User talk:MarkDilley/Archive1

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NOTE: this 'User talk:MarkDilley/Archive1' page is an archive of older discussions.

Please place new comments on the
currently active talk page of this archive, thanks!

Archives:1,2,3,4,5

I'll second that thanks...

...For the welcome hello. Have a nice day!! Clarissa Caldwell 18:55, 28 August 2008 (EDT)

Thanks!

Thanks for adding WikiLens. I'm curious how to found it. Of course, since that was in 2006, you may not remember. Dfrankow 12:17, 21 October 2007 (EDT)

Notification on users talk page only

People's "talk" pages alert them to messages. Their user pages don't. Best wishes! Robin Patterson 00:46, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

Thank you for the tip Robin! - Need to write something up about that function. WikiIndex:Talk Pages for Wiki People - best, mark

Testing Notification for Message on Talk Page

Does it work? did you get the notification? TedErnst 16:35, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

When I first signed up for Wikipedia, I was TedErnst, but then somehow couldn't get signed in again using that name so became Tedernst and started editing without realizing what was up. Now I'm attached to it. Then, since this is also MediaWiki, I stuck with the strange name. I'll fix it out. Thanks!

And you can welcome Tristan by editing the talk page (not the user page directly), which is considered fine etiquete at MediaWikis, as far as I know. TedErnst 16:49, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

Mark, I'm okay with whatever is going to happen here and don't need it to look any way, so please know that I love you very much and all my suggestions are just that, suggestions. I'm here to help. :-)
That said, MediaWiki has some really cool features that I think will be useful to use. Notice how MarkDilley and User: MarkDilley are two different pages? One is an article and the other is a user. I believe it'll be cleaner to not have any people in the article namespace, the space that you want to be full of wikis. When you make a comment that you'd like signed, you don't have to link to anything, you can just type 4 tildes, and it'll expand out with the datestamp and a link to your user page. TedErnst 16:34, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)
Oh, and I just remembered, media wiki also has a talk page connected with every other page, in every namespace. So if I want to leave a comment for you, I don't leave it on your user page, but on your talk page: User talk: MarkDilley and you'll get a notification (I'm pretty sure) that you have a new message. TedErnst 16:34, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)
An admin can do it. First, an admin has to delete the page "User:MarkDilley" because it was nothing but a redirect. Then any registered user can move "MarkDilley" page to "User:MarkDilley".

So Tristam, I just MarkDilley and it goes to my user name or my article name?

On Wikipedia it's really important to preserve edit histories because of the GPL licence. We don't have that issue here with the CC license, correct? So a cut and paste move isn't a problem here the way it is there? TedErnst
The purpose of moving pages with the move function is to keep the edit history for attributing the page authors. The licence of WikiIndex also requires to attribute the author properly, so the move function is still important.

Link to yourself automatically using tildes

Just sign your contributions with 4 tildes "~~~~" and you won't need to remember how to link to yourself. TedErnst 17:13, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

Yea, I just don't like the time date stamp, so I don't do that. It is not in my wiki nature :-)
If you don't like the time stamp, you can use three tildes instead.

Okay, well, we're going to have to decide the namespace issue. I just noticed that John Stanton has his page in the article space as well. Where can we have that conversation? TedErnst 17:22, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

It is cleaner to have the name of Wiki People have article pages. Thanks for the tild example! MarkDilley

Mark, you're sounding very dogmatic. Things should be this way because they should be this way. I'm not so sure things are so cut and dried automatically better one way over the other. And if you're not interested in using the features of MediaWiki, perhaps another engine would be a better choice? TedErnst 00:59, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)

Actualy Ted, it sounds to me as you are the one being dogmatic. We must do this because that is what the wiki software is capable of. I think that individual choice works for me here. I am not forcing anyone else to do it any other way. :-) Hugs back - MarkDilley

I like the namespaces because of what they give you. They are unique in my experience to MediaWiki. I like them not because they exist here, but because they are useful. You seem to not like them only because you haven't used them. Or maybe there's some other reason? I don't know because your answers feel so absolutist to me. I'm not trying to run your project. I'm here to help. Believe me, I'll do my best to help this project succeed, however you set it up. I'm just hoping to do it in the way that makes the most sense for those doing most of the work. That might not be me and thus I shouldn't have all that much say. It's just that you might not have experienced some of the features you're poo pooing. No worries. I'll get down to work presently. TedErnst 01:12, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)

I don't think I am poo pooing any ideas. MarkDilley

Category sorting

[[Category:Wiki People|TedErnst]]

The purpose of this code is not to show up and differently on Tristram's page, it's to sort the name properly on the category page. Otherwise, we'd all end up in the U section, if we're using namespaces. If we're not using namespaces, then we could use that code to sort by last name, if we wanted to.

