User talk:Caesar Schinas/Archive 2

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

Caesar Schinas
Current Talk Page
Archives	1, 2, 3

Template:TOC-right Moved everything except conversations edited today to /Archive 1. 15:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Bot support for approval process

Hi Caesar, please take a look at http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,2666.0.html and if you see ways to make the process technically simpler (e.g. by means of a bot or of supplementary name spaces), please let us know. Thanks! --Daniel Mietchen 16:55, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

1. Well... It looks far more complicated than it needs to be, but I'm not entirely familiar with the system. I imagine the best solution would be a custom MW plugin which added approved article support.
2. A non-technical comment - shouldn't typos, grammar, etc be allowed to be changed without re-approval (though obviously only by Constables or Editiors)?
3. Another interesting topic... should images used in approved articles be protected? Personally I think not, but it's worth bearing in mind that at present images in approved articles can be changed/replaced quite easily.

Caesar Schinas 10:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I numbered your points and entirely agree with the first two. As for the third, I see the point (and the same would apply to templates) but this hasn't been a problem so far. Once the first two are sorted out, we could include into the approval process a posting of approved versions to some internet archiving sites, e.g. http://www.webcitation.org/. --Daniel Mietchen 11:49, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

No, I agree that unless problems start to occur images (and, as you say, templates) shouldn't be protected. And if they were, there would have to be multiple copies of them - each approved article would need a copy which was as it was when the article was approved - a lot of trouble.

I must admit to never having heard of webcitation.org, but it looks like a good idea to automate posting of approved versions to sites like that, if possible.

But someone will have to create the plugins(s), and as I said on the forum, I just don't have the time at the moment. Caesar Schinas 12:47, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

I didn't mean to push you into doing this, and sorry if you understood it this way. I am fully aware of the limitations of volunteer projects like this one. --Daniel Mietchen 15:07, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

No no, not at all. I just meant that whilst I'm eager to see this sorted out, I can't see anyone getting round to it in the near future. I'm very happy to give my feedback on issues like this, and I realise you're not trying to push me into actually implementing it... I was just lamenting the fact that I can't! :-) Caesar Schinas 15:14, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

unlocked the Cascading protection

I went back to the Speedydelete template and unlocked (I think) the Cascading protection on the other pages. Hayford Peirce 22:53, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Alright; thanks Hayford. As I said, I'm not really objecting to specific pages/templates - but I do think we must be careful not to protect too much when it's not entirely necessary or may not be clear why, which is one of WP's problems. In particular, I think that templates should be protected on a case by case basis rather than using the cascading option. But most of all, I think a policy for exactly what should and shouldn't be protected is probably needed. Caesar Schinas 10:57, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

You've gotta understand that I come very late to this discussion and that in any case templates are something that is far over my head. Tell me what should be protected and what shouldn't be. The one in particular that I protected (and then removed the cascading feature from) was something that Chris or someone else came up with at some point and made a particular point of wanting to keep where it is. That's all I know, or understand about it. I certainly trust *you* to play around with it, but I didn't want someone else to go in and mistakenly fool around with it. If Chris, or whoever the creator (and guru) is, says it should be unprotected, I'll be happy to do so.

In the meantime, I've deleted all of the new templates you put up for deletion *except* for the one you labeled as being an experiment by Chris that he *might* want to keep. Let's wait to hear from him on this.

When I'm deleting templates I *always* try to look to see if the Discussion tab on that page is live -- if it is, I first go there and delete the talk page, then go back and delete the main article. But *sometimes* I forget to look at the tab to see if it's red or blue. It's therefore conceivable that with the hundreds of deletions I've done in the last month or so I've overlooked a Discussion page deletion even though the main article itself has been deleted. Is there any way that this can be checked, to see if there are loose Discussion pages floating around? Hayford Peirce 17:58, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Ah; so you do read the reason for deletion... :-p

Yes; we'd better wait for to hear from Chris about that one. I've left a message on his talk page.

