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July 24

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Can't Back Up System Files

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I have a Dell Inspiron 3910 with 16 GB of RAM and approximately 216 GB of solid-state storage as the C: drive. I just got a pop-up message saying something to the effect of "We can't back up your system files". It says that if I free up some space on my "hard drive" (which is hard because it is solid-state), it will be able to back up my system files. I don't recall having seen that message before. I do see that I have 10.1 GB free on my solid-state C: drive out of 216 GB. I also see that my pagefile.sys on the C: drive has grown to 26.6 GB, which is what is taking up the space. My question is: What system backup function is there that was trying to back something up, and was unable to back something up? The message was a pop-up, and I can't bring it back, although maybe that isn't important. So: What system process was trying to back something up to my C: drive and didn't have space for the backup? I will, in the very near future, be getting something like WINDIRSTAT to get a better view of how the 206 GB is being used, to see what if anything to move to my F: drive. So what is trying to back up my system files automagically? Robert McClenon (talk) 18:15, 24 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You've probably told us before, but which version of Windows are you using? Is there a load of Dell stuff in your Start Menu? Do you ever use such apps? Could be a cause. Maybe try disabling them sequentially in Services via Windows Task Manager. To reduce disk usage, perhaps try the resident Disk Cleanup app. Try using a fixed-size paging file. Delete the contents of your Temp folder and Recycle Bin. Purge your browser's cache frequently (In Firefox, press Ctrl+Shift+Delete, select 'Cache' only.) Your mileage may vary. MinorProphet (talk) 22:19, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
User:MinorProphet - You have addressed a question which I might have reasonably been asking, but not the question that I was asking. You have told me how to free up space on my disk. I already have plans for freeing up space on my disk. What I am asking is what process was trying to back something up on my C: drive. But thank you for useful general advice. Robert McClenon (talk) 07:06, 27 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am running Windows 11, and I think that I have the personal version. (Are there a personal version and a business version?) Robert McClenon (talk) 07:06, 27 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Robert McClenon: Hi, sorry for the slow reply, I don't come here every day. Last question first: You probably have the 'Home' version as opposed to the 'Pro/Professional' version. It's mostly to do with Pro's office networking capabilities. My main question may have been camouflaged by my suggestions: Does your PC have any pre-installed Dell software? If so, I found this page from Dell with plenty of screenshots which might prompt some memory of that transient pop-up, in case it wasn't anything to do with Windows. Just attempting to eliminate likely suspects. MinorProphet (talk) 16:46, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi I just noticed your query further down: You said you had Norton Safe Web installed. Do you have any other Norton apps/utilities installed? Might they have been attempting to back up your hard drive? MinorProphet (talk) 16:56, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Take a screenshot of the message when it happens again. That should definitely help identify what is trying to do this backup - I'm pretty sure you have paraphrased the error rather than given the exact wording. My first guess would be: disable OneDrive on your system. In this video at 00:44 you can see an option at the top that says "back up important PC folders to OneDrive" - something you can check and consider whether you want to disable it. My opinion: all unencrypted backups are data breaches waiting to happen, and data breaches for online data always happen given enough time. Komonzia (talk) 00:25, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Fourier transform

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Can the Fourier transform, using the Fourier series, analyze a function f(x) on a bounded interval x whose members are -P/2 and P/2 for some positive real number P, with frequency being the reciprocal of period (f=1/T or T=1/f), be programmed in PL/1? Afrazer123 (talk) 23:43, 24 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

no, as the frequency goes to infinity for this, and the coefficients are real numbers that can be calculated, but not with perfect accuracy. However PL/1 could be used to approximate a finite number of coefficients approximately. see Square wave#Fourier analysis for the calculation. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:47, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The question is not entirely clear. Does T stand for the variable x or for the constant P?  --Lambiam 13:45, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
T doesn't stand for the variable x. T does stand, however, for the constant P. Afrazer123 (talk) 02:55, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

July 25

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Are there apps or any software, that can identify one's accent?

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E.g, software that can identify a person's native language, when they are currently speaking in a non-native language (e.g. English), rather than in their native language we want to identify.

