Question Wiki Wiki Wiki!

By the way, if you fans want to help but can't think right now of anything to contribute to the wiki...

...the new domain and structure of the site means that there will be a LOT of broken links in the wiki. Just fixing those would be a huge help. And as you familiarize yourself with the wiki, you will probably see other things that you feel able to improve.

There's no requirement to be invited, there's no requirement even to register in Wikia (although we like if you do, because it reduces the work for the admins -- known users can be trusted, while anything done by an anonymous user has to be double-checked as troll prevention). We welcome all and sundry.

Climb Mount Niitaka

E. E. Nalley wrote: Climb Mount Niitaka

Um, that would be "Tora, Tora, Tora".

For "Wiki, Wiki, Wiki", it's probably "Climb Mount Nintendo"

(Oh, wait - that would be Wii, Wii, Wii. Never mind.)

Just a note because it's handy here - Skybolt's page on the wiki is blank. I know it wasn't before, but when I went to find a dab of info, I got a lot of white screen.

Odd. It loaded fine for me (and checking history shows no edits at all since April). It must have been a temporary glitch on Wikia's servers.

Nope. Cleared my cache and did a refresh, and still nothing. Odd, as I haven't found other pages that have this behavior. And it's frustrating in that I need Skybolt's info for the story I'm currently working on.

Not loading in Firefox OR in Chrome.

I'm getting 'some' info but nothing about the character themselves.

Cavaliers info comes up fine for me tho.

Ib12us wrote: I'm getting 'some' info but nothing about the character themselves.

Cavaliers info comes up fine for me tho.

If it's in your cache, that might be why you see it. If so, I strongly suggest that you save that data to a file, then clean out your cache and do a refresh to see if you end up with nothing as well. Otherwise, all of Skybolt's data might get lost if something happened to the wiki db.

Its all blanked out for me too, interestingly if I hit the Edit button it all comes through, so it looks as though the database is fine, the front end is having issues.

And I hate to say it, but that is the exact same symptoms as when Crystal Hall forums got hacked, and I was not able to create a login before because of database errors.

If anyone has the time, we might want to start a project to copy the Wiki /sigh

Did a quick idea. Used Wayback machine and chose a date. Its not perfect but is able to pull up date about Skybolt. Not sure how much can be retrieved. Just a thought.

I was also able to pull up the Whateley forum but haven't tried drilling down to see if actual messages appear. I went to a time before the actual forums became inaccessible.

*edit* Never mind its not archived.

The only info I could retrieve is this:

With her boyfriend Cavalier, she used to be in the Beret Mafia and maybe the Cape Squad. Over Christmas 2005, they were enslaved by Hekate with a mind-slave spell. For a year they were used and abused by the Alphas, until during winter break 2006, Hekate tried to both renew the spell on them and put it on Fey. This resulted in all three of them going free, as Jade destroyed the circle holding them, and Fey cursed Hekate. When Skybolt and Cavalier were freed, they first attacked Hekate until she escaped, then when they returned to Whateley they attacked the Don, putting him in the hospital. They are currently in ARC for treatment.
Retrieved from " crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Skybolt "

Pulls up for me, here's the info for just in case:

Skybolt
Jump to: navigation, search
Whateley s Cavalier n Skybolt by Drunkfu

Skybolt with her boyfriend Cavalier. Art by DrunkFu
Elaine Schroepfer[1], codename Skybolt, is (or perhaps was) a Whateley student with powers ratings of EX-4/EN-3(lightning, flight).
[edit] Description

With her boyfriend Cavalier, she used to be in the Beret Mafia and was checking out the Cape Squad.[2]

Over Christmas 2005, they were enslaved by Hekate with a mind-slave spell.[3] For a year they were used and abused by the Alphas, until during winter break 2006, Hekate tried to both renew the spell on them and put it on Fey. This resulted in all three of them going free, as Jade destroyed the circle holding them, and Fey cursed Hekate.[3]

When Skybolt and Cavalier were freed, they first attacked Hekate until she escaped, then when they returned to Whateley they attacked the Don,[4] putting him in the hospital.[5] They were subsequently sent to ARC for treatment.[5]

After some special therapy[6], she was deemed well enough to return to Whateley. As of April 29, 2007 she's again residing at Melville Cottage.[7]
[edit] Relationships

Jean-Michel Cardan (boyfriend)
Daphne Bosworth (Roommate, Melville room 502)[7]

Enemies
Hekate
The Don

[edit] References

↑ Diane Castle on the Crystal Hall Forum Msg 20243 rescued from Forum Crash, see Talk page
↑ Ayla and the Tests: Chapter 1 - The Lernean Hydra
↑ 3.0 3.1 Christmas Elves: Fey and Jade's Holiday Havoc
↑ There's an Angel in Dickinson Cottage: Part 1
↑ 5.0 5.1 Ayla and the Great Shoulder Angel Conspiracy: Chapter 1 - Ishim
↑ Whilst Any Speaks
↑ 7.0 7.1 The Kodiak Conspiracy: Chapter 2

OK, this is REALLY odd.

The page loads fine in my main browser (Seamonkey), but loads blank on any other browser I tried on my PC.
It did load fine on both Chrome and Firefox in my Android phone, though.
I suspect that it might have something to do with scripts -- I have NoScript in Seamonkey, but not in the other browsers. And mobile browsers are served a different page, with different scripts.

Anyway, I will look into the Wikia backup option... it seems wise to do it, after all the trouble we had.

EDIT: I did some minor editing on the page and it seems to have fixed the issue. Now it loads in all my browsers. Maybe it just needed a nudge... large sites like Wikia use several redundant servers, they may have got out of sync.

I have firefox 41.0.2. Have not tried it with explorer as I don't use it. We will see.

Did a check with Explorer and the information comes up fine. ? Going to check about scripts with Firefox

when Sir Lee edited it it fixed it.

I couldn't get it to load in Seamonkey last night, after his edit it loaded just fine.

As with any decent Wiki software, Wikia maintains an archive of edits (useful for reverting vandalism / accidental wipes etc.).

There are two ways of viewing the history:

1) Click the little arrow on the right side of the green Edit button, and choose History from the menu,
2) Add ?action=history to the end of the page URL.

The last two revisions to Skybolt's page were today (Sir Lee adding a couple of line breaks to fix a viewing issue) and back in April.

Anyway... I looked into the option of backing up the wiki. It's not that hard -- there's a feature in this page:
crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Statistics
that generates a dump of the entire wiki as a XML file and compresses it in .7z format. I just downloaded it -- the backup with full revision history is just 3.5 Mb. Yeah, pretty small, but then, it's not that big a wiki. (But the XML is about 220 Mb -- it just compresses really well). Anybody who wants a copy can just download it.
It obviously does not include the images, though.

Sir Lee wrote: Anyway... I looked into the option of backing up the wiki. It's not that hard -- there's a feature in this page:
crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Statistics
that generates a dump of the entire wiki as a XML file and compresses it in .7z format. I just downloaded it -- the backup with full revision history is just 3.5 Mb. Yeah, pretty small, but then, it's not that big a wiki. (But the XML is about 220 Mb -- it just compresses really well). Anybody who wants a copy can just download it.
It obviously does not include the images, though.

7zip is a pretty good compression ratio and xml is nothing but plain text so it compresses very well. I wonder if the dump has urls for the images, they would be fairly simple to strip out of the wiki with a wget script if so.

Just a quick thing, if the whole blank page thing happens again to any page in a Wikia wiki, just add ?action=purge to the end of the URL. That should kickstart the wiki's servers and let the page display correctly.

So Something Kristin and I where looking at. Currently if you click on a tag link you get a big long spool of all the stories that feature that tag (e.g. Mischief ). On the other hand, when Elrod was having issues accessing the Wiki, I tried to copy the data onto this site into a blog, and Kristin saw it and set it up as Skybolt's tag information (see here ).

Now it would be a lot of work, but what do people think of the idea of having the Tags for this site copying the Wiki information for the characters (including a link to the Wiki)?

wouldn't make any difference to me. tags and I do not interact. That comes from sites where site search is via tags, and I get 10k results, with ZERO results on the topic I was looking for.

As far as I'm concerned, tags are graphic bloat in the user interface of a site.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: So Something Kristin and I where looking at. Currently if you click on a tag link you get a big long spool of all the stories that feature that tag (e.g. Mischief ). On the other hand, when Elrod was having issues accessing the Wiki, I tried to copy the data onto this site into a blog, and Kristin saw it and set it up as Skybolt's tag information (see here ).

Now it would be a lot of work, but what do people think of the idea of having the Tags for this site copying the Wiki information for the characters (including a link to the Wiki)?

Hmm...that actually looks pretty good to me. It's a good way to get some basic information quickly, which would likely be helpful to new readers (and older readers who have just forgotten the details of a particular character).

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: So Something Kristin and I where looking at. Currently if you click on a tag link you get a big long spool of all the stories that feature that tag (e.g. Mischief ). On the other hand, when Elrod was having issues accessing the Wiki, I tried to copy the data onto this site into a blog, and Kristin saw it and set it up as Skybolt's tag information (see here ).

Now it would be a lot of work, but what do people think of the idea of having the Tags for this site copying the Wiki information for the characters (including a link to the Wiki)?

I have to admit I am torn on this idea. For one, the Wiki pages won't have a link to all the characters appearances, and not even all the stories where the character is important or even a POV.

I don't know how hard this would be, but instead of the wall o' stories, if a "wall" of links to the stories and perhaps a link to the wiki page. Can you imagine the size of the wall of Diane's stories? And if that wall is by date, different stories are going to get mixed.

If its direct tags to Wiki I can see a use for it. I also understand that it will be a very slow process to implement but how hard will it also be to maintain? Over time new data will be imported as new characters are introduced, but what about old articles? The internet (as an example) is littered with broken links and such.

I'm just concerned about the resources needed to keep such an undertaking current. If its not to hard to learn, I'd be willing to take a crack at helping. But you would have to be patient with me as I get the feel of it.

I think the short blurb from the Wiki, a picture is we have one (and the creator is OK with us using it), then the link to the wiki along with links to the stories would be nice.

