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.

Wish for a 2020 End of Year Summary

If Robin has time and the inclination, it would be nice with a summary of what has happened on Wikispooks in 2020. Suggestions: Peter's retirement, increased or decreased traffic, increase in database size and quality, censorship and attacks, posts with most interest, which subject areas in general have more interest, Wikispooks finances, any possibility to increase database speed (on some days, like yesterday, it is so slow as to be impossible to read or edit for me), how to recruit and keep quality editors, the long term view of keeping it the site active, 'famous' writers linking to Wikispooks in articles, etc. etc. Terje (talk) 12:09, 30 December 2020 (UTC)---

Wish for Cleaner Imports from Wikipedia

• If references in Wikipedia were more compatible with Wikispooks, it would allow for neater and faster imports of whole paragraphs. At the moment, when importing I have to go through the references one by one to remove "{{cite web" etc, which all Wikipedia references have, to avoid the error message "Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "CSS")", which makes the whole Wikispooks page look unprofessional.

Terje (talk) 23:21, 21 December 2020 (UTC)---

Do we have any mediawiki experts (extant or aspiring) who would like to look into this? I wonder whether a simple re-write of (or just a close look at) Template:Cite web might help? I do remember looking into this and failing to fathom it. -- Robin (talk) 14:18, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm technically illiterate, but I've noticed Wikipedia likes [[<ref]] and [[/>]] to open and close many references. If they could be accepted here equally to [[<ref>]] and [[</ref>]] it might help get rid of some of the very ugly

• Sometimes the templates do not properly create page sections but display as ordinary text beginning with "==".
• Some pages have problems with displaying references
• Unique icons are missing from the year pages references on the coverpage -- Robin (talk) 18:54, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

Manifested by the June 2019 software upgrade:

• Some items have no text on the coverpage, although they don't have
• Some job icons not rendering correctly when they link to pages which exist but which have no icon. This may be connected to redirects.
• Ratings not rendering correctly at the bottom of pages.
• Some office holders not shown -- Robin (talk) 18:59, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

Fixed

• The Export to RDF (e.g. https://wikispooks.com/w/index.php?title=Special:ExportRDF/Margaret_Thatcher ) prints a space character before the "<", causing it not to display properly in some browsers (such as Firefox) - Removed a stray newline from an earlier fix:-) -- Robin (talk) 01:22, 10 January 2018 (GMT)
• The edit dialog which comes up after using the top right button to publish and entry states "Publish to {{SITENAME}}". - Fixed by editing the source file. -- Robin (talk) 02:35, 10 January 2018 (GMT)
• 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. - Fixed by adding |limit=200 to Template:Concept -- Robin (talk) 02:16, 10 January 2018 (GMT)
• The infoboxes are not behaving with some unusual characters. Fixed 2017-11-18 by tweaking the substring extension to use multibyte functions. -- Robin (talk) 16:24, 18 November 2017 (GMT)
• Some government employment names are common between different countries - Best practice here is to prefix the ambiguous jobs with "CountryName/" to make them unique.
• Some pages sometimes do not display an infobox, but instead report "Lua error: Internal error: The interpreter has terminated with signal "24"." - this tend to be those people with several jobs, (e.g. Dominik Suter) so it is suspected to be a resource limitation.

• Icons not displaying correctly on the coverpage
• Junk text when Display properties are set.
• Ratings:
  • The "highly rated" tab of coverpage is empty
  • Ratings not rendering correctly at top of infoboxes

Design

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

Space usage

• Some of the labels in the infoboxes still appear as plural even if the matching data is singular.^[Which?]
• Some of the labels in the infoboxes might benefit from reordering.

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Community Portal discussion

IMO, this community portal is set up all wrong.

Firstly, it does not convey community. The utility is good (could be improved) but the community aspect needs promotion, and maybe a nice image for collective achievement.

The Wikispooks:Community portal page is not editable. I wanted to alphabetize it and update from 5 to 6 the Wikispooks:Projects list - which IMO Projects should be added to this other "Wikispooks Categories" list and maybe copied to the left margin menu:

• About Wikispooks
• Help
• Semantic Mediawiki
• Wikispooks Policy
• Wikispooks Technical
• Wikispooks To Do

Maybe add "Wikispooks SaidIt" below "Wikispooks Twitter" and "Wikispooks Reddit" in the left margin, under "Misc" or a new "Social Media".