Yesterday, I presented this question at the language reference desk. However, no one has given me a positive answer yet, except for a possible direction via AI, but without a certain answer. 2A06:C701:7B31:C100:7D63:C50F:C3A5:9744 (talk) 10:18, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You received a comprehensive answer at the language desk. The answer is no. Shantavira|feed me 11:48, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
AI is used for pattern matching and classification. If there is some pattern that classifies speech as having a specific accent, AI can identify the pattern and classify the accent. AI is not magic. It won't do any more than identify a pattern using one of the many methods of pattern matching and then classify using one of the many ways of clustering and classification. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 12:12, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A more precise answer is that no respondent here is aware of the existence of such an app. Perhaps the NSA has developed one but is keeping it under wraps. If so, how would we know?  --Lambiam 13:33, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is likely that, for the moment, it is far easier and cheaper to employ non-Artificial Intelligences, i.e. people, with linguistic expertise that enables them to make such identifications. This of course would only apply to specific instances – an AI-like application would be needed for automatic surveillance on a mass scale. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.235 (talk) 00:18, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
People on Hugging Face have created some accent related models but putting that into some piece of software you can use will be a very much do-it-yourself task. Models found there also have rather variable quality, most of them are research projects not intended for wider consumption. With enough data, classifying existing accents in order to infer other accents should be possible. But, speaking anecdotally as someone who grew up in world cities, the way someone learns a language hugely influences their accent... possibly about equally to the languages they spoke before that, and the possibility for error is huge.
Again speaking anecdotally: You should think of accents as individual but similar to each other - usually a property of how that specific person has used and learned their languages, but sometimes completely learned and how that person wishes to speak. You should approach whatever problem you are trying to solve with this in mind, it is not just a symptom of a person's previous languages. Komonzia (talk) 21:13, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

How to automatically search and replace text in Linux CLUI in a multi-lined way?

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We can automatically search and replace single-lined text in Linux CLUI with awk and sed, but I need a way to do it multi-lined.

  • File A has several HTML structures.
  • File B has this HTML structure:
    <footer class="site-footer">
      <div class="site-footer__inner container">
        {{ page.footer_top }}
        {{ page.footer_bottom }}
      </div>
    </footer>
  • File C has this HTML structure:
    <footer class="site-footer">
      <div class="site-footer__inner container">
        {{ page.footer_top }}
        {{ page.footer_bottom }}
      </div>
      <span class="globalrs_dynamic_year">{{ 'now' | date('Y') }}</span>
    </footer>

How to automatically search in file A and if it contains the text of file B then replacing that text with the text of file C?

How would you do this with C/Perl/Python/PHP/Node.js or something else? 103.199.70.159 (talk) 19:06, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While it would be trivial to do this in Python or any other reasonable programming language, if I wanted to do this with a script, my approach would be:
  1. . Convert all three files to a version which eliminates newlines, using sed. For convenience, I would replace the newline character with some character or string which would not occur in the HTML, call it '~' (tilde).
  2. . Now add a newline to change the tilde in every occurrence of "</footer>~" to a newline in each of the three converted files. Do the same for "~<footer class="site-footer">". You end up with files where the html of interest is on a single line.
  3. . Use sed to do the substitution of the single line file C text to replace the single line file B text in the single line file A text.
  4. . Use sed to convert single line file A back to the original formatting by replacing '~' with newline.
This won't work if files B and C are not marked with the exact footer head and tail as you have shown.-Gadfium (talk) 20:46, 25 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In any programming langauge, A, B, and C are just text. So, you use a string replace function. In C++, it is (from memory) replace(A,B,C);. In Perl (again from memory), it is A=~s/B/C/;. In PHP, it is $A=str_replace($B,$C,$A);. In Python, it is A = A.replace(B,C);. In Node.js it is A = A.replace(B,C) as well. Note that in a programming language, a string is just a string of characters. It doesn't care if there are newline or return characters in it. So, replacing a substring replaces it all, including the return and newline characters. But, the text has to match perfectly. For example, if A is using two spaces for indentation and B is using tab characters, it won't match. Similarly, if one uses all lower case tag names and another uses all upper case tag names, it won't match. In that case, you need to reformat the text so it is all the same or use regular expressions. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 13:31, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Unix/Linux utility sed can do this; see sed § Multiline processing example. The search ["sed" multi-line replace] gives some more examples.  --Lambiam 23:01, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Since the OP asked for a Perl solution, here is a simple one.
my $orig = `cat $ARGV[0]`;
my $repl = `cat $ARGV[1]`;
my $text = `cat $ARGV[2]`;
$text =~ s:$orig:$repl:g;
print $text;
CodeTalker (talk) 18:57, 27 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

