A Wiki of Ice and Fire talk:Community Portal

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Spoiler tag

On Wikipedia there is the spoiler tag: {{spoiler}}. It doesn't work here (yet). What must be done to make it work?

The Template:Spoiler and Template:Endspoiler has to be pulled in from Wikipedia. I've gone ahead and done this (I think), I haven't tried it really. BTW, remember to sign posts with four tildes enclosed in paranthesis. (Ran 11:30, 22 April 2007 (CDT))
I think it matters where the template is. On Wikipedia the templates are on ..org/wiki/Template:... On AWOIAF the template is on ...org/index.php/Template:Spoiler (Scafloc 10:11, 23 April 2007 (CDT))
I'm not sure that it does, actually,
Yep, it doesn't matter. At some point we'll look at obscuring things a little to get the unsightly index.php reference out of there, I think, but it really doesn't matter as far as template functionality. --Ran 10:31, 24 April 2007 (CDT)


Meta - Organizational Structure?

On wikipedia, the members of each house are listed on the house page; here we seem to be splitting the more prominent characters off onto their own pages, i.e. Tyrion Lannister - what is our preferred practice? Subheadings under the House page, or individual character pages, ala the Encyclopedia WOT?

I believe we should go with individual house pages. It makes sense to provide characters extra room, so to speak, in the AWoIaF than they would be allowed in the Wikipedia. The LotR Wikia is, I think, a good model for how we should approach things. --Ran 02:47, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

We should establish a consensus policy (or an editorial one) before we go very much further.

I'm certainly all-ears on this. I've had very limited wiki experience. Wikipedia has, obviously, a fairly thorough and complex organizational structure to handle these things, but it's probably overkill to begin with. Anyone know of any good, smallish fancruft wikis that we might look at for ideas? --Ran 02:47, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

On a related note, I think it would be simpler and more useful to list entries regarding a house's stronghold and/or seat on the house's page, rather than separately, i.e. Sunspear should be a sub-heading under House Martell, rather than its own page - any ideas? I think that the strongholds page on wikipedia is a disaster. --Daena the defiant 19:36, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Similar to the above, I think we should have separate pages for house seats, and we can do things like making use of categories, internal links, and possibly even transclusion (when appropriate) to group articles together. --Ran 02:47, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
The policy in the wikipedia is that each subject with enough rellevant information should have its own article. The thing is that the standards of what is rellevant vary a lot between the Wikipedia and us. Of course Sunspear is rellevant (Oldcastle is!), so the question is: are we capable of writing three or four paragraphs on it? Of course we are.
IMO, we should start moving the charachters from the their house pages to their own pages, leaving only a brief description of their members in the house article.--The hairy bear (Send me a raven) 02:56, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
Aggree but let's not make it an "offical" policy to start with a page for each character. When someone feels that a heading has enough material to justify an article in stead of a heading, feel free to create a new page and remove the info. A short description should remain on the original article I think. Scafloc 09:34, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
This sounds like a good approach to me. I could easily see people running around creating pages with no content to help, and then never helping to actually fill in those pages with content. Too many empty articles = bad. Minor members of houses who basically only appear in the appendices or are mentioned only once can probably do without their own page. --Ran 10:26, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Theory Policy

I've put in extensions and templates from Lostpedia that provide Theory tabs for all articles and provide a set block of text intended to be put into the theory sub-articles when they are first edited. Please add {{Theory_Policy}} at the top of a new theory sub-article before proceeding. An example can be seen at Will/Theories. --Ran 12:00, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

Commons

Does anyone know why linking images from commons (File:53 daenarys.jpg) does not work? Is this feature disabled?

