User:Johan G/My plans and things to do

These are some of my plans and things to do.

Related to the wiki in general

See also my essay The FlightGear Wiki — Its structure, content and ease of use which can be seen as my long term plan.

• Wiki improvement
• Unification and improvement of maintenance templates

Categories

Some of this work will require some help from Gijs with bot jobs.

Unifying category names styles

• Initial caps (except for abbreviations an a few names)
• Add strictly initial caps only redirect pages for the exceptions. This will make it possible to type a page name in the search box using only lower case letters.
• Plural form or verbs as if things are being done (I do not know the correct grammatical nomenclature here)

Renaming of some categories

This will need to be well thought through, being well motivated and being proposed for a while for other to think through as well.

• Removing "FlightGear " from the insim screenshots. See Category:FlightGear screenshots.

Some work ave been done here, though one remaining hurdle is that categories should be named "<Subject> screenshots" instead of "Screenshots of <subject>". The reason is that I have a very strong impression that users add categories using the autocompleting text box in the upload wizard. Doing so the do not even see the screenshot categories, but place the images in the category pages.

A related issue is that users use categories as tags, for example could a Cessna 172 cockpit screenshot instead of Category:Cessna 172 cockpit screenshots get both Category:Aircraft and Category:Cessna.

—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 11:23, 12 March 2016 (EST)

Cleaning up category pages

Some category pages are turning into articles and galleries.

Separating image and article categories

The images can not be found by browsing the image categories and the articles can not be found through a regular wiki search using the text box.

Moving out long category descriptions

Some category pages are turning into articles. Such pages should be cleaned up by turning lengthy text into regular articles and moving images into image categories. This is a lot of work...

Some of those pages:

• Category:Scenery enhancement

Category:Scenery enhancement is "kind of" fixed. Its content was moved to Scenery enhancement which need two metric tonnes of elbow grease for cleanup. —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 11:23, 12 March 2016 (EST)

Articles

In essence pages in the main/article namespace.

Unifying page names

• Initial caps (except for abbreviations an a few names)
• Add strictly initial caps only redirect pages for the exceptions. This will make it possible to type a page name in the search box using only lower case letters.
• Plural form or verbs as if things are being done (I do not know the correct grammatical nomenclature here)

Templates

Fixing issues caused by the howto namespaces

Since a while wiki has the extra namespaces "Howto" (namespace id 3000) and "Howto talk" (namespace id 3001). This messes up a few things. First of all, except for sorting on the category pages they are in every other way treated as regular articles, for now.

The best solution would probably be what the English Wikipedia call a "user managed namespace", in essence moving all the Howto: pages back into the main namespace but keeping the Howto: prefix. It would solve all the issues except that those pages would need a category sort key when categorized.

Affected templates

• {{main other}}
• {{talk other}}
• {{namespace}}
• {{namespace detect}}
• {{category handler}}

Ways out

There are three ways to handle this:

1. Handle main and howto separately
2. Handle main and howto the same way
3. Handle them the same way, and when needed, separately.

I am pretty sure that most people does not discern between the main and howto namespaces and their talk namespaces. Unfortunately the 2nd and 3rd way to handle this requires rewriting existing templates, which is totally doable though.

Another way to handle this would be to remove the namespace (I think few would notice) and turn it into what is sometimes called a "user managed namespace", in essence using a prefix but not having the actual namespace. All the templates would then work as everyone would expect.

Help pages

• Split up some of the longer pages, in particular Help:Formatting.
• Create a help navigation box.
• Get going with the style guide.

Gijs has since added FlightGear wiki:Manual of Style. —Johan G (Talk | contribs) 11:23, 12 March 2016 (EST)

• Write a guide about writing technical text based in part on Nitramus article To make the incomprehensible comprehensible (sv. Att göra det obegripliga begripligt) on the Swedish Wikipedia.
• Make a list of maintenance templates.

Miscellaneous

• Adding information to the table of models
• Adding XML part of Howto: Edit a livery