Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/Early

Welcome to Wikipedia's computer help desk; this is a centralized spot for seasoned computer veterans and people who need help with software related to Wikipedia. We are here to turn your complicated, time consuming, or boring task into a software problem and solve it for you. We also help people who are using automated tools, or possibly creating their own. If you are looking for assistance please continue reading. If you would like to become a member of this project please see #New members.

Computer help desk

The help desk is the information technology resource and help center for many medium and large scale organizations. Such is our aim here: to help apply our knowledge of computer science to the articles you need help with and to help you resolve problems related to software as you use it to work on the Wikipedia. Please note that we do not have the resources to support your general computer questions or problems with your computer; we are limited to software tools as they are used to directly achieve tasks in the Wikipedia.

What is it exactly that we can do for you here? Here are some of the things we have done in the past:

• Find all the articles that Chick Bowen had created for WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles; see 20051219 Chick Bowen.
• Scan the Transwiki log and add a link to a WP:VfD if it exists for that specific page; see 20050709 Dmcdevit
• Convert large lists from improper formats to proper formats; compare List of Middle-earth articles and this page
• Reorder lists; see Tributaries of the Columbia River where the alphabetical listing was created very easily
• Help a contributor fix a tool that broke after a software upgrade on the Wikipedia; see 20050702 Dmcdevit

There are also things that we will not do:

• We will not write software that systematically changes articles; this means that a human must be present to apply each change that will be made to an article. If this is what you need then bot requests is the place for that request.
• We will not modify the MediaWiki software; however we may be able to create tools to work around deficiencies that you are facing.

To start the process to receive assistance please see the #New cases section.

Scope

The scope of this project covers the entire Wikipedia but is limited specifically to software related to Wikipedia.

Goals

1. Assist fellow Wikipedians who are having trouble with an existing software tool
2. Assist fellow Wikipedians who are trying to write their own automated tools
3. Publish information, example source code, reusable modules, and other software packages to encourage fellow Wikipedians to create new software tools
4. Create new software tools to assist fellow Wikipedians
5. Apply the tools to articles or create tools for article specific tasks

Parentage

• Father: WikiProject Community
• Mother: WikiProject Computer science

Descendant WikiProjects

1. WikiProject stubsensor - Identifies articles that may have the stub tag on them improperly. Contributers are required to verify the stub tag's correctness.

Related WikiProjects

• Bot requests
• WikiProject User scripts

Projects

Support

New cases

We do not have the resources to help you with general computer questions or help you edit Wikipedia. We are here to write software tools to make remedial tasks easier. For now add an item to the end of the list (or start the list) below. Please give a brief overview of your problem including the tool that you use and what you use it for. Someone will open a case for you and leave a message on your talk page requesting more information. If you are unsure what to do feel free to contact us via this talk page. Please be patient.

• User:Splintax has requested an update of Wikipedia:Offline reports/This article links to a redirect back to itself. -- Beland 04:18, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

• I would like some help separating and sorting red links and blue links as part of the WP:MEA. Compare this and this. This is currently being done by hand as it makes pruning the lists much easier. Ideally I would have control over the tool so I could select which articles are chosen or not chosen because it may not be appropriate for all lists, though I'd be happy with anything. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 19:30, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

• I have downloaded en 1.5 database tables page, pagelinks and categorylinks. Given a category (e.g. Category:Mathematics) how can I get:

1. The list of 'Subcategories' titles (e.g. Algebra), currently there are 65 according to the math category web page? 2. The list of 'Pages in category "Mathematics"' (e.g. Additional logarithm topics), currently there are 71 according to the math category web page? I am looking for the way to link the tables together via SQL.-User:Kippersnax

• Some guy just moved the article about Sasha to Alexander Coe and it has broken about 100 links that are now directed at a disambiguation page. Can someone throw something in a bot to fix this? All it really needs to do is find all the articles that link to Sasha and change their link that says [[Sasha]] to [[Alexander Coe]]. Wickethewok 17:15, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

