[Mediawiki-l] Several issues

[Brion Vibber]

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)