That seems simple enough to keep track of and make, considering mostly it will be copy past from the wiki.

As far as how hard it is to do, according to Kristin they edit like the blogs do.

I don't use tags myself, but...
Well, I don't see much point in kinda-sorta duplicating the wiki content in the main site. Particularly if this content has to be manually copied by an admin -- we should work to minimize admin work, not increase it.
My preference would go towards doing something that the wiki (at least in its current structure) *cannot* do, such as pulling all the stories featuring a character. Yes, we could start creating Wiki categories for each major character and tag the stories accordingly, but the character bios do convey that information already.

If it's feasible, I would suggest that the tags invoke some sort of script to not only dynamically generate a list of relevant stories (not necessarily pull the stories themselves, which could be a very long page, but if the only ready-made solution compiles all the stories, go for it), but if feasible, add -- either at the top or the bottom -- a link to the relevant wiki page. Not pull the content from the wiki, just a link.

Yes, there might be a few dozen broken links due to slightly different naming approaches for characters, but we can address those on the wiki side with redirects and, possibly, renaming pages.

Sir Lee wrote: I don't use tags myself, but...
Well, I don't see much point in kinda-sorta duplicating the wiki content in the main site. Particularly if this content has to be manually copied by an admin -- we should work to minimize admin work, not increase it.
My preference would go towards doing something that the wiki (at least in its current structure) *cannot* do, such as pulling all the stories featuring a character. Yes, we could start creating Wiki categories for each major character and tag the stories accordingly, but the character bios do convey that information already.

I am working on the reverse, listing all of the characters appearing and mentioned in each story.

If it's feasible, I would suggest that the tags invoke some sort of script to not only dynamically generate a list of relevant stories (not necessarily pull the stories themselves, which could be a very long page, but if the only ready-made solution compiles all the stories, go for it), but if feasible, add -- either at the top or the bottom -- a link to the relevant wiki page. Not pull the content from the wiki, just a link.

Yes, there might be a few dozen broken links due to slightly different naming approaches for characters, but we can address those on the wiki side with redirects and, possibly, renaming pages.

Fixing the names on the Wiki should be easier than Kristin messing with stuff here. Plus she already has enough to do here.

The tags already list each story that is so tagged when clicked (currently as a long list of the full scripts for the stories, but hopefully at a future date we can change that to just a list of links) but each story needs to be tagged with the characters for it to work.

Also, I don't want to do the full Wiki page on the tag, but having a description and a link to the full wiki page would be good (so those that just want to know who someone is don't have to go to the wiki to find out).

Also, I think tagging the stories here with all their character would be better then in the Wiki, I know the big long list of everybody at all is distracting, a list of the main characters, yes, but if all that is mentioned is 'the grunts' in passing, listing out all the names of the grunts as appearing I. The story seems excessive. If a particular character (like Mule) is called out by name, fair enough, but a passing mention to the grunts probably doesn't need to be listed.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: The tags already list each story that is so tagged when clicked (currently as a long list of the full scripts for the stories, but hopefully at a future date we can change that to just a list of links) but each story needs to be tagged with the characters for it to work.

Also, I don't want to do the full Wiki page on the tag, but having a description and a link to the full wiki page would be good (so those that just want to know who someone is don't have to go to the wiki to find out).

Also, I think tagging the stories here with all their character would be better then in the Wiki, I know the big long list of everybody at all is distracting, a list of the main characters, yes, but if all that is mentioned is 'the grunts' in passing, listing out all the names of the grunts as appearing I. The story seems excessive. If a particular character (like Mule) is called out by name, fair enough, but a passing mention to the grunts probably doesn't need to be listed.

Having gone through a number of stories, Sappho (all parts) has 240 different named characters, ranging from 75 to 100+, Silver Linings (all parts) has around 300 named characters. On the other Roulette has under 20.*

Also here you run into the, if I click on Jade, it should give me all of the Jade and Team Kimba links, but should Team Kimba give me all of the members links?

I think for Kristin's sanity, this site should be as simple as possible. Perhaps including a link to the story's wiki page could be added.

*These are close approximations based off my memory.

Valentine wrote: Plus she already has enough to do here.

Quoted for truth

Any chance a few of us could get access to editing the tags and we can play around and see what we can make work?

Or would doing that be more work then it's worth?

As for moving the wiki here... it's theoretically possible, for the most part. Some content that was based on extensions like Wikia Maps might be lost (but then, we didn't do much with it yet).

That would involve setting up a wiki software capable of importing the XML that Wikia saves. A fairly-current version of MediaWiki should be able to do it, I guess. There might be other wiki software which can import MediaWiki backups, but I didn't research it.

The crux of it is, MediaWiki is supposed to be a very powerful, but pretty complicated beast to set up. Right now, Kristin and her helpers are already swamped with the main site, forums, and all the Joomla extensions work. It seems to me that throwing in MediaWiki would be a sure way to drive Kristin to go into retreat at the Scary Devil Monastery.

Let's table any discussion of the sort for, oh, at least one year. Since this year is near the end, let's round it up and wait until 2017 to revisit the idea of bringing the wiki in-house.

any wiki script is complex in setting up.
though some of them have modules activated that would allow them to completely replace joomla here so the wiki script could be the entire site.

They have forums, site mail and site im, blogs, file share, announcements. all of which can have multiple level of access. ( I have installed and played with some on my own servers )

Over the next few days / weeks, you'll start seeing increasing numbers of story links in the List of Canon Stories sprout yellow backgrounds and the word count change ever-so-slightly.

I'm gradually working my way through the list of stories uploaded here and updating the wiki links to point to them rather than the old site.

While I'm doing so, I'm also using a revised version of the javascript bookmarklet I use to do the word counts, which hopefully is a little more accurate than the old one:

(To use yourself, copy elsewhere, remove the line breaks, then create a new bookmark and paste it into the URL field. Save the bookmark on your Bookmarks bar or somewhere else easily accessible. To run it, select some text then click the bookmark.)

Word count scripts tend to count the number of spaces in the document. Simple ones will do just that and nothing else (so if an author inserts two spaces after a full stop, that'll count as an extra word). This one originally collapsed multiple spaces and other assorted whitespace - I initially added the line dealing with newline + space, and my new addition also gets rid of "special" characters, so for example, punctuation-based section separators don't count as additional words.

I'm deeply sorry to say that for the first time since I became a wiki admin, I had to use the banhammer.

A new user started making an annoyance of himself, uploading a bunch of EXTREMELY poorly-chosen images to entries (e.g. a picture of Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in the page for "The Don", a photo of Fran Drescher in character as "The Nanny" in the Dinah Pierson page, a cut-and-paste copy of the Wing Chung Wikipedia page on the entry supposed to be about the _Whateley class_ on Wing Chun Kung Fu, stuff like that).

That is, it is not really SERIOUS vandalism -- no content deleted, no spam, no tasteless stuff, no pr0n -- but in my book it is still vandalism nonetheless. I even entertained for a moment the idea that it could be just over-eagerness by a misguided newbie... except that the guy left a message in my user page that strongly suggested that it was a deliberate prank. So I blocked the guy, and his IP, for a while, and reverted all the edits.

If the responsible part is in fact a Whateley fan and wishes to apologize, just PM me -- if you make a convincing case that it wasn't malicious, I might even lift the block ahead of time.

If anybody NOT responsible for the attack feels that I was too quick with the banhammer, feel free to criticize me publicly.

You acted well diligently and properly.

'nuff said!

What E.E. said. You acted as you had to for the good of the community. If the offending party is a member here and apologizes profusely, it is one thing. If not, it is a deliberate prank as you stated and he deserved the ban. Plus the Whateley community has had enough troubles in the past couple months as is, pranking the wiki like that was not smart.

I would have to say Sir Lee you most likely did the right thing. Given how the previous sites had problems with malicious hacker(s) I would have to say it was best to err on the cautious side.

If the individual felt the need to prank so early (or even at all) then it seems the individual might step up their game. Some may think I'm either being cynical or over reacting but like I said we don't know the persons full intent.

When I saw what had happened, I was wondering what the Wiki ban procedure was.

Basically, it takes an user with a Bureaucrat or Admin level. Which, currently, are (by ascending seniority) me, E.E.Nalley and Anvildude. Anvil created the wiki, E.E. was promoted as a representative of the TINCC, and I was promoted when Anvildude went silent for an extended period and it was thought prudent to have at least two active admins.

All 8½ pages of stories that have been copied over here have now had their links (and word counts) updated over on the List of Canon Stories. Now to wait until Kristin has time to copy over another batch

Coincidentally (OK, it was no coincidence. I was shamed into it by Mittfh finishing his part first, even though he started later), I also finished updating the links in the story entries themselves. I may have taken the opportunity to create a couple stub story entries and update a few other little things...

Anyway, I hope Kristin will give a heads-up to us in the Wiki team when she uploads another batch of stories, so we can proceed to update those entries.

Funnily enough, I spotted a couple of tales I hadn't previously added to the Wiki (given the publishing date was my birthday [18th May]...)

At some point, I'll update the word count spreadsheet thingy (probably initially as a new column so I can compare new vs old wordcounts - in a few stories, the new version of the word counter has increased the count by a few, in others, it's decreased by up to a couple of hundred (likely due to punctuation-based separators counting as multiple words), while in others it's remained the same.

All 92 currently transferred stories have had their links updated on the Wiki's List.

Off-topic aside: it's interesting to note that the ssoftware assigned each story a number within its URI path, which is generally sequential (making me think Primary Key), but with a few gaps (1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12-22, 25-30, 88-91, 106-107, 110-113, 115-118, 120-121, 123-130, 134, 136). I wonder if it has skipped the missing numbers, or if they're allocated to currently non-visible content...

Some of the gaps are things such as main page announcements (ie: 136). There are a couple of abandoned fan-fic entries (107, 113) and a couple blocks (124-130, 140-156) of converted stories that have not yet been published. I haven't looked at the sources to confirm, but from the prospective of a minion helping with the conversion, the behavior matches that of a primary database key.

Kristin Darken wrote: Btw, has anyone spent any time using the search option to search for tags?

