User talk:GMedich

Welcome!

Hello, GMedich, and welcome to the Mises Wiki! Thanks for signing up – we're glad to have you! If you need help getting started, take a look at our help pages.

Community discussion takes place at the MisesWiki Commons, so feel free to post any questions you might have there or on my talk page. Please sign your messages on talk and discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. Again, welcome!

Hi, thanks for the redirect fixing. We can also use a script for that, by the way; I just hadn't run it in awhile (actually ever) because no one requested it. Nathan Larson (talk) 01:04, 28 December 2013 (MSK)

Thanks for the welcome, Nathan. Although I've worked on a few wikis in my past, I prefer to ease into them by making a few minor edits at first. I believe it warms me up a bit to some of the underlying patterns used by the community. There weren't really that many double redirects, and I kind of enjoy housekeeping a little bit on the wikis I try to support. GMedich (talk) 01:16, 28 December 2013 (MSK)

Yeah, I just ran the script: "No double redirects found." Looks like you were pretty efficient at your wikignoming! The situation you observed was atypical in that I had created a bunch of articles in mainspace that more properly belonged in an Essay: namespace, but it didn't exist yet. After it was created, User:Pestergaines moved them in there. Nathan Larson (talk) 01:24, 28 December 2013 (MSK)

I stopped with the "broken" redirects after I realized they probably would be better deleted than maintained as redirect pages. I don't imagine many users would actually search out some of those terms. GMedich (talk) 01:27, 28 December 2013 (MSK)

MediaWiki

Hi GMedich, How familiar are you with the technical side of MediaWiki (e.g. configuration, troubleshooting, etc.)? Once in awhile we run into some glitches that I have trouble figuring out how to fix. Thanks, Nathan Larson (talk) 01:45, 29 December 2013 (MSK)

My most technical endeavors have included a small amount of css customization and stretching the capabilities of wikicode. I have only recently begun trying to reverse engineer some basic semantic MediaWiki functions. I would probably be at most rated as a talented dabbler. GMedich (talk) 07:28, 29 December 2013 (MSK)

Actually, I was just attempting to decipher some CSS today, and figure out what is making those headings on the left sidebar so undesirably big. We have a custom skin; see Special:ViewFiles#main.css and MisesWiki:Vector.php.

Are you referring to the SMW described at mw:Semantic MediaWiki? There have been several discussions about whether we should switch to that system; see MisesWiki:Commons#Semantic_wikis and MisesWiki:Commons#Mass_imports. Also, I came up with my own system, mw:Extension:BedellPenDragon, which is in use at PolyWiki.org, ChildWiki.net, and SuicideWiki.org. The "randomly featured article" rotation, "new articles" feed, and Glossary are generated using Template:PageSummary and Template:FASummary. That's all stuff that could probably also be done using SMW.

More input at those Commons discussions would be welcome, once you reach a point at which you would feel familiar enough with the wiki to be comfortable weighing in. Thanks, Nathan Larson (talk) 09:35, 29 December 2013 (MSK)

I imagine your headings are simply using the default settings of h5. You might try something similar to:

.portal h5 {
   padding:0 1em 0 .5em;  /* example only */
   font-size:90%;
   font-weight:normal;
}

I could not test this on a personal css file here since creating such files appears to be prohibited. GMedich (talk) 00:30, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

Okay, I changed $wgAllowUserJs and $wgAllowUserCss to true. That should allow you to try it. Nathan Larson (talk) 02:28, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

I see where you added this, but I am still being prevented from creating either User:GMedich/common.css or User:GMedich/misesskin.css subpages. The system keeps me logged in, but the "Create account" and "Log in" options replace the user options which are typically displayed there. The message I receive continues to read "There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs, but you do not have permission to create this page." I could not see another option in the LocalSettings.php which would prevent my access. GMedich (talk) 02:56, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

Oops! I just found the Preferences>Appearance tab now provides this access. I have been accustomed to adding it directly. GMedich (talk) 03:00, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

Well, that seemed to work fine for me in my personal common.css file, Nathan. The navigation headers were normal weight and slightly smaller. I did not play with the padding values to see what variations could be produced. This should work for you in the general css file if you intend to adjust the appearance of these headers. GMedich (talk) 03:44, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

