User talk:Adrignola/2010/12

Wikibooks policies and guidelines template

I noticed that in the style conventions the items listed aren't policies or guidelines. Not extremely important to users that known the status and distinctions but can be confusing to unaware Wikibookians. --Panic (talk) 23:09, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, and some of the items in the template are still proposals but for the initial contents I tried to limit it to more of the de facto guidelines. The style conventions could very well be guidelines and others could be either approved or rejected were we to kick it into gear and decide after (how many years?) what the state of things are. One of my ulterior goals with the template is to try to foster greater efforts in getting things sorted. – Adrignola talk 23:13, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Can't add to the template the use an asterisk "*" near texts that need community approval, and request WIkibookians to participate in the discussion ? (or something like that, color/font change) --Panic (talk) 23:18, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

That's a good idea. I made some changes. See what you think. – Adrignola talk 23:24, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

That makes it clearer. Thanks. --Panic (talk) 23:29, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks again!

I don't do much blocking and so I forgot to add the templates to those spammers. To my defense it was really quite late in my timezone :). Thenub314 (talk) 13:42, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm also copying the user agents, spammed domains, and CU information to the mailing list, so that the accounts can be globally locked, the domains blacklisted, and CUs at other wikis can check for spammer accounts. – Adrignola talk 13:49, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Links to moved pages.

I have no problem with deleting redirects for moved pages. However I think links for moved pages should be updated rather than striken from discussions to preserve the context of discussions as best we can, so people can continue to follow links to pages that contributors thought was relevant to the discussion. Whenever I fix links I try to use a format such as [[new page|old link text]] as a way to make the change as subtle as possible. I created {{bad link}} on the advice given to me for the cases where pages are deleted and there are no good ways to preserve context. Seeing others make use of the template gives me hope that other people see the merit in what I do. --darklama 14:55, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

I do follow the same thought. But the instances where Wikibooks:Revision review were striken were already next to Help:Revision review in places comparing the two's previously different scopes in the same sentence. Since they would have both gone to the same page it didn't make sense to have the link twice to the same destination in the same sentence. In situations where it was just Wikibooks:Revision review I did indeed correct the link. – Adrignola talk 14:57, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

In Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2010/July the wikibooks links striken was next to a wikibooks talk page link rather than the help page for example. Maybe you misread? I noticed this in a few places. --darklama 15:07, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

The errors have been corrected. – Adrignola talk 16:03, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for name correction

Thanks for fixing the name of the article. I actually know better, but I forgot. A spend a lot of time at Wikipedia and at Wikisource, where the conventions are different. -Arch dude (talk) 10:17, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Will anyone see this?

I added a suggestion at Talk:Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Team. Is that the appropriate place? Is this project active enough that others will care, or should I just implement it on my own on new pages? -Arch dude (talk) 23:52, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Blender 3D: Noob to Pro might get more attention, as the main talk page of a book is typically used to talk about the whole book. Also Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Blender 3D: Noob to Pro suggests there is quiet a bit of activity. --darklama 00:05, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! -Arch dude (talk) 17:20, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Design Patterns

BenFrantzDale has been removing examples from WP with moved to Wikibooks as the reason in their edit summaries. My best guess as to where to look for what pages might need to be imported for the Design Patterns book. --darklama 15:25, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I've left a note on their talk page and will see if I can match up removals to additions. – Adrignola talk 15:31, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Template:Dutch/Translation

Hi Adrignola

I noticed your name in the history of the above template. It used to provide dropdown panels so that you could see an exercise before looking at the solution. The functionality is somehow gone and I do not know why. I had used it quite a bit on the Dutch language course to insert practice material without interrupting to main story. All that is gone now. Any ideas?

Jcwf (talk) 23:53, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Some back-end code on the site was changed and while some templates were updated to maintain their functionality, it looks like that one was missed. I don't know how many others there are since the code doesn't involve calling a template. I actually did not make any edits to that template. I simply reviewed an edit made by another. I have, however, updated that template to work with the new code.– Adrignola talk 00:02, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! Jcwf (talk) 00:35, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Category redirects

I only just noticed you'd undone my eradication of the CAT:RFU redirect.

