You can fix the problem by going to this URL while logged in:
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Preferences&useskin=battlestar
This will take you to your preferences page and temporarily override the skin. Once there, select one of the available skins and save your changes, which will update your preferences in our database.

We apologize for the inconvenience and hope you have had a spendid New Yahren so far.

Good hunting!

The idea of SUL is that you can log into all Battlestar Wikis (i.e. all languages and the Media wiki) by only logging in once. To enable SUL for you, do the following:

1. Log out
2. Log back in while keeping “Remember me on this computer”. (Check this post, as this is a temp fix.)
3. Go to Special:MergeAccount. You should see a big header saying “Login unification complete”. If you don’t, you’ll have to enter your password in the form and click “Confirm login information”, then click “Unify accounts”. After that, you should see “Login unification complete” as well.
4. Go to a wiki where you’ve never even *been* before ( the Chinese wiki is a good candidate for most people).
5. You’re logged in already! You don’t even have to create an account there: it’s been automatically created behind the scenes.

Note that steps 1, 2 and 3 only have to be taken once. If you have any problems using SUL, please report them at the Chiefs’ Noticeboard and I’ll look at them. If you are having trouble, lease send us an email at webmaster [at] battlestarwiki [dot] org as you can not post as a guest.

Do note that the ability to hide the notice is based on a cookie stored in your web browser’s cache, so if you continually purge your cache, you’ll see the site notice whenever you check out the website after the cache is cleared.

Any questions?

Check out our FAQ by [[BW:FAQ|going here]].

Of course, if you have questions that should be added in our FAQ, please send them our way or add them to the page yourself!

Now to choose different themes, you need to have a username on Battlestar Wiki. So if you don’t have a username on Battlestar Wiki, get one. It’s free. We don’t bite. Promise.

Once you have a username, log in with it. (The log in link is at the very top right hand corner of the page.)

Once logged in, click on “My Preferences“. Then click on the tab named “skin” in the control panel that loads. From there you have your choice of skins! Right now there are three. The lighter of the three is a skin called “bsgmonobook”, which is essentially a version of Wikipedia’s skin, with black text and with an off-white background.

Cool, eh?

An outstanding and somewhat irksome issue to me was the fact that I could never check to see whether or not a certain image was being used across multiple wikis, without manually fiddling with the URL in the address bar. So what I did was change “media” (as in “media.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Image:thing.jpg”) to “en” (as in “en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Image:thing.jpg”), “en” to “de” and so on.  Needless to say, a tedious task to do manually, particularly when you want to delete unused or inappropriately tagged images, even with someone who can type up to 110 words a minute.

The reason for this check is to discover what pages on a wiki are using this file. Once I (or one of the admins) discovers what pages use the image, it’s a fairly simple matter to go through and remove the image from articles that are using it prior to deletion, thus avoiding a “broken image”. Which results in an unprofessional and unclean distraction from the page’s content.

So the problem that faced me was simple: How do I easily switch between the image description pages on all the Wikis?

It’s something that I’ve been trying to tackle for a while now, and I’ve rummaged through the Wikimedia Commons (a larger repository very much the “mother” of the Battlestar Wiki Media repository) in an attempt to discover inspiration.

If you take a look at this image description page on an image of [[Edward James Olmos]] on the Wikimedia Commons, you’ll see some tabs on top of the page, which read “check usage”, “find categories”, and, the last one, a small tab called “en” (the two letter code for English).

I tried (briefly) adapting the “wikitools” software that the “check usage” and “find categories” tab makes use of, only to find that it would be more of a hassle to rework, debug, and run through hundreds of lines of code and configuration swtiches. Indeed, it made the laborious task of tweaking the URL in the address boxes look like a stroll in the park.

So that was out… but the “en” tab struck me.

And so I began finding out which files in MediaWiki generated the tabs. After a brief bit of research, I found the target: a file called “SkinTemplate.php”, located in the “includes” directory of any MediaWiki installation worth its salt.

With my fair knowledge of PHP at hand, I managed to whip up basic tabs for each language (”de”, “en”, “es”, etc — including “media” for the repository), and “hide” tabs of the same language.

Quite pleased with myself, I managed to figure out that I was on the right path.

One problem. Some languages, such as German and Turkish, have a different name for the “image:” namespace. (”Bild:” and “Resim:” respectably.) While MediaWiki is apparently smart enough to discern that someone calling for:

http://de.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Image:William_Adama_promo.jpg

would get:

http://de.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Bild:William_Adama_promo.jpg

it’s not smart enough to do the reverse, unless you change both “de” to “media” and “Bild” to “Image:”… by hand.

So I came up with a solution of running the URL through PHP’s preg_replace().

And thus I have worked out the following bit of code, which requires only minor modifications to the SkinTemplate.php file. I’ve attached the file with the code, so it’s easier to manipulate (and, obviously, if anyone wants to take a crack at making it more efficient, you’re welcome to do so)!

Download the file here!

When you use the attached file, you will want to go through and remove the instances of “battlestarwiki.org”, in addition to renaming the file so as to strip the “.txt” extension. I had to do this since WordPress doesn’t like file attachments with the .php extension.

Comments, suggestions, and constructive criticisms welcome! Also, if you do use this on your own wikis, I would kindly ask that you credit me and Battlestar Wiki somewhere when doing so!

Also, as a side note, I plan on doing more of these “how tos” in the future, so as to share our knowledge with other webmasters and web entrepreneurs. Personally, I’ve never cared to horde knowledge, so I find teaching back to others is gratifying and, ultimately, beneficial to us all. So, if you want to know how we do something, please ask and we’ll be glad to try and answer your questions!