Template talk:EpLink

Categories
I started creating category pages but the name is not right. Anyway, I got to "The Defector" before I realised it.

So you can change this template to the use "Category: Memory Alpha images by episode (SER: EPISODE)" or delete these category pages: ... list removed, unnecessary ... Then change Template:Files by production to match.
 * Category:Memory Alpha files by production (TOS: The Man Trap)
 * Category:Memory Alpha files by production (TNG: The Vengeance Factor)

--Bp 00:36, 22 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Poke, poke. I need to know whether to create the rest, or create all new ones at the other name, or just leave it. --Bp 07:14, 28 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry, forgot answering the first time around... Seeing the list you already created, the fact that we also have "Category:MA images by episode (SER)" as supercategories and the fact that this naming convention will group them all together in the alphabetical category listing, we might as well keep these names and change the template. Will do that this evening, if there aren't any further comments against it. -- Cid Highwind 11:52, 28 January 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, I started a little earlier than that - images should start to appear in the categories listed above now. I'm currently "touching" image pages to help that process, so it might take some time before all images are re-categorized. Start creating those categories, if you like. -- Cid Highwind 13:47, 28 January 2007 (UTC)


 * All categories created. --Bp 22:05, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Need to do something about the Title-tooltips thing
The Titles tooltip thing that Renegade54 added causes a long list of redlinks to be at the end of every edit page for an article that uses the template, see this. We could remove it since it isn't used on MA/en or I could create every tooltip page with some content. The second one might not be such a good idea, because of recent experience with the image catagory pages and moving epiosde pages based on title card title. --Bp 21:20, 9 February 2007 (UTC)


 * It's really not hurting anything. They're only pseudo-red links, i.e. they don't show up in the wanted pages list. You only see them if you edit the page, and only if you go all the way down do the bottom. They seem to be an anomaly of the #ifexist logic. If they really bother you... um... don't scroll down to the end of the page? :P -- Renegade54 22:03, 9 February 2007 (UTC)