Excellent! That looks much better. Thanks. A few other small issues: (1) the watch/unwatch star to the right of the Edit button is hanging down where it's not supposed to. (2) I think the blue portion of the background is supposed to extend all the way to the bottom of the screen. Do you think that would look better? Right now, the Ludwig von Mises image is hanging off the edge into the white. (3) Widget:YouTube isn't working, even on videos that play on other sites. See, e.g.: {{#widget: YouTube|id=FR2LWUM8in8}} This works at Nathania.org: http://nathania.org/wiki/User:Leucosticte/Mises_Wiki_interview You have access now to play with Widget:YouTube. Thanks again, Nathan Larson (talk) 04:49, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

I have been using the "Inspect element" option in my browser in an attempt to ferret out the root of these issues. I noticed that the von Mises image can be adjusted by increasing the padding in the footer-wrapper to 40 px (on line 212):

div#footer-wrapper {
    width: 100%;
    margin: 10px auto 0;
    padding: 40px 0; 
    height: 300px;
}

Although I did notice the unexpected change in my user rights, I cannot seem to edit the main.css file to make this change. The watch/unwatch star appears to be due to js features rather than css coding. The inspect element does show the icon size being larger than its intended positioning, but there is no related css coding I can find to adjust it. Several error codes show when inspecting the js side, including some missing bits. I am not very familiar with javascript functions, unfortunately...usually just a cut-and-paste feature in my past experience. Any thoughts? GMedich (talk) 18:04, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

Yeah, main.css is not in the MediaWiki namespace; it's in the file system, and is edited from the shell. I'm not sure there's any way to override it from within MediaWiki. I did make the change you suggested and it seems to have fixed the issue. Thanks!

Maybe the star has something to do with js. It could also be related to something in Vector.php. See, e.g.:

                if ( $wgVectorUseIconWatch ) {
                        $mode = $this->getSkin()->getUser()->isWatched( $this->getSkin()->getRelevantTitle() ) ? 'unwatch' : 'watch';
                        if ( isset( $nav['actions'][$mode] ) ) {
                                $nav['views'][$mode] = $nav['actions'][$mode];
                                $nav['views'][$mode]['class'] = rtrim( 'icon ' . $nav['views'][$mode]['class'], ' ' );
                                $nav['views'][$mode]['primary'] = true;
                                unset( $nav['actions'][$mode] );
                        }
                }

Our Vector.php was written for some obsolete version of MediaWiki; right now we're using the cutting-edge v1.23alpha. The recent upgrade from v1.21 caused those glitches to start appearing. mw:MediaWiki_1.22#Upgrades_to_Vector_and_other_skins might have some useful info pertaining to that. The star is not an incredibly big deal since it only is displayed to logged-in users, and we don't have very many of those. Nathan Larson (talk) 18:30, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

I understood "Vector" to be the latest default skin for MediaWiki. Is the custom skin you previously mentioned built upon Vector as its foundation? GMedich (talk) 18:52, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

They have some similarities. I know nothing about the history of our Vector.php, other than that this custom skin has been around since at least v1.18. You can see the file reference for MediaWiki's Vector.php here. I see that the PHP code snippet above is identical to what's in the MediaWiki codebase's version. Nathan Larson (talk) 19:09, 30 December 2013 (MSK)

Gadgets

I forgot to mention, most of the gadgets are probably broken too. I didn't import any gadget-related stuff from Wikipedia except the MediaWiki: namespace pages that started with MediaWiki:Gadget. If you (or another sysop) can fix those, and make a note of how they were fixed, then we can expand the Gadgets section of mw:Manual:Using content from Wikipedia (or maybe create a new page, mw:Manual:Using gadgets from Wikipedia). That would be very helpful to the whole non-WMF wikisphere. A lot of the gadgets seem to use code from people's userspace, and there doesn't seem to be a central list of what all those pages are.

The WMF-specific gadgets, of course, we can dispense with entirely. The gadgets extension was only installed a few weeks ago, so if none of us gets around to fixing the gadgets, we haven't really lost any functionality. Leucosticte (talk) 06:37, 31 December 2013 (MSK)

Yes, I had noticed that many gadget functions do not seem to be currently accessible. I cannot help but think that backing out some of these gadgets would be a very good idea. Adding and accessing content is typically the primary function of a wiki. Time spent tweaking widgets, gadgets and "who's its" can easily undermine such productivity. GMedich (talk) 19:15, 31 December 2013 (MSK)