No, have you clicked a tag in an article? Go to Whisper (ch 36-39) and click [sleethr]. You don't get a list of links to all the articles tagged [sleethr] (as I was expecting). You get the content tagged by [sleethr]: whateleyacademy.net/index.php/component/tags/tag/20-sleethr
Not sure what can be done about it. But for some tags, that won't be very convenient.

So. I was in the middle of updating the story entries in the Wiki and I finally got annoyed enough with the generic look of it that I decided to put to use those admin powers I was granted and figure out how to customize it.

Turns out that the following can be tweaked:

1. Colors. Besides a collection of ready-made themes (apparently we were using one named "Jade", I changed it to "Rock garden" just to give people an idea of how much can be changed), it's also possible to hand-pick the colors and to make one's own color theme.
More specifically, there are two major "zones" to be customized:
a- The "background", which can be a solid color, an image (single or tiled) or a combination thereof. Images can be tiled or kept from scrolling. (There's some extra options for large background images that I'm really not concerned with right now).

b- The main content area, where we can choose "paper" color (including some transparency to let the background image bleed through), color of buttons, links (well, the valid ones -- apparently the "red" (broken) links are not customizable. I wonder what happens if we choose red as the color of the main links... they don't offer it as a ready option but it's still possible to do it by specifying the hex value) and a "header" color which seem to be the toolbar at the bottom.

I'm willing to hear proposals to make it look less boring. For instance, which colors people associate with Whateley? Which image could make for a suitable background (perhaps one of the campus buildings)?

2. The wordmark (the "title" of the wiki, at top left) can be customized either by changing the text or the font (from about a dozen choices offered) -- or it can be replaced with a PNG graphic, 250 pixels wide by 65 pixels tall, transparency allowed. I made a small logo just for kicks by using the school crest but I'm no creative artist; design studios don't have to worry about competition from me. So maybe somebody more artistically minded might offer something better.

3. The favicon, which we customized years ago but is as subject to criticism as anything else. If someone can offer a better one, I'm willing to look at it. Restrictions are the ones from the .ICO format: 16x16 pixels, 256 colors, transparency allowed but in an all-or-nothing way, like in GIFs (no alpha channel).

Still experimenting with the themes... I added a Whateley crest wallpaper, but I'm not sure if it makes the page too garish. Someone out there must have a better aesthetic sense than me... I mean, if I wanted to pick someone worse than me I would probably have to call Jericho...

The background barely shows through, but it's nice (IMHO) to see the crest is tiled behind the page. White paper is MUCH, MUCH better than the grayish stuff on the gray background. My older eyes weren't happy reading it the way it was a day or so ago.

You have my approval with this current iteration - for what that's worth.

The crest looks as if it goes across the background as if tiled as I can see small outlines behind the white as with half on the right side. I do like the crest and the white as Elrod stated is better on the eyes. Don't know if you could tone it down to a cream color or not as it kinda feels bright also, but that is a judgement call also.

Otherwise it looks good. On a side note I had done some searches for power usage and the screen there is diff and some of the links are pointing to the old forum. This is just an observation. You can go to the link here to get a better understanding of what I'm seeing. crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Avatar_Trait If you click on the bottom concerning the Bek, Maggie and such you'll be redirected to a 404 error.

I understand that its taking time and there are thousands of pages you and others are going through.

This one works, it's easy to read, and the Whateley crest is fine.

Ib12us wrote: The crest looks as if it goes across the background as if tiled as I can see small outlines behind the white as with half on the right side. I do like the crest and the white as Elrod stated is better on the eyes. Don't know if you could tone it down to a cream color or not as it kinda feels bright also, but that is a judgement call also.

Yeah, it is possible to change the "paper" color. I might experiment with taking one or two bits off from #FFFFFF... maybe something like #FFFFEE. Just enough to make it slightly yellowish.

Ib12us wrote: Otherwise it looks good. On a side note I had done some searches for power usage and the screen there is diff and some of the links are pointing to the old forum. This is just an observation. You can go to the link here to get a better understanding of what I'm seeing. crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Avatar_Trait If you click on the bottom concerning the Bek, Maggie and such you'll be redirected to a 404 error.

Yeah, that's going to be a problem for a long time. There are LOTS of reference links to the old forums spread around the pages -- there's quite a bit of information that's Word of God. And they can't really be fixed, the best we can do is to change the ref to "dead link". We really should have started quoting the original source after the first forum crash, instead of just linking to it...

And the damn thing is, I tried searching for the URL to crystalhall.org and it didn't work. Maybe there's a special syntax for that, but so far, the best we can do is to fix the links as we run into them.

If someone with a deeper knowledge of MediaWiki can lend a hand (for instance, coding a template that we editors could past in place of the broken links, so they all would look consistent) it would be a great big help.

Well overall I have to compliment you on your efforts. Thank you Sir Lee.

Yeah, it is possible to change the "paper" color. I might experiment with taking one or two bits off from #FFFFFF... maybe something like #FFFFEE. Just enough to make it slightly yellowish.

I actually like the contrast of #EEEEEE for backgrounds. just slightly off white, enough to reduce the glare of a white background glowing into your face from a monitor, yet light enough to contrast nicely with dark foreground elements ( text ).

however you go, avoid the illegible grey on grey on grey that GOOGLE uses for user interfaces for their apps. I deleted my google account when they changed the default gmail ui to all greys since I could NOT see the ui to interact with it.

Sir Lee, you do good work. Can I hire you for my non-existant personal website? I promise long hours and no pay! It's a sweet deal!

Uh, can you change the link color, I can't really tell the difference between the current very very dark blue and the black regular text.

I remember chatter about a category for late-arrivals? Anything come of that?

Also, how about a group for all those who went to Chilton?

Or People Ayla Knew As Trevor... Or the Upper-class?

Well, there's this: Mutants Trevor Knew, but I haven't seen it linked from anywhere...

Just wondering here...

1. Yeah, it's possible to make the links a tad lighter. I'll experiment a bit.
2. We don't have hard rules on what categories can/should be created. If you think a category might be useful, go ahead and start tagging pages to it -- you don't have to create the category beforehand, it's created automatically when you tag a page. But it only gets inserted into the structure of the site (that is, integrated with the other categories) when someone bothers to edit the category page itself... and add categories to it.
OTOH, just because someone created a category, it doesn't mean that anyone else cares about it or bothers including pages in it. So consider a bit if it's something easy for other people to maintain, or if it is useful for anybody else but you.
3. Speaking of categories, I'm experimenting with a bot called AutoWikiBrowser. It promises to make it much easier to do things like fixing category names (last night I moved a bunch of pages which were tagged with "Category:Villain" instead of "Category:Villains"...) Unfortunately, I'm working on the less efficient user-mode instead of bot-mode while I wait for E.E. to respond to a PM I sent him...

Thank you for all the emails.

I noticed you'd been rather busy

Meanwhile, courtesy of SG, GA we've got some information to stuff the ER! page, as well as Madcap's latest gambit (migrating from Chaotic Evil to Chaotic Neutral [she can't be considered Good while she retains the stolen powerups] in a ploy to retain media popularity - although it's probably best to wait for future installments before deciding whether to rename / redirect the page in the light of her apparent change in codename).

Valentine wrote: Thank you for all the emails.

Uhh... what?

Done, Sir Lee. Let me know if that's insufficient.

Sir Lee wrote:

Valentine wrote: Thank you for all the emails.

Uhh... what?

I didn't think to turn off the email notification on pages I created, so every time they get edited I get an email.

E. E. Nalley wrote: Done, Sir Lee. Let me know if that's insufficient.

Turned out it is not, in fact, sufficient -- this is one of the things that's reserved for Wikia staff to do. I have contacted them.

But OTOH, it was something that needed doing anyway, for redundancy reasons. So it's all good.

Sir Lee wrote: 2. We don't have hard rules on what categories can/should be created. If you think a category might be useful, go ahead and start tagging pages to it -- you don't have to create the category beforehand, it's created automatically when you tag a page. But it only gets inserted into the structure of the site (that is, integrated with the other categories) when someone bothers to edit the category page itself... and add categories to it.
OTOH, just because someone created a category, it doesn't mean that anyone else cares about it or bothers including pages in it. So consider a bit if it's something easy for other people to maintain, or if it is useful for anybody else but you.

I'm thinking of making a "Families" Category to gather all the Family pages,

Like

From searching for Family, crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Searc...mily&fulltext=Search

It seems we have 15+ of those.

But, I click the categories button at the bottom of the page, and type Families, but can't save it.... I'm logged in...

Yeah, we have a lot of these, and we will soon have a few more (I started the Wickham one, and I'm looking into a couple more from Cincinnati).

But is the grouping useful in any way? I mean, having a "warpers" category is useful if you are writing a fanfic and needs a warper. Or having a "Whitman Cottage" category is useful if you want an estimate of how many students there are in Whitman, or who a Whitman character is likely to run into at the hallway.

We didn't use to do much in the way of geographical categories, but one of the new contributors (I think it was Baby Valentine) went through the wiki tagging everybody by place, and you know what? Pretty useful!

(Aside: we currently don't tag characters by ethnicity, mostly because, well, touchy subject, particularly in the label choice department, and involves a lot of subjectivity. But I can see how that would be useful to writers.)

I don't particularly see a scenario where a listing of the known notable families of the Whateley Universe ("notable" in having several members who appear in the stories, that is) is useful. But then, you might be seeing a scenario I'm not. If you can see such a scenario (you don't have to justify it to me, justifying it to yourself is enough), go ahead.

I started creating "family" pages for characters that had families that appeared in stories, but weren't likely to return, like Kamura's family, and her friends. (There are a bunch of pages of "friends" also, for the same reason.

Other "family" pages cover important characters family, like Phase, Kayda, Chaka, so you can quickly find their relatives.

And even others, because that's all they are referenced by. The McKinnon fami,ly are robbed by Dr. Dad, and referred to once, I believe.

So, why can't I make new categories?

Malady wrote: So, why can't I make new categories?

You can, nobody is keeping you from doing so. There are no requirements at all for anybody to create new categories.

But. Creating the category is easy; ensuring that all relevant pages are appropriately tagged is quite a bit of work, and it has to be maintained over time. We are suggesting that you consider the usefulness and maintainability of the categories before you create them, otherwise you might find yourself in the position of being the only one bothering to tag the appropriate pages with that category.

