I noticed that the software (see how I avoid saying "my software" in this
context? ;) sometimes creates subpages that are named wiki.phtml.
Trying to figure out the cause of that, I'd like anyone who accidentially
created such a page tell me what *exactly* he/she was doing when this
happened. Were there any other strange side effects? Did you do a preview?
Create another new page? Got an edit conflict?
Anything might help.
Thanks,
Magnus
"Magnus Manske" <Magnus.Manske(a)epost.de> writes:
> That's it (as I understood it). The problem at [[Middle Earth]] does seem to
> be thy typing inconvenience.
As necessitated by disambiguation. (is that a word?)
> The proposal should solve it nicely and simple,
It would certainly seem to.
> without subpages.
Well, maybe not. But not without something isomorphic to subpages :)
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)
Hello,
The recent conversion to the no-subpage policy has created a
problem with editing those pages that describe whole independent
universes. This first came to my mind in relation to
[[Middle Earth]], but it is also relevant to pages such as
[[Star Wars]], [[Star Trek]] and possibly other pages.
Since this involves a policy issue as well as a technical one,
I wanted to discuss it in Wikipedia-L before I (or someone else)
began to write lengthy patches.
The problem is in the following: it is extremely inconvenient
(as a policy) to write "[[Middle Earth/Elrond|Elrond]] was
the lord of [[Middle Earth/Rivendell|Rivendell]]" than it is
to write "[[Elrond]] was the lord of [[Rivendell]]"
I could think of several solutions to this problem:
* Remove the [[Middle Earth/]] part (e.g. [[Elrond]] instead
of [[Middle Earth/Elrond]]. But this would not only
add fictional content to the generally real-world
encyclopedia but also confuse the readers (think about
[[USS Enterprise]]!)
* Creating a new namespace (e.g. [[Middle Earth:Elrond]]).
But that would not automatically solve the linking problem,
and would generally contradict the way namespaces are
used now (the division being functional and not
content-oriented).
* Creating a new Middle Earth wiki. Although it would solve
most of the problems above, that would require too much
effort and make linking with the "main" Wikipedia more difficult.
The solution which I would personally prefer is to add another
addressing mode to the Wiki links.For example, we could add
a #base directive after which all links except escaped ones
would receive a certain prefix. For example:
#base [[Middle Earth/]]
[[!JRR Tolkien]] wrote that [[Elrond]] was the lord of Rivendell.
The link with the prefixing "!" would not be affected. However
after the #base directive, [[Elrond]] will automatically become
[[Middle Earth/Elrond]].
What do you think about it? Could this be implemented or there's
another (easier) solution?
Sincerely yours,
Uri Yanover
Hi all,
I'm back, sort of--at least, I have a place to live and a computer
connection, but things are still kind of crazy, so I won't be able to work
full time for several days still. I notice this interesting controversy
about the use of subpages for Middle Earth. I'm sure you can guess what
my view about it will be. :-)
Larry
IMHO, I don't see why we can't have an article called
Elrond or Bilbo Baggins, and have in the first line,
"Bilbo Baggins was a character in [[Middle Earth]]..."
and I think it's fine to have a fictional character as
an encyclopedia entry. After all, Wikipedia is not
paper... I think it will turn out much differently
than traditional encyclopedias and we'll have to
accept some non-traditional ideas to do it.
Chuck Smith
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I think getting rid of the / is an important goal for Larry and others. So
I'd change you system to use the new approved style:
Elves (Middle Earth)
The other question is what happens if we try to use this for something where
there's likely to be a "real" article on the wikipedia which we might want
to link to as well? Certainly there were "elves" in folklore before Middle
Earth. My suggestion is that we could use some escape symbol to tell the
system not to use the alias...
That said, this seems like the simplest suggestion so far for context
sensitive linking. And conceivably the most flexible, because we could
configure this to use nested alias namespaces. This means that we could
put:
#alias [[Middle Earth]]
#alias [[Fantasy Novel]]
#alias [[Fantasy Movie]]
#alias [[20th Century Novel]]
at the top of the page on The Fellowship of the Rings. And links on that
page would look for a link to [[Elves]] first in the Middle Earth alias
namespace (which might contain an alias for [[Elves of Middle Earth]], and
then to the Fantasy Novel namespace which might also contain an alias for a
general article on the history of the use of elfish characters in fantasy
novels. And so on. At any point using the escape character before a link
will skip out of all namespaces, and just point directly to the [[elves]]
article.
