Wiki meta issues

==Move along, nothing to see here==
This page is for the use of regular contributors and staff of the Caledon wiki to discuss issues of style and policy.--Otenth 20:28, 16 March 2008 (MDT)
Should we make this a "talk" page so that the + tab appears for us to add to a discussion? --Excalibur Longstaff 12:26, 17 March 2008 (MDT)
So let's see. We can have a talk page to talk about a page intended to talk about policy. Lewis Carroll would be proud. (insert broad grin here) I used it, btw, I'm really not picking on anyone. The oddity of it all just hit me somehow. Valentine Janus 13:41, 17 March 2008 (MDT)
: It's the necessity of editing the who conversation if we do it on this page versus a talk page (which has a "+" tab for adding an item at the end without editting the whole page). And yes I agree Lewis Carroll would be proud. :) --Excalibur Longstaff 23:53, 17 March 2008 (MDT)
And now I am totally confused. It seems that we should be talkng about wiki issues here, and discussing the discussion of wiki issues on the Talk:Wiki meta issues page. But whatever. As long as we're talking, it's good! --Vi.Paravane 22:35, 17 March 2008 (MDT)
I saw something new today: red exclamation marks beside some of the entries on the "Recent changes" page. What does that mean? --Vi.Paravane 11:22, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
: That's part of the new role you have. It has to do with patrolled edits. (Whatever those are.) You can safely ignore them. --Otenth 12:37, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
:: It means "You're Somebody Now!" ;-) Seriously, each exclamation mark represents an unpatrolled edit. Any time a curator looks at an unpatrolled item, they get the option to mark it as patrolled -- i.e. someone responsible has seen it and it's not bad for the wiki. Curator edits are always treated as patrolled by default. As we build the team, it will be good to make more use of the patrol feature so we're confident that nobody is sliding in bad content. (So far, of course, the community has been every bit as great as we would expect from Caledonians. But I did have to do my first user block the other day.) Valentine Janus 12:42, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
::: I just had a wave of spam account signups on the forums (I am confident "Free Porn" is not a valid SL user name) but thanks to the 3-step process no actual spam was posted. My thought for integrating log in between the forums and wiki site was to have the wiki login consult the forums and if the information used here matched an existing user on forums (password and all) go ahead and add them and sign them in here. The least invasive way of doing that from the standpoint of the independent wiki would be to still allow signup here even if there was no account there (no one is *forced* to participate in the forums to use the wiki, and the user database would be separate allowing the option of alternate hosting arrangements later without everything "breaking").
I just patrolled everything in the first 50, and remembered that I need to add a point -- if you patrol an edit (not a new page) it is best done by clicking the (diff) link on the left. That brings up the side-by-side comparison of changes, and in the header of the right-hand column you get the option to click a link and mark the revision as patrolled. Valentine Janus 12:48, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
: Well. <smoothes her skirts and beams> It's good to know that I can actually do something with the new title. What else should I look to undertake? --Vi.Paravane 13:04, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
:: I'd say you're already doing it. A promotion such as this is simply recognizing how obviously indespensible you have become. --Excalibur Longstaff 17:36, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
* CaledonWiki skin
I had thought to put the google search up in the preferences bar (the woodgrain background) but have put that off for some time due to the need to resize it and move things below it out of the way without knocking down the nice CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) house of cards (there are no fewer than half a dozen patch CSS files to compensate for the ways various versions of Internet Explorer and Opera do not implement the CSS standards in a standard way). As the front page has gotten more and more spartan I found myself again wishing for a better location for the google search (it's a cheap way to let Google know about our site and does serve a legitimate purpose). For the time being I have moved it to the bottom of the content area (it already automagically disappears when the page is printed) and in the process moved the included file to the skins directory and added a test for the existance of the vertical banner ad (I wanted to remove or at least reduce dependency on directories not a part of the wiki or this skin). If you still see the google search at top of screen you may need to clear your browser cache. --Excalibur Longstaff 17:36, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
* Using native MediaWiki preset groups
Upon closer examination the hard coding of the words "sysop" and "bureaucrat" were even deeper than originally evident. In the interests of restoring lost wiki functionality, making exports of this wiki more interchangeable with other wiki (most notably wikia.com) *and* to prevent things from breaking when we eventually upgrade to a newer version of MediaWiki later down the road, I am going to attempt to revert to the original group names. 
I now know how to read the binary blobs in the mySQL database exports (there is a setting that shows them in more human readable form) and look at a dump of the database in that form I found that the software was injecting the word 'sysop' in even more places. The only place I seem able to use our local terms "curator" and "librarian" is in the language localization section. It now appears my rewrite of the term throughout the source was not agressive enough. --Excalibur Longstaff 20:01, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
: Okay, all better. We are now running an essentially generic version of MediaWiki and can upgrade when new versions are released (our customization is now limited to the languages/messages/MessagesEn.php and the LocalSettings.php which I will include in our next semi-regular site backup). The only side effect to *not* including the MessagesEn.php would be "Curators" and "Librarians" would show under the MediaWiki terms "Sysops" and "Bureaucrats". *WHEW* --Excalibur Longstaff 20:42, 18 March 2008 (MDT)
* Glossary vs Wikipedia approach
When I google "Define: <term>" I often get a reference to wikipedia which is organized with a term per page. While I think a glossary page is a great idea it is ok to have a page per term. The database "cost" per page is minimal (since MediaWiki is designed to support the Wikipedia approach of having lots of pages with just snippets of data). The advantage is visitors can type caledonwiki.com/wiki/term and be taken right to the subject. Now having said that I am not sure there is one "right answer" as to how we should do things, and answering the question "What would Wikipedia do?" does not necessarily answer the question of what we should do. For my money more ways of getting to the same information improves usefulness of the resource. --Excalibur Longstaff 13:11, 21 March 2008 (MDT)
: I was the one that pushed the Glossary to begin with. I am more than willing to reverse myself. We could create a new Category:Terms for such pages, and move everything out of the Glossary to independent pages. Valentine Janus 13:22, 21 March 2008 (MDT) 
:: I'm not sure this is a case where there is one right answer. If someone is moved to create a page for a definition or add a word to a glossary it isn't critical (IMO) that we necessarily have it in one form or another. It is an ad hoc effort will always have the randomizing factor of new contributors inserting things without an understanding of our style guidelines. By the same token if those of us contributing editing work are moved to (for example) add a reference in a glossary to a stand alone page with more detail we shouldn't hesitate, and likewise if it seems more appropriate for a brief definition to move into a glossary with a redirect from the named page, that will in some cases be the best thing from the standpoint of everyone finding information they seek. As the glossary has evolved it seemed to me likely that there would be more than one, for example one for GirlGenius. --Excalibur Longstaff 01:23, 27 March 2008 (MDT)
* Profiles and similar pictures
As a style point I am inclined to right align and "thumbnail" images (using a size parameter to keep them from being too small) such as user portraits. Since we seem to upload the same 160x160 images used in the forums (which is actually a little bit larger than the defaults for phpBB...as I recall the default was 100 or 120), it seems natural to standardize on that (to the extent anyone can actually make standards stick on an ad hoc community maintained database). If I see an image someone has already sized and framed differently I am inclined to leave it alone, since that might have been an artistic or stylistic preference on the part of the page creator. Anyone have thoughts on this? --Excalibur Longstaff 19:33, 6 April 2008 (MDT)
: Seems like a good thing to me. I changed the pic in my profile and it looks nice that way. --Vi.Paravane 22:50, 6 April 2008 (MDT)
Category:Sandbox