User talk:Woozle/2007 archive

Chriswaterguy's introduction
Hi Woozle. I'm an old friend of Jsrrts, from Australia.

Thanks for your edits to Housing affordability. And commendations on a great site. Issuepedia will probably never be my main focus (since Appropedia matches my expertise and interests better... and thanks for putting it on the interwiki map, btw) but I'll certainly spend some time here. At times that I would normally send an email with a link or my own ideas, I'm now creating a page and sending people a copy and the link.

I think I can safely say that we at Appropedia look forward to collaborating anyway we can, whether sharing templates, or helping each other with promotion (or, rather, awareness-raising). Speaking of which, I'll mention Issuepedia on my livejournal. See you round. --Chriswaterguy 21:28, 6 February 2007 (EST)

hmm, I may have been mistaken...
Thanks for the note. I got the link wrong - copied http:// twice.

I put the identical info on his Appropedia, which I've now fixed here. I've copied that text to his userpage here, User:KevinFryatt with corrected links. --Chriswaterguy 01:43, 14 February 2007 (EST)

That fixed it.
Wow, I don't know why I didn't spot that either. A case of "Paris in the the spring", I guess. I've added the "foreign aid in africa" link to the Poverty page as well, which I suspect will be getting more attention in the near future ;-) I've also posted a reply to your comments on this page. --Woozle 07:21, 14 February 2007 (EST)

When finding seemingly useful snippets...
I often find interesting tidbits that I don't have time to follow up on. Would it be useful to make a practice of copying these to the relevant talk page? E.g., re corruption and social capital:

Eric M. Uslaner's book manuscript, The Bulging Pocket and the Rule of Law: Corruption, Inequality, and Trust (under contract to Cambridge University Press), is now fully drafted and is available on the author's corruption web page, http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/uslaner/corruption.htm Please follow the link for further details and to download draft chapters of full manuscript: http://www.socialcapitalgateway.org/eng-news.htm#RIC - from Fabio Sabatini's email newsletter (home page: http://www.socialcapitalgateway.org)

Perhaps that should be pasted to Talk:Corruption, for example. Though if there's no article (as with corruption, at the mo)then I'm less clear on this... --Chriswaterguy 17:09, 14 February 2007 (EST)

policy from on high
It really depends on how much time you want to spend. Your solution seems fine; here are some alternatives:
 * I have a Snippets page (maybe not the best name; suggestions welcome) for useful-seeming links (and occasionally quotes) I don't have time to categorize; this is the minimum-time solution for saving links for later. Works best if you tag the link with some keywords or descriptive text, as this is likely to show up in a search (especially if someone is preparing a page on a given topic and looking for relevant material already on-site, which is how the Snippets page sometimes gets smaller instead of larger), and is especially useful when a given link may be relevant to several potential topics (so you don't have to go around creating all those pages just to save the link).
 * You could also just create the page, slapping in a template and a ==Links== section and then your link. This has the advantage that if anyone linked to the page with your name, the link would be blue and they could thus tell (without actually loading the page) that some work had already been done toward substantiating that topic. If I think a new page duplicates an existing page, I'll merge them and leave the redirect in place.
 * If you know what page the tidbit should be on, and it already exists, then there are two fairly painless solutions.
 * If the tidbit is basically a link, then it can go in the ==Links== section (Wikipedia discourages using their articles for "lists of links", but such lists seem entirely appropriate for Issuepedia, in its wiki-as-newsroom-file role); I initially start out with just "Links" or maybe "Reference", but as links accumulate I tend to have an overall "Links" section with "Reference", "News", "Blog entries", "Articles", "Editorials", etc. as needed. No hard-and-fast rules for this as of yet, though I try to give date (YYYY-MM-DD) and author, where known, as this supports searching by date and author.
 * If the tidbit isn't really a link or you're not sure what to do with it for whatever reason, you can create a "==Notes==" section (if there isn't already one) as a home for any loose whatevers belonging to that particular page but which haven't yet figured out how they fit in. This can include opinionated comments on the topic, unattributed mentions of things (if you can't quickly find the attribution), and other stuff that's generally less rigorous than the more formal part of the page. (Perhaps this sort of stuff really belongs on the talkpage, as you initially suggested? I'm not sure I'd be as likely to notice the existence of the talkpage, though, if I was researching a topic in a hurry; I tend to save talkpages for more meta-level discussions and debates about the subject, but maybe it's not necessary to avoid posting on them solely to keep them free for that. Your thoughts on all this are, of course, welcome; my current habits were formed after only minor deliberation and haven't been subjected to the test of heavy site-editing yet.)

