[Mediawiki-l] Several issues

[Kevin Heneveld]

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