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.

Semantic Mediawiki

Most pages have some input from SMW, which should give an overview of what it is capable of. 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 normal human perspective can be of great important from the point of view of SMW.

Modifications

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')

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

New Ideas

New things that could be programmed with SMW.

• Quotations by one person could appear on the page of whoever made them (or pointers to them)
• Better integration with subpages
• ...

Subpages

These are functional, but more standardisation could be helpful to get more value out of them.

• 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
• 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.

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)

Timelines

The timeline implementation used to have no connection with the SMW, which has slowed the development of both timelines and SMW. I have created a new SMWObject, Template:Timeline which I am trying out at Ukraine coup 2014/Timeline. Although it doesn't yet look as good, I recommend usage of this template for new 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
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

Robin (talk) 20:09, 16 November 2014 (GMT)

Known issues

• Some pagenames need ',' in them ideally, but this conflicts with comma as a list separator.