Maybe make that "Wikispooks Categories" list into a template to add on Wikispooks:Projects somewhere, and elsewhere where appropriate.

The large icons list and the second short list are confusing. IMO, small icons in a vertical list would be good enough. But the categories and the page seem to be very different creatures. This is very confusing and may need clarification/cleaning/unifying - or more discussion on how to best present the content and rework thereafter as necessary.

I'm not really clear on what "Projects" means. It seems to mean "priorities" or "goals" and is very close to "To Do" which seems to be more about "maintenance", but not quite "webmaster administration". Generally projects could mean so much more too. Distinctions with a difference.

Part of my confusion is that, on a personal level, I consider the "Eric Ciaramella" page to be an active "project" that needs more clarity, sources, information, etc. (Maybe "Projects" and "To Do" could be merged and simplified with a "Priority" status added. Or not.) I also intend to bring some projects to Wikispooks to open up from being just my own to a collective effort. Maybe those "projects" will need a different term.

And now I've discovered this discussion page.

First, IMO, this whole discussion page should be moved to the main page below an appropriate header (maybe in a locked template) - then this discussion page can be deleted/locked. Sadly, many/most people don't even look in the talk pages. In this way it puts this community discussion front and center. Resultant goal: Easy access to community discussion. Perhaps in the future community divisions may be necessary. Presently this "Wikispooks talk:Community portal" seems more like another To Do list. Maybe all the To Do lists need to be consolidated, or not. Maybe there need to be several community discussions on different aspects of Wikispooks - the admin, the maintenance, the to do, the topics, the projects, the content, the design, etc. But until there is an overflow, it seems like one discussion might be enough, for now.

Second, I haven't even read this page yet.

Third, I'm shocked at how short it is. This is evidence that this "community" needs help. Or maybe it doesn't. While I'm not surprised it exists, I wasn't aware of the Wikispooks presence on Twitter and Reddit. (Now on SaidIt.net too.) Maybe there are other forums where people discuss things. I know there's an email list that I have to catch up on too. While all of that is good, this seems like the most logical centralized place to start for community to check in. All the other social media, etc can be linked to in a dedicated header or sidebox list.

I don't mean to shit on Wikispooks. I'm just offering my first impressions. Maybe they can be addressed in time, no rush, or considered and solved in other ways. ~ JasonCarswell (talk) 23:02, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikispooks talk:Projects discussion relocated here

I didn't want to take the liberty of saying what Wikispooks should or should not do until I get more acclimated. But I have a few ideas nonetheless.

I alphabetized the Wikispooks:Projects sections on the page (and made a couple minor grammar and punctuation adjustments). I saw no evidence that any were a priority above the others. There's no great reason to do this other than it might help a bit, and it might also make it more inviting to add more sections for more content needing attention, if necessary.

The PropOrNot/List was history to be sure. But is it a priority? "Reporting cases of censorship, particularly on the internet" could be a much larger expansion with many primary sections, ie: Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. as well as their funding sources: PayPal, Patreon, etc. Those lists must be huge. That's not even counting the "foreign agents" thing - like how RT News is called.

It may be worth adding to the Whistleblowers Suggested improvements for this project include: something like "the pros and cons" and "follow up". On one hand listing the cons of whistleblowers might frighten many - but it may also warn them of things to avoid. Also listing pros is good - for example they might have saved millions of lives. And follow up, IMO, is important to help publicize problems whistleblowers may be facing - and may even be helped with. It's also necessary to recognize heroes, etc.

I would like to see one more addition in particular, assuming it's cool with the Wikispooks people. I'd like to see a little "Wikispooks Community" section that lists things that exist and to do in order to build the WS community, including centralized information, centralized hangouts (ie. https://SaidIt.net/s/Wikispooks), etc.

If this discussion should be in a better place (ie. A centralized Wikispooks community Tea Room or something) please feel free to copypasta move (and delete) this post there and please ping notify me. ~ JasonCarswell (talk) 22:04, 3 February 2020 (UTC)