• Tool for researchers - history page analysis. Briefly - it would look at the history page and generate some statistical info, like who has edited the article, when, and what have they done with it. Please see details here.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 20:03, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

• There's a great need for a semi-automated tool to handle reviewing Articles for Creation submissions. Rather than posting an excessively long entry to this list, I'll refer you to my Village Pump request, which includes a before-and-after sample of the type of editing that needs to be done. Any help you can provide would be really, really appreciated. Kickaha Ota 17:33, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

• It would seem that the Special Page "Cite" e.g. the one for "Driverless car" is broken, in that an attempt to acces the list of main contributors barfs complaining about python: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~tim/cgi-bin/contribution-counter?page=Driverless_car&namespace=&dbname=enwiki_p&hide_minor=on Help! Is this what is meant by long replication lag? if so, a more useful error message would be, er.... Useful. Samfreed 22:57, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• wikEd is a full-featured in-browser text editor that adds enhanced text processing functions to Wikipedia and other MediaWiki edit pages. Currently it works only for Firefox and other Mozilla browsers. I am looking for somebody who can help to make the script work under Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9. Cacycle 04:27, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Cases needing help

This is a list of projects that have an open case and need help but no one is currently involved in the case.

1. Dmcdevit 20050718 Dmcdevit has noticed that the List of Wikipedians by number of edits page is badly out of date. Triddle 20:46, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
2. Smack 20050724 Smack would like a new report format for fixing disambiguations at WikiProject Disambiguation.

Open cases

This section is for projects who have an open case and are actively receiving help from a member of this project.

Todo

This section is a list of items that should be completed but no one has found the time to do them yet.

Wish list

This is where ideas for useful tools or other software bits can be noted. If there is free time and interest this is a good spot to find something to do.

1. I think it would be nice to have a tool that can take wikitext table data and sort on column names, etc then re-output the table. Triddle July 2, 2005 18:05 (UTC)

• See [1] --Admrb♉ltz (T | C) 03:17, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Tool now at WMF Labs —[AlanM1(talk)]— 13:33, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Articles

Active cleanup projects

For previous cleanup projects see the archives

• Stubsensor

Software

1. Parse::MediaWikiDump is a Perl module that makes processing a MediaWiki database dump simple. Updated for the new XML dump format and providing a new and easier interface the module is now available via CPAN.
2. wpfsck is an application developed in Perl that searches for various errors in the english Wikipedia. Currently the software is unable to use the new XML dump file format and must be ported to the new Parse::MediaWikiDump.
3. Wiki Data Dump Searcher is graphical easy-to-use a tool that directly scans the "Articles" XML dump, depending on how complicated the search is it can take as little as a couple of minutes. It is good for jobs like finding typos. (Written in C#)

Studies

1. Category graph study A study of the current Wikipedia category system (currently implemented as a graph) and ideas on how to make it more useful. Community discussion is encouraged.
2. Double redirect study A study of the possible solutions to the large problem of double redirects, including the penalty of each solution, and the positive aspects. Community discussion is encouraged.

Instructions, policies, organization

New members

Sure you can join! Right now there is little structure or leadership; simply read the sections below, sign your name in the #Participants section, and check out the #Projects section.

Orientation

As stated above, much of the purpose of this project is to assist new users of scripts, bots and other software tools for finding, sorting, manipulating and maintaining Wikipedia content. If this topic is completely new to you, here's a good introduction to Bots. Much of what we do here is creating one-off or general purpose tools for editing tasks. Regular expressions are extremely useful for this purpose as is strong knowledge of a high-level programming language. However, you do not need these qualifications if you wish to help; in fact your presence here is a welcome and we will work to teach you as much as we can.

A common problem among talented computer users is frustration when dealing with less knowledgeable users; it is important to combat this tendency: remain patient, communicate clearly and effectively, and be extremely to overly friendly. To assist in this task we will develop procedures, templates, and other methods of making the task of interfacing to other wikipedians as painless as possible. Also remember that there are very specific things that computers are good at, especially as it relates to dealing with abstract things such as text. It is unlikely that other contributers will have a firm grasp on these intricacies and may well ask for the impossible. The proper course is to properly research the problem and if you don't think you can solve it then bring it up for general discussion. Perhaps another member can bring some insight into the problem and if it is particularly difficult to solve, but also useful, it will probably generate lots of support.