July 27

[edit]

Fast Fourier transform

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Can a relational database, with its set of rows and columns, support the computerization of the Fast Fourier transform ? Afrazer123 (talk) 04:40, 27 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No. The FFT algorithms require computations based on the indices. This is not supported by relational databases. The notion of index is in fact alien to the relational model, which is essentially an unordered set of tuples (the rows) of named values (as identified by the row names). One can add the index as a key, basically an extra column, but this does not help. The SQL-type languages that come with such databases also do not support the recursion used by FFT algorithms.  --Lambiam 13:18, 27 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the reply. How pulsating! It seems there's a discharge of some sort which apparently isn't taken into consideration by the RDB while using an extra column (key) only exacerbates things. Also, SQL appears to be to confining, off-limits for the algorithm's recursion. Afrazer123 (talk) 02:09, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

July 28

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Turning Off Ad Blocker

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If I am using Firefox and Windows 11, and a web site asks me to turn off my ad blocker, and I don't know what ad blocker I am using, how do I determine what ad blocker I am using, so that I can turn it off? This is sort of a strange question, because I don't want to deal with ads, but I would rather just ignore the ads than deal with web sites that aggressively fight ad blocking. I do have Norton Safe Web. I don't know if it tries to block ads. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:23, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Robert McClenon! In Windows 10 which I'm on, such blockers appear (with other things) in a drop-down list of 'Extensions' found by clicking a jigsaw-puzzle corner piece at the top right corner of the Firefox window. I had a similar problem (with YouTube) until I discovered that Malwarebytes had added ad blocking to its functions. Hope this helps. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.235 (talk) 20:54, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The better way to get around this is to reconfigure your RAM firewall to exclude cloud analytic encryption on your virtual platform. Pretty simple fix, will take about 30 seconds. Jidarave (talk) 21:49, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The above post is nonsensical. Philvoids (talk) 22:53, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is probably the same troll who reappears here periodically to post gibberish like this before getting blocked. CodeTalker (talk) 06:52, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It looks like perfectly legit response from AI. Maybe someone is training their bot to replace human editors on Wikipedia. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 12:50, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The responses by LLMs tend to read like something a human could actually have written as a reasonable response, using terms from the question. This response does not. It looks contrived to sound impressive while making no sense whatsoever.  --Lambiam 22:51, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm glad it's confirmed to make no sense, because although I didn't understand it, I feared that to be because of my limited knowledge of IT.
This sidetrack being dealt with, can anybody give a better answer than mine to the OP's query? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.235 (talk) 18:03, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A long shot, but are you using NoScript in Firefox by any chance? It's a kind of an ad-blocker on steroids and because it completely blocks scripts (unless you allow them) it can be difficult to know what's getting blocked. Using the "temporary allow" function usually gets me past things, but sometimes I end up having to switch to incognito mode (which I have setup to run without NoScript). Matt Deres (talk) 16:02, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In Firefox's Privacy and Security settings, if you have tracking protection set to Strict, try setting it back to Standard. This should help. win8x (talking | spying) 20:19, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

July 29

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Can you delete and then undelete your twitter account?

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This is about the incident with Pete Souza and an intactly-eared Donald Trump photo.[1] Souza apparently deleted his twitter account after both he and the Trump photographer took heat. Question: can he undelete it later, and get his old tweets back? I mean using normal Twitter features. Presumably someone famous like Souza could get Elon's, um, ear for a special request, but let's not count that. Thanks. 2602:243:2008:8BB0:F494:276C:D59A:C992 (talk) 23:39, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

According to [2] you have 30 days to reactivate your account. After that, it cannot be recovered. RudolfRed (talk) 15:50, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]


July 31

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Alternating between dark and light mode?

