FlightGear wiki:Village pump: Difference between revisions

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(→‎Welcoming template: Automation might be a good idea if there is one registration every second day)
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::: [[User:Bugman|Bugman]] ([[User talk:Bugman|talk]]) 01:43, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
::: [[User:Bugman|Bugman]] ([[User talk:Bugman|talk]]) 01:43, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
:::: One registration every second day.  Automation might not be such a bad idea after all.
:::: —[[User:Johan G|Johan G]] ([[User_talk:Johan_G|Talk]] | [[Special:Contributions/Johan_G|contribs]]) 12:09, 19 April 2019 (EDT)

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Welcome to the Village Pump. This page is used to discuss the technical issues, operations and guidelines of the FlightGear wiki.

Please add new topics to the bottom of this page.

Old discussion should be moved to a FlightGear wiki:Village pump/Archive YEAR. These discussions can then be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate.

2018

Captcha

Hi all! I need to fill the captcha box for each edit or new page in this wiki. I think for registered users isn't necessary. I will be glad if its removed. Thanks

Loss of thumbnails!

This is a rather catastrophic issue. I have made an Internet Archive snapshot of the front page to illustrate: https://web.archive.org/web/20181213094322/http://wiki.flightgear.org/Main_Page. Note all the text "Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination". I don't see anything in the wiki history that might cause this. Has there been a recent infrastructure update? Or is there a disk full issue or failure occurring on the server?

Bugman (talk) 04:31, 13 December 2018 (EST)

As already said on the mailing list:
Thanks for reporting! Apparently we had run out of inodes due to expired sessions not being deleted. Should be fixed now.
Gijs (talk) 07:18, 14 December 2018 (EST)

2017

Build Templates

I only just realized that we're unnecessarily duplicating information in most build related articles by separately mentioning build dependecies instead of using a shared template, which would also be easier to update/maintain should the build requirements change (think osg 3.4), which would also mean that it would be easier to maintain correct URLs for each depenedncy, while also having a way to nicely keep dependencies for different fgfs versions - so probably a worthwile thing to do... -Hooray (talk) 07:17, 31 December 2017 (EST)

New Portals (Dec/2017)

Looking at the forum/devel list, two more portals may make sense:

  • RC
  • Cockpit Building

Thoughts / ideas ?

-Hooray (talk) 10:22, 29 December 2017 (EST)

Newsletter templates (June/2017)

Referring to Johan's comments at [1]: Is there anything we can do to unify newsletters and changelogs without requiring major additions to the wiki in the form of plugins/addons ? Specifically, I was wondering if something along these lines would be worthwhile to discuss:

  • Create a basic template-based structure to add standardized announcements/news
  • These would be standardized based on category (core, aircraft, scenery, canvas, Nasal etc), inspired by recent changelogs/newsletters
  • Move specific text to sub-templates, so that we can easily localize/translate those using a handful of templates
  • support optional screenshots/youtube links
  • support optional fields to be added/excluded in a given mode (newsletter vs. changelog)

In other words, we would review our published newsletters and changelogs and determine the common structure that could be re-implemented in the form of templates, and then come up with a handful of templates to add items in a standardized fashion, e.g. along these lines:

  • category
  • new/updated/removed feature
  • headline
  • common text
  • changelog specific text
  • newsletter specific text
  • screenshots
  • videos
  • link for additional information

Something like this could be easily implemented without much wiki magic, and it could be also easily translated at the template level

Thoughts / ideas ?

