Forum:Film and show template bugs

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There appears to be a problem/bug with the TNG, DS9 and film templates at the Worf article starting at Worf#Deanna_Troi and going on through the page from that point. I've looked at the code and everything seems to be in order, but the episode names aren't showing up. I don't know if this is related to the upgrade, but the templates themselves do not appear to have been changed recently either. —Scott (talk) 01:48, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Yikes. If you edit the section and preview, all the refs look right. This is definitely a bug in the software caused by too many template calls. Really strange behavior. --Bp 02:18, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Template_limits. It is not a bug, it is a feature. --Splarka (talk) 00:55, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

So the fact that it worked pre-upgrade suggests that it was something never mentioned as a side-effect of the upgrade? Ergo, it's a bug. :) -- Sulfur 01:08, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

The fact that it makes the servers not die as much means it is a feature. r16015 --Splarka (talk) 01:18, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, I've read the discussions over at Wikipedia on the topic, and I understand what the limit is attempting to do (or prevent), but from our perspective, it breaks a bunch of our larger pages. Because we heavily cite article text, and because the citations are inline, and because the citations are accomplished via templates, for long articles we have many citations (i.e. many repeats of the same template), resulting in a lot of transcluded text. This is not a simple change here... we're talking about a total rethinking and redesign of the site to get around this. Not a pleasant thought to contemplate. -- Renegade54 01:36, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, unfortunately as the software grows, it gets a bit more sensitive to excessive things like extreme transclusions. Wikimedia was shut down completely by some 20-second templates on 20,000 pages, on two of the obscure sub-wikis (italian or spanish wikipedias, I think). Looking at the Worf page source we see:

Pre-expand include size: 2096716 bytes
Post-expand include size: 282184 bytes
Template argument size: 215294 bytes
Maximum: 2097152 bytes

So the current limit Wikia has set is 2 megabytes. It is very probably possible and likely easy to set this to a higher number for you (as well as any other projects that complain), but it should be a reasonable number and not 'infinity plus one' ^_^. So the question is: how much is needed for Worf not to be grumpy? --Splarka (talk) 04:29, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Worf is one of the larger pages, the second longest to be exact, with James T. Kirk being the longest. Looking at the source for Kirk's page, the size is a bit bigger than Worf's:

Pre-expand include size: 2097004 bytes
Post-expand include size: 302657 bytes
Template argument size: 228225 bytes
Maximum: 2097152 bytes

It appears the the longest 8 or 10 pages are currently affected by this. If I'm reading the output above correctly, it would seem that a 2.5 Mb limit would do the trick for us as things stand now and leave a bit of room for growth for the longer articles (but might need expanding in future). A 3 Mb limit should suffice for the foreseeable future. Thoughts? -- Renegade54 14:13, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I've asked them to do that. Give it a day or three (very busy week as you can guess). --Splarka (talk) 22:46, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

$wgMaxArticleSize = 3072

Thanks for your help, Sparkla! -- Renegade54 03:17, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's been increased, but it might not be enough. Kirk's page now says:

Pre-expand include size: 3145683 bytes
Post-expand include size: 453028 bytes
Template argument size: 346428 bytes
Maximum: 3145728 bytes

However, I don't know what to look for. Still broken? --Splarka (talk) 11:09, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

As it looks as though it will be, it's been increased again... biiig articles.... -- Sannse 11:23, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Moved from Talk:James T. Kirk

Despite the huge increase, the Kirk article is still affected. This is due to the large amounts of templates used in the page – particularly, the dozens of EpLink templates scattered throughout. The following discussion began at Talk:James T. Kirk but, as per the suggestion from Sulfur, it should continue here. --From Andoria with Love 16:20, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

---

Something happened in the ambiguity section where a number of episode titles were replaced with the letter "e". it now reads like "based on Mitchell's comments in e, we can assume e." What happened and how do we fix it? -FleetCaptain 05:05, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

This happened previously after the last MediaWiki upgrade. Pages that make too many template calls (which are the "e"s) get them cut off after a long while. The threshold for template calls was increased a good deal, so it shouldn't happen anymore (this page hasn't received any major upgrades). Oddly enough, other large articles (like Worf) don't seem effected.--Tim Thomason 05:11, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

After frequent testing by Splarka, it seems the only way to permanently fix this problem from this and all future articles, aside from splitting up the page(s), is to get rid of the EpLink templates and go back to using direct episode links. The EpLink templates take up about 3 megs of space of this page, hence why many templates at the end were not working properly.

