User talk:John Stanton

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Request for Removal

Hello. Could you please remove the page Dresden-wiki (now Stadtwiki Dresden - the other name is not used) and the Image:DresdenwikiLogo.JPG. I updated the corresponding page so this file and article are not necessary any more.

I've gone ahead and done it. — User:Sean Fennel@ 04:59, 19 November 2006 (EST)

Hello

Requerimos saber ¿como hacer para que mi wiki : www.wicodatos.org pueda tener implementada la caja de creación de artículos? debido a que hemos tratado de crearle una propia, inclusive copiandola de otros wiki-sitios y no lo hemos conseguido.

We need to know: as doing so that my wiki: could www.wicodatos.org have implemented the box of creation of articles? because we have tried to create the proper one to him, inclusive copying it of other wiki-places and have not obtained it.

--Wicodatos Colombia 17:55, 21 June 2006 (EDT)

My translation: Wicodatos would like the add box for their wiki, but they don't know how to do it. :-) TedErnst | talk 01:33, 22 June 2006 (EDT)

This is a MediaWiki extension, see Input Box Extension John 14:05, 4 July 2006 (EDT)

tagging

check out Add a Wiki and How do tags work. I jiggered it a bit, let me know what u think, thx --Ray 02:44, 27 Jan 2006 (EST)

WSR3

hi John, WSR3 is becoming active. see http://www.wikisym.org/wiki/index.php/WSR_3 -- Max

future wiki-nodes

Hello John, I am toying with the mark-up for wikinodes that are not there and TedErnst asked me a good question. Can we currently sort on a no for URL_wikinode? Meaning if we do what I am thinking about (e.g. The_league_of_scarybirds with the - WikiNode) does that damage being able to find those? Best, MarkDilley | talk

List of wikis by size

Is it possible to introduce another categorization criteria, by size (conservative pages count)? 84.177.187.236 04:17, 27 Feb 2006 (EST)

Page count would be interesting, but difficult to keep up-to-date. It would also be interesting to measure other things, like the edit rate of wikis, which will vary over time. And the number of active users. But we wouldn't want to be measuring these things by hand. We could try to build a tool to automate some wiki analysis. Visiting wikis as a web-bot. It could also present the figures on the wikiindex wiki by updating the wiki as bot, but it might be easier to implement as a seperate display, as least initially. -- Harry Wood 06:26, 27 Feb 2006 (EST)

At least for Mediawikis with more than 7000 articles and Wikimedia Projects a batch process like this alredy exists. http://s23.org/wikistats/ You should contact the author in offering aid to extend his efforts. 84.177.187.236 07:51, 27 Feb 2006 (EST)

Hi, im the author. Do you already check the wikis automatically to some extent or is this all manual still? Do you already get data from the Special:Statistics?action=raw pages? Mutante 08:25, 27 Feb 2006 (EST)

Still pretty much a manual operation with a thought to future automation. Welcome any suggestions and/or help along this line John Stanton

Could you extract a list of all Mediawiki URLs, something like "select old_text from text where old_text LIKE "%Recentchanges%"; hmm,or make a mysql dump file and grep it from there? If we had a list with all Special:Statistics URLs of the listed Mediawikis that would be the key to make automated statistics. Mutante 16:02, 27 Feb 2006 (EST)

Main Page

Hi John, Sean over at Meatball pointed us in this direction: How do I change the main page for whenever you get around to it. Best, MarkDilley | talk (uhhh, wait, that didn't tell us anything... )

I'm pretty sure that what that means is that (and an admin will have to do this as the page is protected) the page MediaWiki:Mainpage just needs to edited to say the name of another page. 158.135.241.100 02:43, 1 Mar 2006 (EST)
Exactly what is it that we want to do here? John Stanton 15:11, 2 Mar 2006 (EST)
Map the upper left logo to Wiki Index
Then Wiki Index is going to have to be set as the main page. Clicking that logo is meant to be a shortcut back to the main page. Right now it is mapped there, but that's only because the page it's really mapped to redirects there. —User:Sean Fennel@ 02:03, 6 Mar 2006 (EST)
I just notced that mediawiki.org has their main page set up exactly the way we've been discussing here: "main" page is page with same name as the wiki itself. —User:Sean Fennel@ 02:06, 6 Mar 2006 (EST)
Hope that does the trick John Stanton 15:16, 8 Mar 2006 (EST)

