FlightGear wiki:Village pump/Archive 2020
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New Portal: Embedded or Hardware (02/2020)
Suggestion: Dedicated portal for articles relating to embedded/hardware topics (which would be in line with numerous threads on the forum, as well as existing articles on the wiki). - Hooray (talk) 11:59, 17 February 2020 (EST)
- That is slightly less complicated than you might think. What you would do is to create a new page with the prefix
Portal:and a suitable name, say for example Portal:Hardware development, Portal:Cockpit hardware or Portal:DIY cockpit hardware, or maybe Portal:Hardware if you would also like to see commercial hardware there, and then copy and modify the content from a similar portal.
- Hint: There is actually not a portal namespace, it is just a prefix. The portal pages are actually in the main namespaces, and thus function just like any other article page on the wiki.
- Though I think your Portal:Embedded might be more diffuse than Portal:Hardware for people that do not know what embedded software
is, I have still added it to the main page and added Category:Portals to it. It will get more use if people can find it. :-P
Use as few categories as possible
Always use as few categories as possible. Categories are a place in a structure rather than tags. Putting each page in a lot of categories will put a lot of of pages in each category. There is in particular no need to put a page in both a category and then in each category above that category.
Please see advice in Help:Your first article#Categories and maybe also Help:categories.
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 13:04, 15 March 2020 (EDT)
Meta template and templates for commonly used logotypes and icons
Through a placeholder page (ugh!) and a edit summary Hooray suggested making a template for commonly used logotypes.
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placeholder/stub for all sorts of wiki related logos that may need to be updated over time, but that are referenced on multiple pages - so that we don't need to edit each and every page here. |
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@Johan: could use your help with this, unless I can write the heuristics in Php or JavaScript ;-) — Hooray, 11 April 2020, 08:04
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I would guess you also intend it to be used for icons as well, for example the ready icons? Logotype/icon templates might not be a bad idea. Less typing is almost always good.
{{logo}} should probably be a meta template, a template used by other templates in this case by logotype templates. Meta templates are pretty common on MediaWiki wikis.
Essentially, there could be a set of logotype and icon templates, for example {{Compositor logo}}, {{FGInterface logo}}, {{Air refueling ready icon}} etc, that pass the image for the logotype, an alt text (for accessibility and when the image is not shown, for example due to browser settings) and a link to a relevant wiki page to {{logo}}. Possibly also optional parameters like other sizes etc. The meta template would then add the boilerplate stuff around that and set the size.
I would advise that having a suffix indicating the type of template, for example logo, icon like mentioned above or navigation (for navigation boxes), in essence having less ambiguous names, is generally a good idea.
I should mention that I am generally against placeholder pages.
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 06:44, 12 April 2020 (EDT)
UTF-8 language pages cannot be edited (cont. from 2015)
While migrating my own unrelated MediaWiki instance, I may have stumbled upon "a" SQL issue blocking the creation of pages with non-latin characters in their titles. See:
- FlightGear wiki:Village pump/Archive 2015#UTF-8 language pages cannot be edited
- FlightGear wiki:Village pump/Archive 2016#UTF-8 language pages cannot be edited
- FlightGear wiki:Village pump/Archive 2019#Language flags on the main page
If someone has access to the MySQL backend (command line or phpMyAdmin), could you check what the "Collation" of our database is set to? For example:
USE dbname;
SELECT @@character_set_database, @@collation_database;
Or in phpMyAdmin the collation is given in the database listing. My guess is that we are not using UTF-8. That can be changed (after a backup) with:
ALTER DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
Or in phpMyAdmin, select the databse of this wiki, click on the "Operations" tab, in the "Collation" box select "utf8_general_ci", and finally click on "Go". Hopefully this is the cause of this long standing and painful issue.
Bugman (talk) 03:33, 9 September 2020 (EDT)
- Hi Edward,
- I somehow missed all these previous reports :-( Sorry!
- You're right. The database is in latin1. We're actually currently in the process of migrating some of our server work and updating. I will take care of setting the correct collation on that occasion.