[[Category:Wiki People|Dilley, Mark]]

Categories at the top?

Why? TedErnst

It is a standard that ICANNWiki used, that we all liked, and the added bonus is that the categories sort before the template categories, giving the first ones more relevance with a folksonomy.

Okay, Hopefully I won't hate it too much. TedErnst

You wrote: "also, the standard we are trying to set is categories at the top of the page." They recommend the opposite in Wikipedia because the newbies may get confused when they see odd-looking category descriptions instead of normal text, when they start to edit a page. There used to be problems with search engines, they showed categories before the normal text in their page summaries. However, I don't know if the search engine problem is occuring any more. Tristram Shandy

Personally, I think that is not a problem with this wiki for three reasons:

  • The wiki is for other wikis, so one assumes that other contributors are not newbies.
  • If we do get a newbie checking out the inside, the data is structured and I think they would be able to figure it out quickly.
  • I think categorys in wiki are pretty valuable and exciting things to start to be able to understand, so it is kinda cool to have them smack dab in the front. My 2 cents. :-) MarkDilley
Why do you want the extra added categories to be listed before the ones in teh box? Shouldn't the ones in the box be the most important? TedErnst 00:58, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)

The categories at the bottom are already redundant once, some may say twice because of the sidebar links. So adding the Folksonomy Categories in the front helps the richness of the site. I like that they are redundant at the bottom, but I think they are less valuable because they are the highlighted ones in the templete. Also, while this is a MediaWiki, it is not Wikipedia. Best, MarkDilley :-)

I don't understand anything of what you're saying here. Redundant once how? Redundant twice how? What's a Folksonomy Category? How do the sidebar links come into play? And does the wikipedia comment come from my other comment? Of course it's not wikipedia. That's why I wonder why we're using wikimedia engine if it's clear that its features are not what you're looking for in building this project. TedErnst 01:09, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)

Look at the categories in the template box, now look at the categories at the bottom of the page, they are the same. A folksonomy is when people come along and say, hey this is a category art wiki, so they add it into the non structured data area of the wiki page. Test for yourself, add the non structured category data at the top, save, see what is looks like, now move it to the bottom and see how it changes to the back. I think those categorys are good to be redundant from the template in the page, but not really necessary to be in the front.

table of contents

Any time there are 3 or more (I think) headings on a page, the TOC pops up just before the first of them. Often there is introductory text before the first heading, so that ends up before the TOC. You can force NOTOC somehow, and you can also force TOCright, where the text will then wrap around. We'll have to figure those out. TedErnst 01:01, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)

Using __TOC__ will insert the table of contents at the current position instead of the default. __NOTOC__ will turn it off altogether. There is also a code which will turn off the "[edit] section" links.

category thing

John thinks it gets lost on the bottom, so he likes to see it there also. So I only say that if you're going to put extra categories in the "body" area, then put both commands in the same place so people can see what's been done and copy that if they like it that way.

Ok, I think that is fine, I think as a standard, people will get used to it being next to the category tag at the bottom. MarkDilley

Work in Progress

what exactly is the 'check name' field for? --Ray 23:11, 19 Jan 2006 (EST)

Is the name of the wiki page the same as the name of the wiki, I have found several that aren't

Really? Such as... what?

I think, for the most part, we have moved many wiki that were in this category to their "proper" namespace. Our policy is to have the WikiIndex page match exactly. (The case of disambiguous pages messes with that, but for now, for those pages that is our best option. ) MarkDilley

Back in January, we had an explict wiki_name field in the structured data. Sometimes this field did not match the WikiIndex PageName for that wiki. To avoid this kind of redundant data-entry, and ensure these fields were always the same, we changed the structured data. It didn't occur to me until Mark just pointed it out that this new scheme breaks down for wikis with ambiguous page names because we use disambiguation, which means the WikiIndex page name is by-definition not the same as the name of the wiki. We can either ignore this or create a new wiki template for ambiguous pages. Thoughts? TedErnst | talk 12:32, 5 June 2006 (EDT)