 * It's not really a big problem, because it only shows up when editing an article, as described. In those cases, though, it looks like an error in the page for an editor, because all called templates should normally exist. Additionally, having this logic active when it doesn't need to be seems like a waste of server resources. If we can decide that we don't ever need tooltips for episode links (which originally was invented for other language versions!), then we should remove that part from the template at some point. -- Cid Highwind 13:15, 11 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, um... this is actually a problem for me not only for the reasons Cid described but also because... well... they just don't look good. They make the editing page look ugly. I want the pages to be pwitty again. Pwease!? :D --From Andoria with Love 04:49, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Constedits (attn Admins!)
OK guys. Time to stop editing this template today. The Special:Statistics page earlier today when you guys started messing with it showed a job queue of 88,000+, and it is now up to 172,000+. As a comparison, Wookieepedia's (a wiki with both more pages and one that is edited faster than MA) Special:Statistics page shows a job queue of 3,000+. This has got to stop people, you are going to break something. Like the server. --OuroborosCobra talk 01:27, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * GAH! You've uncovered my master plan! DRATS!!! I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids! I'll get you next time, Cobra! Next time! (cue Scooby-Doo/Inspector Gadget music) --From Andoria with Love 01:39, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * It'll go down... some day. :P See Cid's talk page for more info. -- Renegade54 03:14, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * This is not a joke, Cobra is absolutely right... What more than a protected template page and a very lengthy initial discussion about exactly this topic ("only change if absolutely necessary, after discussion, and if you know what you're doing") do you need? Even if it doesn't "break" anything per se, it should be obvious that having nearly 200k unnecessary jobs in the queue means that necessary jobs will be done with considerable delay only. PLEASE DON'T CHANGE THIS TEMPLATE UNLESS NECESSARY... and if you need to test your changes, do it elsewhere, not on the live template itself! -- Cid Highwind 09:55, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * After thinking about this for a while, I don't believe it is that big of a deal. Also, I don't believe that 200k figure is accurate, because it will skip jobs that do not need to be done. For instance, if you edit the template eight times in a row, but there is a page in the queue that has not yet been refreshed from the first edit, it will not refresh that page eight times. Either it will not get added to the queue, or there is some timestamp that lets the queue manager know that the page has been more recently refreshed than when the job was addeed, and it will be skipped when it comes up. So a maximum of 30K pages could be waiting to be refreshed, which seems like a lot, but it isn't really. And by the way, linktip is called in this template, which means that every page gets queued when it is edited, yet it is not protected.
 * ... and speaking of that, maybe we should put something useful in each of those Titles things, like the season and episode number (2x14). I've notice some appearances lists with those tacked on to the end, and it might be better to use the tooltips for those, to make them all the same and keep them accurate. This would get rid of the redlink template lists, the problem is that it is one more page to remember to move when we change the name of an episode. --Bp 11:13, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * All that doesn't change the fact that one shouldn't simply go and change the template to see what happens. At least, check first that your changes are correct and don't break the existing template inclusions - and whatever you do, do it in one step, trial&error is not the best way to edit a template that is included on 30k pages. -- Cid Highwind 11:34, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * FYI, the job queue is 0 currently. While in general I agree with you, Cid (and I apologize for inadvertently adding an extraneous line feed into the template), it would appear that the queue manager is a bit more intelligent than we give it credit for. My initial assumption was that if my edits were confined to the section of the template between the tags, the queue manager would be smart enough to skip over that in doing updates. And initially, it seemed that it *didn't* skip that text. What it appears that happens, though, is it first queues up all the files that the template is included in, and then runs through the list quickly once it figures out that the new text doesn't need to be propagated. Since all of our edits were to non-included text, the size of the job queue increased quickly (30k x # of edits), but once the actual queue processing started, the size decreased quickly as well, since none of the edits actually needed to be applied to all those files in the queue. If that made sense. -- Renegade54 14:37, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

It may have been smart eventually, but it took a very long time. That queue was at 172k for several hours. In the mean time, if another template had been edited, like say the episode sidebar, they would have lined up in the queue behind the 172k, and taken hours to get done while the system decided whether or not to be intelligent. At least if I understand the system correctly. --OuroborosCobra talk 15:29, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * It does make sense, and it might well be the case that "non-changes" won't get propagated at all (although that would need a pretty sophisticated mechanism to check what actually gets changed for each invalidated page; might be easier to just recreate the page directly). But, the point I'm trying to get across is not "Don't change this template! Ever!", but "Change this template if and only if necessary - but if you do, do it right the first time.". I know this might sound as if I'm trying to place blame on someone, although this isn't my intention - but Renegade's edit did change the template (by adding a newline to the "non-noincluded" part), and Shran's three edits were effectively unnecessary. To re-iterate, I'm not trying to prevent any and all edits of this template, I just want to counter Bp's idea of handling this template like any other page because "it can't really be that bad"... If you do something, do it carefully. :) -- Cid Highwind 15:43, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Agreed. :) -- Renegade54 18:28, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I'll also add that I am not trying to say we should not edit this at all either, but as Cid say, "only when absolutely necessary". It was edited 5 times yesterday by three people, and probably only needed to be once by one person. --OuroborosCobra talk 16:20, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Cross-wiki citing
Whenever we create an important (Trek-wise) page over at Fanfic wiki, we usually quote MA for canon info. However, with the introduction of this template, editing out the episode links (as is wiki policy over there so we don't have to add every episode) is a lot more difficult. I'd like to use this template on the wiki, but I'd like the adapt it so it links to the MA episode page as a cross-wiki link when we add the template to our wiki. Is it possible to code the template to do that? If so, can someone help me out? -- Kevin W. Tlk 08:10, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Done. -- Cid Highwind 13:44, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

links thing
Trying to understand this thing I've written a little psuedo-code. function linktip ( $article, $tip, $linktext ) {   ... }

