User talk:Mrxc

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.

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.

Somewhat-related question: What is the 'Atheism United' namespace for, as distinct from the default namespace (i.e. no namespace specified)?

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.

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?

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?

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.

Sub-pages

Do we have sub-page support? Can we get it if we don't? It might be useful for different organizations to be able to create their own 'mini-wiki' pages underneath their main page.

Config request

Can you set $wgCleanSignatures to 'false'? Otherwise, my new signature is going to spew ugly HTML code everytime I use it. I made a Template:Interrobang to simplify my signature, but when I try to use [[Interrobang|{{Interrobang}}]], this setting forces it to become [[Interrobang|{{SUBST:Interrobang}}]], which means the template is worthless. I don't think there are any serious downsides to setting it to false. It is briefly mentioned here, here and here. Since access to this wiki is going to be pretty limited to atheists, I don't think there is much risk of abuse. See what it looks like?: ‽ Wonderist (talk) 03:29, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Try it now --Mrxc (Talk) 07:57, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

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.

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.

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...

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)