Creating a new case

Once a contributor has listed a new case under #New cases a case should be created and placed in #Open cases as soon as possible (but only if that case is actively receiving help). To create the case simply create a sub-page on this project. The format of the name is the date in DNS zone format (20050701 is Jul 01, 2005. The first four digits are the year, the fourth and fifth digits are the month, and the last two digits are the day.) followed by the username of the contributor who initiated the request. Example: Wikipedia:Computer help desk/20050702 Dmcdevit. There is currently no template; one will be created as experience is increased.

Once the case has been created please place it on your watch list and leave a message on the contributor's talk page with a reference to the new location for the case and instructions asking that all communication be performed in the case. Also please list the case under #Open cases if you are going to begin helping immediately or under #Cases needing help so someone else knows it is available.

If you create source code as a solution to the case you are working on, please publish it by creating a separate page, placing the source code there, and including it in your case as a template. Then protect the page that has the source code from edits and watch the page; this is done so the code is less likely to be modified to be malicious. If you are not able to protect the page yourself then please leave a request on this projects talk page to have the page protected.

Participants

1. I hope this idea takes off and it works out well. It will be nice to have one spot where people who need technical help as it relates to Wikipedia and people who can actually provide that help come together. Status as of Oct 4, 2005: School and work are keeping me busy; I don't have the spare time to get anything done for the help desk at the moment. Triddle 17:36, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
2. Me too. I'm mostly just a normal user I'm not a coder but I play one on TV. I'll help as much as I can. Quinobi 21:47, 9 July 2005 (UTC)
3. Me too! r3m0t ^talk 21:44, July 24, 2005 (UTC)
4. And me, I'm a C# programmer. Martin 20:51, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
5. I wish to improve my understanding of the various procedures. I am relying on Help Desk, henceforth.

I am 110 percent STUDENT and -10 percent INSTRUCTOR. Superslum 13:59, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

1. I want to increase my knowledge about general computing and impart wisdom of PHP onto other people @kshay 07:39, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Todo

1. Generate some attention for the project. The best way so far seems to be by organizing cleanup projects and crediting the help desk with the task of managing them. With the new XML dump format supported by Parse::MediaWikiDump new cleanup projects should be coming soon.

Help desk Meetups

The Wikipedia:Bootcamp is an IRC help desk and community resource center for both new and seasoned Wikipedians. Anyone is welcome to log into FreenodeIRC (irc://irc.freenode.net) and /join #wikipedia-bootcamp for Realtime help on work that you are doing - 24/7. - Please be patient. Type in tractor: help if you see me in there. (The tractor is an IRC implement under construction right here at the help desk project.) operated manually these days by Quinobi

Read http://freenode.net/catalysts for some insights on using freenode and IRC.

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Archives

Cases

1. 20051219 Chick Bowen Dig through User:Chick Bowen's contribution list to find the articles he has contributed in the name of WikiProject Missing articles.
2. 20050715 LukeSurl LukeSurl has noticed that many articles on asteroids contain the stub tag but its not really needed.
3. 20050709 Dmcdevit The Transwiki backlog has caused the VfD pages to become out of sync. Dmcdevit would like a one time run to help hyperlink to existing VfD pages for Transwikied articles.
4. 20050702 Dmcdevit The Windows tool that Dmcdevit uses to perform Transwikis has broken since the software upgrade.
5. 20050506 Triddle Convert a very large and improperly formatted list to the proper format at List of Middle-earth articles.

Cleanup projects

1. Wikipedia:Computer help desk/cleanup/double redirects/20051009 Oct 9, 2005; over 7,800 double redirects.
2. Computer help desk/cleanup/double_redirects/20050623-1 6,032 more double redirects have been discovered.
3. Computer help desk/cleanup/double_redirects/20050623 1,325 double redirects have been identified.