Put another way: if you create a category based on a feature that only interests you, nobody else will help you to maintain it. But in most cases, if you think of a way that a slightly different concept could be useful for more people, other wiki editors will help you.

Take your "families" category. I, personally, right at this moment don't see much utility in this. But I could be mistaken (I often am, on lots of things). It may be that I'm the only one who is so shortsighted that I'm not seeing how good and useful it would be. All I'm suggesting (not asking, not requesting, much less -- perish the thought -- demanding) is you spend a few minutes considering whether it does fulfill an useful role. If you think so, go ahead.

Just as food for thought, consider if a broader category (it might be called something like "Groups of people" or "pages with multiple people" or something else) would be more or less useful than the "families" category. It may be that one is clearly better than the other, or it may be that both are useful but fulfill different roles, or it may be that both are useless.

I have no objections to anybody creating any categories they deem relevant -- but if it turns out that there are categories that nobody is interested in maintaining, well, deleting them is a possibility in order to unclutter the wiki.

Sir Lee wrote:

Malady wrote: So, why can't I make new categories?

You can, nobody is keeping you from doing so. There are no requirements at all for anybody to create new categories.
... Snip.

Okay! I got what went wrong: I didn't see the "Press Return or Enter key when done." message. I thought I'd just type letters in and press Save to make a new category.

Meanwhile, an oddity noticed when editing the List of Canon Stores: Silver Linings Ch 2 Pt 2 was originally published in six installments:
2013-06-16
2013-07-28
2013-08-18
2013-12-01
2014-06-01
2014-06-02

The single file republish over here has a publication date of 2013-07-13, mid-way between the first and second installments. Should I keep the original six publication dates, replace them with the new one, or do something different? It's worth asking for reference when the remaining stories originally published on the old forums (or, as in the case of at least one of the Merry tales, published in multiple parts to the old site, then [later?] combined into a single file over there) are republished over here (as while the multiple publication dates are more accurate, they of course interfere with sorting the Wiki List by publication date).

I think Silver Linings 2 chapters 2-9 was the only Canon story that was still in the forums, all the rest had been shifted to there own HTML pages with a publish date.

Abyss 1.5 and 1.6 are still stuck in the forums, but they were each published on a single date (rather than over a period of several weeks). I guess the point is whether we preserve the original publication dates for those episodes which have later been collated, use the date of one of the parts (tricky if there's been a significant gap between parts, allowing other Canon to be published between Part x and Part x+1) or use the collation date?

Other then Abyss, what other Canon stories do we need to decide for?

Since Abyss was published as two parts (seperate threads on the forum?) shouldn't we just move it over and keep it as two seperate stories?

Silver Linings 2 Chapters 2-9 where combined as they are a single thread on the forum, so single story on this site.

We can probably use the latest date for these since the parts were all sequential:
Ayla 1
Merry 7
Fling 3.2

These have a sequential dates, then a gap before the latest - I think the latest date is when it was republished as HTML - so use the penultimate date?
Foxfire 1
Nacht 1.5
Stella
WARS1 (which I can probably rename as WARS unless EE intends to write any more WARS vignettes)
Vamp 1
Saks
Ayla 9.1/2/3
Aquerna 3
Loophole 5.1/2/3

Someone mentioned hierarchicalness of tags a bit ago; it occurred to me that that would solve the "should Team Kimba tag link to all the stories of all the members?" issue. No - it should instead take you to a list of the tags for the team members. This would also help with things like "teachers", "adminstration", "known MCO agents", etc., yes?

Also, I've started looking through the pages the Wayback Machine _did_ save from the forums, specifically for fan-fiction (none found yet but there's 180+ pages of 50 entries each, I may be some time), and y'all might try that for the currently-dead links in the wiki as well?

(Do any of the old admins still have _file_-level access to crystalhall? Could they pull off all the raw files and figure out what was what later? Text files, they be small...)

--Dave

dbdatvic wrote: Someone mentioned hierarchicalness of tags a bit ago; it occurred to me that that would solve the "should Team Kimba tag link to all the stories of all the members?" issue. No - it should instead take you to a list of the tags for the team members. This would also help with things like "teachers", "adminstration", "known MCO agents", etc., yes?

Also, I've started looking through the pages the Wayback Machine _did_ save from the forums, specifically for fan-fiction (none found yet but there's 180+ pages of 50 entries each, I may be some time), and y'all might try that for the currently-dead links in the wiki as well?

(Do any of the old admins still have _file_-level access to crystalhall? Could they pull off all the raw files and figure out what was what later? Text files, they be small...)

--Dave

The old forums is locked out to 'all' levels.

From what Kristin said, there are still backups of the forum around, the idea has been tossed around to make a read only copy of it on the new site, but it's a very low priority compared to other things that need to happen, like porting over the canon stories and redoing the author permissions to better serve the three different authoring groups (gen 1 canon, Gen 2 canon and Fan Fiction).

Also, Kristin is very busy, like punch drunk busy, with her paying job at the moment.

Yep - I gathered that from other places on the forums. And, by the way, am grateful to Kristin and others for doing the usually-thankless jobs in the first place - my thanks (if that will not mess things up!)!

If I find some way to help a bit, I shall.

--Dave

There's no way to tell what pages are linked from where, right?

Asking 'cause there seems to be pages containing info I've never heard of until now, at least in the given terms, like Tesla Matrixes from The World.

Ah, yeah. Some of the info is original information coming directly from the canon authors. That page is almost certainly one of those.

Whenever we know/remember where the original info came from, we tag it accordingly. You will find some pages tagged as belonging to the "2005 bible", some others referencing explicitly a forum posting by one of the authors (often with a broken link to the old forums...). But some we simply don't remember. I assume most of those are 2005 bible stuff that was imported from the first wiki, which ran on a different platform.

Well, we officially entered Gen2. Seems like a good time to put this out...

From a Wiki perspective, Gen2 started with a bang. This first chapter lists something like 20 characters, and more than half of them are expected to be recurring and important. That's a nontrivial number of major new pages, and more will come with the following chapters. We in the Wiki team will do our best, of course, but help is always welcome.

So... anybody would like to pitch in? This is actually an excellent time to get into the Wiki -- lots of background entries (like power types and such) are already done so you can leverage that, but anything on the characters themselves is almost a blank slate. Those are *easy* pages to edit.

There are jobs of all sizes. You can do one page for one specific minor character who might not ever reappear, and never do anything again, and that would help. Or you can endeavor to tackle a major job, like maintaining the timeline pages like Xaltatun used to do, and that would also be welcome.

It is also important to note, now that we've gotten into generation Two, the proper marking of what is Canon for Gentwo versus original is imperative. And while it's all very new right now, perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to the wiki team is that the authors use the wiki as a writing reference. Which is why the use of proper labeling of original versus Gentwo canons on any entry is critical so that a couple years from now someone going to check something doesn't use the wrong information.

Thanks again to the wiki team for all the hard work!

Would a system such as Wookiepedia's Canon/Legend toggle be of use for making the separation between 1st and 2nd Gen clearer, assuming such a thing would be possible and wieldy enough?

It should be possible, because I think Wookipedia is hosted on Wikia. But I have no idea how to implement it.

I started tagging the new article I created in a "Gen2" category. When I get back to my main computer (where the wikibot is installed) I think I'll tag... pretty much everything else with "Gen1" That should be a start.

You might want to seperate Gen 1, Gen 2 and have another category for 'common history' for things that are relevant to both (e.g. background history for Whateley), or something like it.

Probably a lot of work, but it might be an idea to start looking at the various pages as you edit them and see if they contain mixtures of Gen 1 specific information, and 'shared history' information, and think about moving shared history into its own pages so that you can get a clean division of 'gen 1' vs. 'gen 2' stuff.

Yeah, but it's quite a lot of pages.

Admittedly, most *character* pages will be gen-specific, with the odd exception of major figures like Mephisto and Lady Astarte. And I assume that there will be a Champion in Chicago, even if he's not the *same* Champion. But still, all current student pages will be assumed to be "Gen1-only" until such a time as they are revealed otherwise.

Categorisation is likely to be the easiest implementable method to distinguish between G1 and G2, especially since over the next decade, G2 may grow to be as large as G1 is currently (depending on the number of authors recruited over that period and their productivity).

There are a couple of alternative methods, which aren't as elegant and probably not worth serious consideration, but perhaps worthy of a mention anyway:

Subwiki - you can have nested pages on wikis, so it would be theoretically possible to hang G2 related stuff from crystalhall[.]wikia[.]com/G2/whatever - but that does kind of relegate G2 to a lesser status.

Namespace - similar disadvantages to Subwikis, but implemented as G2:Charactername.

However, such strategies may prove useful if consensus determines a need to document library stories and/or officially published fanfics (as opposed to old/new forum fanfics - particularly if a fanon [fanfic alternate universe canon type thingy] emerges).

-oOo-

EDIT: 2nd Jan 2016

I've created a new page: List of Second Generation Canon Stories. As 2G is set a decade after 1G (and it will likely take the best part of a century for 1G to reach 2015-16), I figured a new page to hold the list of 2G stories would be a better approach than expanding the 1G page further (never mind the 1G page is already necessarily ridiculously long!)

We now have seven new authors in 2G, nine new students, a new member of staff, plus a handful of assorted others...

OK, I started on the process. Today I tagged the six-hundred-plus student pages as "Gen1". Man, even with the bot it's a lot of work... and there's a BUNCH of other pages yet to tag.

Now that I'm done with the students, I'm considering who else should and shouldn't get the "Gen1" tag. I'm thinking of using a general rule of thumb -- if the character is just mentioned but hasn't an actual active role in any story, I'm thinking of considering them as "general background" instead of an actual Gen1 character, and leaving them untagged. People like, say, Deicide, who is often mentioned but have never actually shown up in any story -- AFAIK, he might be dead, or an urban legend, or it may turn out that he will be extensively used in Gen2, but I have no grounds to call him a "Gen1 character". The same reasoning would extend to Champion, by the way.