I think you need to use [[commons:Image:53_daenarys.jpg]] for it to work properly. It seems to work for me, as here: commons:Image:53_daenarys.jpg. If you mean you can't embed images, I don't think interwiki linking supports embedding images, but I could be wrong (I've tried it various ways and the only way to do so is to point directly to the image, which I don't believe would be proper wiki etiquette). We could transwiki from there if we wanted to embed GNU FDL imagery from there, I suppose. --Ran 07:00, 25 April 2007
In the Wiki projects I've worked, you could . For example, this Targaryen gentree on the english wiki is directly taken from commons, while in our wiki it's not working (Targaryen#Genealogy). Anyway, we can always upload the images from commons on our wiki so it's not a big problem. --The hairy bear (Send me a raven) 08:36, 25 April 2007 (CDT)
Although now I'm seeing that "File uploads are disabled on this wiki." So we are choosing to have an wiki without images?--The hairy bear (Send me a raven) 09:38, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

I'm also missing the Redirect option in my toolbar. I wonder if this could be added somehow. --The hairy bear (Send me a raven) 05:44, 25 April 2007 (CDT)

I'll look into this. Does this button show up in the editing screen? --Ran 07:00, 25 April 2007 (CDT)
Nevermind, all fixed. Let me know if there are any other useful buttons for the edit page. --Ran 07:21, 25 April 2007 (CDT)
Thanks! I don't think further buttons are really needed--The hairy bear (Send me a raven) 08:36, 25 April 2007 (CDT)

Color Scheme

It looks like either some sort of new color scheme was just introduced or I hit a wrong buttom somewhere. Many of the text boxes are now grey instead of white. Is there any way I can set my display back to the normal wikipedia look? The grey is too murky on my eyes and it looks strange contrasting with the other areas of white. -Oorag 15:10, 25 April 2007 (CDT)

It's testing to see how skinning works. For the time being we've put it back to the standard. In the future, you'll be able to use MySkin and a custom CSS file to change some of the details to your liking. We are thinking of a grey-and-red scheme for the wiki, but haven't made any final decisions. --Ran 15:22, 25 April 2007 (CDT)

Copying from Wikipedia

Ok, I've recently reverted some edits copied from Wikipedia because they weren't done properly. Please folks, if you're going to copy from Wikipedia, even though it is permitted, there are some rules to follow. See Wikipedia's copyrights page. I'd also recommend against such blanket copies, since they leave the residue of Wikipedia behind, which leads to some rather ugly pages with all sorts of red links and bad templates. I'd suggest holding off on any copies till we know how to import things anyway, that would give us both the content and a history. Mistermanticore

You're right on needing to learn the transwiking process. Unfortunately, it seems import is restricted to sysops on the originating site -- it dumps a file on their computers which they can then upload to the new site to move things wholesale. So we'll have to do without that. The Transwiki process is here. If you scroll down, there's a good example that helps illustrate the (rather complex) step by step instructions, which should make it easier. --Ran 17:54, 25 April 2007 (CDT)
To add a little more, it looks like the only legal requirement in the transwiking process would be appropriate attribution of the work. This is done by putting a notice in the article that it derives from a Wikipedia article by linking to that article.
Finally, what might be useful is for someone to go through Wikipedia and make a list of articles to be transwikied, if they don't have time to transwiki anything themselves but would like to contribute (I suggest putting that in the talk for the Main Page, or create a "Project:Articles to copy" page. With that, people can move articles to the transwiki namespace to clean them up and make sure all links work properly. Then we can note which ones are ready to be moved from the namespace to full-fledged articles, and I (and anyone else we end up setting up with move ability) can get them in place. --Ran 18:19, 25 April 2007 (CDT)
We've got a bigger problem than I though. I just opened House Stark. It too was copied, unattributed, from Wikipedia. Same with House Targaryen and House Lannister who knows what others? I'm sure a lot of the contributors here are the same as the ones there, but not all, and it doesn't absolve us from following Wikipedia's rules on reusing their content. I hate to do this, but I'm going to go through several pages and blank all of those which it seems to me are copies from Wikipedia. I don't know if they'll need to be deleted outright, but if this continues, it will be a problem. Mistermanticore 23:07, 25 April 2007 (CDT)
Well, I went through several pages. I found numerous other copyright violations. I can't find one attribution. I expect there are a lot more like that, and thanks to the moving around going on, it may be a lot more. At this point, I'm very close to suggesting we just delete all the articles and start fresh. Copying from Wikipedia isn't a simple matter of doing a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V. There are rules. They are not being followed. I hate to sound like I'm being an ass here, but I'd hate for Ran to get into legal trouble just because some overeager fans thought it'd be ok. This is an especially big problem since Ran is working on an official worldbook for the series. Mistermanticore 23:22, 25 April 2007 (CDT)