The only idea I had for ambiguous pages was to have X number of templates there for each wiki. That doesn't scale very well! Otherwise I was just going to sit on it, until someone comes up with a better idea than yours! ;-) MarkDilley

altorgwiki

mostly bad porn, but worse it's riddled with spam links and the like. i didn't think it added any value and thougth it might offend some. feel free to put it back in if you think otherwise.

yea i found it, altorgphpwiki. spam porn links... should we remove others that are porn spam links?

redirects for alternate names

Mark, when someone comes here, they don't know if their intended wiki is already here. So they type the name in the box and if they don't have it exactly the same, it'll say "not found, would you like to start it?" For this reason, I believe we should not delete any redirects from alternative names, because these increase the liklihood that a person will find the wiki they're looking for and therefore not create a new page for it when one already exists. So save yourself some work and stop deleting redirects! :-) Just an opinion, not a decree.

hugs, TedErnst

I think that people will type in their wiki name exactly as it is, if it is not there, then they should add it. I am not so sure that alternate names are important. By the way, I added most of these wiki to SwitchWiki and I think I added the wiki to many of them. So I am comfortable deleting the wrong name. :-) MarkDilley

Will they type Meatball or MeatBall or MeatBallWiki or meetballwiki? I just don't see the benefit of deleting a harmless redirect. It's more work for you to delete, and possibly more work later when someone creates an article that alrready exists. This may be just a huge big in MediaWiki that won't let you find a page without having the name exactly right, but it causes amazing problems at Wikipedia. I've done it myself, created articles that already existed. The redirects left over once all this is fixed each time means the next person to make the same mistake won't make the same mistake! TedErnst

The problem I see is that this solution, not eliminating redirects, causes redundancy in the alphabetical listing. MarkDilley

Now you've lost me. The redirects shouldn't have any category information and thus shouldn't show up in any lists. That sounds like a bug to me if you are seeing duplicates. Have you asked John about it? Crap. TedErnst

Nope I haven't ask John yet, you are just now bringing up the issue! ;-) I don't think it is a bug because it is base on article pagename, not categories... but alphabetical stuff... unless it is something that needs to populate the page database and in a few hours won't be a problem. I will check a few later to see. MarkDilley

Okay, I'll leave it alone. Perhaps I'm wrong with my assertion "People will re-create pages that will then need to be deleted, over and over again." In fact, I must be wrong. Traffic here will not be that high, and will be primarily, if not exclusively wiki people. I'm overthinking and planning for the newbie. So just ignore me. I'm going to bed!  :-) TedErnst

Also Ted, If people create them in the future, then maybe we should do a redirect. But for the launch of this wiki, I want as few redirects as possible. I have however kept a couple that I think are close, similarly to the Meatball scenario you layed out. It is wiki! :-) Best, MarkDilley

WikiSym

I think it would be good to get together at RCC to talk about this project and figure out what we want to say about it at RCC and at WikiSym

Wikified Link

Until we can get a LocalName system here, I think we should standardize external links to other wikis. exp: MeatballWiki:MarkDilley

  • isn't there a system of connecting that we could do fairly easily within wiki... I will check MeatballWiki MarkDilley

edit link in box

I figured out a different way to do it. [[User talk:TedErnst/articlewithtemplatetest]] uses [[User:TedErnst/templatetest]] as it's template. I'm pretty happy with it now. Does it suck? You threw me for a loop there by commenting in the template. I couldn't figure out how you commented on the page without it showing up in the history, but it was just included from the template. Pretty sneaky! TedErnst 15:39, 21 Jan 2006 (EST)

Yes, my intention was to sneakily weird you out! :-) MarkDilley let me go figure out what you are up to. Are you doing this now? Maybe we can hang and skype while we work? MarkDilley

a question about the faq

WikiIndex:Frequently asked questions - what it the purpose of the questions being links? TedErnst 15:55, 21 Jan 2006 (EST)

I see it as a way to build a useful faq. I am imagining someone typing a question in the search box, and hopefully getting a direct hit to their question. MarkDilley

duplicated

Ha, this is funny! Category:FAQ - there's a duplicate there! - my bad - not sure how to fix it - it's your question mark bug

SwitchWiki

I think I want SwitchWiki.com to point here. Then I want SwitchWiki in red and black, instead of IndexWiki. I think we should capitalize on the name recognition that SwitchWiki has.