Hard redirects from categories should never, ever be used because they "don't work" — not in the sense that you won't be redirected automatically if you go there, but in the much worse sense that you will be redirected automatically if you go there, while pages added to the "redirecting" category will belong to that rather than the target of the redirection. Over on Wikinews, I once came across a category redirect that had one article belonging to it, that had been languishing there for years because, of course, the redirect always whisked users away to the target so they'd never notice that there was an article lost in the redirect (and therefore not properly categorized in the target). If I were remotely Bugzilla-savvy I might file a request to make the redirect magic word not work in category space, to prevent this accident waiting to happen (or vote for such a request, if there already is one).

To test-and-demonstrate the principle, as I write this, WB:Sandbox is in Category:RFU. --Pi zero (talk) 16:26, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Category redirects of this type are intended to be used as shortcuts, not for categorizing. The Wikibooks community supported the creation of the CAT shortcut. Like files I think there is work to make category redirects work by having pages show up in the target category, and so the move functionality can be enabled for categories. I much rather see you work on or vote for that functionality than disabling category redirects. Category redirects are only a problem right now when people try to use a redirected category to categorize pages, instead of just a navigational aid. --darklama 18:29, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

The reason I wouldn't try to lobby to fix what happens when a page is categorized into a redirect is that I believe that lobbying would be a complete waste of time, that is, that the devs didn't set that up because it would be expensive and there's absolutely no way they would change it.

As I recall, the community, including me, voted for the CAT namespace shorthand (if that's what you mean), but that shorthand has nothing to do with the begging-for-an-accident practice of putting redirects in category pages. It's exactly because category redirects are not meant to be populated that they should not be created in the first place: once the category exists, it's appallingly easy to accidentally put something in it (it produces a blue link, and when you click on that blue link it takes you to the right place) and appallingly easy to not notice the problem, later. --Pi zero (talk) 19:25, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes I mean the CAT namespace shorthand (or namespace alias as they are called in the software). The aliases work by utilizing the existing namespaces. A page named Wikibooks:RFC has to exist in order for WB:RFC to work too. WB:<what> just expands to Wikibooks:<what>. The same is true for the CAT shorthand. Category:RFC must exist in order for CAT:RFC to work. So in a way the shorthand is connected with the potential for redirects to be an accident waiting to happen, because Category:RFC must exist and point somewhere for CAT:RFC to work. Without Category:RFC has a redirect, people would have to use CAT:Requests_for_deletion which defeats the purpose of having shortcuts to longer names. --darklama 20:18, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

An interesting conversation being had here. The comments Pi zero makes I can understand, but that category is populated by a template and should not have anything categorized manually. I've also seen the way things are done elsewhere, where they don't use a redirect for the same reasons Pi zero states, but then they place a template tag on the page noting the category that should be used instead. But in that situation you still have a category that appears as a blue link to a user and we don't have the luxury of bots handling any recategorization in those cases if they have that set up. The real reason I undid the shortcut removal on the category was because the shortcut template was fixed by a person to allow it to work without categorizing the category it was placed on. I can only say that I thought everyone was well aware that CAT would be used like WB was before we made it an official alias. Otherwise, as Darklama points out, it defeats the purpose of the alias. – Adrignola talk 20:30, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

I've noticed the sporadic practice of soft redirects from categories. As one might guess from the above, I consider that somewhat less bad than a hard redirect, but I'd rather have no page there at all, so it'd show as a red link and HotCat would shy away from it. Even better, on top of that, would be if the page also has a deletion log entry that says what other category to use instead.

It's true of course that the category involved here should not have anything categorized manually. But keep in mind, my objection is about preventing and detecting things that happen even though they shouldn't.

When we voted in the namespace shorthands, I remember thinking the CAT shorthand wasn't very useful since redirects don't work in category space... but I invested both my thinking and my lobbying to nix the idea of multiple shorthands per namespace (on which, you'll recall, I succeeded). Thinking it through now, for purposes of shortcuts we'd be better off if we hadn't introduced shorthand CAT — because if only CAT were not shorthand for category space, we could have hard redirects from mainspace pages starting with CAT: (such as CAT:RFU), and those shortcuts could never have stuff accidentally categorized in them because they themselves wouldn't even be categories.

