FlightGear wiki:Village pump
Welcome to the Village Pump. This page is used to discuss the technical issues, operations and guidelines of the FlightGear wiki.
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Welcoming template
I have had a shelved draft of a welcoming template laying in a subpage for quite a while that I have dusted off and rewritten.
It has a welcoming message and some links I hope will be useful to new users (and perhaps not so new ones as well). The idea is that when some of us sees that there is a new user we will add that template to the top of the new users discussion page. I am not sure about whether we should wait till the user have made some edits (to see if it is a bot) or if we should add it at once.
I would like to have some more eyes on it to see for example if I should have some more or some less links, or if there is something I did not think of. I tried to use as few links as possible, while also keeping ones a new user might hope is there, but do not know where to look for.
When I feel content with it I will move it to the template namespace and add a site notice linking to it for a while, as I am not sure if you all look here or on Special:RecentChanges.
Anyway here is my current draft (do not hesitate to add suggestions on its discussion page): User:Johan G/Template:Welcome to the wiki
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 13:02, 15 April 2019 (EDT)
- The template is now moved to {{Welcome to the wiki}}
- —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 18:19, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
- It looks good to me too. What about using Extension:Create User Page to fully automate the process?
- Bugman (talk) 09:57, 16 April 2019 (EDT)
- If you mean as in automatically creating a user discussion page and adding the welcome template? Though it would probably be a good idea, as likely no one will be left without a welcome, it kind of feels better if it is done by a being of flesh and blood than if it was done by a bot. Consider me undecided. ;-)
- —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 18:13, 17 April 2019 (EDT)
- It is a worry that the automation will not seem personal. However I just counted the new user registrations from 17/04/2018 to 17/04/2019. There are 113 registrations! Maybe 5% are not bots, but identifying these is hard. I think it will be too overwhelming for any individual to manually do this.
- One registration every second day. Automation might not be such a bad idea after all.
- I noticed though that Extension:Create User Page does not create the user discussion page, which is where such messageboxes typically are placed. Maybe not a big problem.
- —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 12:46, 19 April 2019 (EDT)
- A site notice is now up with the text "Hi fellow wiki users!
- To help new users get more familiar with the wiki (and maybe older users too) there is now a {{Welcome to the wiki}} template. Have a look at it and feel free to add it to new users discussion pages (and perhaps your own).
- I have tried to keep the template short, but meaningful. /Johan G"
The lead section, or first section, as I have called it
Most of the time when I have been writing help pages I have tried to use the terminology used on Wikipedia and its sister projects, but somehow I have called the lead section (or lead or introduction) first section and done that consistently. I have gone through the help pages and changed that.
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 08:56, 23 May 2019 (EDT)
Automated translation for the wikipedia template
Just for the record, I attempted to modify {{wikipedia}} to automatically determine the page language and point to the non-english Wikipedia page without the lang parameter. I have recently added the wikipedia parameter to {{infobox aircraft}} and was hoping to use the language auto-detection to have the wikipedia infobox link point to the correct translation at Wikipedia. I could not use {{PAGELANGUAGE}} as this required MediaWiki >= 1.29 (see [1]). So I unsuccessfully attempted to use the same logic as the {{LangSwitch}} parameter. I reverted all changes as there appears to be no way to correctly detect the page language (other than wait for the next MediaWiki upgrade to expose {{PAGELANGUAGE}}).
Bugman (talk) 05:51, 24 May 2019 (EDT)
- Note that this means that the aircraft infobox wikipedia link can only point to the English page until an upgrade occurs (this is not urgent though).
{{lc: {{#titleparts: {{PAGENAME}} | 1}} }}should return the language code needed for the lang= parameter.
- Note that you will only be able to pull this of where the article title is exactly the same in another language. If a model for example have have another name in one country (like cars sometimes have) the link will fail. If the title transcribed the link will fail. Etc.
Expansion of the upload licence list and uploading errors
I've always been concerned that we do not present enough licence choices for the graphics uploaded to the wiki. In testing this, I've noticed that I can no longer upload graphics to the wiki! I see a red exclamation mark and the text Unknown error: "unknown", None of the uploads were successful., the button Retry failed uploads, and 0 of 1 file uploaded. Has any one else seen this?
Also, is there a reason we don't update MediaWiki:Licenses? I think I'll add the CC v4.0 licenses so those can be selected. I'll probably also add the GPL.
Bugman (talk) 04:22, 27 May 2019 (EDT)
- While I have not tested uploading, according the upload log files were uploaded as recent as the 26th.
- Regarding the licenses it might be a good idea to add any missing license templates.
- —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 08:39, 28 May 2019 (EDT)