Conservapedia talk:An illustrated guide

This is an article tmtoulouse encouraged me to write. Should the title be A pictorial guide? larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 20:12, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

No, it should be "a graphic guide" or "an illustrated guide". Graphs aren't really pictorial, except in the loosest possible sense of the word. Wèàšèìòìď^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 20:15, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Bravo sir, Bravo *begins slow clap* Z3ro^talk 20:32, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

∗begins to flush∗ larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 20:55, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Wonderful stuff. Ace McWickedⁱ⁹ 21:12, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Good pictures, but most of them if not all falls into the category of "Conservapedia:Blocking the planet", perhaps? Or do we plan to have other pictures picking on other aspects of CP? [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 21:32, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

A picture tells a thousand words. There we were, blabbering away for years, inserting nonsense and gibberish into articles, and you turn around and explain the whole thing with a very few juicy, succinct diagrams. My faith in the diagram is greatly renewed, and someone should hire you, if they haven't already done so. DogP^{Marmite Patrol} 00:02, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

You, Sir (a word we use far too little around here these days) are a genius. Take a bow. --PsyGremlin_Whut? 11:54, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

This needs an update. Tyrannis (talk) 16:48, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Motivation and scope of this article

“”Mind throwing the maps into an CP namespace article with a brief explanation of what we are seeing? There was some outside interest in your work comparing the block rates and I want to go back to promote this work you have done here as well.

—tmtoulouse 18:35, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Flattered, I started at once this article. I'd thought about such an article for a while: a table of pics with short explanations, easy to read, a pictured pictorial illustrated guide to Conservapedia. For now, it only includes a section about blocks. For the future, I'd like it to have such a structure:

• Introduction
• General Data
• Editors and Edits
• Blocks

Most pics will be of CP, but a few pics of WP will be included - just to get a realistic view.

Many of the pics of the current section blocks are used in the article Conservapedia:Blocking the planet, too. But I see no fault in re-using them for this guide.

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 22:41, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Your plans for the future sound great. I did some quick fixing of typos, one thing that still needs is to make sure the capping of CP and WP written out is consistent throughout. I mostly looked that way, but I only really looked at the second half while editing (no typos in first half...). ħuman 23:55, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Are mishaps like this, this and this, for whatever reasons, within the scope? [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 21:34, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

These events are of a more anecdotal nature, I'd prefer to include statistics based on a more significant amount of data... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:42, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Format

All the images being thumbs makes it hard to really read some of them. I made a "test section" of the last two, arbitrarily making them 600px wide, with the text below them. I think this makes it easier to do things like add headers/subheaders, etc., than one long wikitable, and also makes things easier to see. Downside - larger image rendering slows down the load time a bit. ħuman 03:25, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

• Genghis Khant, zero, human, Mountain Blue, K61824: Thanks for the much needed improvement of the text!
• The idea is that the text is easy to read and somewhat independent of the pics: I wanted to avoid direct references like the blue lines shows or look at the slope - the reader should choice whether he looks at a pic in detail. There, he may find all the necessary information.
• Therefore, I'd prefer to stick with the wikitable (or a couple of them). Using bigger pics increases the volume of the page dramatically - and the text can't be read easily, due to the heavy scrolling :-)

I'll make some changes to reflect these ideas. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 08:52, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome. Mountain Blue 10:33, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

No problem, it was just an idea. By the way, if you look at the headers I added, it seems like some later bit should be moved up? ie, put all the "blocking" together, then the "editors" data? ħuman 19:54, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely right - we should move the content creation section down. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:09, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Who deleted my explanation of the white/black dots on the square thing? Without it, the image contradicts what it is trying to show. To be really effective, people should be able to get the gist of what an image shows (which most do well) without enlarging it. And that one makes it look like WP has blocked most of the internet. There's plenty of room for text next to the images, so why not explain what they show in detail (after the snarky sentence or two that are the "story"? Perhaps in italics?) ħuman 00:05, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps ,^{thanks M. B.}there should be a third column with details of the graphs? So that the text column doesn't have to include any legends?

At the main page, the number of page views is bragged about. This number is manually updated a couple of times a week by the owner of the site. An update of the software at CP lost a couple of million page views in June, 2008.	page view at CP	355 data points, each representing a single update by Andrew Schlafly from June 27th, 2007 until June 17th, 2009 (687 days), an average of 3.6 updates a week. While there were 69.4 million page view announced on June 16th, 2008, the next entry (June 29th, 2008) features only 50.4 million page views, stating "surpass 50 million page views even with the narrower definition of a page view in the upgraded software" Another upgrade of the wikimedia software lead to an complete loss of the data for an whole week in January 2009.
It can't be said how accurate these claims are. They almost certainly include the actions of bots - like the one which gathered the data for this article.	page view at CP per week	Andrew Schlafly's page views linearly interpolated and transformed into page views per week. The week of the upgrade in 2008 is left out. The data loss in 2009 is visible, too: while in 2008, only the page views were lost, in 2009 a whole week of edits, account creations, page views etc. vanished. Most traffic occurred in November 2007 and May/June 2008, perhaps due to reports about CP in other media. The Lenski affair aroused some interest in August/September 2008.

But perhaps this is to wordy... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 11:00, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

I like it. It saves looking at the big images in most cases, making the article more "internally complete", and separates the "story" being told on the left from the explanation on the right. Might want to fix the left side column width to a consistent number so the images line up vertically? ħuman 19:38, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely! I'll prepare a third column... larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 23:43, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Great - oh, and can you align the text to the top of the cells? ħuman 23:52, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Very nice! ħuman 20:22, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Plotting tools

Just an idea. Would it work better if we use dynamic data plotting tools like this , this, this or this instead of pictures? [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 22:55, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Gchart4mw would work for the simpler pics like Schlafly's page views, as there only ~300 data points. But even a simple-looking graph like IP range blocks at WP consists from over 25,000 data points - that's a long CSV list: I don't know how the server reacts if it had to store all the raw data and make the calculations...

And frankly, I'm used to R :-) larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 23:34, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Article length

Recently someone reminded me of File:Quantifying Obsession.png, which may or may not require update. I am attempting to put the numbers somewhere in the article. Perhaps someone can give a heads up on refreshing the article length to have a refreshed picture. (Talks comes from this archive and this archive) [[User:K61824|]][[User_talk:K61824|]] 19:20, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Separate Europe/College maps?

Would it be possible to create a map of the known educational establishments/colleges that have been blocked? i.e. a map of blocked colleges/campuses/schools? DogP^{Marmite Patrol} 08:42, 28 June 2009 (UTC)