User talk:Teratornis/Wiki tasks

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Comments are welcome

Note to everyone: if you have any comments to share on topics in User:Teratornis/Wiki tasks, please share them here, rather than on my user page itself. I will edit the user page to reflect any consensus that emerges here. Note that I am new to RationalWiki, I have no destructive powers, and I won't do anything that seems remotely crazy until I run it by at least one person who seems not to be. --Teratornis 02:41, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

No, no! Crazy is good, crazy is very good...the crazier your idea the faster you should implement it and the less consensus you should build! Expand the insanity, embrace the chaos! Zhakrin ^Kallisti 02:46, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Don't listen to Zhakrin, he's insane ;) human 07:23, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Does he live by his own advice? --Teratornis 16:28, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

(undent) I now have destructive powers, but I promise to be good. --Teratornis 00:56, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

Categories

There is no need for cats to be tree-structured - especially here, since we aren't a 'pedia of any kind. human 17:53, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

At the risk of asking a stupid question - what would be the advantages/disadvantages of doing this? To put it another way, why is the present situation a problem?--Bob^{'s your uncle} 04:30, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Your question is far from stupid; I was going to get to that. And thanks for asking, thereby giving me the excuse to share my views as if I am merely trying to be helpful rather than hectoring (a thin pretext, but it's all I've got). So, pull up a goat (I still don't know what that means, although it sounds vaguely obscene and therefore potentially interesting) and get comfortable, while I rev up my blather engine and dust off my gallows humor.

First of all, in my own experience at learning to edit on MediaWiki, and from what I have observed of others, categories tend to be one of the most initially baffling features. (To get a taste of just how complex categories and discussions about them can get, feast your eyes on the links at wp:WP:EIW#Cat.) Even experienced editors are usually thinking in terms of the specific page they are writing about, rather than in terms of how to categorize the page. The result is that a typical wiki ends up with a category scheme that isn't really a scheme at all, just some hit-or-miss categories that more or less randomly group some (not all) pages into isolated islands of information, depending on who happened to think about categories as they were working on something else. While disconnected categories are still useful for finding pages that relate to a given page, they don't enable efficient browsing through an entire site via the category pages themselves, or even browsing to pages that are more than "one degree of Kevin Bacon" away. The only entry point(s) into categories will be category links on articles themselves, so there won't be any hierachical entry point into categories at all (although I did see that RationalWiki conflates the notion of "portals" with "categories" to some degree, making for more entry points).

Now, of course, a wiki does not need one or more comprehensive categorization schemes; a wiki does not need categories at all. People could still find stuff using Search, links, Special pages, and so on. Wiki technology is popular in part because it provides many ways to organize and search information. Categories represent a refinement that people will tend to add on after the fact, that is, after a wiki has enough content to start making category schemes apparent. In other words, a well-developed category scheme indicates a well-developed wiki, one on which a number of people have thought about their content on a level higher than the individual article. In general, there is a logical division of labor between article authors, and article categorizers (just as book publishers don't ask authors to index their own books, they hire people who specialize in indexing).

I should address Human's "'pedia" comment. Yes, I know RationalWiki is not an encyclopedia, and RationalWiki is especially not Wikipedia. However, this only makes a (roughly) tree-structured category scheme more practical, due to the manageably smaller size of RationalWiki. Wikipedia itself does not have a tree-structured category scheme, and specifically advises against trying to impose one. Wikipedia is simply too large to cram into one tree, so it ends up with multiple categorizations schemes, each one being quite extensive, and each scheme typically containing some cycles, thus making it not a tree.

The MediaWiki software has some special pages relating to categories. Two of them are particularly helpful for analyzing problems with the existing categories on a wiki:

• Special:UncategorizedCategories - displays the degree of disconnectedness between categories, that is, the number of category browsing dead-ends. Another way to view this page is that it counts the number of distinct category schemes (many of which might contain only the one uncategorized category itself).
• Special:UncategorizedPages - actually displays the number of uncategorized articles, because it only shows uncategorized pages in the main article space.

These special pages are somewhat analogous to Special:WantedPages, in that they measure certain types of unfinished work on a wiki. Uncategorized pages and categories are considered undesirable, in something like the way red links are undesirable.

Note the distinct pattern in the above two pages: obviously, RationalWiki's users have done an excellent job of making sure almost every article is in at least one category, because there are only three uncategorized pages (really only two, because Main Page arguably doesn't need to be categorized). In sharp contrast, RationalWiki has a large number of uncategorized categories, suggesting its user community hasn't gotten as far yet with the concept of subcategorization. The result, at the moment, is that RationalWiki does not support a satisfying category-browsing experience, what with the dozens of dead-ends.

