Mailing List Archive

Several issues
Brief background:

We are running a local wikipedia (read-only copy) to provide our k12 students with faster access
to research as we have only 2 T1's to share amoungst 20,000+ users. Having a local copy speeds
research while simultaniously reduces external internet traffic. It also allows a modicum of
control over certain topics and their related images (when we get them) which may not be
appropriate for our younger users (ie, clitoris, etc.).

We are running into several issues that I haven't been able to find answers to online.

First, on the Main_Page we have the "Selected Anniversaries" and "Did You Know" blocks. At the
bottom of each is the "More..." link. However, the link is getting incorrectly displayed and is
instead diplaying as:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_anniversaries/March" class='external' title="">More
selected anniversaries...

With the "http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_anniversaries/March" acually being the active
link. This doesn't happen on other wikipedia sites I've looked at so we must be doing something
wrong. I'm not sure where to look for the answer because the entire block (in the case of
anniversaries) is genereated with the
{{msg:{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}_{{CURRENTDAY}}_selected_anniversaries}} command on the main page so it
appears we have no formatting control.

What am I missing?


Also, we are having problems when clicking links to pages that include apostrophies (ie "Boyle's
Law"). We get "Bad Title" errors. I've reduced the problem by adding a mod_rewrite rule to remove
the apostrophies and change the link to "Boyles_Law" which works in some cases, but not in others.
I know this isn't the right way to handle it and am assuming that the apostrophy character is
probably getting encoded as something else in the MySQL index, but haven't figured out what or why
yet.

Again, any ideas.


Also, we've skinned wikipedia to fit seamlessly with our internally developed "Web-Based
Integrated Learning Environment" which can in turn be skinned in a variety of ways and has a
light-blue background color by default. I've modified the source code for texvc to create
transparent backgrounds on the TeX math equations. This works, but the antialiasing occasionally
leaves undesireable (grey) artifacts along the edges. Does anyone have a better hack for texvc
that will allow better transparency or alpha-transparent .PNGs?


Finally, I know there is no image dump on the downloads page yet, but is there a place I can
perhaps "curl" or "rsync" the images from? If not, when might there be an image dump?

Thank you, and forgive me if these are "stupid newby" questions.


_____________________________________
Kevin Heneveld - System Administrator
Fairbanks School District
(907) 452-2000 X375
Re: Several issues [ In reply to ]
Kevin Heneveld wrote on March 17:
> First, on the Main_Page we have the "Selected Anniversaries" and "Did
> You Know" blocks. At the bottom of each is the "More..." link.
> However, the link is getting incorrectly displayed and is instead
> diplaying as:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_anniversaries/March"
> class='external' title="">More
> selected anniversaries...

That sounds odd... Have a look at [[MediaWiki:March 17 selected
anniversaries]] or equivalent; does the link work in there, or is it
just on the main page?

Also, exactly which version of MediaWiki are you using?

> Also, we are having problems when clicking links to pages that include
> apostrophies (ie "Boyle's Law"). We get "Bad Title" errors.

Check your PHP configuration; weird things can happen with apostrophes
if "magic_quotes_gpc" is on. (This is a misguided "feature" of PHP to
"help" developers by semi-randomly putting slashes in front of
characters _just in case_ you want to blindly insert data into SQL and
_never ever_ do anything else with input.) We try to work around it but
may miss some spots.

If you can disable this option in php.ini and restart the web server,
hopefully that'll clear it up.

Docs: http://us4.php.net/manual/en/ref.info.php#ini.magic-quotes-gpc

> I've modified the source code for texvc to create transparent
> backgrounds on the TeX math equations. This works, but the
> antialiasing occasionally leaves undesireable (grey) artifacts along
> the edges. Does anyone have a better hack for texvc that will allow
> better transparency or alpha-transparent .PNGs?

If anyone does, we'd love to have it too...

> Finally, I know there is no image dump on the downloads page yet, but
> is there a place I can perhaps "curl" or "rsync" the images from? If
> not, when might there be an image dump?

Sorry, an official image dump has been held up by the rampant practice
of uploading copyrighted images without permission or a clear
demarcation of what is really considerable as "fair use" vs what's just
plunked in without thought.

You should be able to spider the /upload directory with curl or wget if
you really need to.

-- brion @ pobox.com)