CWCki:Community Portal

The Community Portal is designed to be a public forum to discuss CWCki related affairs for site wide concerns, policy, that sort of thing.

Please consult the archives to make sure your concern hasn't already been posted before:

CWCki:Community Portal/Archive 1
CWCki:Community Portal/Archive 2
CWCki:Community Portal/Archive 3

Welcome to the future

Welcome to the glorious future of MediaWiki 1.15.1! MediaWiki 1.11 was really old and busted.

Here are some of the things people should be aware of:

• This version of MediaWiki uses a new markup parser. It's a stricter parser that works a little bit differently from the old one. Which incidentally means that if you have broken markup somewhere, it might have worked in previous version, but it doesn't work any more at all. You may see a lot of articles that have broken <center> tags. Make sure they're properly balanced!
• There are a few new features that we might put to good use. One is __HIDDENCAT__. You can use it to hide categories that are purely for editors, and don't actually have stuff that benefits readers. For example, it's used in Stubs and Articles needing citations now.

I'll probably post more when I get inspired. --wwwwolf (wake me when you need me) 12:19, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Some help needed at Templates. Some frequently used templates had consistently broken markup and have missing </center> tags. They also use <table> tags instead of MediaWiki table tags. Take a look at what I did at, say, Template:Needs Images to see how to fix all of these, for the GLORIOUS FUTURE. --wwwwolf (wake me when you need me) 12:37, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

<center>

I'm pretty sure the (center) thing comes when people put a {{quote}} inside a <center></center> tag; quote has its own center tags included, so when MediaWiki parses them both you get two open tags and two close tags. One of the open tags, then, is rendered as text. --Umad 01:10, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Broken refs

Similar issue: Some articles may use <ref> tags without corresponding <references/>. Previous version was silent about this, but new version puts a giant big red warning in the end of the articles. If you see it, please add a source section! --wwwwolf (wake me when you need me) 14:48, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Chris and/New pages

There's a lot of newfags, which isn't a bad thing but I think some people who decided to get into editing CWCki since we moved to the new server and who really haven't gotten a feel of how we do things around here. For starters, a lot of people want to start making pages which can be alright, but the problem is that they really don't get when a new page is warranted and when it's not. Particularly, it seems like the "Chris and" series is drawing a lot of attention to this regard.

For starters, let's discuss the "Chris and" series of articles. I think I might have actually come up with it, now that I think about it, mimicking how CWCkipedia might have an article like "x and y" to discuss topics that are too in depth for the main subject article. For example, there might be an article called "Thomas Jefferson and slavery" to discuss his views on slavery since it's such a huge topic that can't reasonably fit in the main Thomas Jefferson article. Same deal here - we could in theory mention this shit on the Christian Weston Chandler article but that would be huge, especially for topics like sex. It would be awkward to call something like "Chris and sex" just "sex" since people know what sex is, what they want to know is Chris's relationship to it.

I think the problem is that every single trait of Chris does not need a lengthy discussion unless it's very notable. Do we need a full page discussion that Chris isn't reliable when it can simply be said "Chris is not very reliable"? Likewise, there's a need for a degree of subjectivity - what is reliability? It's not like Chris sets any deadlines to make. Furthermore, not everything has to be "Chris and." As I said elsewhere, pretty much every article on here could be a "Chris and [x]" article. HOMOS could easily be "Chris and homosexuality." JERKS could be "Chris and men." Women's rights could be "Chris and feminism." Point is, not everything has to be "Chris and." For fuck's sake, be original. Think of a better name. For example, "Chris and facts" could easily be called "The world according to Chris." Unorthodox but more original.

About new pages in general, seriously, not every little thing about Chris deserves a page if it can be incorporated into existing pages. As long as it's mentioned somewhere, it's cool. Srsly.

Feel free to weigh in on this. --Champthom 00:26, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

I like the Chris and: Series, I really do, but It's really only for things that play major, consistent roles in the bizarre story of Chris-Chan. Chris and writing is a good example. The way Chris writes is just so impossibly fucked up that it deserves more than just a single mention in the main chris article, but calling it just "Writing" is weird and awkward.

I think some of these new articles could really go far. Chris and Authority seems like it could cover an awful lot, but people really need to draft their articles in their sandboxes or talkpages to show what they're aiming for instead of just making a page with the title and a half-paragraph.--Beat 00:36, 6 January 2010 (UTC)