On a wiki that does have most of its categories categorized, and connected enough to become browseable from any starting point, users gain another way to explore the site content. One can arbitrarily select one category to act as "the" top-level category, that is, a category analogous to the Main Page in that it is not a subcategory of any other category. And to make category browsing easy for new users to find, one can add a link to that category to the MediaWiki:Sidebar page so it shows up in the navigation box. To see a partially-implemented example of this, check out Bicycling Wiki (and try not to puke at the ugly design of the Main Page there, everyone can see that site has its own problems too). The navigation | Categories link provides an easy entry into the category scheme for the site. Again, because that site is small, a single category scheme remains manageable.

In summary I should stress that I don't intend to change the categorization of any page (or at least, so far I haven't seen any categorizations that appear to be broken). Rather, I'm talking about two basic tasks:

• Analyzing the uncategorized categories, and thinking about how to categorize most of them into other categories (either existing categories which are already more general, or new categories which would generalize several existing categories).
• Adding a link to "the" top-level category (if we can reasonably end up with one, and I suspect we can, easily) to the MediaWiki:Sidebar page, to allow even brand-new visitors to discover and browse our categories without having to become rocket scientists first.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Again, I won't do anything until consensus emerges. --Teratornis 16:14, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

While the above essay is fairly complete, I should add that the CategoryTree extension becomes useful when the categories on a wiki are connected enough to eliminate most of the uncategorized categories. (RationalWiki does not appear to have CategoryTree installed yet - something else I might eventually ask our overburdened Bureaucrats to consider installing.) To see CategoryTree in action on a very large category scheme, visit wp:Category:Categories. --Teratornis 16:25, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

OK - so it's another way to browse the site - for those who are used to browsing that way. To be honest I've never browsed any wiki that way, - but that may well say more about me than the software. How much effort would be involved for the advantage (if the mob does, indeed, think there would be an advantage).--Bob^{'s your uncle} 16:40, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

Not much. I could do the first part myself (categorizing all the existing categories) in a few hours. (At the moment there are 79 categories, so the minimum work would be to add 79 category links to them, and create Category:Categories. The actual work would probably be a little more, because we probably need some intermediate categories to group similar existing categories together. Making every category a subcategory of the top-level category makes for a shallow fat tree, and that's usually not the most efficient way to browse (although MediaWiki allows multiple independent category schemes to coexist, so it's possible to have shallow fat trees alongside tall thin trees, if someone wants to build them).) Then any administrator could add a link to the top-level category in about one minute. The nice thing about category browsing is that it's so cheap to set up, in contrast to creating a site index, which will take me quite a bit longer. Not many wikis have decent category schemes, and MediaWiki does not by default have a navigation box link to a top-level category, so most wikis don't do much to encourage people to browse by categories. In my observations of how people use wikis, some people "get" categories, and some do not. For those who do, it's nice to provide the option. We may be spending more total time between me explaining what I want to do and others trying to understand it than it would take me to just do it, but I'm not complaining. I think everybody who wants to do something that is unfamiliar to other people owes them an explanation. And if we want to document the resulting category scheme, I now have a head start. --Teratornis 02:10, 15 October 2007 (EDT)

Administrators

This site is somewhat anarchic. I'm afraid that nobody can really said to be "in charge" - it is, apparently, a "mobocracy".--Bob^{'s your uncle} 15:05, 13 October 2007 (EDT)

Navigation templates

Ah, I went and read what they are, and we have built a few so far - there's one for US discrimination law, one for conservapedia, one for human sexuality, one for law in general. Off the top of my head. Don't know if we put a logical fallacy or logic one together yet. The sex one lists 13 random selections from the cat and adds the article it's on to the cat (for example). The discrimlaw one os more wp-like, linking to a category and also several prominent articles. Are there things we could/should be taking advantage of with these that we aren't?