Maybe I'm reading the link you provided wrong, but this section: "Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement)" seems to say that as long as we include a link to the original wikipedia article in our AWOIAF article, we'll be fine. If that's true, instead of blanking the page when you find copying going on, just add a link in a "references" section. However, I do agree that people need to fix the wikilinks before they save an article. I've gone through a bunch of articles fixing them, but it's tedious work. -Oorag 00:17, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

It's slightly more complicated than that. Specifically, you need to look at the rights and obligations section, and besides, given that so many pages were copied without even an edit summary indicating the source, well, I consider it a problem. I think people just didn't realize that it wouldn't be a good idea to copy blindly. Mistermanticore 00:34, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
Maybe I'm an idiot, but I'm getting lost in these documents. Could someone with a firm grasp of exactly what needs to be done to propely cite wikipedia write out some directions on what to do? First of all, how exactly does one paste the wikipedia article history into the AWOIAF talk pages? Does that mean just highlighting the text of the wikipedia history page and copying the text into the AWOIAF talk page? That doesn't make much sense to me is why I ask. Anyway, I'm one of the people who was pasting in material from wikipedia (though I didn't leave bad links), so I'd like to fix the articles I created if possible, but these legal/tech documents are a black hole of confusion to me. Maybe someone could do one article properly and we can use that as the model to follow. -Oorag 01:03, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
In fact, I think Oorag is right. I don't believe we _have_ to put in the edit history of the templates we're using, for example, o fulfill the GNU FDL. All we need to do is provide a link to the original in our articles. This can be easily done.
Reading the Discussion for the Transwiki article, it seems primarily concerned with the appropriate way to move _Wikipedia_ articles between wikis. It may also be considered "good wiki" to do so, on the basis that it simplifies understanding prior contributions. But as Oorag noted (and as someone notes in m:Transwiki_talk, the GNU FDL does not have a requirement for maintaining full attribution of contributors. This should be the defining document for our own set of rules, rather than trying to make use of all of Wikipedia's procedural methods. --Ran 02:19, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
What I'm going to do is to contact all users, or maybe figure out how to put up a site admin message, and put a freeze on new article creation until all present articles are verified to link back to their source document and that all users are aware of the requirement of linking back. --Ran 02:19, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

Let's not panick and overreact. There are a lot of wiki's and more then one must have experience this problem. Ran already pointed out that we may be alble to learn from the Lord of the Ring wiki. I read the article Mistermanticore metionned about the copyright of wikipedia. It seems we have to do the following (when copying):

  • mention we copied from wikipedia
  • release our articles including changes under GFDL
  • link to the original article
  • provide acces to the transparent copy

I saw how the "Lord of the Rings" wiki handled this problem, they use a template which does the things mentionned above. So what we should do is see how to import that template (with thinking about the copyright of the template!!!) and use the template. Again, let's not panick. If this is the hardest problem we will experience, we'll be doing great.-- Scafloc 03:14, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

Templates

I've learned a bit more about MediaWiki, including the fact that Wikipedia is not automatically enabled as an interwiki source. I'll have to fiddle with the database to fix that. When that happens, I believe the templates we've transwikied from there are going to be removed in favor of using something called "scary transclusion". What this means is that we'll be able to transclude the templates directly across to placeholder templates of our own without having to transwiki them. One benefit of this will be greater compatability with Wikipedia.

So, until I get that sorted out, please avoid introducing new templates from Wikipedia. If you find that you'll be needing templates to get pages to look right, note them here. --Ran 18:29, 25 April 2007 (CDT)

Required Atribution Notice

This a generic message related to the appropriate means of copying material from Wikipedia:

Before adding new articles today, please review all articles you have contributed to (and any other articles you care to check, but your own articles first and foremost) and verify that they are either: a) wholly original or b) copied from Wikipedia. If (b) applies, please verify that w:Copyrights#Reusers.27_rights_and_obligations is fulfilled by making sure that somewhere at the end of the document is a notice of this kind:

{{EnWP|<Full name of Article>}}. --Ran 02:32, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
Ran on the LotR wiki they have a template which does (as I read it) all we need when copying. Do you think you can copy the template (with acknowledge the copyright ect? Scafloc 03:21, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
Thanks! I've now imported it in, and it seems to work perfectly. Terrific. :) This should make the process much quicker. --Ran 04:10, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
Some articles cobble together two or more articles from Wikipedia. Can the template cite multiple pages, and if so, how? If now, how should we go about multiple citations? -Crawdad 11:42, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
I'm not sure if you can do set up the template for multiple entries, but you can always do the template twice. Mistermanticore 11:47, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
Yeah, twice would be the best bet right now. Best to get the attribution issues out of the way ASAP, and then we'll see about making it more effecient. Maybe once I've enough experience I can modify the EnWP to take multiple attributions. Or someone else could try. --Ran 12:51, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
I have changed the template. It is now possible to refer up to 4 pages. You have to use the parameternames (1,2,3,4). Parameter 2,3,4 are optional. 1 is not but you don't have to use the parametername ("1"). Scafloc 07:31, 27 April 2007 (CDT)


  • BTW, can we get this template added to the edit bar? It might help encourage people to do it. Mistermanticore 13:53, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
Hum, I think I could figure it out. Don't have an image for it, though. Hrm... Anyone know if LotR Wikia has one? --Ran 14:23, 26 April 2007 (CDT)
I could not find anything at LotR, but there is something on wikipedia. The idea is that a user can do this for himself, but it must be possible for an adminstrator to do this for all users. Seems complicated though and will take some time to figure out I think. Scafloc 15:06, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

Interwiki Linking

Interwiki linking should now be functional. This means that you can easily and simply link to Wikipedia with w:, wikipedia:, and en:. For example, [[w:A Song of Ice and Fire]] will link to Wikipedia's version of the ASoIaF page. This should make a number of things easier, in particular making sure the GNU FDL is fulfilled.

Timelines

Hey folks, I've added the EasyTimeline extension to the wiki. It has a fairly rigorous but otherwise straightforward scripting language which will allow one to construct some pretty complex timelines (with clickable link elements, no less!) I think we can get a lot of mileage on this -- timeline of the Targaryen kings, speculative timelines, and so on. Check out the above link for examples and more information. --Ran 16:48, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

GNU FDL Free License banner display errors

Is anyone else getting a display error with this GNU FDL Free Doc License banner? It seems to be displayed at a fixed distance from the top of the page. When an article is longer than that distance, the banner overlaps the article. -Oorag 22:15, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

Could you give an example or two? --Ran 03:34, 29 April 2007 (CDT)
Alrighty, made some screencaps: here is an example of the banner on a small article, with a gap between the banner and the end of the text, and here is a long article with the banner overlapping text. -Oorag 17:09, 29 April 2007 (CDT)
Huh. That last article appears to be this Talk, and I've never seen that before. Does this problem happen consistently for you, or only on occasion? Have you tried resetting your cache to see if it might be a caching issue? I think on IE you can do that by holding down CTRL while pushing the reload button.
Anyone else notice the problem? --Ran 03:25, 30 April 2007 (CDT)
I just cleared all my offline content and nothing was affected. It always displays like this. -Oorag 23:13, 30 April 2007 (CDT)
On my own pc it works fine; the banner is displayed at the bottom of the page. But on my pc at the office I have the same problem Oorag has. No idea what causes it Scafloc 06:41, 1 May 2007 (CDT)
Well, I just did a bit of testing, and I'm seeing the problem on IE 6, but not one Firefox. In fact, I'm seeing it on this page, with the little image sitting just at the lower left corner of the edit window. Mistermanticore 08:42, 1 May 2007 (CDT)
Yeah, it looks like the problem is with IE. Firefox has no problem. -Oorag 10:59, 1 May 2007 (CDT)
I'm fairly sure we're using the standard Monobook, so I'm not quite what's going on. Will look into it. --Ran 08:53, 2 May 2007 (CDT)

How to note years

Well, the new topic to discuss/decide is how to note years. I started an Aegon's Landing page so that people could write years like "298 AL" and link to that article for anyone who doesn't know what AL means. I prefer that way personally, rather than saying "300 years ago", since when "now" would be is nebulous. -Oorag 19:10, 2 May 2007 (CDT)