Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2014/April

Flood gadget

I've added a n ew gadget to the list available in Special:Preferences, which attempts to make it blindingly obvious when someone is using the flood flag (in Vector, by changing the blue sidebar red). If anybody can think of a way to make a pure-CSS solution, I'd be grateful; or if we wanted to tone it down to something less glaring we could make it non-optional by editing Mediawiki:Group-flood.css. Microchip08 (talk) 19:57, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

So, the gadget only works in vector? (I'm no more than curious, atm, as I haven't had occasion to use the flood flag in some time.) --Pi zero (talk) 23:16, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

It adds a "(flood flag)" next to the log out button, similar to the UTC clock gadget, so it'll work in all skins that support that one. In Vector, however, it does a few more things. Non-vector skins could be supported trivially; I just haven't got round to it. Microchip08 (talk) 17:08, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

• I've enabled it. It turns a whole bunch of stuff red, redlinks red in fact,making it extremely obvious you're on flood. Makes it harder to forget about. BRS ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 17:10, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Intersection link

Something I cobbled together today using my dialog tools. I'd always had this sort of thing in mind, but it seems awfully slow, so I'm wondering how it might be sped up. Any thoughts welcome.

{{intersection link|cat1=Environment|cat2=Disasters and accidents|label=Environment ''and'' Disasters and accidents}}

would produce

Environment and Disasters and accidentsWikinews:Dialog/do

--Pi zero (talk) 19:08, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

Some perspective on this; trying (perhaps forlornly) to bring the issues here within reach without getting swamped in technical esoterica.

My tools allow a dialog action to be performed only via a button, such as action=do&label=Environment and Disasters and accidents&verb:button-local-field-verb&page:button-local-field-page&cat-one:eda-cat-one&cat-two:eda-cat-two&‍cols=&rows=&viewxcols=&rows=&WN:View intersectionxWN:View intersectioncols=&rows=&Environmentxcols=&rows=&Disasters+and+accidentsx. If you click on that button, you'll get the same thing as the link I gave earlier, except that it'll be about twice as fast. The time delay is for loading the interactive machinery for the target page.

A button is a big obvious thing, and I meant it to be, so a dialog action couldn't be disguised as an ordinary wikilink. But I also set up a special page that can be simply viewed to cause a dialog action to take place; in effect, that page converts a url into a dialog action — technically, an unauthenticated action. So you can make a dialog action look just like an ordinary wikilink, but the action will never be highly trusted. The trouble is, this takes twice as long as the button does, because first you have to load the special page for converting a url into a dialog action, with all its machinery, and then you have to load the page for displaying the category intersection, with all its machinery. --Pi zero (talk) 12:59, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

It is, perhaps, a reflection of the nastiness of this esoterica, that in fact the above button doesn't do the same thing as the link, and I'm not sure why. --Pi zero (talk) 13:04, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

(Fixed. <shudder>) --Pi zero (talk) 13:08, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Special:Search/incategory:"Disasters and accidents" incategory:"Environment" might be of interest. Microchip08 (talk) 13:20, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

What's the difference between this and dynamic page lists? Microchip08 (talk) 13:32, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

The target page uses a dynamic page list. The interactive machinery provides the parameters to the DPL. The special search, of course, besides not offering the compact, convenient, publication-date-ordered format of the DPL, also doesn't instantly change with the status of articles on-site. --Pi zero (talk) 13:43, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Though I do find the special search rather cool. (Frustratingly, a recent change — I believe — to the special search is that it now searches the post-template-expansion form of the page rather than the pre-expansion form, which has the advantage that you can now search an article on a category that's added by an infobox, but the disadvantage that, afaics, you cannot search on wiki markup patterns that disappear during expansion.) --Pi zero (talk) 13:49, 29 April 2014 (UTC)