Forum:Missing and broken features

ShoutWiki — express yourself and be heard!
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Forums: Index > Community help

Yesterday I moved my wiki here. I've since found out that I can't edit the interwiki table or use in-page css (mw:Extension:CSS). These features were somewhat important on my wiki as you can see on here and here, and I'm rather annoyed that they're not available since not only do I have a use for them but I suspect other wikis might as well, and the wiki farm I was using - Wikkii - does make those features available. Wikia also does not have those features and if we did it would make us a better competitor I think.

You can see on s:w:cynnwys:Template:Links my reason for needing an interwiki table; I'm not sure you allow that kind of thing here and if not feel free to delete the wiki and block me or whatever it is you do, but in any case I would appreciate it if you could install the CSS extension and allow local administrators to add interwiki prefixes just for their wiki.

Finally, an unrelated thing but I'm not sure where to put it - someone take a peek at these issues with the Aurora skin on iphones please? Llwy-ar-lawr (talk) 22:44, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Also for some reason wikimedia commons files work here but not on Cynnwys. Llwy-ar-lawr (talk) 01:13, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
Also there's something funky with s:w:cynnwys:Special:Statistics - showing -1 active users. And why are the numbers of registered users on Special:Statistics and s:w:cynnwys:Special:Statistics different? Llwy-ar-lawr (talk) 18:40, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
Firstly, hi and welcome to ShoutWiki! We're glad to have you here. :-)
Editing of the interwiki table is restricted because interwikis are global (shared between all ShoutWiki wikis) and we'd like to keep the list useful. That means basically that we don't need separate entries in the interwiki table for all Wikimedia Foundation or Wikia wikis...but it's what would — eventually — happen if the interwiki table was editable by local administrators. Yes, it's somewhat inconvenient, but if you ask us, chances are we're more than happy to add the prefix or prefixes you need into the interwiki table.
Looking at your Links template, I'm sure we can add the wikis in question to the global interwiki table — but I'm not sure if the template has the effect you hope it does. Search engines' private and proprietary ranking algorithms, notably Google's PageRank, are very complicated and they take several factors into consideration when determining the relevance of a link. One such factor is the link title and I have a fun example related to that. Back in 2005 Aapo Puskala, a Finnish programmer, decided to "cheat" Google by making it return the official site of the Finnish Parliament as the first result for the search query "Mordorin linna" (Finnish for "the castle of Mordor"). His brief write-up (in Finnish) is still available on his personal website. Long story short, over 8 years later the Parliament's site is still among the top results for that search query (appears to be the third result today), despite that said website obviously doesn't include any Mordor references anywhere.
Should you try pulling a stunt similar to what Aapo did? I for one can't recommend that, for various reasons. If you haven't read it yet, I strongly recommend taking a look at Wikipedia's article on Google's PageRank algorithm. Yes, there are plenty of scary maths-related things there, but besides those, there's a lot of good and important information there, too.
Per-page CSS allows a lot of interesting things to be done, but on a public wiki, it means that you risk someone putting * { display: none !important; } on a page...or all pages. Depending on the target audience of the wiki, reverting such edits might be as simple as clicking the rollback link on the recent changes list, or next to impossible.
Better yet, "per-page CSS" is already available and has been for a very long time in core MediaWiki — by using the appropriate page- CSS class. For example, this page's <body> element has the class page-Forum_Missing_and_broken_features, so to turn all links on this page green, you could insert something like body.page-Forum_Missing_and_broken_features a { color: green; } into MediaWiki:Aurora.css or MediaWiki:Common.css. Whilist this method has certain issues, it's certainly a safer alternative, as the MediaWiki namespace can only be edited by administrators.
If, nevertheless, you feel comfortable with a per-page CSS, please file a ticket on Bugzilla and we'll look into installing such an extension for you.
The InstantCommons feature, which allows embedding content hosted on Wikimedia Commons, is not enabled by default. It's enabled on some wikis which have opted in, such as this one. If you want it enabled for your wiki, let us know — it's literally as simple as toggling a global variable.