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I work on Google Sheets spreadsheets all day and I don't like how bright light mode gets during sunset. I don't like the look of dark mode either, so I'd prefer to only use dark mode during the sunset time or night. Does anyone know if this is a thing that Google has allowed for? Is there an extension that does this? I could try making a Chrome extension but this is not something I have done before. ―Panamitsu (talk) 05:46, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Google Maps does this automatically when in satnav mode, but I don't know if it is extendable to other products. -- Verbarson  talkedits 10:30, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Neither of the above are exactly what you want, but it might come close. The "colour temperature adjustment" apps might be closer to what you actually want, since it isn't dark mode. Things get slightly more 'red' when it is active, but your eyes will get used to it - I use it myself. Komonzia (talk) 20:57, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 1

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Tweaking the "Format Axis" options in Excel

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If you have a chart or pivot chart in Excel, you can double click on the X axis to bring up a pane that gives you all kinds of formatting options, including setting minimum and maximum bounds for the graph. So, you can set the maximum value to be $1,000 and any values that go above that either don't display or are cut off (depending on the chart type). My problem is that, I need to set such a maximum, but I want it to truly act like a maximum value instead of a set number. Like, if the user's choice of filters means that the chart never comes near the boundary I set, then the upper and lower limits should behave dynamically. Is there a way to do that?
If that's hard to picture, here's an example: we sell 10-20 apples and 200-300 oranges each month, so the monthly totals are mostly around 250 or so. But one month we had a crazy value: we sold 10,000 oranges. The chart is unreadable if we leave the defaults in, so we set a maximum value of, say, 350. Now we can read it. But if the user selects "apples" from the filter, the graph becomes unreadable the other way around: we've forced the upper bound of the X-axis to be 350 and the apples are now just a ripple across the bottom of the chart. What I want is for Excel to dynamically resize the chart like it normally does, but not go past my maximum. Can it be done? Googling has not been fruitful so far. Matt Deres (talk) 19:11, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I understand that you do not want to chart dynamically all the monthly apple totals. Instead you may chart dynamically the minimum of two values, viz. each month's apple total and a numerical limit of 350. Use the Excel MIN function. Philvoids (talk) 18:19, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, that is completely unrelated to what I'm talking about. I'm trying to control the way the graphs establish limits to the X-axis. Matt Deres (talk) 01:43, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 3

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newline

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If you use {{subst:Welcome-newuser|heading=no}} it insert an extra newline at the top. Can that be fixed? Thanks, Polygnotus (talk) 02:20, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is not a good place to ask; try instead Template talk:Welcome, or, if that yields no response, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). I can report that the extra newline issue already appears for just {{Welcome|heading=no}}.  --Lambiam 11:47, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, I moved it there. Polygnotus (talk) 15:09, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 4

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Karnaugh map/gates

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As of now, is the 'or' gate better at handling electricity vs the 'and' gate?Afrazer123 (talk) 01:29, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That will depend on the implementation, and what electrical state represents the 0 or 1. And it also depends on what you mean by "better". (faster, less energy wasted, smaller, least noise, least sensitive to noise, fan out, tolerance of power supply variation, cheaper, higher yield). Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:47, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. The Karnaugh map is useful for showing logical relations between Boolean data types that take only values "1" (true) or "0" (false). Elementary Logic gate functions such as AND, OR, NAND, NOR, EXOR, etc. can be mapped, also combinations of connected gates if they are not too complicated. However Boolean data is abstract and the "1" and "0" need not always correspond to electric voltages. Karnaugh maps are equally applicable to fluid logic that uses water instead of electricity. For example a fluid OR gate is simply two pipes being merged. Philvoids (talk) 17:15, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"better": less energy wasted, higher yield. Afrazer123 (talk) 05:52, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) logic devices have low static power consumption and do not produce as much waste heat as other forms of logic, like NMOS logic or Transistor–transistor logic (TTL), which normally have some standing current even when not changing state. Since one transistor of the MOSFET pair is always off, the series combination draws significant power only momentarily during switching between on and off states. There is no significant difference between power consumptions of the logic functions AND, OR, etc. The current drawn from the supply increases with increasing rate of data changes and is mainly due to charging and discharging the output capacitance. Philvoids (talk) 13:14, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For actual numbers, old digital circuits that I used back in the 70s implemented both and and or with components. The drop is 0.3v pretty much any way you do it for both an or and an and gate. You are either dropping 0.3v across a diode or 0.3v across a transistor. I doubt any modern circuits have that much drop and I'm certain it is still very similar between diodes and transistors. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 12:20, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 5

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Downloading MediaWiki for home use

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I usually use an LG Gram 1 TB SSD laptop with 32 GB RAM. I've got about 600 MB free. I would like to be able to create articles on my own PC instead of using my personal userspace. I haven't gotten any response at Talk:MediaWiki, so I'm asking here. I have always created my articles in my userspace, but have recently experienced harassment and stalking for doing so, and I'm tired of it.