OTOH, there's no rule that says a character cannot be *both* Gen1 and Gen2. If, say, Ms. Carson is still the Headmistress in Gen2, she would get both tags. If she went back to the "outside world" (perhaps actively superheroing, perhaps retired) she would get only the Gen1 tag until such a time when she appears in Gen2 story.

Along the way, I noticed a number of small issues and proceeded to fix them. Things like two different pages for the same character (found not one, but two cases of that), character pages tagged twice with the same categories...

Two not-so-minor things I noticed:
1. The number of student pages with no known codenames is rather large (90 if I'm not mistaken). I thought that having a category for those would be rather helpful, either for an author to find very minor characters which are still "unused" or for fans to match codenames to those characters. So I did it.

2. There are a number of students who have no individual pages, but rather "group pages" -- mostly siblings (the Stratosphere Siblings, the Kenner Twins for instance). I'm thinking most of those could, and perhaps should, be split into individual pages. For one thing, those "group pages" make it harder to count students... there are some of those for non-students too, which might be considered for splitting up (the Millsap Twins come to mind -- there's no special reason for them to be listed together, since they never appear together in the stories except by third-party mention)

The List of Canon Stories has now been updated with all the tales ported over in the last month or so, including all 22 chapters worth of Ayla and the Mad Scientist (note to self: avoid the temptation to start re-reading stories when doing the updated word counts...)

Oh, and the blank row at the bottom of the main table is there for a reason - the date fields are filled with invisible 8s to stop the field contents wrapping (easier to understand for anyone reading the code than using U+2011 for the hyphens, and will work on any combination of software that isn't yet unicode-compliant).

EDIT: List of Second Generation Canon Stories - complete with a plethora of redlinks - the Gen2 authors and characters don't yet have Wiki pages (awww!)

mittfh wrote: The List of Canon Stories has now been updated with all the tales ported over in the last month or so, including all 22 chapters worth of Ayla and the Mad Scientist (note to self: avoid the temptation to start re-reading stories when doing the updated word counts...)

Oh, and the blank row at the bottom of the main table is there for a reason - the date fields are filled with invisible 8s to stop the field contents wrapping (easier to understand for anyone reading the code than using U+2011 for the hyphens, and will work on any combination of software that isn't yet unicode-compliant).

EDIT: List of Second Generation Canon Stories - complete with a plethora of redlinks - the Gen2 authors and characters don't yet have Wiki pages (awww!)

Give me a week or so. In early December a close friend of mine died suddenly, and I ended up having to run a Convention that was last weekend. I was not fully prepared to take over his job, I expected at some point to have to take over the treasurer's job.

Kristin Darken wrote: Any chance I can talk you into regularly updating the 'unmigrated' page say... weekly? I'm making progress on it, but I keep finding myself looking at things and going... did I do that one yet or not...

Well, the "Unmigrated" page is a category, so it's pretty easy to remove it whenever we update the corresponding story page. The problem I'm running into is figuring out which stories HAVE BEEN migrated. At the beginning it wasn't too much work, but with 200+ entries in the "Canon Stories" listing, it takes a while to go through it.

The "Latest Articles" column could help... except that it lists the articles when they are entered *in the fanfic section* for edition, which is no help -- we have to wait until they are in the Canon Stories section to have the (relatively) stable URL for them.

Hmmm... maybe if I look at the site when logged out? It's worth a try...

(EDIT:) didn't make a difference, perhaps because the most recent articles were posted directly on the Canon Stories section.
Anyway, I'm attacking the list by hand now. Actually HAVING the "unmigrated" category listing helps a lot, because I opened the canon stories page in "show all" mode, and I can just go through the list searching for keywords...

Valentine and I tend to work by Authors as we can't see what the other is doing.

I just finished doing Drunkfu (not posted but queued), I was working my way through all the authors who use images in their stories, I think I've finished them now.

So, from my notes, we should have finished transferring the following author's stories (again, let me know if any are missing):
• Babs Yerunkle
• E. E. Nalley
• ElrodW
• Kristin Darken
• Morpheus
• Motley
• ScramblerJ / Diane Castle
• Warren
• Drunkfu (queued)

I know something that has caught me out a few times is that none of our lists are complete, there is the "Story" list on Crystal Hall, the "Authors" list on Crystal Hall, and the Wiki, and I've run into instances where all three have been missing posted stories (luckily, so far, between them they have always had the stories). If people look at the list of "migrated" authors and can't see a story they know is posted, please let me know so I can make sure it is migrated and doesn't get lost.

Well, Diane is hardly complete; "Adios", "May Your Death Be Sweet" and "Triple Threat" are still missing.

And so is the Heyoka 3 snippet by Motley.

I'm not sure what to do with the "snippets" and "sneak peaks" that were posted to the forum, I'll let Kristin decide what is going to happen there.

If Valentine hasn't already done the missing Diane ones (I can't see what stories others have queued) I'll migrate them over next.

Well, it's her decision... but my vote is to migrate them as if they were stories.

For instance, the ONLY canon material we have from Liliandra is the "Wild Times" excerpts, and it's important as background for the New Olympians. Similarly, the Heyoka 3 teaser is the only glimpse we have at a Survival class, and one of the teasers for an abandoned Fey story is relevant to discussion of the Laws of Magic. So they are part of the canon, and need to be kept available.

As long as the old forums were working, we had the option of linking to the forums. That's no longer an option. It's either to bring them onboard or to remove a part of the Whateley canon.

Whate we COULD and SHOULD do is to add a note in the header explaining the particular circumstances of that story. That, by the way, is also a good idea for "As Above, So Below" -- because even if it was an April Fools' prank, it is still considered canon-relevant.

I haven't gotten to the last of Diane's stories, so go ahead and grab them.

I went to update the Wiki for Drunkfu's stories... and stumbled (again) in the matter of the confusing chapter numbering for "Abyss."

To summarize, the internal numbering of chapters (which DrunkFu called "Parts") in the story is out of whack. The best I can determine, chapters 3 and 5 were mistakenly renumbered as 2 and 3, probably because they were being posted two at a time, and whoever prepared the files didn't notice that. That is, the chapters were numbered 1,2,2,4,3,6,7,8.9,10 (chapters 7 & 8 were published together but numbered correctly, chapters 9 and 10 were published one at a time and numbered correctly)

The Wiki had been calling the files "parts" and numbering them 1 to 6, which is not helpful if someone joins all the parts for reading. So I redesigned the Wiki page for "Abyss" to make the situation clearer. Yes, it did involve some boring work tracking down the links to that page and correcting them.

The only wiki page I *didn't* change was the List of Canon Stories, because I don't want to step on Mittfh's toes; that page links *both* to the Wiki page and to the story itself, so I thought it would be best to let Mittfh decide how to handle the issue. (My personal suggestion would be to do something similar to what I did on the Wiki page, unfolding the six entries into ten. But it's not my call to make)

I'll look at what you've done on the wiki article for the story itself, compare that to the migrated files, and decide what to do.

There's been another batch of migrated tales in the past week or so which I need to update on the List, as well as adding Road to the 2G List.

That is, in addition to reading Odds & Ends 2 tonight... why can't there be more than 24 hours in the day or 7 days in the week?! I might then have more chance to read / update stuff...

I'm thinking about adding a couple of infobox templates to the Wiki. Namely, a "character" infobox and a "story" infobox, for starters.

Yeah, I know. There are literally thousands of pages on the Wiki, most of them for characters, and for the most part nobody is going to the trouble of adding infobox to all of that -- not when there's so much other stuff to be added.

But... well, Gen2 is just starting, it has just a few pages done, and a lot yet to do. Having ready-made templates would probably be helpful.

So... what fields should those infoboxes include (keep in mind that in most cases, templates can be written so that if a field is blank, it does not show up at all)?

For stories, I'm thinking:
- Title
- Author(s)
- Publication date
- Main character(s)
- Starting date
- Ending date
- Previous story
- Following story
- Link(s) to the story itself

For characters:
- Picture if available
- Codename
- Name
- Alignment
- First appearance
- Creator (unless there is other data, assumed to be the writer of the story the character first appears)
- Main author (if any -- that is, the writer who "owns" that character)
- Date of birth (even approximate, if known)
- Profession
- Whateley Class of...
- Whateley dorm
- Power (if any)
- Place of origin/main residence
- Affiliation

...am I missing anything important? The template I was looking at in another wiki had a field for "species", but I'm not sure if it's really useful here; maybe a field under a different heading that would fit any of "Human/mutant/sidhe/Mythos/spirit/Dyna-Host/Origin/Batson..." but my imagination really isn't running full-gear at the moment, so I couldn't think of a good one. "Character class" maybe?
"Alignment" might include "student"; I was thinking of using the same categories as the MID colors... maybe even coloring the infobox according to the MID colors, if I can figure a way to do it that isn't too complicated to use.

Is the story infobox for the overall story in each case or each entry in it? (ie. part11, part2, etc)

If for each entry it seems good but if for the overall story you may want to expand it to account for tracking or mentioning the story parts as well.

For the characters you'll want a section for description which you may want to subdivide into Height, Weight, hair color, eye colors, etc. Species might be relevant as you'd pointed out as "Human/mutant/sidhe/Mythos/spirit/Dyna-Host/Origin/Batson..." but there's one canon story that DOES deal with aliens and there may be more in the future so it may be good to keep it as an option.

I think "Power" should be fairly generic, just listing the general classification Avatar, Energizer, Devisor, etc. instead of the detailed list that would be below.

Both could use Generation.

Story listing could use a location

I rarely use Wiki's, here or elsewhere, so maybe I'm missing the point here but, this suggestion strikes me as creating a great deal of work for you guys who look after the Wiki to both set up and maintain when it seems that most, if not all, the information is already included in the various pages of the Wiki. So this begs the Question:- Do we really need it?
??

John.

Yeah, I get what you mean. And retrofitting the old pages for the templates will probably never be done, or at least not as a definite project.

It's more like what we have done with the MIDs, which used to be hand-made tables until someone made a template. From that point forward, new MIDs were entered with the template (which is MUCH less work) and whenever one of the old pages was overhauled, sometimes the editor took the opportunity to template-ize the MID.