The "-1 active users" is a strange and old bug, which sometimes happens. Running the script which refreshes site statistics seems to have fixed that. Seems that running the same script on ShoutWiki Hub fixed the inaccurate "total users" count, among others. I'm guessing that the underlying cause of the bug is caching — but "luckily" the "total users" count isn't very useful to most people; admins generally speaking are interested only in the people who contribute to their wiki. --Jack PhoenixShoutWiki Staff (Contact) 00:40, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
Thank you for your replies.
Interwikis may be global but I don't see anything wrong with allowing local administrators to add only local prefixes; it even says stuff about how there are no local interlanguage prefixes defined, so why you can't enable individual wikis to have semi-separate sets of prefixes I don't understand. I don't care to tell you to add prefixes because I spend enough time poking people to do stuff I can't do as it is.
Yes I do think it works to increase google ranks that way btw; I've done it - the only reason fr.illogicopedia.org is near the top of the search results for Logimalpedie, and indeed the only reason it's in the search results at all, is the work I've done to get it there by exactly this method.
Re. the other stuff, it's no big deal to me as I already know about mediawiki messages (and btw the individual page method I'm familiar with is one you haven't mentioned here - subpages of Mediawiki:Skin) and I don't particularly care about having things enabled just for my wiki, it's not important enough for me specifically, I just thought it would make other people's lives easier if you could enable it everywhere. And if you don't want to. enable it for everyone because of security and whatnot, I'll happily just drop it. Llwy-ar-lawr (talk) 23:02, 13 March 2014 (UTC)
Regarding local interwikis, it's not as simple as it seems, or at least I don't think it is. Associated reading: bz:12, mw:Extension:ShoutWiki Interwiki Magic, mw:ShoutWiki/Patches/Interwiki (even though the code on the last page is outdated; my bad, I know).
The patches to the Interwiki extension as-is are confusing and painful to reapply during each upgrade; tweaking the InterwikiMagic extension should be considerably easier, though. You're encouraged to open a ticket on Bugzilla to make sure it'll be properly tracked — though I have to warn you that it won't magically jump onto the top of our list of engineering priorities, but we'll definitely investigate it.
What I described was the only core way of doing per-page CSS; the "subpages of MediaWiki:Skin" method is a rather crude JavaScript hack that originated at Uncyclopedia (look for "Reskin parser") and because it's a JS thing, it means it won't work for people whose browsers don't support JS or have JS disabled for some reason. (I tried implementing it in PHP earlier today but stumbled upon ResourceLoader's limitations and/or MediaWiki's stupidity, and hence nothing became of it, sadly. Apparently ResourceLoader can't figure out or doesn't care about the current page and its title, which is a rather important thing for a per-page CSS(/JS) extension.)
Wikitext already allows plenty of inline CSS, which some people sadly choose to abuse; as such, I don't think we'll want to see what these people would do with a per-page CSS extension that'd be globally enabled. --Jack PhoenixShoutWiki Staff (Contact) 19:52, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
I see.
You are right that people abuse inline css, though after thinking about it some more I'm pretty sure you can't abuse local page stylesheets any more than inline css - you can just use, say, <div style="position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; background: #fff; z-index: 9999;"></div> and blank the page that way. (Example of a legitimate use of such coding here (though the effect is only visible when the template is transcluded).)
In any case, though...I'm sorry to say this, because this is a nice shiny hosting service and you deserve lots of traffic and things, but I seem to have set up yet another wiki elsewhere and I plan on moving my (very sparse and rather stupid and directionless) content there, so I think maybe Cynnwys should be closed. So I'm not sure I'll try to get you to fix any more stuff with it. Before you do though, is there any way to get a database dump of it without just going through Special:AllPages? Or is that asking too much? Llwy-ar-lawr (talk) 01:02, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
Oh also the users numbers seem to be fixed. I don't know what you did, but thanks. Llwy-ar-lawr (talk) 01:02, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://www.shoutwiki.com/w/index.php?title=Forum:Missing_and_broken_features&oldid=15453"