Background:
Over on en, the userboxen wars have started up again. Some undergrad calling himself User:Cyde, with a punny tag Cyde Weys, cajoled his way into admin status by promising to stop his disruptive activity there, and nearly the first edit of his first hour as admin began deleting a userbox.
He'd recently speedied others such as "Template:User infidel", and been rebuffed after a week of deletion review. The past couple of days he's been edit warring on "Template:User Christian", making it a page long with a sideways cross, then a spinning cross, and that really stoked the flames.
Because he lied about his intent (to gain privileges), and has been so disruptive, he probably should be desysopped, but the process for that seems to be rare and undocumented.
I'd skipped the userbox wars the previous time around because at about the same time, a couple of folks started turning all abbreviation pages (encyclopedic) into disambiguation pages (explicitly not encyclopedic), deleting/redirecting the categories and templates without any prior discussion. Don't know what it is about the winter holiday break giving a few folks too much time on their hands. (heavy sigh)
Technical: Anyway, over at Wikipedia:Categories for Deletion, today folks are proposing making a clean demarck between user space categories and "encyclopedic" categories. Seems reasonable to me. Dunno whether it will make some folks happier, but is worth a try.
Surely it's just a tag of some kind, but categories require some software support. Is it possible to add a second group of category space labeled "Wikipedian:"?
For example, "Wikipedian:Politicians" instead of the current * "Category:Wikipedian politicians", previously known as * "Category:Wikipedians who have run for public office"
Pointers to code would be appreciated.
"William Allen Simpson" wrote:
Technical: Anyway, over at Wikipedia:Categories for Deletion, today folks are proposing making a clean demarck between user space categories and "encyclopedic" categories. Seems reasonable to me. Dunno whether it will make some folks happier, but is worth a try.
Surely it's just a tag of some kind, but categories require some software support. Is it possible to add a second group of category space labeled "Wikipedian:"?
For example, "Wikipedian:Politicians" instead of the current
- "Category:Wikipedian politicians", previously known as
- "Category:Wikipedians who have run for public office"
Pointers to code would be appreciated.
Well, everything is possible. But not everything is going to happen. Categories are identified by namespace 14, and functionality is linked to it. Then "Category:" prefix is added to refer to it. This name can be changed, but then you're changing all the names referring to it.
The problem is that you want this duplicated. So it would all be copying and pasting chunks of code, while changing little bits. Not really difficult, but dirty. Category special pages wouldn't work for the new one, neither.
Maybe you could have Wikipedian: working as an alias for Category: but you could see it as Category:Politicians as well as Wikipedian:Politicians
I don't thing that this could be a real solution for this.
Platonides wrote:
"William Allen Simpson" wrote:
Technical: Anyway, over at Wikipedia:Categories for Deletion, today folks are proposing making a clean demarck between user space categories and "encyclopedic" categories. Seems reasonable to me. Dunno whether it will make some folks happier, but is worth a try.
Surely it's just a tag of some kind, but categories require some software support. Is it possible to add a second group of category space labeled "Wikipedian:"?
For example, "Wikipedian:Politicians" instead of the current
- "Category:Wikipedian politicians", previously known as
- "Category:Wikipedians who have run for public office"
Pointers to code would be appreciated.
Well, everything is possible. But not everything is going to happen. Categories are identified by namespace 14, and functionality is linked to it. Then "Category:" prefix is added to refer to it. This name can be changed, but then you're changing all the names referring to it.
Understood. Not what I meant.
The problem is that you want this duplicated. So it would all be copying and pasting chunks of code, while changing little bits. Not really difficult, but dirty.
Maybe the code can be generalized for cleanliness.
Category special pages wouldn't work for the new one, neither.
Again, the code may be generalized.
Maybe you could have Wikipedian: working as an alias for Category: but you could see it as Category:Politicians as well as Wikipedian:Politicians
No, that's not too useful.
I don't thing that this could be a real solution for this.
"Pointers to code would be appreciated." Where should I start looking?
William Allen Simpson wrote:
"Pointers to code would be appreciated." Where should I start looking?
After an hour or so looking, and discovering that the documentation at MediaWiki is woefully incomplete, but eventually finding a fairly useful page at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categorylinks_table, it seems that "cl_to stores the name (excluding namespace prefix) of the desired category."
Without the namespace prefix, doesn't appear to be possible to have more than one namespace worth of categories, or categories that are specific to a single namespace.
Perhaps someday in the future, in conjunction with the unified username project, the user namespace could have its own categories and templates.
In the meantime, I'll just remind the disputing folks that there is currently no such thing as "encyclopedic" namespace and "non-encyclopedic" namespace. Categories and Templates apply to all namespaces.
Bits are bits are bits.
"William Allen Simpson" wrote:
Perhaps someday in the future, in conjunction with the unified username project, the user namespace could have its own categories and templates.
In the meantime, I'll just remind the disputing folks that there is currently no such thing as "encyclopedic" namespace and "non-encyclopedic" namespace. Categories and Templates apply to all namespaces.
Bits are bits are bits.
Yes, they use to be mixed, but *any* page can act as a template, if called with {{ }} Template: is simply a namespace to avoid having to type the namespace name. We haven't such global-action for categories yet.
Somebody wrote:
Anyway, over at Wikipedia:Categories for Deletion, today folks are proposing making a clean demarck between user space categories and "encyclopedic" categories. Seems reasonable to me.
One alternative, at least in theory, could be to introduce globally unique login names and keep all user pages and "wikiproject" portals on meta, not only for all languages of Wikipedia, but for all projects. Then categories such as "users who speak Danish" could reside on meta, once and for all. Wikiprojects on meta could be designed to address multiple languages and multiple projects, synchronizing Wikipedia with Wikisource and Wiktionary.
While this change might be "too big" and "too late" to be practical, it can be introduced on an individual, voluntary basis. Those who like the idea, can move the content of their own various user pages over to meta, keeping just a short reference on each local language. Those who disagree, don't have to change anything, but can continue as if nothing happened.
On 5/13/06, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
One alternative, at least in theory, could be to introduce globally unique login names and keep all user pages and "wikiproject" portals on meta, not only for all languages of Wikipedia, but for all projects. Then categories such as "users who speak Danish" could reside on meta, once and for all. Wikiprojects on meta could be designed to address multiple languages and multiple projects, synchronizing Wikipedia with Wikisource and Wiktionary.
That actually sounds like a pretty sensible idea. Twould be cool if we could transclude from metawiki onto en for example, for user pages.
And similarly for commons - most commons user pages say "try fr or er" or similar.
Steve
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org