-Hooray (talk) 06:40, 2 July 2017 (EDT)

I will start slightly off topic with that I actually consider the current newsletter format to be slightly more complicated than it really needs to be. This is mostly due to the handcrafted table of contents replacing the automatically added one. If we go back a few years a wiki newsletter page was done exactly as any other wiki page using the same way to add headers and with an automatically generated table of contents.
To illustrate the above, compare the 2010 newsletter (plain article style, one template for the header), the intermediate 2011 newsletter (one additional template to move the ToC right and change the text flow) and the later 2015 newsletter (discarding the automatic ToC for a handcrafted one using a template for each main section and subsections added by hand.) Even if that is only so much resistance, it can be what stops a contributor.
What I was referring to with
Cquote1.png I think it would be technically possible to make templates that could simplify adding new newsletter blanks (but I have said that for years without doing anything about it :oops: ).
Cquote2.png
was that one can make templates that will import a page blank prepared with regular sections and subsections (that technique have been used on English Wikipedia for adding template documentation.)
In essence such a newsletter blank could have some of this prepared and some commented out suggestions for how to add a new section and how to add images and embedded videos etc.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 09:14, 3 September 2017 (EDT)
I found my way back to some documentation on what I mentioned above.[2][3]
One would basically make a subpage to the template (say {{Newsletter-new}}) with the text to be preloaded (which is the term used) on the subpage (Template:Newsletter-new/Newsletter_blank) and link to it like this http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php?title=FlightGear_Newsletter_<month>_<year>&action=edit&preload=Template:Newsletter-new/Newsletter_blank.
The new newsletter template could simply have a link "Click here to create the next newsletter". It needs to be on another page than the newsletter itself though, for example on a page describing how to contribute to the newsletter.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 09:43, 3 September 2017 (EDT)
I totally agree, while I appreciate the appearance of the new newsletter template, I always found it cumbersome/tedious to actually edit the newsletter compared to the old way. And I am all for automation. Then again, we have been suggesting/requesting certain plugins to be installed, but unfortunately to no avail so far. Speaking in general, it would be great if we could identify some of the recurring tasks on the wiki and find a way to automate most of these. For instance, being able to add contents to one page that shows up on other pages would also be useful, as this could greatly simplify writing the changelog - imagine adding stuff to the newsletter, which is then automagically added to the proper changelog. However, as usual it seems manpower is our primary constraint, Curt does not seem to have the corresponding privileges here and Gijs is basically n/a these days. What is really needed is an additional wiki admin, someone with Simon's privileges. And I would suggest we nominate bugman for that position :-) - Hooray (talk)
Yikes, this actually works: http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php?title=FlightGear_Newsletter_November_2020&action=edit&preload=Talk:Next_newsletter -Hooray (talk)
An early newsletter template draft is now available in my sandbox.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 07:09, 11 November 2017 (EST)
I got around to polish it a bit more now: User:Johan G/Template:This months newsletter
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 12:32, 19 November 2017 (EST)
hi! If you Johan that you're more experienced can prepare Newsletter templates and pages to facilitate translations without need to create descentralised templates and duplicated pages, it would be nice and step forward to non English-speaker users. What you think about be able to do it for December Newsletter? Thank you so much for your work for templates, pages and the wiki!--Catalanoic (talk) 13:15, 10 December 2017 (EST)
Sorry for the late reply.
Yes, a centralized newsletter can be done rather easily. We could add {{LangSwitch}} templates to the sections in the newsletter template (hopefully users adding other sections to a particular newsletter will see what is going on and copy it). It should then be a matter of creating an empty page with a language prefix and transclude the newsletter there as if it was a template.
The downsides are that the newsletter will be more complicated to edit (raising the threshold for new editors and stopping a few of them), that we most likely will not be able to edit just a section (as the section headings will need to be in the language templates as the need to be translated as well), and that the page will be larger to retrieve as you will always download all languages to view or edit the page. I do not think it will be worth it.
However, if we get to the point that we have a template preloading a newsletter blank as discussed earlier in this topic (which seems very likely), we should probably have one for each of the languages someone can translate it to. I think it would be much, much better to centralize this template.
In short: With the approach above the newsletter can be made so that there is a centralized version. But I do not think it is worth the large downsides and think that would be better to instead have a centralized template preloading a newsletter blank for a specific language.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 23:48, 21 July 2018 (EDT)
Hi, currently the German newsletter gets translated like every normal article here on a new page. Works great. I don't think the newsletter would benefit from a centralised Newsletter using {{LangSwitch}} as
  • you also need to create a [[Es/FG News Marzo 2019]] page every month to view the translated content on it
  • it invites to write a new article in your language and we need to find someone to translate it back to english
  • wiki code already is a challenge for new authors, LangSwitch would make it even worse!
My sandbox experiments take another approach:
All these templates should work. Like {{:User:Skybike/Template:This months newsletter|date=2018-11}} Create FlightGear Newsletter November 2018 and by adding lang=de: Den FlightGear Newsletter November 2018 erstellen.
Legoboyvdlp already created FlightGear Newsletter September 2018‎ with it.(Surprised me, need to change the header template there as it links to my sandbox) Note the "create next edition" in the upper right of the header there. But temporarily a new language could use my sandbox as well, just create a new newsletter blank and translate This months newsletter and Newsletter-header-translate.
Skybike (talk) 10:10, 22 July 2018 (EDT)