Since we are just starting Gen2, which will add A LOT of new pages, the templates could really make it easier to create those pages from scratch. For instance, almost all of our "Story" pages contain a first paragraph which varies very little -- something to convey that it's a story, who is the author, important dates, main character yadda yadda yadda. Having a template to put in all those basic stats achieves two purposes:
1- Reminds the editor to add all the available info;
2- Saves one from the need to formulate the first paragraph.

Yes, they could just copy the basic structure from another page; but the thing is, having a repeated text structure looks bad, while having a repeated tabular structure looks good.

And anyway... we don't have a lot of RULES in the Wiki. Using the templates won't be mandatory. It's a convenience I want to make available to other editors.

I'd like to confirm your supposition that Linda and Tweak are one and the same, so Linda's page is a duplicate and can be deleted.

Thanks. It's not every day that we get to remove a character page...

(Actually I turned it into a disambiguation page for the four -- so far -- "Linda"s we have seen)

Sir Lee wrote: Thanks. It's not every day that we get to remove a character page...

(Actually I turned it into a disambiguation page for the four -- so far -- "Linda"s we have seen)

I try very hard to reuse existing characters so as not to create more. But - do you have any idea how hard it is to search the Wiki if, for example, I want a Junior Whitman girl who's a PK brick? It's quite frustrating.

In Gen 2, we have ALL the students in a spreadsheet, so the aforementioned search would be to apply an Excel filter to get Whitman cottage, then a junior, and then someone who has no powers listed or who is a brick. 15 seconds as opposed to an hour or more to search the wiki the long, painful way.

There were times this last year I would have almost PAID some volunteer to put all Gen 1 students into a spreadsheet!

Below is an example of what we have in our spreadsheet - the first 3 characters (and primaries of one or another of us): [/tr/]

First Name

Last Name

Code Name

Reserved By

Family Wealth

Class (1-4)

Cottag

Gender

Orientation

power 1

power 2

Power 3

Notes/orgs

Laura

Samuels

Cerulea

ElrodW

$$$

1

P

MtF

Gay

De 4

Ga 4

Ex 1

Primary character - EW

Tanya

Wright

Invictus

Neo

$$$

1

W

F

Het

Ex 2

Pk 4

primary character - Neo

Erica

von Abendritter

Eisenmadel

Was

$$$

1

D

MtF

Het

Ex 4

Pk 2

primary character - Wasamon

Yeah, one of the things TikiWiki did better than MediaWiki was that you could do searches for various keywords/categories at a time. AFAIK, there is no way to do that in MediaWiki.

But we do have a Sortable Student List. It doesn't have all the fields on your spreadsheet, but it has some of them. Perhaps we could add a few more (not too many, though, because it can result in formatting problems). If you talk it over to the other authors to see which ones are the most crucial, we could work on it.

Sir Lee wrote: Yeah, one of the things TikiWiki did better than MediaWiki was that you could do searches for various keywords/categories at a time. AFAIK, there is no way to do that in MediaWiki.

But we do have a Sortable Student List. It doesn't have all the fields on your spreadsheet, but it has some of them. Perhaps we could add a few more (not too many, though, because it can result in formatting problems). If you talk it over to the other authors to see which ones are the most crucial, we could work on it.

Personally, I'd prefer that info from the sortable student list get copied into our Gen 2 student spreadsheet. IIRC, we have a lot more info in the spreadsheet than the sortable list has. Updating the list on the wiki to add more fields is not practical IMHO.

Well if you just gave us all the character info, we could probably do something about that.

The real problem is that some of the info you are searching for may have been defined in the canon bible but was not made public yet, so it's not anywhere in the Wiki.

For instance, take Loophole. E.E. created her as a bisexual character and wrote her as such, but kept that information from the readers until the big reveal. Naturally, other writers who wanted to use Loophole had to be aware of that fact in order to not contradict Nalley, but that information wouldn't be on the wiki for a long time. In a lower-profile case, we have Saladin, who was also a closeted gay until the "reveal."

I think it wouldn't be too much trouble to convert the current table(s) into a spreadsheet. We could even find a couple volunteers to copy additional info from the wiki into the spreadsheet (if you specify the wanted columns). But a lot of "secret" info would have to be entered by the CC.

What I can do is give you the spreadsheet I'm using - blanked of course, as there are a lot of spoilers in the char list for Gen 2 - and someone could - in their copious amounts of free time - begin to populate it. But the char info for 600+ students in gen 1? I think y'all would prefer that I write gen 1 and gen 2 stories.

If we did decide to go for InfoBoxes for characters, for "Powers" I'd go for a concise (i.e. 2-3 words max) plain English description of the effect of their main power - especially since the ratings mainly describe how powers work rather than what they do - most notably Avatar (OK, they host a spirit - what kind? What effects do they get as a result?). So Nate could be something like "weaponised flatulence", Nikki could be "Nature mage", Toni "Ki manipulation", Anna "Squirrel spirit"...

...but then that system breaks down with those that have a more varied combination of powers - try describing Kayda's powers in 3 words or fewer...

-oOo-

Meanwhile, there are 65 stories left for me to update on the Wiki - I've taken a day off tonight, will work through them over the coming week. As I've said before, as I'm replacing the entire table each time, let me know of any errors / omissions you find in the dark yellow entries (i.e. those that have been updated) so I can amend my offline master copy.

Given how large and cumbersome the table's getting, I think it may be prudent to have a separate page for the 2007-8 academic year (or, as I've often joked, G1.1), plus maybe a separate page across the timespan for the 'dateless' stories (i.e. those which can't be placed to within a few days or are completely undated), parodies (April Fool's - I wonder if the G2 Collective will be daft enough to attempt ones?), 'meta' stories (the "Interviews" experiment) etc.

At the risk of creating two places to update each week, have a page with a list of release dates and the relevant section of the relevant page for the released episode (the terminal anchors are easy enough to do - as the release dates aren't wikilinked, it should be possible to regex an anchor for each along the lines of...
Find: |$1/n|-
Replace: |<span id=\"$1\">$1<\/span>/n|-
...possibly using sed...

Thinking about it, if you do split story lists by year... maybe the origin stories of Class of 2011 characters (Shine et al) might fit better in that page than in the current one... although it might not be obvious to the casual visitor, so... yeah, maybe a hard split by date would be better.

elrodw wrote: Below is an example of what we have in our spreadsheet - the first 3 characters (and primaries of one or another of us):

First Name

Last Name

Code Name

Reserved By

Family Wealth

Class (1-4)

Cottag

Gender

Orientation

power 1

power 2

Power 3

Notes/orgs

Laura

Samuels

Cerulea

ElrodW

$$$

1

P

MtF

Gay

De 4

Ga 4

Ex 1

Primary character - EW

Tanya

Wright

Invictus

Neo

$$$

1

W

F

Het

Ex 2

Pk 4

primary character - Neo

Erica

von Abendritter

Eisenmadel

Was

$$$

1

D

MtF

Het

Ex 4

Pk 2

primary character - Wasamon

So, what, sort of precisely, does having $$$ mean, in comparison to any other kind, like $ or $$$$ or no $ at all? Although, I guess you guys have notes to differentiate between different holders of the same $ ranking?

elrodw wrote: Below is an example of what we have in our spreadsheet - the first 3 characters (and primaries of one or another of us):

First Name

Last Name

Code Name

Reserved By

Family Wealth

Class (1-4)

Cottag

Gender

Orientation

power 1

power 2

Power 3

Notes/orgs

Laura

Samuels

Cerulea

ElrodW

$$$

1

P

MtF

Gay

De 4

Ga 4

Ex 1

Primary character - EW

Tanya

Wright

Invictus

Neo

$$$

1

W

F

Het

Ex 2

Pk 4

primary character - Neo

Erica

von Abendritter

Eisenmadel

Was

$$$

1

D

MtF

Het

Ex 4

Pk 2

primary character - Wasamon

The key (I should have put this in) Cottages: D=Dickinson, P=Poe, W=Whitman, T=Twain, H=Hawthorne, M=Melville, E=Emerson

Gender: M F FtM MtF C (complex)
Orientation = Gay, Het, Q, Bi, Complex
Wealth: $ = Shine, in the hills. $$ Lower Middle Class. $$$ - Avg to Upper Middle Class. $$$$ - Wealthy. $$$$$ = Goodkinds, Gates, etc.

For powers, we use abbreviations:
Av = avatar
De = devisor
Em = empath
En = energizer
Es = Esper
Ex = exemplar
Ga = gadgeteer
He = healing
Ma = manifestor
Pd = PDP
Pk = Psychokinetic
Pm = Power mimic
Ps = PSI
Py = pyrokinesis
Re = Regen
Sh = shifter
Te = telekinesis
Ts = TK superman
Tp = Telepathy
Wa = warper
Wz = wiz
Ch = channeler

Oh, by the way = the spreadsheet will calculate the numbers of all powers included (for statistical purposes - so we didn't end up with 35% gadgeteers!), also total by cottage, by class, by gender, etc. That helps us with distribution.
Currently, class is 0 (jr high) to 4 (senior); I'm modifying it to year of graduation

mittfh wrote:
...but then that system breaks down with those that have a more varied combination of powers - try describing Kayda's powers in 3 words or fewer...

Challenge accepted!

Magical Native American.

Two words:

Legendary Avatar


Anyone for one word?

Actually, I can sum up Kayda's main power in just one word:

Shaman.

Her Ex, Reg, Wiz etc. are secondary.

Ptesanwi

OK, how few words can you use to describe all 3+ residents of Poe Room 202?

Sidenote: added the <span>s to the offline copy of the List of (1G) Canon Stories, with a little help from regex replace in LibreOffice. Once I've updated all 65 remaining stories and double checked the publication dates (which over here seem to be a day later than CH), I can extract the publication dates and start building the master list, which I'm imagining would look something like this, where each date linked to the relative entry in Gen1 Yr 1 / Gen 1 Yr 2 / Gen 2 Yr 1 etc. (ASCII Art FTW!)

Wikia is weird today... Elrod did some additions today, and I was going to tweak a few formatting details on his contribution, but... whenever I tried to load the page for editing, it gave me the OLD version of the page, BEFORE Elrod added his stuff. Looking at the edit story, sometimes Elrod's edits appeared, sometimes they didn't (at one point I was worried I had accidentally clicked on the "rollback" button...)