• template:sex
• template:law
• template:discrimlaw
• template:conservapedia

Quick links for ya. We may have a couple more, I just can't remember. human 20:04, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

The original comment was:

Have you even looked the homepage yet? IE, the "best of RW" thing? By the way, I think you are tool. human 21:32, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

RationalWiki:Contents (the page linked from the "Best of RationalWiki" entry in MediaWiki:Sidebar here) uses table coding to do what the templates in wp:Category:Table and column templates do more compactly. I see that the Quote mining article linked from RationalWiki:Contents is not currently in Category:Best of RationalWiki which may be an oversight; I will analyze the existing category structure there, and if necessary correct the omission. However, that's not what I'm talking about. By "navigation templates" I refer to navigation boxes like these:

• wp:Template:Relevance fallacies
• wp:Template:Dawkins

which appear at the bottoms of articles such as these, respectively:

• wp:Style over substance fallacy
• wp:Richard Dawkins

Wikipedia has thousands of navigation templates. Until now, I hadn't heard of anyone who questioned the self-evident value of these templates. For example, a [[Template:Best of RationalWiki]] navigation box would look nice at the bottom of each article in Category:Best of RationalWiki (or perhaps separate navigation templates corresponding to the subcategories of Category:Best of RationalWiki, to keep them smaller), but I thought I would start by making a [[Template:Help]] first (corresponding to Category:Help - which, by the way, has a bunch of articles whose category links lack sort keys, which matters because all the Help pages are in the RationalWiki namespace - yet another item to correct). --Teratornis 20:11, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

To comment quickly before I get another edit conflict, it looks like the templates you linked (template:discrimlaw, etc.) are in an infobox style. That's fine, but on Wikipedia the "navigation box" style goes across the bottom of a page, leaving room for infoboxes along the right side. It looks like the info(nav)boxes currently on RationalWiki use hard-coded tables. The navigation boxes on Wikipedia use wp:Template:Navbox to do the heavy lifting. I have a version of that template exported to another wiki already, so I can easily bring that here. However, I'm leaving my computer so I might not get to it for a while. --Teratornis 20:16, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

Got the EC anyway!

Yes, I know that's what you meant (now). Did you look at the ones we have (we tend to put them on the side, but we're dumb that way)? And yes, you just pointed out a few good ones we could use (the BO cats; the help articles). Feel like porting over a decent example and populating some of those pages? I'm sure others will join in and help when they see it happening in recent changes! human 20:21, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

I looked at the ones you linked, because I don't consider links a failure to communicate, I consider links fun to click on. Some pages on Wikipedia use right-side navigation boxes like that (for some reason, that seems to be fairly common on some WikiProject pages there, such as wp:Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics - I don't know whether that is historical, or deliberate). In articles, putting navigation boxes on the bottom allows room on the right for infoboxes, as I mentioned above. It doesn't look like RationalWiki has adopted the infobox fad yet, either; we'll get to that later. Wikipedia is a good source to steal useful features from, because Wikipedia has the largest and probably most merciless user community of any wiki, so any feature that becomes widespread on Wikipedia has to seem valuable to a very large and tough crowd.

I hope others will join in too, because others will be more familiar with the article content here and the logical way to group articles. Having lots of navigation templates will make it easier to build my Index, because I will be able to index many articles at once merely by transcluding a template. The index will not only list a bunch of articles, but it will also display the available navigation boxes. --Teratornis 00:46, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

Sort key

We've been using defaultsort to alphabetize people by last name; will sortkey strip the namespace prefix from them as well? human 20:24, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

According to wp:WP:CAT#Setting a default sort key, which I of course found by checking the Editor's index to Wikipedia, the answer appears to be yes. I'm still in the habit of using code like this:

• [[Category:Some category|{{PAGENAME}}]]

because I started with MediaWiki 1.7, and {{DEFAULTSORT}} appears to have originated with version 1.10. Time to upgrade what passes for my brain, I see. I'll test this by fixing the category links on the Category:Best of RationalWiki pages now. --Teratornis 00:28, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

Yeah, defaultsort is cool because it works on all categories. Whoa, wait a minute, did I teach you something about the software? Did not expect that! Anyway, I appreciate your input and schooling on how to manage wiki stuff. human 00:35, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

No, I had heard of {{DEFAULTSORT}} already, but I hadn't upgraded my habits. Obviously it's more efficient to type one magic word if a page with a namespace prefix has many category links. It also might be more newb-friendly, because then the newbs don't have to think about sort keys when they add more category links to a page. (I did, however, first hear of DPL here. I expect to learn new things on every wiki I look at, and so far that's been true every time.) By the way, is there any hour of the day when you aren't logged on here? What wiki is this again, oh yeah {{SITENAME}}. --Teratornis 00:51, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

(undent) Wikipedia also has a wp:Template:DEFAULTSORT, but I haven't figured out what the template provides that the magic word doesn't already do. --Teratornis 00:59, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

Oh, "dpl" rulzorz!!! Even though most of us don't understand what it can do. We just copy and paste and pretend to be smart! human 01:01, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