function EpLink ( $title ) {  if (exists article "$title (episode)") {      if (exists article "Template:Titles/$title") {          return linktip ( "$title (episode)", textof("Template:Titles/$title"), $title); } else { return "$title"; }  } else { if (exists article "Template:Titles/$title") {          return linktip ( "$title", textof("Template:Titles/$title")); } else { return "$title"; }  } } This makes me think I should write a template compiler that would compile something like this into the crazy mediawiki template language. --Bp 00:56, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Error... errrrrror!!!
As you can see here, here, here, here, and here (among many, many others), there appears to be an error in the EpLink code causing qualifiers to be added to episode links where they are not needed. As a result, we have a whole of unwritten episode pages appearing on the wanted pages list. Somebody who knows what they're doing needs to correct this. --From Andoria with Love 08:40, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Interestingly enough, I can see them on the wanted list, I can see them on the "linked here" list, but they are correct on all of the actual pages it appears. I don't get it. -- Sulfur 11:24, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Something had to have changed along the way, because nothing in that template has changed recently, yet all of a sudden these bogus pages are popping up in the wanted pages list. They weren't there yesterday... has Wikia changed something since then? -- Renegade54 13:47, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
 * This bug was noticed in the MA/de several days ago and totally crashed our Wantedpages-list. We are looking for a way to fix it since then, but had no success up to now. If someone of you could find it, this would be great. Here the link for the german talk on this bug: here, please contact us when you find the sollution--Bravomike 11:03, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Bravomike. If we come up with anything, we'll be sure to let you know. For the record (in response to Renegade), Wikia did some updating recently, changing the look of the difference pages, giving more page protection options, and who knows what other goodies. It's possible that this came as a result of something they did. Hopefully, we can fix it soon. If not, we may have to go back to the old way of linking episodes. Pity -- this new form was starting to grow on me. --From Andoria with Love 11:11, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
 * We kept thinking that the problem is related to the MediaWiki version 1.10a the german version was updated to exactly the day the problem occured, but you haven't updated, so it must be a problem related to one of the minor changes mentioned--Bravomike 11:17, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Hi there - anything new on this bug we should know? Or is "wikia still working" on it? 17:48, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
 * It turns out to be a WikiMedia problem; they introduced the bug in the latest version of the MediaWiki code. As far as I know, they're either not intending to do anything about it, or it's very low on their priority list (WikiMedia's, that is, not Wikia's). -- Renegade54 18:34, 27 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Ah, okay - well but how is it possible, that your Wantedpages still has some use, while ours now only has 2 out of 1.000 really wanted pages? Your templates TOS, TNG, etc. seem to be a bit different form ours. Or don't you use them that common as we do in MA/de? 20:54, 29 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure about your links, but we went through all of the "broken" versions of ours, and corrected them, and that allowed only the ~650 links remaining, since the other ~100 "missing" links have are actually the "Name (episode)" articles that exist already. -- Sulfur 21:04, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Special:Wantedpages lists many episode pages that already exist

 * Moved from Portal talk:Main...

Special:Wantedpages shows that many wanted pages are of the form "X (episode)", where "X" already exists as a page and refers to the episode entitled X.

An easy fix would be to redirect "X (episode)" to "X" for all of these cases. Is there a reason this hasn't been done? Kellyterryjones 03:49, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
 * It has something to do with the most recent wiki upgrade and the episode templates we use here. This is why the wanted pages template is set up on an offset to begin where the [X (episodes)]'s end:


 * '''Wanted pages (list)


 * There is a discussion on it somewhere, which I can't seem to locate, and anyway, it is best they be ignored. --Alan 04:03, 23 July 2007 (UTC)