I think they are having some sync issues inside the server farm -- depending on which particular server I get, I'm served the old or the new database. It's probably best to wait a few hours before trying again...

Meanwhile, I've done another batch of updates to the List of Canon Stories - there are 45 left to update in the main timeline, plus the handful of undated / parodies / meta etc.

For the main timeline, you can now jump directly to a publication date courtesy of internal anchors, e.g. 2016-02-16 .

If you notice any errors / omissions within the dark yellow entries, let me know here so I can fix them in both the online and offline copies of the page. Then once everything's OK will come the reorganisation, perhaps something along the lines of:

List of Canon Stories
-> Blurb
-> Links to the following:
Dated Canon Stories: 2006-07 Academic Year
Dated Canon Stories: 2007-08 Academic Year (once they start being released!)
Dated Canon Stories: 2016-17 Academic Year
-> Find Releases by Publication Date (the table from my previous post)

For origin stories, it's probably logical to put them in the academic year the students start Whateley, rather than having separate tables for 05-06 (origins for the 06-07 froshes) and 15-16 (origins for the 16-17 froshes). The Timeline field will be useful for allowing readers to distinguish between [P]re-Whateley and [A]cademy set tales, plus of course the various codes for other stuff (e.g. [X] for stuff in the universe but not directly related to the Academy, other letters for students who have multiple stories [and several hundred thousand words] between origin and arrival - notably [K]ayda and [M]erry).

I saw on another thread that putting in information without all the links and coding was ok, so I did that today,
I added the new info for Pristine and Miasma from Odds and Ends. I'm still not clear on how to do links, so I put the story reference in brackets after the information.

Yeah, that does help, and is welcome.

Maintaining the wiki involves basically 3 jobs:

1. Research -- that is, assembling the data. This is BY FAR the most time-consuming part.
2. Writing. Mostly straightforward, although sometimes it benefits from some finesse with the subtleties of the English language. Not much, though. "Business letter" writing abilities are more than enough.
3. Coding. That involves fiddling with the MediaWiki syntax. It has somewhat of a learning curve, but it's not actually that hard.

So, yeah, if you are intimidated by (3), but can help with (1) and (2), it is a big help.

Even if someone has difficulties with (2), just doing the research and dumping the raw facts in the wiki (or even the talk page, if you are afraid of breaking something), leaving it for someone to clean up later... they are STILL saving the Wiki team something like 70% of the work.

As for how to do links... well, I'm probably the best person to do a five-minute tutorial. The reason for that is that I don't have much experience with the Visual Editor (the normal choice for people who are not serious MediaWiki geeks) -- I tend to do things the "hard way", by editing the source code. But I'm told that it's pretty much point-and-click. There should be a button for turning a word into a link -- even the source code editor has that.

Oh, and by the way... thanks for including the chapter info. Actually adding the chapter data to the ref is Level 2 MediaWiki editing, but if you make it available someone will figure it out.

As part of my editing of the List of Canon Stories, I've moved Tennyo Goes To Hell into Dated Stories, since we know it takes place on the same day as Anecdotal Antidote Apocalypse.

Do we know when the Christmas break 2006 started, or the date range for Easter 2007? If so, we could tentatively move Christmas Chicanery into Dated Stories, and start working out approximate dates for Tennyo's Easter (it starts on the first day of Easter break, and ends just over a week later when everyone's been back for a few days, indicating they may just get Good Friday and Easter Monday off rather than a week or two).

[EDIT]

Meanwhile, I've got two tests in progress:

Release Test - the idea being to list the releases by year and month. For the moment, they're just going in as plain text, but when the Lists of Canon Stories have been fully updated and the release dates amended where necessary (many of which are set to a day later than back at CH), they'll link to the relevant entry in the Whateley Academic Year Lists of Canon Stories.

Dated 07 Test - an attempt at the page for the 2007-08 academic year. I'm also lumping in the origin stories for those starting Whateley that year, as I feel it's more consistent than having them sitting in the 2006-07 academic year.

The idea I have is that the lists of dated stories, and those with uncertain dates but known to fall within a particular academic year, will be moved out to appropriate pages, which will be linked to from the main List of Canon Stories. That List will also contain the general uncertain dated stories (those not taking place in one of the 'main' academic years), the out-of-continuity stuff, parodies and any remaining teasers. The Release List could probably also sit on a separate page, linked to from the main List of Canon Stories page.

As they're my ideas and tests, they're not fixed in stone - so feel free to discuss, either below or on the relevant Talk pages.

Easter was April 8, Kayda and Charge leave on the 9th for a week in SD. They returned on the 15th.

Judging from the Christmas Stories, Ayla, Tennyo, Christmas Break ran Dec 22 to Jan 6.

I think we can infer the date of Christmas 2006 break without too much trouble. Let me see...
- From "Evil Little Christmas," we know that the Bad Seeds left early on the 18th -- which was a Monday. Cutlass and Sapper join them on the Wednesday, 20th, but they had to take their exams all at once to manage that.
- We also know that as late as the Thursday (21th) the Upperclassmen were still having Combat Finals.
- "It's All in the Timing" happened on the 21st, in-campus
- Ayla, Tennyo, Toni, Chou, Fey and Jade all left on the 22nd. Ayla left early on the morning (7 am), Billie left sometime around 9:30, Toni and Chou took the 12:30 train, and Jade & Fey arrived at 7:07PM CST in Kansas City.
- So... I think it's pretty likely that the Winter Holidays started officially on Friday, December 22nd. From what we have seen in the stories, everybody was concerned only with traveling. So it seems that school activities ended on Thursday.

I've just re-read Chicanery - it starts almost a week before the great exodus and ends a day later.

So taking Dec 22nd as the exodus date, we know it definitely ends on Dec 23rd, so I'll estimate Saturday 17th as the start (with the obligatory # at the end of the date to indicate approximately).

I'll re-read Tennyo's Easter over the weekend to determine if it's possible to work out how long each part takes.

Meanwhile, Release Test is currently up to the end of 2008 and the start of the canon's regular release schedule. Links will only be added once the 2006-07 stories have been fully updated and the release dates tweaked if necessary (many migrated stories have a release date set one day after what the Wiki recorded for Crystal Hall).

... There is a What Links Here thing! But it's hidden in the code.

Like for the Outcast Corner Page :

<li class="mytools menu">
<span class="arrow-icon-ctr"><span class="arrow-icon arrow-icon-single"></span></span>
<a href="#">My Tools</a>
<ul id="my-tools-menu" class="tools-menu">
<li class="overflow">
<a href="/wiki/Outcast_Corner?action=history" data-name="history">History</a>
</li>
<li class="overflow">
<a href="/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Outcast_Corner" data-name="whatlinkshere">What links here</a>
</li>

And it goes here: crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Outcast_Corner

Actually, you have just to click on the "What links here" link on the dark blue bar at the bottom of the page. It's the fifth link, after "Following", "History", "Recent Changes" and "Upload photo."

As for updating the links to Mittfh's revamped Story pages... turns out that pretty much no page links to the list; they link to the individual story pages.

Sir Lee wrote: Actually, you have just to click on the "What links here" link on the dark blue bar at the bottom of the page. It's the fifth link, after "Following", "History", "Recent Changes" and "Upload photo."

I don't know what you're talking about. The only dark blue bar I have is at the top, and its headings and subheadings are:

Hmm, you are right in that the buttons didn't show up when I visited the site with a different browser. It might be something in my personal user settings... I have to figure it out.

EDIT: it seems to be the same (rather thin) bar that shows links to "lifestyle", "entertainment" and "video games" when I'm NOT logged in to Wikia -- but with different content. It's possible that you have collapsed it -- look for a small button with two chevrons at the lower right-hand corner to expand it again.

I logged in under a different username (the one I use for the AWB bot), which I had not customized, and it showed the blue bar... with less buttons than I'm used. But one of those is the "My Tools" menu, which by default includes the "What Links Here" button.

Right beside it there is a "Customize" button, which allows you to customize the bottom blue bar -- and include the "What Links Here" to the main bar.

Sir Lee wrote: Hmm, you are right in that the buttons didn't show up when I visited the site with a different browser. It might be something in my personal user settings... I have to figure it out.

EDIT: it seems to be the same (rather thin) bar that shows links to "lifestyle", "entertainment" and "video games" when I'm NOT logged in to Wikia -- but with different content. It's possible that you have collapsed it -- look for a small button with two chevrons at the lower right-hand corner to expand it again.

I logged in under a different username (the one I use for the AWB bot), which I had not customized, and it showed the blue bar... with less buttons than I'm used. But one of those is the "My Tools" menu, which by default includes the "What Links Here" button.

Right beside it there is a "Customize" button, which allows you to customize the bottom blue bar -- and include the "What Links Here" to the main bar.

I'm on Firefox 44.0.2.

At the very bottom, I've got:

Around Wikia's network

Random Wiki

[Ads to other Wikis with Ads Activated]

A link to lifestylehub.wikia.com/wiki/Lifestyle_Hub

About Help Community Central Careers Advertise API Contact Wikia Terms of Use Privacy Policy Global Sitemap

Content is available under CC-BY-SA.

Given the code, it seems like the stuff you're talking about should be below that stuff I just described, but I can't see it. In fact, it's literally in a section called: "WikiaBarWrapper hidden"

I'm not seeing the bar either, and there doesn't appear to be an explicit option within Special:Preferences, so it's likely to be either (a) something that's only enabled for certain usergroups (I'm just in Autoconfirmed users and Users) or something set using Personal JavaScript (which you enable in Preferences and edit in Community Central).

Meanwhile, Wikia's now decided to oh-so-helpfully stick a big box of "Trending Fandom Articles" in the middle of each page (dynamically generated)...

...or at least it did until I attacked it with AdBlock Plus' Element Hiding Helper

I'm seeing it in the bar that floats at the bottom of my window... but only if I'm logged in.