No subpages in RationalWiki: namespace

(discussion moved from User talk:Teratornis to keep it with my tasks page)

{{DEFAULTSORT:{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}

What does that do? Make cats ignore the space it's in? I am assuming so... human 01:59, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

I explained it in User:Teratornis/Wiki tasks#Categories, although you have to follow the links I gave there. --Teratornis 02:02, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

A simple yes or no would suffice. human 02:07, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

Actually it wouldn't. {{DEFAULTSORT:{{SUBPAGENAME}}}} is also an attempt to ignore everything to the left of the rightmost slash character in the page name, as you would know by following the links I gave in my document describing what I am doing. I document my work so I don't have to explain it twice (or N times), as I am doing now. But for some reason I haven't figured out yet, {{SUBPAGENAME}} does not work correctly on some of the help pages, for example: Help:Bored where it works exactly like {{PAGENAME}} instead. This is very peculiar, since it works on other pages (actually, it doesn't work anywhere in the RationalWiki: namespace, which doesn't actually have subpages; see below). I will have to see if this is a bug in MediaWiki, perhaps a "known issue" I don't know about. Or maybe I am doing something really stupid. I can't see what I could be doing wrong, since I am pasting in the same code every time. --Teratornis 02:14, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

I don't want to follow endless links for simple explanations. I am asking, what does it do? What is it supposed to do? Since it doesn't friggin' work, simple explanations might save you trouble and earn you fame. Otherwise, I'm floundering. As I did when I added it to a page and it didn't "help". Surely, you have explained this elsewhere, and can copy that explanation here? (PS, not every MW installation is identical? Is that the problem?) human 02:20, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

(undent) I see the problem. Whoever set up the RationalWiki: namespace did not enable subpages there (I don't know whether that was deliberate; maybe this is a problem nobody noticed yet). We can tell by looking at the top of a (currently) pseudo-subpage like: Help:Edit summary abbreviations and noticing there is no automatic link at the top of the page to its parent page. Thus MediaWiki does not recognize the slash character as a subpage delimiter in a page name such as Help:Edit summary abbreviations. Thus I would have to hard-code the sort key as the page name component I want, like this: {{DEFAULTSORT:Edit summary abbreviations}}, which would require more manual editing, and would create a maintenance problem. Obviously a better solution is to enable subpages in the RationalWiki: namespace, although why they aren't already enabled I don't understand, because I thought that was the default behavior for a Project: namespace on a MediaWiki wiki. --Teratornis 02:26, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

Ah, that explains a lot, thank you. Not that I can fix it... but user:tmtoulouse might be able to - between school work, at least. That's what I thought that thing was supposed to do, funny that it isn't an automatic MW thing. I guess life needs larnin' all the time! Drop Trent (the aforementioned timmy too loose) a note on his talk page, or better yet email him, for the extension (?) you need installed. He'll get it done. human 02:36, 25 October 2007 (EDT) (apologies for the red link!!!)

By the way, parent links on the help page subpages would kick ass. How did we fuck that up? human 02:39, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

I was trying to tell you when you gave me another edit conflict (grrr - when will MediaWiki 2.0 come out and give us LiquidThreads that will supposedly make talk pages actually usable?). Actually what we need is an edit to LocalSettings.php on your server. RationalWiki has several custom namespaces, and most likely the person who set those up neglected to specify the RationalWiki: namespace as having user subpages in the $wgNamespacesWithSubpages variable. I could fix it in a few minutes if I had shell access to your server, but you would be completely off your goat to give me that. Since the solution is simple, I will go ahead and add the default sort key that doesn't yet work to the remaining help pages (oh, I should be using a bot for this, but I'm not that far along yet), and then they will start sorting properly when user:tmtoulouse applies the one-minute fix to LocalSettings.php. --Teratornis 02:47, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

I left a cry for help in User talk:Tmtoulouse#No subpages in RationalWiki: namespace. If the problem is what I think it is, he should only need a minute to fix it. --Teratornis 03:10, 25 October 2007 (EDT)

The variables are set up correctly for all namespaces, but the main space is not acting accordingly. Something deeper is going on. No guarantee on when it can be fixed. Depends on my time and the complexity of the issue. tmtoulouse ^plague 16:26, 28 October 2007 (EDT)

paypal?

You haven't figured that bandwagon yet? Very useful, if you like "eBay" (an internet auction site). human 01:47, 28 October 2007 (EDT)

Although it probably constitutes an Appeal to spite, each time you revert my edits, I wait another π days to think about donating. I also think God kills a kitten. --Teratornis 15:02, 28 October 2007 (EDT)