Cool John!!! MarkDilley | talk

upgrading

Sean Fennel has been discussing the merits of an upgrade here. How does it look from your end? TedErnst | talk 00:11, 12 Apr 2006 (EDT)

We are in the planning stage for an upgrade from MediaWiki 1.4.5 to 1.6.3 which is the stable current version. If 1.7.X becomes the stable version before we upgrade we will use that version. This promises to be a difficult upgrade for the following reasons: (1) the database schema changes significantly and that nearly always creates problems, (2) a variety of modifications that we have made to enable things like editable menus will have to be redone, and (3) the pretty URL hack may break the whole upgrade process. We have an unused wiki to practice on to refine the process and I hope to have all the wikis in our stable upgraded by 15 May 2006 barring any really tough problems. I tell you all this so that you can understand my reluctance to introduce any more variables into this process before we upgrade. Let us see what the status of the RSS feeds is after the upgrade and then we can decide what to do. John Stanton

new wiki button

brilliant with the pre-load! I love it! TedErnst | talk 15:30, 10 May 2006 (EDT)

Thanks Ted John Stanton 18:52, 10 May 2006 (EDT)

clickpic

John!!

I think I know what this might mean! The images in the structured data might be able to be mapped to the wiki, right!?!!?! This is awesome!! MarkDilley

Exactly! 67.160.171.38 20:32, 11 May 2006 (EDT)
I tried it. It didn't work. TedErnst | talk 13:44, 12 May 2006 (EDT)
May require some tinkering to work inside another template. It is meant to get an external logo and point it to a wiki page. I think you reversed the usage trying to get a local wiki image and point to an external site. Anyhow play with it and see if you can put it to good use. It could serve as a model for your usage. Another advantage to getting the external Logo is that you can always tell when the wiki is dead :-) John Stanton 18:56, 12 May 2006 (EDT)

no follow on links?

Hi John, check this out. Best, MarkDilley

The NoFollow setting is a default anti-spam setting in mediawiki and essentially makes spam postings a useless exercise because it makes links on the wiki "no counters" for Google ranking (and other indexers). There should be a policy decision made as to its use or non-use! John 11:59, 19 May 2006 (EDT)

monobook.js

John,, could you please comment on User talk:Sean Fennel#monobook.js? I don't really know much about this, other than that it could help us automate repetitive tass a bit more. TedErnst | talk 13:25, 28 May 2006 (EDT)

I replied on User talk:Sean Fennel John 13:51, 28 May 2006 (EDT)

.htaccess

John, I've just installed mediawiki at http://chicagocoop.net/wiki and I'd like to have the urls show up like they do here, http://chicagocoop.net/wiki/PageName without the index.php and such. How do I do that? Thanks! TedErnst | talk 14:16, 11 June 2006 (EDT)

This is what our .htaccess looks like John 16:17, 11 June 2006 (EDT)
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [ornext]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule .* - [last]

RewriteRule ^([^?].+)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

AddDefaultCharset utf-8
Thanks! I'll give it a try. TedErnst | talk 19:15, 11 June 2006 (EDT)

This operation was way more complicated than I realized, just because I don't know what I'm doing. You .htaccess didn't work for me, likely because my directory structure is different. I ended up re-installing in the /w directory (instead of /wiki) and then following these instructions so my wiki does appear to be at http://chicagocoop.net/wiki and without the index.php http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Eliminating_index.php_from_the_url#Using_a_rewrite_rule_in_a_.htaccess_file THanks much for geting me started! TedErnst | talk 01:04, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

Yeah, there are many ways to do this and it does depend alot on your server configuration and your hoster. Be aware that some hosters (like ours) periodocially overwrite .htaccess as a security measure causing you to lose connectivity to your site. I check all our wikis first thing every morning (even before my first cup of coffee) to make sure they are still up. Keep a copy of your .htaccess handy at all times!!! John 12:08, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

MyNavMenu

Another mediawiki question for you. I can't figure out how to edit the sidebar on my new install. I see that here at WikiIndex it's MediaWiki:MyNavMenu, but that page doesn't exist on my new install. Any suggestions? TedErnst | talk 14:44, 11 June 2006 (EDT)

AhHa now you are after the secrets of the trade :-). The two menus on the side require a modification to the skin code in Monobook.php. We have several different Monobook.php files for differing configurations of Google AdSense as well as one that does not use any ads. Let me know which one you want & I'll send it to you. John 16:25, 11 June 2006 (EDT)

The no-ad version would be great. Thanks! TedErnst | talk 19:15, 11 June 2006 (EDT)

