{blah} }"
 * for catching "[blah]]"
 * for catching "{ {blah}"
 * for catching "[[blah]"
 * Someone who's better than me can decide if these could be good filters (I'm not sure if we should deal with comments or if there a place these usages could be acceptable). --Bequw → τ 17:04, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Maybe that first one can be
 * instead, allowing links in the "blah"? And likewise the third could perhaps be
 * ? In any event, those only places I can think this would acceptable is where "{" or "}" belongs in a template parameter, especially where a free-text template parameter (like the first parameter of or the second of ) uses "{foo}" to refer to template "foo". Is there a way to account for such uses? &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 17:01, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
 * ? In any event, those only places I can think this would acceptable is where "{" or "}" belongs in a template parameter, especially where a free-text template parameter (like the first parameter of or the second of ) uses "{foo}" to refer to template "foo". Is there a way to account for such uses? &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 17:01, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
 * ? In any event, those only places I can think this would acceptable is where "{" or "}" belongs in a template parameter, especially where a free-text template parameter (like the first parameter of or the second of ) uses "{foo}" to refer to template "foo". Is there a way to account for such uses? &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 17:01, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

adding superlatives to templates
I'd like to add some absolute superlatives here, of the form -issimo, -íssim, issime etc. I guess a good way is to use the templates such as and add a parameter that can produce absolute superlatives. See the Catalan page boníssim for an example of the type of stuff to produce. Is this the sort of thing we might want? Surely it is a Good Thing, and can be adapted to, , , and potentially others. I'll play around with the templates later on to generate a few things. --Rockpilot 07:46, 17 September 2011 (UTC)


 * We already have and, so I don't see why we shouldn't have something similar for Spanish, Catalan etc. (or you could complexify existing templates if you can figure out the curly brackets) SemperBlotto 07:49, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
 * OK, I've added something at duríssim. It might be OK, I'll need to ask someone who knows more Catalan than me. What I'm looking for, however, is to modify to allow a parameter for the superlative forms. I had a fiddle with it, and did something at dur with a modified template, but it failed. --Rockpilot 12:22, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

template doc subpage should not appear in category
Hi! I just created "The Missing Manual" of the calque template: Template:calque/doc and added one example. Now the doc subpage appears in the French calques category. I had a look at template:borrowing and template:compound how they managed to insert examples without adding the doc subpage to an unwanted category, but I cannot find it out. Any ideas? Thanks! --MaEr 13:45, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
 * checks and only categorizes if the page isn't in the main namespace. doesn't yet, but should. If you want template practice, you can try and update it. Otherwise someone else can easily do it. --Bequw → τ 17:09, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Bequw. Unfortunately, I haven't been fast enough, so someone else has fixed it. But now I know that I have to look in the template itself. Yesterday I tried to find the solution in the code of the sub-page. --MaEr 08:16, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

infl-table
(reposted from here) I can't find any templates in the recent dump that use the span "infl-table". Have all of these been removed (the last discussion I can find is over a year ago)? If so great. Let's remove the pair of lines in Common.css (the default is inline, right, so the .infl-inline statement isn't needed either). --Bequw → τ 17:12, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Removed the line for . --Bequw → τ 12:36, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Category:Mandarin parts of speech
If I've understood correctly, pinyin should no longer appear in this category, but only in Category:Mandarin pinyin. There are about 6500 pinyin entries in these categories. That's an awful, awful lot. Can we use a bot to convert these at least partially to the new format? If not, 6500 is a lot of entries for a human editor (20 a day for a whole year). Mglovesfun (talk) 10:12, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

the function incategory doesn't work in the french wiktionary site.
the function incategory works on the english wiktionary site, but not on the french site. can anyone look into the problem?

http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=0&search=incategory%3Aenglish_idioms&fulltext=Search&searchengineselect=mediawiki&ns0=1

http://fr.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sp%C3%A9cial%3ARecherche&search=incategory%3ALocutions_adverbiales_en_fran%C3%A7ais


 * I think that comes from Extension:DynamicPageList which is enabled on En but not Fr. I say I think because it is not listed in the documentation for that extension and I can't find Amgine to ask him. -  21:11, 23 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Can someone fix the problem? It would be greatly appreciated.
 * Actually we're waiting for the few selected authorized responsible persons for several months. JackPotte 10:26, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Abuse filter bugs
Check out the history for balcony today, says bad-lede (for some reason, we prefer this to 'bad lead' which is what it means) but it isn't. Also is the removal-of-rfd-or-rfv-template supposed to also work outside the main namespace? Mglovesfun (talk) 20:05, 24 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I've fixed the bad-lede filter; [[balcony]] does have a bad lede (the image should go within the ==English== section), but filters should only be used to flag the introduction of new problems, not the failure to resolve existing ones. (And, I'll go fix [[balcony]] now.) —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 22:56, 24 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Re the bad-lede filter: Thanks for the catch, Martin, and this fix, Ran. Re the removal-of-template filter: I was thinking "yes", which is why I wrote the filter that way. But what do others think? (Note that anyway a tag is not a stigma or anything: its sole purpose is to call attention to edits to those who might roll them back will catch them more easily. They should be defined however best serves that purpose.) &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 03:05, 25 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I think the removal-of-rfd template should work outside of namespace:0, because categories and other namespaces can be subjected to RFD. - -sche (discuss) 03:42, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

gibberish postcatboiler subpages
Category:Malecite-Passamaquoddy nouns, Category:French nouns and many other language categories transclude the nonexistant pages Template:poscatboiler/neuter nounHdggghhhhjjjhjuthhbbvvyuhhhhbhbhhy and Template:poscatboiler/noun sgggggform. I assume someone vandalised a template... - -sche (discuss) 02:41, 25 September 2011 (UTC)
 * See also [[WT:BP]]. &#x200b;—msh210℠ (talk) 03:10, 25 September 2011 (UTC)
 * It was Template:poscatboiler/noun. - -sche (discuss) 00:26, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Ancient Greek declining templates?
Hi, so if I find a word in Perseus (e.g. ), how do I find out which declension it is, and therefore which template do I use and what do I type in it in order to get a table of noun forms to pop up? Thanks. <font color="#006600;">It Is Me Here  <font color="#CC6600;">t / <font color="#CC6600;">c 00:14, 29 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Essentially you type it into the search box, hit enter, and if it exists and has a delension, you know what declension it is. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:05, 2 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I think you're misunderstanding question. I'm pretty sure  is asking how to find out what declension template to use at a given entry that doesn't yet have that information. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 14:32, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
 * We have no fewer than 214 Ancient Greek declension-table templates, so you may need to browse a while before finding the right one. This page has some notes on using them, but it doesn't look very newbie-friendly to me. —Angr 14:00, 3 October 2011 (UTC)