Can MediaWiki be downloaded for personal use at home, with no one else accessing it? If so, what would be the requirements to get it functioning properly? Would I need to download other software, or have a huge hard drive? I guess I'm hoping for a word processor type program that works like editing here.

If it won't work in that way, is there another software program that uses the same wikimarkup we use here? I'd like to be able to create content on my PC, move it to userspace, maybe then to draftspace, and finally to mainspace. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 02:22, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You can download MediaWiki software yourself, as per Manual:Installation requirements. You will require both a database and a way to serve the webpages to the user, however, as well as PHP. Doing this yourself would require a separate server or machine, although you can use a webhost and just have them install the required dependencies.
Actual storage and memory requirements are quite low, so storage wouldn't be a terrible issue, but depending on how much you would use it, that can fill up relatively quickly.
Alternatively, there are several wiki softwares that aren't all that great for public use, but are good for what you want to do (personal, internal use). Something like wikijs or dokuwiki would be better suited for this. SmittenGalaxy | talk! 06:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It sounds a bit complicated for this old man. Is there anything simpler and similar to a word processor program like Microsoft Word (and I'm old enough to have used WordPerfect and directly edited its code) that uses our wiki markup? It's okay if there are red links because I wouldn't be hosting all of Wikipedia. -- Valjean (talk) (PING me) 14:54, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is Extension:Word2MedaWiki that can take Microsoft Word and translate it to MediaWiki markup, although it is quite old and unmaintained, and as such I don't believe works on newer 64-bit versions of Word. Microsoft did release this addon for Word 2007 and 2010 (and 2013 with registry editing).
Aside from those, LibreOffice and OpenOffice (stated below as well) are standalone editors that can save directly as MediaWiki. See Help:WordToWiki as well. SmittenGalaxy | talk! 21:51, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
OpenOffice has a wiki extension so you can write articles in a word processor and save them in wiki markup. I personally do not feel that it procudes optimal markup, but it works. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 18:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, you can do this. I've been doing it for years: on my own servers, on my laptop (often on client sites) and also internet hosted MediaWikis, so that I can access them elsewhere. They're all fairly easy.
One way to do this is with a hosting company (or the free tier on AWS) that offers a 'one click install' of MediaWiki. This is very simple.
However installing complex software on a public-accessible website always needs care and competence. Even if you're just locking it down as an extranet, you still need to lock it carefully. Andy Dingley (talk) 23:18, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Or else you do it the classic and well-documented route of installing a Linux (or Xampp under Windows), then Apache web server, then PHP, then MediaWiki, then some MediaWiki extensions, then the Wikipedia content (mostly some templates) needed to emulate the Wikipedia experience. Because it's not so simply bundled, it's the Wikipedia templates that might take the most time to do. You can also install Lua (not all installs do this as standard) which many Wikipedia templates use instead of MediaWiki template code (which is hateful stuff anyway).
I use this every day. It's my basic desktop organisation tool. I also used to use it for writing articles for here, back when that was still worth doing. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:32, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think this highlights a key point not really discussed until now. If you're hoping to develop content for en.wikipedia and you want to be able to actually preview locally what you've developed, it's quite likely it's not just a basic wiki install you need but key templates as well. I mean even if you don't care about infoboxes and some stuff so can ignore these, you're probably using templates for referencing and maybe some other formatting things. A quick look at one example of what I guess is a sandbox [3] shows plenty of templates e.g. for referencing, block quotes, and other things. Note also that unless you have a local mirror of all content, or some other more complicated set-up, all interwiki links will generally be red so it might be difficult to notice if you've made a mistake. I'm sure there are ways to set it up to just obtain the templates from en.wikipedia but I suspect this is complicated and you might need some caching setup or API access or risk excessively downloads from the web frontend that server admins aren't happy. Possibly a better option might be to just write and store your content locally, with something capable of highlighting wikisyntax and/or providing shortcuts if that's what you want, and then preview online. This does mean you need an internet connection whenever you preview. (In theory you could make this fairly automated so you have an editing syntax and are able to save locally, except when you preview it uses en.wikipedia, but I'm not sure if there's an easy way to set that up.) Nil Einne (talk) 00:16, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

August 6

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