Thanks - very good. Will refer to this later... I've been very much caught up in Appropedia (exciting stuff happening there - hoping we can keep it on track and get some good partnerships happening). --Chriswaterguy 10:20, 5 March 2007 (EST)

Templates
I notice you've got some cool formatting templates. At Appropedia we've also worked out a few solutions using templates, as well. I figure we should share.

When we share, I think it's good practice to put something at the bottom saying "This page is adapted from Appropedia:Template:WP or whatever. Or, Issuepedia:Template:Quoteon etc on the other site.

Ones that could be of interest to you include:
 * Appropedia:Template:WP - inline linking, distinguishes WP links from internal links. More practical than elegant, arguably, but improvements welcomed.
 * Appropedia:Template:Wikipedia & Appropedia:Template:Wikipedia p - notices about Wikipedia articles. (I plan to use an optional argument, like this, and merge these two.)
 * Appropedia:Template:Fact

Or you could check out Appropedia:Category:Templates and see if anything grabs you. --Chriswaterguy 17:46, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Indeed
I made a project page for indexing templates over at HTYP; something similar would be a good idea here. I'll start it sooner or later, unless you'd like to do the honors. A quick listing of templates which I'll copy over later:
 * Template:wikipedia: link to wikipedia article but just show the word "Wikipedia"; useful for ==Reference== sections
 * Template:wpref: link to wikipedia article but just show [W]; useful for using Wikipedia as a citation within text
 * Template:quoteon and Template:quoteoff: makes indented quotations in a smaller font (possibly should be renamed "quote/-quote" for parallel to "excerpt/-excerpt")
 * Template:excerpt and Template:-excerpt: similar to quoteon/quoteoff, but with some differences:
 * Optional parameter leaves room for citing source in header and footer ("So-and-so said, in 'Some Book':")
 * Doesn't indent very much; maybe it should, as this is very handy for nesting quotes.
 * Formatting looks nicer, I think (colored background, serif font)

I try to document template usage (parameters, what it's for, etc.) in the template's talkpage, but often don't get around to it.
 * list of all templates
 * list of all template talk pages

When I get around to doing template documentation and cleanup (if not before), I'll also take a look at what you've got over at Appropedia. --Woozle 19:50, 14 February 2007 (EST)

oneworldwiki.com
Just got an email from Curt Beckmann of Appropedia:


 * More issue based, but amazing number of "legit pages" for 7 people.


 * http://www.oneworldwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Statistics

Woozle adds
I've added them as an interwiki: oneworld:Main Page. I notice, however, that their global warming article currently featured on the home page (but without a link) looks like a straight copy/paste (not even an import, which would preserve the edit history) of 's article – something I have specifically not done on Issuepedia except in one case (Internet Community Ports Act) when the content on Wikipedia was temporarily non-NPOV and hence in need of rescuing. (I did include the full history, Issuepedified the layout, and added some content of my own.)

"Email this user"
btw I just noticed there's no "Email this user" option - have you deliberately turned that feature off? --Chriswaterguy 19:50, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

Did you check again after you logged in? The link shows up for me... --Woozle 07:00, 21 March 2007 (EDT)

New MediaWiki Extension (video-wiki)
Hello,

My name is Avigail Perl and I support all our Wiki partners here at Kaltura. We have created a new open-source extension to the MediaWiki software, adding wiki- video and rich media functionality.

With this extension, any of your users can add images, videos and sounds to the collaborative videos created, or edit them using the full-featured online video editor (with full history and versioning similar to the text-wiki).

Please let me know if you need any help in setting up this extension. I have included simple instructions below.

Best regards,

Avigail

Simple steps for adding the video-wiki extension:

1.      Get a Partner ID here:  http://www.kaltura.com/index.php/cms/signup

2.     Download the Kaltura MediaWiki extension here: sourceforge.net/projects/kaltura/

3.     Add the extension to your site

finally looking at this
...and it looks very interesting indeed. I need to try it out and see what it can do before deciding where and how to install it. Thanks for letting me know about this! Questions (I'd email you to ask, but you posted anonymously so I don't have an email address): --Woozle 09:49, 1 March 2008 (EST)
 * is this the bulk of the documentation? Or are there other pages I should be reading?
 * why is it necessary to sign up for the "partner program" in order to make the extension work on my wiki(s)? (Perhaps I will find the answer to this when I read your site in more detail.)