Sent it by GMail John 20:46, 11 June 2006 (EDT)

This works great! Thanks! TedErnst | talk 01:54, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

It has worked well for us but you must remember that is a custom file when you update. Sometimes they modify the skin files during an update (as they did massively between versions 1.4.x to 1.6.x) and I have to reprogram it. Just keep in sync with us and you should be ok! Your next questions should be about the extensions we use (CharInsert and InputBox), I'm ready when you are :-) John 11:57, 13 June 2006 (EDT)

More potential

This wiki is great, but I honestly believe if it turned into a wiki of websites, instead of just wikis, it could be all that better. You already would have a good start on other wikis attempting this, as you already have users and info about lots of wikis. --Elliot Goodrich (not a member here)16:37, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Funny you should mention that because within a week or so our sister wiki, AboutUs.com will launch with that exact concept pre loaded with 2 million+ web sites. Keep checking it. John 16:48, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Talk:WikiProject:Recent Changes Patrol

moved to page above.

Talk:ThisWiki:Copyright

Talk:ThisWiki:Copyright ... sorry for the late answer. --Kawana 03:46, 14 August 2006 (EDT)

Sitemap

Hi John, please see this conversation: WikiIndex:Community_talk#Sitemap. Best MarkDilley

spam filter problem

John, could you please take a look at ProcrastinateNetFirmsWiki and see what's up with the spam filter? thanks TedErnst | talk 12:09, 31 August 2006 (EDT)

What were you trying to do??? It saves fine with it's current content. John 18:45, 31 August 2006 (EDT)
Trying to remove the spaces I had to put in the URLs to get the page to save. — User:Sean Fennel@ 03:56, 1 September 2006 (EDT)
Don't know what is happening to you, I removed the spaces, one at a time, and it saved fine each time??? John 08:16, 1 September 2006 (EDT)
Very strange. I also tried to save it without the spaces, same as Sean did, with the same filter block. Glad it's fixed now. TedErnst | talk 12:32, 1 September 2006 (EDT)

MediaWiki talk:MyNavMenu

Mind taking a minute to look in there? — User:Sean Fennel@ 16:51, 29 September 2006 (EDT)

upgrading MediaWiki

Why do we work with MediaWiki 1.6.5 what is the upgrade policy? --Peu 03:09, 20 October 2006 (EDT)

The MediaWiki quarterly update policy is a bit too frequent so we try to update every 6 months or so. The 1.8.x version was just released at the beginning of October and we wait till most of the bugs in a release are fixed (probably about 1.8.5, they are on 1.8.2 already) before we start to plan an upgrade. We should be on 1.8.5 before the first of next year. John 11:36, 20 October 2006 (EDT)
I see. In our company, we update closer to mediawiki and live quite good with it (of course it's a closed wiki). What about updating to 1.6.8? --Peu 13:09, 20 October 2006 (EDT)
We try to stay with what works unless we have a problem. Every new release brings some incompatabilities that we have to work thru and generates a lot of work. If we had only one wiki and no other interests it might be possible but there are over 40 wikis that we manage on this one server and it is quite impossible to update all of them 8 times a quarter. Just as an example, this next upgrade will require changing everything to PHP5 and will break our current "pretty url" scheme, we know how to change to PHP5 but have not yet figured out what broke the "pretty url" scheme and we cannot upgrade until we solve that problem. John 13:34, 20 October 2006 (EDT)
Oh, I did not know about it. --Peu 15:47, 20 October 2006 (EDT)

error message I've never seen before

John, while patrolling recent changes, I came across this, which displays this error: 

The database did not find the text of a page that it should have
found, named "Category:Asia (Diff: 32701, 32801)". 

This is usually caused by following an outdated diff or history
link to a page that has been deleted. 

If this is not the case, you may have found a bug in the software.
Please report this to an administrator, making note of the URL.

Strange, no? TedErnst | talk 14:49, 20 October 2006 (EDT)

Very strange! I'll check further... John 15:28, 20 October 2006 (EDT)

Here's another new one from Recent Changes: 

The requested page title was invalid, empty, or an incorrectly 
linked inter-language or inter-wiki title. It may contain one more 
characters which cannot be used in titles.

spam blacklist

please see Talk:My spam blacklist. thanks! TedErnst | talk 09:29, 21 October 2006 (EDT)

thumbnail problem

this picture Image:Ruangchotvit_ChinarutPicture.jpg Ruangchotvit ChinarutPicture.jpg is black when shown in any category, it seems it cannot be scaled? --Peu 08:10, 22 October 2006 (EDT)

Something wrong with the picture, I downloaded the original and converted it to a .png format Image:Ruangchotvit ChinarutPicture.png and uploaded it and it works better but still not right Ruangchotvit ChinarutPicture.png John 12:46, 22 October 2006 (EDT)

.org / .com

Hello John!