Other than a hard redirect from a category (which I abhor), or a soft redirect from a category (which I dislike), I see two other approaches we could take.

• We could, at least in theory, de-shorthand the CAT prefix, so that as I mentioned above we could have hard redirects like CAT:RFU in mainspace. Unfortunately, anywhere someone has used CAT: as a shorthand for an actual category, it would break — which is (somewhat ironically) the very difficulty I described when campaigning against multiple shorthands per namespace.
• Alternatively, we could just put these redirects in a different namespace. Project space seems a natural choice. Unfortunately, in this case the obvious name is already taken (WB:RFU; though possibly the moral should be that this redirect should use a different name than that one). But if we really mean the redirect to not be a functioning category, there's a certain logic to not putting it in category space.

--Pi zero (talk) 20:07, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

We could look and see whether any pages link to the redirected category. There are not too many of them and removing the alias would be very low-impact. But we'd have to have another consensus discussion for the developers to consider any requests and I see less and less community participation in such discussions. However, that's the only outcome I can envision that properly addresses the concerns. – Adrignola talk 23:13, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Odd template change?

I note that in the chapter pages for the Muggles' Guide there has been a change to the page layout. Yesterday the next chapter / prev chapter links were in the top right corner, today they are in the top left. Apparently the addition of the "From Wikibooks, open books for an open world" tagline text in the upper left has bunged up the template. I don't know enough about the way WB templates work to correct this; could I humbly request that you take a gander at it when you get the chance? Chazz (talk) 16:35, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I see it too. Removing the tagline did not fix it. I believe this edit caused this to happen, but I'm not sure of the implementation needed for "skin-independent" CSS for the topnav. Will have to investigate further. – Adrignola talk 18:24, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Based off an existing rule in MediaWiki:Common.css/top.css, I added a rule that looks to be working if you clear your cache. – Adrignola talk 23:52, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Sorry about the long time to reply... a very odd day today. Yes, that fix seems to have sorted it. Chazz (talk) 08:13, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm glad to hear that, as I too had made some changes. Hopefully both Jomegat's and your web browser rendering problems are now resolved, and these changes don't cause further problems for anyone else. I had planned to possibly hide the links back to the parent pages when top navigation is present and possible center the top navigation instead, so that a lot of other templates could also take advantage of top navigation too, but had forgotten about it until the issue with the lock icon obscuring the login link came up. --darklama 13:25, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the info on the license, I hadn't found it... --Panic (talk) 23:33, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Goliath Spider

Thanks for replacing the image. I was just getting ready to do that myself when I saw that you had beat me to the punch with the same image I had selected. I hope you have a nice Christmas. --Jomegat (talk) 13:30, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Great minds think alike. Thanks! – Adrignola talk 13:31, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Another broken template...

Don't know if you can help, but I note that if I select Differences, or compare two revisions on a History page, I no longer get the Review This Version radio buttons. I only have the chance to re-review if I select Read. This seems to have started this morning... Chazz (talk) 21:57, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

I still see the review form when viewing an old revision. I can't say I've ever noticed it when viewing the differences between two pages. Are you sure your looking in the correct place? --darklama 22:59, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

I went to the diff link and ended up here -- I can still see the diffs, but I cannot see the Review This Revision buttons. If I go to the Read tab, the "Re-review this revision" buttons are right down at the bottom, below the category. Chazz (talk) 23:14, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

I've never seen a review this revision form when viewing diffs. If you click the "Revision as of" or "Current revision as of" link, you will see a specific revision and the form for reviewing or re-reviewing that revision is at the bottom. --darklama 23:28, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Curious, because I remember seeing it, and using it, though I can't recall whether it was right above or right below the diffs, up until this morning... Chazz (talk) 23:43, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, if you read the documentation created for the reviewing system at WB:REVIEW, the last thumbnail shows File:Diff reviewing toolbar.png, which is only seen when you click a "review" or "pending changes" link on recent changes or the page itself, respectively. – Adrignola talk 01:19, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Exactly... and now, when looking at a diff, I no longer see that. The link I posted above is exactly the sort of diff described at the thumbnail, and one where I saw that "review this revision" yesterday, and the review toolbar is no longer present. Chazz (talk) 01:41, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