Though nested namespaces is helpful in the case of self contained worlds, I
expect that it would be almost necessary on pages like [[mitochondrial DNA]]
where different sequences of DNA are used to mark off an amino acid when
compared to those used in non-mitochondrial DNA. In other words one gene
triplet (for example[[CTA]]) could mean something entirely different in the
context of Mitochondrial DNA than it would outside that context. (Though I
don't remember at all which triplets are actually different, I'm sure
someone with a biology background would know this.) My point is that there
are cases like this where nature is uses context sensitive namespaces, and
it would be very helpful to be able to do the same in the wikipedia
software.
And of course things like the [[poker]] pages would benefit by something
like this as [[stud]] means something entirely different in poker,
construction, and animal breeding contexts.
Any Object Oriented programmer knows that nested namespaces are a very
useful tool for keeping large projects with many programmers working
smoothly. As long as data is properly encapsulated, there's no need to know
what variable names are being used elsewhere. And I think the same thing
will be true in the wikipedia. Someone writing an article on construction
shouldn't have to know that there's and article named [[stud (poker)]],
another article named [[stud (construction)]] as well as one named [[stud
(horses)]], and yet a fourth named [[stud (breeding]], they should just be
able to write [[stud]] and have their article point to the correct page.
Just a few thoughts...
Yours
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Uri Yanover [mailto:uriyan_subscribe@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2002 2:34 PM
To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] An alternative idea to resolve the [[Middle Earth]]
issue
Hi everyone again,
Having thought some more about how it is possible to make editing
[[Middle Earth]] easier once again, I've invented another solution
to the problem: aliases.
Here's how it should work: we create a new Alias namespace.
Inside it we'd have entries like [[Alias:Middle Earth]]. This page
would look like the following:
----------------
Bilbo Middle Earth/Bilbo
Faramir Middle Earth/Faramir
Frodo Middle Earth/Frodo
Gandalf Middle Earth/Gandalf
----------------
In general, the idea would be to match the ad-hoc "short" versions
of the page titles to the "long" version. Each page that that would
want to use the alias, will have to include a directive, explicitly
telling it to, e.g. #alias [[Middle Earth]].
This way we could both keep the longer (and the more informative)
names like [[Middle Earth/Elrond]] and still make short linking
(like [[Elrond]]) possible from the pages that require this.
What do you think about it?
Uri Yanover
[Wikipedia-l]
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Despite all more-or-less-complicated suggestions regarding this topic, I'd
like to repeat an idea I mentioned once as a compromise on subpages. It was
rejected by Larry at that time, but it might be worth thinking about it
again in the light of the [[Middle Earth]] issue.
The idea: On saving an edit, all links that start with "[[/" (like
[[/Frodo]] on the [[Middle Earth]] page) would be extended by the "root"
topic (like [[Middle Earth/Frodo]]).
That would give us back just a little subspace functionality, but would keep
the system "clean" (no automatic backlinks, no weird stuff on "GNU/Linux"
etc.). It just saves some typing. Personally, I doubt that would encourage
massive wild-growth of subpages, but of course, I'll accept the decision of
the powers-that-be ;)
Magnus
Hi everyone again,
Having thought some more about how it is possible to make editing
[[Middle Earth]] easier once again, I've invented another solution
to the problem: aliases.
Here's how it should work: we create a new Alias namespace.
Inside it we'd have entries like [[Alias:Middle Earth]]. This page
would look like the following:
----------------
Bilbo Middle Earth/Bilbo
Faramir Middle Earth/Faramir
Frodo Middle Earth/Frodo
Gandalf Middle Earth/Gandalf
----------------
In general, the idea would be to match the ad-hoc "short" versions
of the page titles to the "long" version. Each page that that would
want to use the alias, will have to include a directive, explicitly
telling it to, e.g. #alias [[Middle Earth]].
This way we could both keep the longer (and the more informative)
names like [[Middle Earth/Elrond]] and still make short linking
(like [[Elrond]]) possible from the pages that require this.
What do you think about it?
Uri Yanover
Hi all -- I generally like the new site, but find it
REALLY confusing. the way it's set up is very
appealing, and I love the new special pages. The
'diff' sections are much easier to figure out, and I
love the red orphan links. But -- Am I blind, or is
there somewhere on the new site where I can see a list
of "here are the major changes: what used to be this,
is now replaced by that" kind of thing. For example,
I remember vaguely reading about (vaguely placed where
it is for a reason) losing sub-pages, but can only
infer that where there were once pages we now have
name spaces. I think. And I'm fairly computer
literate.
Also, is there any way to add a line or two to the
script that pulls the 'most Wanted' list and have it
exclude years -- or at least 2 digit years? Lots of
times they just don't need to link back and forth...
I still think the site is a huge improvement... just
wish that there was more user-friendly documentation.
I used to write that kind of thing, BTW (in HTML,
even). Could I be of help? [[JHK]]
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--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock. By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)