Special:Emailuser

Hi Mark. Special:Emailuser is missing from this wiki. You might find it useful to enable it since this is the sort of wiki a lot of people might edit and then not check back for messages for a long time, so emailing them could be the only way of contacting them.

Mark, I think this functionality is only available in MediaWiki version 1.5.x this wiki is still at version 1.4.5. I have not yet upgraded to version 1.5.x because there are issues with servers that run multi wikis (we have about 40 wikis that run on the same server) the issues may just be my own lack of knowledge but I have not yet been able to install a version 1.5.x MediaWiki and have it play well with the other wikis :-). When I can set aside enough time to really explore and solve the issues I'll start the conversion process for all 40 wikis.

InterMapTxt

This is what is on MeatballWiki and other wikis so they can have local names for easy linking between wiki.

Meta:Editing

about tags

I totally get what you're saying about the heading that ends the document (folks/tags/categories). This is different from what John implimented in the template to copy for a new wiki. I improved (I thought) his idea by making the template. He had it set up to show up on the page, and thus be redundant, like you've said. I recall asking about this and got an answer I thought made sense, so I improved his idea by cutting down on syntax. Now I totally get what you're saying AND I think we definitely need to document your idea and make sure John and Ray are on board because your idea hasn't been done before, as far as I know. If this conversation has already happened, please point me that way? Thanks! TedErnst 21:26, 22 Jan 2006 (EST)

All I'm saying this this is a decision that's not been made yet. I found your FAQ page about tags and I commented on it's talk page. Need to get agreement among you, John and Ray about how this is going to work. Then we document the decision made and clean up after ourselves. I can help with that part. TedErnst 21:34, 22 Jan 2006 (EST)

Sure, I can be part of the agreement. I left myself out because your idea excites me and rubs me the wrong way, probably just because it's unfamiliar to me. And since you and John both made steps on this topic in the last few days, I thought maybe it was better for me to let the two of you work out the solution.

One potential problem to consider, at least on talk pages, is the MediaWiki feature of the plus sign at the top of the page. This allows someone to add a comment in a new section at the bottom of the page automatically without having to edit the whole page. This new section will be below your footer, unless you get John to hard-code the footer. TedErnst 12:00, 23 Jan 2006 (EST)

Bravo! I think the tag template is a brilliant way to allow people to add a new category to an article easily and have it display on both the article and the category area on the bottom. Mark pointed out to me last night that it might be even better for the template not to automatically bullet the text because that way we could also embed the tag into a paragraph. That makes sense to me because then we could use it that way, or bullet it if we wanted to with an asterisk as usual. I think this also solves the problem of having to make a large heading (folksonomy, tagging, caregories) and have it appear near the bottom of the page. --Ray 12:12, 23 Jan 2006 (EST)

Ray, when I first made the tag template, it did not have a bullet. John then changed it to include the bullet because he said it was messing up the formatting otherwise. Perhaps we need two templates? tagb and tag, one having the bullet and the other not? TedErnst 12:17, 23 Jan 2006 (EST)
Yes, good solution --Ray 15:35, 23 Jan 2006 (EST)

Also, I'm not quite getting what Mark wants from the folks/tag/cat footer. There's already a footer with the categories right below this, labeled "categories." Could that text just be chagned to include folks and tag and be bold? Would that make everyone happy? Then we could use either categories or the tag template (without the bullet) in the body and everything would show up neat and clean? TedErnst 12:17, 23 Jan 2006 (EST)

I think we're close to being on the same page, when Mark put in the "folks/tag/cat" heading we didn't have the benefit of the tag you created. So as far as i'm concerned, if we have the tag and tagb commands, we don't even need any extra headers/footers. --Ray 15:35, 23 Jan 2006 (EST)

nvc communication

Yes, and instead of No, but or Yes, but to help communicate ideas of growing and buidling collectively and collaboratevely

Back channel communication rather than wiki for real time

  • I am going to be on irc.freenode.net #wikiindex
  • I also am available for IM and possibly voice chat on skype - "MarkDilley" - Best, Mark

my new signature

I figured out a way to have my signature not point to my user page and to have it point directly to my talk page. If there's interest, I'll document this. TedErnst | talk 13:54, 24 Jan 2006 (EST)

Ted that is awesome, could you document it please! Best, MarkDilley

Test it out to see if it's clear? WikiIndex:New page for yourself#Step 5 – create your signature. I also put in a new step 4 for creating redirects. TedErnst | talk 15:37, 24 Jan 2006 (EST)

test, [[User:MarkDilley|MarkDilley | talk]] --- ??? what am I doing wrong? MarkDilley

[[User:MarkDilley|MarkDilley | talk]]

I don't know. Did you check the box? Hmm. TedErnst | talk 11:45, 25 Jan 2006 (EST)

I think that is it, MarkDilley | talk

Yup, that's it! Excellent!