You won't see the bar once the pending changes are reviewed, though. Try any of the "review" links at Special:PendingChanges and let me know if the bar still doesn't appear. – Adrignola talk 01:46, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Okay... allow me to rephrase. The revision toolbar shows up if a revision is unchecked. It does not show up if a revision has been automatically checked. The reason I'm seeing this is because I'm chasing after PNW Raven, who leaves her edits auto-checked rather than approving them; generally, I'll do a diff to see her changes and confirm a lack of typos, then re-review to approve and keep the pages we're actually happy with at the Good quality level. Used to be I could look at what she had done, and then review on the same page. Now I have to check what she's done, pop into the Read page, scroll down to the bottom and re-review there. One extra annoying step... Chazz (talk) 01:50, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

┌──────────────────────────┘
Well, while I'm in the same boat as Darklama, I can't say that the process you use is one I've ever engaged in. I do notice that categories no longer appear at the bottom of a page when I'm looking at the pending changes diff now. That recent update they did also removed the ability to prioritize higher-rated revisions for pages that show the reviewed version by default. Looks like the problems you're having are another result. I don't know that I can do anything to resolve this, but I definitely share your frustrations with changes being made without consultation to a system extensively used by Wikibooks and German Wikipedia in order to placate those at English Wikipedia who felt it just wasn't good enough for them. – Adrignola talk 02:01, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I guess I should probably have mentioned there are review preferences that may be related to this. I have seen diffs after reviewing a revision and a diff link for pages with revisions that have not yet been reviewed, when I have had those options enabled. However like I said I've never seen a review form on a normal diff page itself before. The form being available from a normal diff could be ambiguous as to which revision is to be reviewed, not to mention it could mean review both or what the affect should be on any intermediate revisions not shown. I must say I'm a bit skeptical that it ever was the case because of that problem and since I've never seen it for myself, which is why I asked you before if you were sure you were looking in the correct place for the review form. I guess I should also mention that I think they recently tried to integrate "pending changes'" diff more with mediawiki's default diff, so the distinction between mediawiki's diff and "pending changes'" diff that I had pictured in my mind may be irrelevant now. --darklama 12:20, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Plenty of clarity deficiency to go around, I guess... I will say that I never had any problem guessing which revision I was reviewing, it was always the more recent of the two in view, same as the text following is always the more recent of the two. Perhaps my use is a little specialized, that of an actual editor rather than author/editor. But it's because of that use that I was aware of the existence of the revision review on a normal diff page; I knew it was there because I used it heavily, and now it's gone. But if it's a mediawiki decision, there's little we as a minor project can do about it... Chazz (talk) 16:07, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Right. As pointed out seems to still be there when a revision has not been previously checked at all. I guess Wikipedians felt that people who have their edits auto checked should be trusted to know what they are doing or that a revision needing to be rechecked is a rare case. --darklama 16:47, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Incubation

I was first interested in incubation because of an idea that has evolved into NYCwiki. That project actually has a good home now. But I have seen many interesting proposals on meta and foundation-l that have not been able to find any home, and where I think a solution with Wikibooks could be beneficial to all.--Pharos (talk) 18:15, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

FYI, I've started a very brief draft here: Wikibooks:Incubator.--Pharos (talk) 21:35, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Feedback Needed

You have been watching and reviewing my contribution in "Technical Analysis". I need your feedback on how do I improve quality my contributions. (Yndesai (talk) 13:22, 29 December 2010 (UTC))

My reviewing has simply been anti-vandalism patrol, really, but I'll note what appears to me to be the best area for improvement. You will want to consider splitting the single Technical Analysis page up into subpages. Using Wikibooks/How To Structure A Wikibook can provide detailed information on this. At that point it truly becomes a book, rather than a page. If you have questions, feel free to ask. – Adrignola talk 19:10, 29 December 2010 (UTC)