Some other alternatives are to simply replace the EpLinks with direct episode links for the really large articles (such as Kirk) or other pages which experience the problem. Removing the noinclude stuff on the templates will also free up some space. In reality, though, the eplink template is just far too overused in this article. I personally suggest we just go back to using direct links instead of templates, at least for this page. --From Andoria with Love 07:41, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

This comes back to the Forum discussion that was started right after the upgrade. Wikia was supposed to expand the limits to handle the Kirk page without a problem, and indeed, appeared to have done so. I think it best to continue this discussion there, so that the history is in place. -- Sulfur 12:32, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. I've moved the conversation there... and here it is. :) Now... what shall we do about this? --From Andoria with Love 16:20, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm not seeing the same errors in either Kirk's or Worf's page. Has it been fixed? ----Willie 16:26, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I guess I should have explained that part, sorry. Yes, the page has been fixed, but it's only temporary. At the moment, there are some episode links that are using the EpLink template or the E template and some that are using direct links (i.e. TOS: "Obsession"). I think it best that we have consistency as to which link form we use – and we can't use the templates throughout the entire page, so I guess that really only leaves one option. ;) --From Andoria with Love 16:38, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

• Guys? Anybody wanna comment on this? 'allo, 'allo? --From Andoria with Love 00:55, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

The point of the templates is to make things consistent and better. Maybe Kirk's article needs splitting or something. Anyhow, why did it suddenly break? It was working fine until Splarka started playing with the template the other night... -- Sulfur 01:13, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree. After the testing that Sparkla and I did earlier, everything was fine. We use Kirk's article for the testing because it's the biggest article on the site. After several iterations of testing and tweaking, Kirk was fine. What changed since then? -- Renegade54 05:07, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

OK, I greatly trimmed the amount that gets included in two of the templates, specifically {{Film}} and {{Linktip}}. I changed the logic in Film, and moved the documentation to the talk page in Linktip. It'll take a while for the changes to ripple through the whole site, but they should help significantly. I'll look around a bit more tomorrow to see if I can trim any more. -- Renegade54 05:59, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

If you are referring to the tests Splarka did on the 22nd, he was trying to find ways to fix the template breaks; the problem was already there before Splarka did anything. Anyways, it seems to be fixed now. Good job, Renegade. :)

For the record, though, Splarka and I still feel that the EpLink templates place waaaay too many templates on all the pages (at that's the way Splarka felt at the time). To quote Splarka: "Crazy." ;) --From Andoria with Love 03:19, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

A Question

Forgive the bump, but I was wondering, what final steps have been taken to solve this? Did fixing the max article length do anything for the site at all? I was also wondering, cutting out some of the "No include" stuff, does that mean just within the code or, on the template page entirely, I use those tags after a code on template pages on my wiki (Using the same steps MA does, hence my post here, and on Cid's page) to display the usage code and instructions etc... I've also noticed that MA uses (And I do, in most cases) the "Includeonly" tags around the template code, does this do anything to help at all?--Terran Officer 09:06, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Apparently (as mentioned in some WP discussion once), template calls on a wiki page are resolved by first inserting the whole code of the template page and then removing everything in "noinclude" tags. This means that if you've got a high-use template like the eplink one (which may be used several dozen times on a single page), and each of these calls adds only some KB of usage information to the intermediate wikitext, you'll be hitting the limit very quickly.

A better way (WP does this, I think) would be to move all usage information to some subpage, and then transclude it back to the template page using a template call like "<noinclude>{{Template:TITLE/Usage}}</noinclude>". That way, the overhead would be reduced to the few bytes needed for the template call, while usage information would still be visible on the template page itself. -- Cid Highwind 19:39, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Forgot to answer the other questions: Using "includeonly" shouldn't change anything in this regard, because that tag is interpreted on the template page itself, not on the page where a template is used. Increasing the limit in combination with the above steps to reduce the template size helped with our then-current problems, I think, but didn't solve the underlying issue. -- Cid Highwind 19:45, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Just to be clear (As I like to make sure I catch what I read), I make a page at "[[Template:TITLE/Usage]]", and then use that as a template on said page that is "[[Template:TITLE]]", and it will work with placing the information I want on the pages, without adding to the Template that will actually be used on the articles?--Terran Officer 06:18, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

One more thing, would placing this info on the talk page (Similar to the Linktip template) work?--Terran Officer 09:36, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I meant. See it in action here: Wikipedia:Template:Languageicon. That page contains usage information, but the wikitext only contains a template call. They apparently even created another template to deal with this, {{template doc}}. Using the talk page for usage info and then adding a link to that page should work as well, but creates the problem that this info is not available instantly. -- Cid Highwind 10:25, 8 October 2007 (UTC)