 * It boils down to a bug in the #ifexist parser function that was, as Alan mentioned, introduced in the last upgrade. We're still waiting for a fix, but until then, we're just ignoring those bogus entries in the wanted pages list. We explicitly don't want redirects for those pages, since the red links only exists as a result of the bug. -- Renegade54 04:10, 23 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Part of the problem was in the Portal:Main/Panels/Edit page, which has now been fixed to link to that offset so that the main page most wanted link is "correct". Whee. -- Sulfur 08:56, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Bot request: Easy correction of episode mislinks?
I was cruisin' the "articles requested" feature off of the main page and happened to reorder the list in terms of number of requests. What I found astounded me, but I suppose it might be common knowledge to admins. Just in case it's slipped under the radar, here's the current top 20:

What You Leave Behind (episode) (411 links)

The Cage (episode) (337 links)

All Good Things... (episode) (320 links)

The Way of the Warrior (episode) (318 links)

Storm Front, Part II (episode) (296 links)

Encounter at Farpoint (episode) (284 links)

These Are the Voyages... (episode) (281 links)

Endgame (episode) (255 links)

Trials and Tribble-ations (episode) (248 links)

In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II (episode) (235 links)

Far Beyond the Stars (episode) (234 links)

Future's End (episode) (229 links)

Tears of the Prophets (episode) (220 links)

Conspiracy (episode) (219 links)

The Trouble with Tribbles (episode) (218 links)

Where No Man Has Gone Before (episode) (216 links)

In a Mirror, Darkly (episode) (206 links)

The City on the Edge of Forever (episode) (197 links)

Dark Frontier (episode) (195 links)

In the Pale Moonlight (episode) (193 links)

And the list keeps going on with the exact same error. I've no training in creating bots, but surely there's a simple bit of programming which can redact the "(episode)" from these links and get the links straightened out. Or is our only recourse line-by-line manual change of these errors?  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  02:33, 20 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It's a known bug. See this thread for more information. -- Renegade54 02:45, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Reinserted #ifexist
I reinserted one #ifexist in this template. It's necessary in case of misspelled episode titles. Otherwise, the template call that is used to provide the second argument for linktip will be to a page that doesn't exist, meaning that the template call will be changed to a standard redlink instead - which, in turn, messes up the whole resulting HTML code so that an  tag won't be closed properly. -- Cid Highwind 23:00, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Need help with this template on Serbian Memory Alpha
I would really appreciate if somebody could help me here. I got this template working most of the time, but there is a strange thing happening. If I use this template many times in the articles, linktip stops appearing and just shows ???. For example, I used : on the beginning of article, and then I used template for example 20-30 times in article to reference episodes. Now, I used the same episode, : on the end of article and linktip is not working. So, I'm not sure after how many times of usage this template stops, but it stops.

My template is here: http://sr.memory-alpha.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:EpLink

Example article: http://sr.memory-alpha.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%A4%D0%9F

Search in the article for episode (ДС9: "Паклено свијетло"). Now, you'll see that linktip works in section "Историја", but for same episode in section "Репутација" it is not working.

Any ideas? Thank you! Igor871 (talk) 19:15, July 14, 2013 (UTC)


 * I assume you're running into a template inclusion limit (explanation here: ). If this is the case, you can first try to reduce the size of all templates used on the page (each byte of the template wikicode counts, even if it is a comment). If that alone doesn't work, you can contact Wikia to have that limit increased for your wiki. -- Cid Highwind (talk) 19:28, July 14, 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, it's seems that limit is a problem. On English version, it's 300, and on Serbian it is 100. And since I'm translating all articles from here, I'm using same templates, so there is nothing to reduce. Are there any other limits which I should ask wiki to increase, except $wgExpensiveParserFunctionLimit? Igor871 (talk) 19:36, July 14, 2013 (UTC)

It seems I don't. I checked wikipedia link, and from what I could see, other limits are the same. Thanks again. Igor871 (talk) 19:41, July 14, 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, they seem to be the same. In the past, we also had a problem with the "post-expand include size", but that seems to have been increased for all wikis. -- Cid Highwind (talk) 19:45, July 14, 2013 (UTC)