Except the talk isn't working, frump! :-)

I'll bet it is. MediaWiki doesn't self-link so since we're on your talk page, no link. Try it on my talk page and I'll be it works. TedErnst | talk 16:11, 25 Jan 2006 (EST)

Glad you like it! TedErnst | talk 16:16, 25 Jan 2006 (EST)

TagCloud

This would be a good page to have for people. http://www.TagCloud.com pulling off of the rss feed. nice.

ParkingLot:

Folksomonmy/Tags/Categories discussion - redundancy is still an issue, but not for thougth now.

Shortcuts

In the search box, type these in to get to a frequently used page quickly.

  • File - upload a file
  • Help - help files/page
  • Add - how to add a wiki, the template for it

Recursive Nature of Wiki

MarkDilley is trying to figure out how this recursive nature of wiki will be best utilized. So far this Category:Wiki along with PhpWiki are examples of an idea I am trying to groke.

Go here for a clean page of Wikicities, or rather follow the redirect twice to get back to this page to see what I want to happen, and it should say "Wikis" instead of articles. Best, MarkDilley

  • So here's another place where namespaces are useful, or could be. I believe you want everything that's currently in the main namespace to be a wiki, correct? So this page, [[RecursiveNatureOfWiki]], really doesn't belong here. I'm not sure what you're getting at with the concept, but I think it goes in the WikiIndex: namespace (WikiIndex: RecursiveNatureOfWiki). Mind if I move it? Or you can. Just use the move link above. TedErnst 16:29, 18 Jan 2006 (EST)

Actually I do mind that you move it, because it is what I mean.  ;-) The idea is that I want the MediaWiki wiki to be at the top of Category: MediaWiki, so that all the other MediaWiki sites are below it. does that make sense? John Stanton knows what I am trying to get at, and he is thinking of it from a programmers percpective. John, can you add anything?

Sure, I won't move it. I don't understand why the pagename and namespace are so important to you. No worries. Here's a wikipedia category for Chicago Transit Authority. There's also an article for Chicago Transit Authority, linked right from the top. Category:Chicago Transit Authority Is this at all related to what you're talking about? TedErnst 13:42, 21 Jan 2006 (EST)

We might need to talk about it, or me show you an example. What I want is Wikicities to be a page name and a category, because it is both. The wiki Wikicities at the top and a category list at the bottom of all the wikis using that engine. MarkDilley

Interesting idea. A simpler way to accomplish this, not nearly as slick visually but also not requiring any programing would be to have Wikicities be a disambiguation page with two links, one to the Wikicities wiki page and the oter to category wikicities. We could impliment that immediately without bothing John for code. It doesn't give you what you want, but maybe it's in the right direction? TedErnst 15:53, 21 Jan 2006 (EST)

On Namespace of course we want wiki's as the main types of articles, but if there's another article (like this one for example) that's in the main namespace, so long as it doesn't collide with a wiki, it think it's fine because it won't junk up the categories if we don't categorize it to anything. Am I missing something? --Ray 00:01, 23 Jan 2006 (EST)

For future reference, here are links to Template:Wiki engine and Template:Wiki engine boilerplate. Just didn't want them to get lost, in case we decide to go back to them. TedErnst | talk 02:59, 11 Mar 2006 (EST)

nested boxes

Test

ScreenSize matters though... need to keep that in mind when designing web pages.

greetings

Thanks everybody for all the efforts on WikiIndex!!!

  • Would like to concentrate getting as many new wikis into the system, and to completing the second pass through the list to add Logos and correct data entry errors. We have a very limited time between now and RecentChangesCamp, and we want to look as good as possible when we show it to folks. Any help with this process is greatly appreciated!

immediate active collaboration

ongoing collaboration
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