Odd. My main browser (Seamonkey) has NoScript, so I thought that might have something to do with it...
...so I tested it using a portable version of Firefox ESR (38.7.0), with no extensions at all, and go the following results:

1. Not logged on: blue bar at the very bottom of the window (right above the Windows Taskbar), showing three dark grey/white text rectangular buttons ("Lifestyle", "Entertainment" and "Video Games"), each one sporting a bright blue "antenna" icon. At the right end, the bar exhibits a link in white letters to "10 Star Wars vacation spots you need to" <truncated>
2. If I click on the very right end of this blue bar, it collapses leaving a small squarish button (blue with a double upward-pointing chevron) on the bottom-right corner of the window. If I click on that button, the bar comes back.
3. There are some rather obnoxious ads.
4. When I log on (I'm using my "Bot" account for this, since I didn't bother customizing it) the blue bar at the bottom changes to display a few tool buttons: "Follow", "My Tools" (which opens an upwards menu, which includes the "What Links Here" option), "Customize" (with a gear icon) and "Shortcuts". It can be collapsed as well -- in fact, the right-hand end of the bar sports a button two downward-pointing chevrons, working identically to the bar for unlogged users.
5. The ads become *very* slightly less obnoxious.
6. If I go into the Preferences/My Info page and disable the "show all ads" option (it's the last one), it apparently removes the bottom ad block -- but not the right-hand ad block.
7. If I click on the "Customize" button at the bottom blue bar, I get the option to add more buttons to the blue bar, and edit the "My Tools" list.

That's about it. NoScript in my main browser does a good job of blocking the ads without disrupting Wikia functionality, but I remember it took me a while to find exactly which scripts I had to allow (I believe I had to allow wikia.net, nocookie.net and wikia-beacon.com for starters).

The blue bar at the bottom of my page has the following:

Following My Tools Customize Shortcuts

My Tools opens a "History" and "What Links" button
Customize allows you to add or subtract tools from the My Tools drop box
Shortcuts is a list of keyboard shortcuts.

Big milestone. I have just created the page for AJ/Lex Blackstone -- and the page count for the wiki reached 3000.

Three. THOUSAND. pages. And, AFAIK, MediaWiki does not count redirects and a few other things for counting purposes. So it's more likely to be three thousand actual CONTENT pages. Not bad for a wiki from a small fandom, with only half-a-dozen regular editors at any particular time.

But we still would love to get more help. A LOT more. Right now, we have a list of 713 "wanted" pages. That's almost 25% of what we already have -- that WITHOUT taking into account that, when people start creating those pages, doubtlessly new "wanted" pages will appear on the list. And both Gen2 and the 2007 academic year will add a lot of new characters pretty soon.

Not to mention adding new info to the already-existing pages.

I have said this before -- we will take whatever help you can give. We are not a closed club, we don't demand that you learn wiki syntax, we don't even require good grammar or spelling. All of that can be fixed later.

If all you know how to do is to dump raw text with info, that's fine. Research is a big part of the job.
If you don't even know how to do that, but you do have the research -- dump it into a message in the forums; someone will probably copy it to the wiki.

(Although I really would like if you registered in Wikia and put the material directly in the wiki -- that way, you get credit for the edit. No, it doesn't buy you anything, but it does give you the feeling of being a part of the process)

How hard is it to delete pages, again? In case we make a mistake?

Is the Wanted Pages list supposed to be easy to find? 'Cause it took me a while to get to the special pages, and then to here: crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Wante...s?limit=500&offset=0

Also, Schmidt (HPARC) is linked from nowhere: crystalhall.wikia.com/wiki/Special:WhatL.../Schmidt_%28HPARC%29

Although, now it redirects somewhere.

Malady wrote: How hard is it to delete pages, again? In case we make a mistake?

Since the pages are editable, the only reason to need to delete a page would be if it were a duplicate.

Only admins can delete pages. If you find a page that you think should be deleted, you may tag it with the {{delete}} template. If you can't summarize the justification for deletion in the "edit description" field, explain on the talk page.

As for redirects that are not actually being used, well, they are still useful: whenever you begin writing a link (at least in the source-code editor), the Wikia "autocomplete" feature will suggest the *destination* of the redirect instead.

For instance, if I start writing a link for "Frost", the autocomplete will suggest "She-Beast" instead. It also works for the wikia Search field, which is convenient. (Yes, I deliberately *created* an unused redirect for that).

Admittedly, sometimes I don't WANT the destination, and prefer routing through a redirect. For instance, consider the family pages. Right now, the "Danny Franks" page is a redirect to the "Franks family" page -- but Danny is likely to get his own page pretty soon. Whenever he does, all we will have to do to point all references to the new pages will be to edit the redirect.

So, when do I think unused redirects should be removed? Well, basically when the chances of someone looking for the page under that name are pretty slim. Misspellings, for instance (other than canon name inconsistencies). Or old page titles which were really vague (like only the first name of a character), and were used only because we didn't have anything better at the time.

As for the "wanted pages" (and other similar features)... it's not really in our control, but I think that their being slightly hard to find is deliberate -- they aren't helpful for the casual browser, after all; they are intended for the more regular contributor.

I really should make an "Introduction for new volunteers" page summarizing a few general guidelines and linking useful resources... Any Month Now.

I have a knack for spreadsheets and I would be happy to work on creating one in line with Elrod's format. I bet if there were a few of us we could do it pretty quickly. I agree with mittfh's suggestion to keep powers to a couple words.

I don't know code but FWIW I could populate a spreadsheet.

marie7342231 wrote: I have a knack for spreadsheets and I would be happy to work on creating one in line with Elrod's format. I bet if there were a few of us we could do it pretty quickly. I agree with mittfh's suggestion to keep powers to a couple words.

I don't know code but FWIW I could populate a spreadsheet.

Note that this site's table format can easily be copy-pasted into Excel. ... Testing with Whateley Wiki... The wiki's tables transfer well too!

***

EDIT: A rip of all 5+ character+entity tables + Orphaned Pages + Wanted Pages ... Should have basically all entries. Super messy. Anyone with link can edit. So it's hidden. I have an original.

Have to sleep now. I can clean and repost tomorrow, if no-one wants to edit this vers. ... Is ~516KB.


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If someone wants a copy of the Excel spreadsheet, e-mail me and I'll send a depopulated version (okay, I'll leave in Laura and one other character so you can see how it goes.

It's set up to collect stats by year, power type, cottage, etc. Lots of little formulas I put in that are kind of tough to describe in English.

elrodw wrote: If someone wants a copy of the Excel spreadsheet, e-mail me and I'll send a depopulated version (okay, I'll leave in Laura and one other character so you can see how it goes.

It's set up to collect stats by year, power type, cottage, etc. Lots of little formulas I put in that are kind of tough to describe in English.

Received! ... Can I post a link to my Google Drive Copy? ... What is Position?

Malady wrote:

elrodw wrote: If someone wants a copy of the Excel spreadsheet, e-mail me and I'll send a depopulated version (okay, I'll leave in Laura and one other character so you can see how it goes.

It's set up to collect stats by year, power type, cottage, etc. Lots of little formulas I put in that are kind of tough to describe in English.

Received! ... Can I post a link to my Google Drive Copy? ... What is Position?

I don't have a problem putting a link. Just maybe put in a note that it's contributed by me?

Position is for things like Resident Assistant (new for 07), Fixer, and such. You could open it to put in Alpha president, etc - it's mostly for noting if they have a key role in a cottage or on campus.

Important note - Google Docs spreadsheet is not nearly as friendly to filters as Excel. I would put in a note to NOT do any sorts or other such things on Google Sheets, but to download a copy and use the Open Office or Excel filters and sorting functions - because they can be easily undone and such. Google Sheets is much more limited. Filling in data? No problem, but using it for sorting? problem.

Note also that all powers have a 2-letter abbreviation - we use Ex-X for Exemplar, where X is the numerical rating. Exemplar-1 is Ex-1. If you use the power abbreviations as listed on the stats column, everything works beautifully for sorting, filtering, collecting stats, etc.

elrodw wrote:

Malady wrote:

elrodw wrote: If someone wants a copy of the Excel spreadsheet, e-mail me and I'll send a depopulated version (okay, I'll leave in Laura and one other character so you can see how it goes.

It's set up to collect stats by year, power type, cottage, etc. Lots of little formulas I put in that are kind of tough to describe in English.

Received! ... Can I post a link to my Google Drive Copy? ... What is Position?

I don't have a problem putting a link. Just maybe put in a note that it's contributed by me?

Position is for things like Resident Assistant (new for 07), Fixer, and such. You could open it to put in Alpha president, etc - it's mostly for noting if they have a key role in a cottage or on campus.

Important note - Google Docs spreadsheet is not nearly as friendly to filters as Excel. I would put in a note to NOT do any sorts or other such things on Google Sheets, but to download a copy and use the Open Office or Excel filters and sorting functions - because they can be easily undone and such. Google Sheets is much more limited. Filling in data? No problem, but using it for sorting? problem.

Note also that all powers have a 2-letter abbreviation - we use Ex-X for Exemplar, where X is the numerical rating. Exemplar-1 is Ex-1. If you use the power abbreviations as listed on the stats column, everything works beautifully for sorting, filtering, collecting stats, etc.

Added the stuff in the email at the top. And fixed the typo for "the".

You guys can edit this one. I have an original.


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Also, that Gen1 Character Sheet I linked to has been cleaned up a slight bit...

The 'class' limit for gen 2 is 2016 to about 2025. That'll need to be changed in the data validation / drop-down for classes for gen 1. Almost forgot to tell you about that.
You can either redo the data validation, or eliminate it (which might affect sort options)

elrodw wrote: The 'class' limit for gen 2 is 2016 to about 2025. That'll need to be changed in the data validation / drop-down for classes for gen 1. Almost forgot to tell you about that.
You can either redo the data validation, or eliminate it (which might affect sort options)

Hmm... I see. ... Well, tagging years to things that aren't data validated would allow year data until I figure out how to fix that, and a simple Find for things that mark the years, like brackets, would allow quick fixing once I figure things out.

Umm... Did you know you left all the other sheets?

Well, anyway, they've been removed, and Year Data Validation has been removed, or, at least set between 1000 and 2025, inclusive...

Double posted so even if you just look at the emails, you'll see the info.

@Sir Lee:

What is Template:Underlinked?