What are your thoughts on the possibility to make all of WikiIndex's links .org?

See you soon I hope, MarkDilley

Looks complicated, I'm having enough trouble just trying to figure out the rewrite rules for upgrading to 1.8 :-) When do you arrive??? John 12:41, 27 October 2006 (EDT)

ParserFunctions extension

Hi John, would you please have a look on the template wiki talk [1]? Dantman suggested to use this extension for WikiIndex; he has good experiences with it on Gaiapedia, and we have problems with our if-template and the resulting text layout, that could not be worked around. Could we have these extensions too (in the next future)? (see also my posting and his answer on gaiapedia) --Peu | talk 10:13, 29 October 2006 (EST)

See the discussion under Template Talk. John 12:15, 29 October 2006 (EST)

Interwiki editing

That'd be great! Thanks! – Smiddle / T·C·@ 17:44, 29 October 2006 (EST)

Ok, you can edit now.
Yeah, but what's those "local" and "trans" stuff? – Smiddle / T·C·@ 18:02, 29 October 2006 (EST)
They allow you to do local and remote site transclusion, check both for maximum capability :-) You can actually suck in pages from a remote wiki into your page. See some of the examples I put on the InterWiki page. John 18:10, 29 October 2006 (EST)

Can I add links to all wikis? I just clicked a random wiki, I'll piece the description: "WikiFur is a wiki about furry community" etc. we could add interlinks to all (most) wikis and for example link "furry" and everything in the article.

Extensions to Install

Since Peu wanted to allow the logos of wikis to link to the sites I thought I'd do that because I already know the only ways images can be made into links on media wiki.

Firstly, I don't know if it will work in the template but this extension may let people create linked images at will if you want it.

But this is the best way I can think of to make it work. I basically created a simple extension that is similar to the Fullurl and Localurl functions already built into MediaWiki. They are Fullimage and Localimage, they basicly instead of doing links to articles they make external links to local images so that they can be embeded in a method that allows for linking.

Here's the code (Just place it in extensions/FullLocalImage.php and include it int LocalSettings.php) 

<?php
/**
 * @Extension Full/Local Image
 * @Author Daniel Friesen( Aka: Dantman )
 * @Description Creates 2 parserfunctions. Localimage and Fullimage, they work similar
 *      to the Localurl and Fullurl functions except they return the path to a image not a article.
 */


$wgExtensionFunctions[] = 'wfFLImage';
$wgExtensionCredits['parserhook'][] = array(
	'name' => 'Full/Local Image',
	'author' => 'Daniel Friesen( Aka: Dantman )'
);

function wfFLImage() {
	global $wgParser;
	
	$wgParser->setFunctionHook( 'Localimage', array( wgFLImageFuncts, 'Localimage' ), SFH_NO_HASH );
	$wgParser->setFunctionHook( 'Fullimage', array( wgFLImageFuncts, 'Fullimage' ), SFH_NO_HASH );
}

class wgFLImageFuncts {
	function Localimage ( &$parser, $name = '', $arg = null ) {
		return wfImageDir( $name ) . '/' . ucfirst( $name );
	}
	function Fullimage ( &$parser, $name = '', $arg = null ) {
		global $wgServer;
		return $wgServer . wfImageDir( $name ) . '/' . ucfirst( $name );
	}
}
?>

It would be much apreciated, If you can get that I can get some stuff working in Template:Wiki/3 that couldn't before. Dantman 19:50, 29 October 2006 (EST)

