Wikispooks talk:Community portal

Welcome to the WikiSpooks Community discussion page. This is the place for Wikispooks discussions which relate to the site as a whole, rather than just particular pages. All Wikispooks editors are encouraged to contribute thoughts relevant to developing the software and community behind the Wikispooks project.

Software

Features

• "Export to PDF" (like Wikipedia has) could be good. I printed one of these pages once, and it came with a lot of unneeded fluff.

Subpages

More standardisation might improve their utility.

• Integration with SMW. e.g. A fixed set of subpages which could be interpreted by software if found ".../murder", ".../perpetrators" etc.
• .../Quotes - for quotations relevant to an article, or quotes made by someone (perhaps this is better in a subsection)
• The need for Template:SubPages is slightly counterintuitive, so perhaps the subpages should appear by default in the infobox?
  • My main concern is that sub-pages should always have an obvious link to them on their parent pages. I was thrown by the David Kelly one for a while this morning. I'm not fussed about exactly how it is achieved, hence my installation of the subPages extension when I was having problems with the issue a while back --Peter P (talk) 11:19, 21 September 2014 (IST) ✓ Sep. 2014 - Infoboxes now display a list of subpages.

Documents

Template:Video, Template:Image and Template:Document fulfill analagous founctions, but evolved separately.

• The semantic objects produced should be standardised for compatibility
• Some thought about transcripts/translations is in order

Timelines

The following developments are to be expected:

1. Timeline pagenames will be standardised. i.e. Parent Event/Timeline
2. All 'timeline events' should be upgrade to use the normal Template:Event ✓ July 2015 - All timelines were upgraded to integrate with SMW
3. The earlier image strip has been replaced by a list of text links, which should be replaced in due course with a set of image links
4. The timeline should automatically read data from the parent event
5. All the hardcoded categories and forms should be replaced by dynamically generated ones
6. No separate page for the two different timeline formats - they should be shown on a single page in a tabstrip
7. A large proportion of the old events need upgrading since they are mostly little more than a label.

Semantic Mediawiki

All pages now have input from SMW. You do not need to know how to program SMW to use it, or to help develop it by suggesting new ways it could be used. Beginners to SMW should note that being precise is very important for it to work properly, so apparently small points from a human perspective can be of great important from the point of view of SMW. If it's not working as expected, remember to check points such as capitalization and singular/plural etc.

Upgrades

Ways to improve how SMW is currently implemented.

• The "|perpetrators" field for events is too simplistic, since it doesn't distinguish, for example, the 'hired guns' from those who do the hiring.
• The "|membership" field for groups is too simplistic, since it doesn't allow for dates and grades of membership (e.g. 'chairman')
• Quotations by one person could appear on the page of whoever made them (or pointers to them)
• ...

Known issues

• Some titles of page need ',' in them ideally, but this conflicts with comma as a list separator. This will probabaly never be fixed, since "," is so useful as a separator, but please be aware of this and do not use commas in titles.

As of September 2015:

• The edit dialog which comes up after using the top right button to publish and entry states "Publish to {{SITENAME}}".
• document incorrectly handles uploaded documents:- meaning that it is necessary to add File: after "|local=" to fix the PDF link. This is a small, but hard to diagnose problem for MW editors.
• The "Interest of" list has an upper limit on the #entries it will display. This doesn't affect many pages (probably only Terrorism), and is due to the #arraymap parser function in Template:ArrayMapBulletedList.
• Object pages (e.g. Event, Person...) display images, but only for the first 50. Clicking on the "next" button changes the SMW query, so that the images are displayed as text - and also, the pagename is doubled. e.g. See here
• The coordinates parameter of Template:Event and Template:Place sets semantic data but does not display on the page. There is probably a useful template on Wikipedia that could be imported to fix this.

Design

The design intended to be fairly staid but functional as befits an encylopaedia.

Space usage

• The upper right corner is important space which is hardly used by many of the object templates.
• Some of the labels in the infoboxes might benefit from reordering.

Article status symbols

Wikispooks is very uneven in coverage - certain topics are well covered, others of major significance are stub class, or completely missing. This state of affairs is likely to remain so in the future, so how about some system of helping visitors quickly locate good content - i.e. a system of grading articles, or just marking out the most complete?

That would be useful. Enhancement/development to the existing Template:Stub is probably the way to go. --Peter P (talk) 15:11, 25 September 2014 (IST)

I imagined something like Portal:Featured_content. Robin (talk) 05:02, 28 September 2014 (IST)