- Gijs (talk) 04:24, 9 September 2020 (EDT)
- Great, that sounds exactly like this problem. Only pages with 'latin1' characters in their names can be edited. I really hope switching the collation to UTF-8 will fix the problem. There must have been a MySQL server migration many years ago where the old database was UTF-8 and the import automatically changed the language to the server default of 'latin1', as many pages were created on this wiki with non-latin1 characters in the past. I see this with my MySQL database too - I have to switch back to UTF-8 after import into the new SQL database.
Needing an extra pair of eyes
There is a problem with automatic categorization in {{Autoflight Navigation}} that I can not seem to solve.
For details see Template talk:Autoflight Navigation#Automatic categorization seem broken.
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 10:26, 10 September 2020 (EDT)
- All done! In summary, the {{howto other}} template logic was completely broken and was operating as the {{main other}} template instead! Checking if the {{NAMESPACE}} is set to {{ns:0}} is not how you check for the "Howto" namespace. As I don't know the numeric value of this namespace, I switched to comparing {{NAMESPACE}} to the simple string 'Howto'. So the template is now fixed. We should see a lot of auto-categorisation additions and fixes now. I also switched {{Autoflight Navigation}} to use {{namespace detect}} to simplify its logic.
- Thank you som much for fixing that. :-)
- Did not think of comparing the namespace numbers between the templates.
- I was wondering where I found the numbers, but could not quite remember. If I figure it out I will probably add the source for those at a suitable place, like under Technical details in ducumentation for {{namespace detect}} or something like that, though using full names of the namespaces is probably the safer option.
- —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 02:07, 12 September 2020 (EDT)
The Howto namespace
- Copied here from Template talk:Autoflight Navigation.
To be honest, from the start I have considered the Howto namespace to be an abomination. There is absolutely no need for it, as one could simply have articles in the main namespace with a Howto: prefix (IIRC they call this "user administered namespaces" or "pseudo namespaces" on Wikipedia). To not have to type the prefix, one could simply create redirects. Creating a separate Howto namespace have caused issues in the past, like that the search function per default only looks for articles in the Main namespace. It is not entirely unlikely that what we see here might be some configuration issue as well.
Sorry for the rant. And thanks again.
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 06:29, 11 September 2020 (EDT)
- I wouldn't call that a rant. It would be better on FlightGear wiki:Village pump though. To me 'Howto' here is simply a categorisation. Why is that categorisation even needed in the page title? I never liked this namespace, specifically because the default search misses it, and there is a significant grey area of what you would categorise as a 'howto' or not. I think it would be better managed with a basic {{howto}} template at the start of each of these articles which automatically adds Category:Howto. If you take your discussion above over to the village pump, I'll copy this over there as well.
- Hi guys,
- I agree that we can get rid of the Howto namespace. It seemed like a good idea back when we started it (almost 15 years ago), but there are more dis- than advantages to it nowadays. Apart from the ones listed above, it also doesn't work well with translated articles.
- It's unfortunately not just a matter of running a script, as lots of articles will need some title editing to make sense after dropping the "Howto", and we have duplicated articles like Howto:Animated jetways and Animated jetways that currently co-exist. Maybe it's a nice job for a rainy Sunday :-)
- Gijs (talk) 14:26, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
Space shuttle screenshots category need cleanup
There currently are quite a number of misplaced files in the Space Shuttle screenshot categories, possibly making it harder to find screenshots and other images. For example external screenshots in the cockpit detail category, that preferably should be closeup images of panels and displays, and screenshots of large portions of the cockpit in the cockpit detail category.
I do expect some overlap between the cockpit categories and the custom dialog categories as dialogs are featured in a lot of those.
There are also a lot of diagrams with no part of the Space Shuttle at all in the screenshot categories, those are more at home in the Space Shuttle diagrams category.
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 20:10, 3 November 2020 (EST)
Have done a little cleanup, a lot left to do.
If my recategorization edits fill up recent changes, click Hide minor edits. When (re)categorizing, I mark my edits as minor edit so they can be filtered away if they fill up recent changes (I have gotten frustrated comments on my edits filling up recent changes before).
—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 21:23, 3 November 2020 (EST)
Also added Category:Screenshots of Earthview to relevant Space Shuttle screenshots up to and including File:Shuttle-tutorial2-01.jpg.