This file seems to be missing the ending PHP tag and may be missing more than that, can you complete the listing??? Many thanks. John 20:19, 29 October 2006 (EST)
Sorry about that, I must have slipped when I copied it from my local installation. But that's all the code there is, the code works fine. I just don't have uploads on my testing because it's a local installation on my XP Home computer meaning I can't work permissions. But I did some alternative testing to it. My guess from looking at other wikis and the MediaWiki code is that MediaWiki capitalizes the first letter of every file it uploads automaticly. So I have the ucfirst function there. From everything I've tested this should work fine. The worst that could happen is that I miscalculated something on how the system works, and some of the Places where {{fullimage:Something.png}} is used create incorrect urls that I'll half to find a way to fix. But for all purposes it should work now. wfImageDir is a system function that I used to grab the directory, so that should compensate for any mistake other than how files are capitalized. I added the end tag just for reassurance. Dantman 04:07, 30 October 2006 (EST)
I loaded the extension using 
include($IP."/extensions/FullLocalImage.php");
per your instructions (other options would be "Require" or "Require_Once") and it did not cause the wiki to fail :-) so I assume it is functional. Please check it out and let me know if it is functional. I would appreciate it if you would start a page called "FullLocalImage Extension" and document the uses, syntax and source code for the extension. Many thanks! John 11:41, 31 October 2006 (EST)
I looked. Unofortunatly it trys to work. But it's using a filepath instead of a urlpath (A server may use /home/~user/www/public_html/ as the filepath of it's server, and the local urlpath to that would just be /) So the links aren't working right. I'll try to find out what I can do to fix that. I added the full information on meta, and just created that page you wanted with information leading to there. I put a slightly different version on meta, the only difference is I added the 'url' element to the information array so when you go to Special:Version if you change to the one on meta right now, it still won't work, but the url there will lead back to that page for information. Dantman 20:06, 31 October 2006 (EST)
Ok, I updated the code at meta. There are no errors so it still won't break the site. The URL element is in so that people can reach the documentation either by the article you requested or by using the link given on Special:Version. This Time I think I found the correct methods for it from the documentation. It uses predefined methods so it should work. Dantman 20:37, 31 October 2006 (EST)
Yup double checked. 1.6.8's code has those same methods. So if something does go wrong the only glitch that could come out should be it for some reason giving the fullurl making localurl give a fullurl, and fullurl give a fullurl with the https://wikiindex.org before it. Dantman 20:40, 31 October 2006 (EST)

Wiki analytics

Hello,

my name is Lars Sobanski, i´m writing my Diploma Thesis about wikis. So, i do a analythics of wikis.

I also have some qustions which normaly can not be answerd throw the wiki itself, may you please answer me some?

What is the story of founding this wiki? Has there been a community before? What public realation measures has been done to promote the wiki? Can Users become admin?

Thank you in advance

Lars Sobanski

(excuse me for my english, i hope you understand what i want know?! i´m german antive...)

Lars, brief history of WikiIndex:

WikiIndex.com was created by Ray King and John Stanton in June 2005 as a way to track the wiki sites they thought had value for them. At the WikiSym conference in San Diego in October 2005 Ray and John joined forces with Mark Dilley who had a much more comprehensive wiki list called SwitchWiki and took the decision to join the two efforts together. The resulting wiki was to be more comprehensive and take full advantage of wiki technology. John converted and expanded the data from both sites and built out the original set of 1000 wikis in January of 2006. Throughout 2006 a community formed around WikiIndex and greatly expanded the number of wikis and improved the original format. By November 2006 the article count was at 3,195 and WikiIndex had become the authoritative source for information about Wiki sites.

WikiIndex dedicated volunteers include the following who have sysop status: Ray King, Mark Dilley, John Stanton, Ted Ernst, David Cary, Mattis Manzel and Sean Fennel. Many, many others have contributed significantly to WikiIndex in all kinds of capacities.

A previous community existed for SwitchWiki, Mark Dilley's creation.

We did do some some promotion at various events including Recent Changes Camp. We did caricatures of participants, gave out stickers and other promotional items.

Users are invided to become admins based on participation and contributions we started with 3 admins and we now have 7.

John 11:29, 14 November 2006 (EST)

Namespace creation

Read my comments here. I don't know how to install it, but it could be useful. (now I know I'd put it on talk:main page but anyway) – Smiddle / T·C·@ 10:11, 15 November 2006 (EST)

Here I found something (maybe) meta-wiki:Help:Namespace manager, download – Smiddle / T·C·@ 14:08, 17 November 2006 (EST)

Problems with ParserFunctions

I tried to use #expr in the Sandbox-Page (Permalink), but it did nothing but errors. How can we get it to function? (it's for WikiProject:By Size: if #expr does it's job, we can enter and display page count numbers and auto-categorize the wiki page (by comparison with size class limits)) --Peu | talk 13:37, 22 November 2006 (EST)

We should do further discussion on Help:ParserFunctions or its talk page. --Peu | talk 16:33, 22 November 2006 (EST)

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