Using Template:Convert

while looking at the Lockheed_Martin_F-35B_Lightning_II, I noted the use of units that we could automatically have converted for us using the convert template from wikipedia... i'm assuming that we can do that, right? so below is an example of how it would be used and how it would look... i've left the original entry in place for final result comparison...

=== Performance Data ===
* '''Maximum Speed:''' 1,200 mph {{convert|1200|mph|kt|abbr=on}}
* '''Rate of climb:''' classified
* '''Service Ceiling:''' 60,000 ft {{convert|60000|ft|m|abbr=on}}
* '''Range:''' 1,200 mi {{convert|1200|mi|km|abbr=on}}
=== Performance Data ===

NOTE: i've copied this from my talk page to bring everything together here in one place as suggested on the forum by bugman...

This is easy, see http://wiki.flightgear.org/Special:Import ;)
Bugman (talk) 18:15, 5 September 2017 (EDT)
And here is the Wikipedia export page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export. You just export from one and import from the other. Quite a few templates were created in this way.
Bugman (talk) 06:21, 6 September 2017 (EDT)
is this something i should do? i don't want to mess anything up ;)
NVM... i'm not an admin so i cannot import :)
Wkitty42 (talk) 10:58, 6 September 2017 (EDT)
Looking at the template source at Wikipedia and on from there, I see that it have a not so small dependency tree, starting with a nearly 4000 line lua module :-/
Something rather simpler can probably be built with what we already have (though it will take time).
What do we really need?
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 11:01, 29 October 2017 (EDT)
whoa! i didn't know that convert template was that involved... maybe it does a whole lot more conversions than i was looking at to use on this site...
as far as "need" goes, we don't really need it but i thought it would be nice to put standard numerics and have a template to list the different conversions... other than needing to be added to pages where it would be appropriate, it would standardize their display on the page...
Wkitty42 (talk) 11:38, 29 October 2017 (EDT)
Maybe I should rephrase myself, as I did not intend to kill the conversation.
What do we need? Something like {{convert|value|from-unit|to-unit|decimals|hide-unit}} used like {{convert|15|m/s|fps}} to get "49 fps"?
I think it is very much possible to do with what we have. It basically abstracts to a matrix of statements from the two unit switches and math done with Mediawiki's #expr parser function (perm).
ICAO Annex 4 could give some pointers for units, abbreviations and conversion factors.
Sounding a bit like Horay here, but I think converting between the the most used units could most probably be done well within a couple hundred lines of (well formatted and commented) template code (including user documentation).
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 05:04, 11 November 2017 (EST)
An early convert template draft is now available in my sandbox.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 09:17, 11 November 2017 (EST)

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)
Hi Johan,
The template looks good to me!
Gijs (talk) 06:48, 16 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.
Bugman (talk) 01:43, 18 April 2019 (EDT)
One registration every second day. Automation might not be such a bad idea after all.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 12:09, 19 April 2019 (EDT)