Difference between revisions of "User talk:Mrxc"

Latest revision as of 11:55, 5 November 2011

From Wonderist (talk)

Interwiki support

Do we have interwiki support yet? If so, is there documentation on it? My plan is to make links to the MediaWiki site, especially its Help namespace really easy to link to so that we can much more easily use their existing help pages without having to duplicate everything. Also, interwiki would be good for Wikipedia links. These should be really super easy for people to link to, for a couple reasons:

• If we have any serious discussions among members of the community, on whatever topic, allowing them to easily link to Wikipedia articles would save a lot of time and reduce duplication of effort.
• This will make our wiki more usable, and hence more popular with people who use it.
• It will also make people more likely to include links in their discussions, which we encourage anyway as part of rational discourse, and providing evidence.
• More links == more popular in Google. Links to Wikipedia are especially good links.

You can see a list of them here:

• http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/wmf/1.18wmf1/maintenance/interwiki.sql

For example, there is already a "wikipedia" entry that goes to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$1"

--Mrxc (Talk) 08:07, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Additional namespaces

I notices we have several namespaces I've never seen before, like the 'MediaWiki' namespace, and the 'Atheism United' namespace. I didn't realize MediaWiki supported so many namespaces. Is it very easy to add arbitrary namespaces of our own? Just curious.

Might be useful to have a Group namespace as a parallel to the User namespace. E.g. Group:American Atheists would be more 'officially' their page than American Atheists might be. Just like User:Brian is more Brian's than Brian Sapient might be. If you catch my drift.

Mrxc: See:

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Namespace
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces

I think that we can use the built in ones for most of our needs.

--Mrxc (Talk) 08:38, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Inter-RRS links

This would be totally awesome in a huge way: Some BBCode tweak to allow us to link to this wiki super-easily, and some sort of inter-wiki tweak to allow us to link from this wiki to RRS super-easily. I cannot stress enough how awesome this would be. Not asking for it right away, but it would be good to know how feasible it is or isn't.

An Interwiki entry would work if the destination URL will work with the article name formatting (spaces get converted to "_", etc). --Mrxc (Talk) 08:41, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Categories

Searching/merging

I'm trying to get a handle on the category system. One thing I would really like to see would be a way to 'merge' the lists of pages from two (or more) categories, so that I could do like Boolean filtering searches like Urgent AND Stub, or Atheist OR Agnostic. The former is probably easier than the latter, and honestly I'd be happy with just that. But does such a feature exist anywhere?

I am not aware of that, although maybe something clever can be done with templates. Including a template into an article can assign it to a category if that category is in the template. Maybe you can create a template where it is possible to pass in an importance of urgent, and have it conditionally assigned to a "Category:Stub-Urgent" or something. But I do not see a way around having to make additional categories. This seems like it would be ideal for large sites, but for our size, I think that a single urgent category will be fine. Maybe we can have different ones depending on the audience that you are seeking attention from. --Mrxc (Talk) 08:16, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Sub- and super-category trails

I'm also trying to make the sub- and super-categories work nicely. Right now, on the Atheism United page, at the bottom, you see a list of categories, including their super-categories. But there are duplicates like Category:Stub appears several times, because I have marked several category pages as stubs.

I think this is a bug. Certainly it makes it much harder to work with sub-categories, which seem like they would be very useful. Is there some way to fix this, or a workaround?

Mrxc: For categories to work correctly here, the category cannot include the stub category unless the category really is a subcategory of stub. --Mrxc (Talk) 08:27, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

I kinda thought you might get caught-up on that minor detail. But it's not only the Stub category that causes this problem, as I explained in the next paragraph vvvvv ‽ Wonderist (talk) 08:50, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

This is sort of connected to the 'searching/merging' question, because if I only put the Category:Community on the Category:Online forum, and only put Category:Online forum on the Rational Response Squad page, then when you go to the Category:Community category page, you won't see Rational Response Squad in the alphabetical list. So a dilemma: 1) You have to add both Category:Community and Category:Online forum in order to have it listed in both categories, but 2) when you do that, Category:Community shows up twice in the category trail at the bottom of the page.

How To namespace

I think it would be really useful to have a bunch of how to pages, to help get people really up-to-speed on how to use the wiki effectively. Either a 'How To' or a 'How to' namespace would be very helpful for that. Each page in the 'How To' namespace would be titled in such a way as to complete a phrase that begins "How to ...", and would be linked like this How to:open a door. Now that I see it written out like that, I think lowercase 'to' would be best.

If there is a way to make one namespace a kind of 'sub' namespace of another one, then 'How to' should be a sub-namespace to the 'Help' namespace. If not, then no big deal.

For the stubs, I do not think that there is a link between the namespaces by article name. I think that some of these namespaces could just be regular articles with a specific category. Remember that the search feature only searches the main namespace by default. --Mrxc (Talk) 08:49, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Admin/mod, ModeHelp, and Meta namespace

If it's possible to restrict access to a particular namespace, then having an 'admin' or 'mod' namespace would be really great for being able to have administrative discussions, like a mod forum.

It would also be good to have a ModHelp namespace to parallel the Help namespace, but which only discusses help related to running the wiki.

Finally, it would be good to have a Meta namespace where we can have discussions/feedback about the site and wiki itself, such as bugs or feature requests, rules/guidelines, etc.

MediaWiki does not have ACLs on pages, so this would be best done in Drupal via the forums. It would be nice if the accounts were linked. --Mrxc (Talk) 08:45, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Other random ideas

• Voting/polling support. Perhaps a Vote namespace to go along with it (so the names of various votes don't pollute the general wiki namespace).
• Community discussion support. This goes along with the idea of not falling into the trap of becoming a Wikipedia mini-clone. Although User Talk pages are nice, it would be awesome if we could have more robust discussions. I suppose the ..._talk namespaces could support additional pages beyond simply mirroring their main namespaces.
• Event and Event_talk namespace. We've already got a request for whether we allow/support atheism-related event announcements.
• Argh! Too many ideas! They won't stop coming! .... sleeeep......
• to be continued...

We also have Drupal to think about too :-) --Mrxc (Talk) 08:32, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Amazon links

Hey XC, sorry to dump all these ideas on you. I do respect your time; hope I didn't come across as pushy. They are only meant as ideas, things to think about. I tend to operate in continuous brainstorm mode.

Anyway, how should we do Amazon links? I mentioned this on User_talk:Brian. It would be good to use a template or similar thing that automatically generates the link and adds in the 'tag' for Amazon partnership. Do we have one for Atheism United itself, or should we use the RRS one for now? I think eventually we should have an Atheism United one, tho.

We're going to continue for now to share the RRS account because Amazon pays based on how many items sell. Our pooled sales will pay more. What I do need is to make sure that we can link to Amazon links, and if there is a way to create a template forcing all amazon pages to have our tag at the end of it, that would be amazing. If we could just type [amazon|itemid] or something like that. Wonderist, post that tag again? (I don't use it like that so I forget it) --Brian 01:37, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

I've come up with Template:Book link, and Template:Movie link, based on a more-generic Template:Product link. Currently they all render identically, but I separated them since I imagined it likely that they would need different kinds of tweaks in the future. E.g. we might add an IMDB link to the movie one, or some formatting differences or something.

Also, I had to add our tag to the spam whitelist. This means other tags will not be allowed. ‽ Wonderist (talk) 11:54, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

From Brian

we need Template:Infobox Organization

we need Template:Infobox Organization as used on Secular Students page --Brian 00:58, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Done. --Mrxc (Talk) 07:58, 31 October 2011 (UTC)