I was wondering about finding orphaned talk pages myself. I haven't found a way, but there are quite a few of them... It doesn't help that in the default Pinkwich5 theme the link to the talk page is the same colour whether or not it exists.

The same applies to doc pages; there are quite a few orphaned doc pages for templates which have been deleted. Again, I'm not sure how to find them. But whenever you delete a template, could you also delete the /doc subpage if it exists? It should say that it does on the template page - "documentation transcluded from ...". I always try to mark the doc page separately. I've never done this for the talk page; should I?

Caesar Schinas 05:58, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I always read the reasons given for a speedy delete and, in some cases, try to verify them. A couple of times in the past I've decided that the reasons were invalid and the requests were withdrawn.

Hmm, I didn't realize that *other* linked pages could be left dangling if I deleted the main article. I knew that the Talk page could, and that's why I brought the subject up. I'll try to deal with any others that I encounter in the future.

If you ever come across any lists of orphaned pages in any form, please let me know where it is so that I can add it to the "look at" list for Constables. Thanks! Hayford Peirce 17:05, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, there's Special:LonelyPages, but as with so many other parts of MediaWiki it's made practically useless by the subpages system. Apart from that, I've never found a list, I'm afraid. Caesar Schinas 17:08, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

The same applies to metadata pages for articles in the main namespace, of course; I don't know if you've thought of that? There's often a lot of them...

I don't seem to have been right about not deleting many more templates, do I... :-D Caesar Schinas 17:21, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

There's something wrong with the Lonely Pages list. I recognized one the names of it and clicked http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Abdul_Rashid_Dostum/Definition That's a definition that Howard created a few days ago and it links directly to a Main Article that Howard also wrote. So it looks to me as if that title is meaningless.

Well, you find 'em, I'll delete them.... Hayford Peirce 17:31, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

That's what I meant; almost all metadata subpages appear there. I think it's because the link isn't a straight link in the article, but rather is created by the subpages template dynamically. So MediaWiki doesn't recognise it. I think... Caesar Schinas 17:35, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Hayford, if you use greasemonkey you can run a script which hides metadata links on the special pages. It's not ideal, but it's workable; I've been using this system today to try to create a list of previously unknown templates, which weren't listed at CZ:Templates... (It's frightening.)

Oh, and it might be as well to warn you in case you get a heart attack when you go to Category:Speedy_Deletion_Requests... there are 90 pages there! :-D

Caesar Schinas 16:32, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Yikes, on both counts! Well, you find 'em, I'll fix 'em! Hayford Peirce 16:40, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Possibly a template that we shouldn't have deleted?

You may be following some of the Forum discussions in which I've been bitching about the difficulties I had with my last article Approval. Would you take at look at this smaller discussion on Joe Quick's talk page and tell me what you think? Thanks! http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User_talk:Joe_Quick#subpages_template Hayford Peirce 02:18, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

According to a more recent comment from Joe, the preload template he mentioned never existed anyway. But thanks for alerting me...

I've actually been trying to basically keep away from the stuff behind the subpages system. I don't really understand it, as I wasn't involved in its development, and I haven't found sufficiently clear documentation to make me comfortable with it...

Caesar Schinas 06:07, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

I can understand this sentiment. i wrote most of it and have to relearn the logic now and then. Not to mention I am not a programmer and I know there is a lot of naive coding in there. It was a case of knowing how I wanted it to function and writing something (anything) that would get us there. It has undergone a few design iterations to try and slim it down but obviously a total rewrite is better. The best, and only documentation, is what you see at {{subpages}} (and I have tried to write hidden comments in the code). I have tried to be rigorous in keeping it up-to-date, but I'm sure I have missed things here and there. With regard to keep things slim, a lot of the code and templates were pre "new processor" days and I know a lot of them are unnecessary now with regard to keeping the size and loading time to a minimum. By the way, thanks for making such a big effort towards standardizing the templates here. This was long overdue. Chris Day 17:15, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Ooops... a comment from Matt Innis, I mean. On Joe's userpage. :-/ Caesar Schinas 10:13, 15 May 2009 (UTC)