User talk:Robin Patterson

(See archives:
 * User talk:Robin Patterson/archive 2005-04 to 2005-10
 * User talk:Robin Patterson/archive 2005-11 to 2006-10)
 * User talk:Robin Patterson/archive 2006-10 to 2007-06)

What's a Year Category?
Hi Robin, thanks for the welcome. I'm VERY new to wiki-editing, but very eager to learn (and fast), but rather struggling trying to make sense of it all. Would love to really understand when and how to use categories. You suggested over on my Jillaine 03:11, 3 July 2007 (UTC) user discussion page that I use the "Year" category for my Richard Taylor pages. But I don't know what that is and my attempts to find out how to use categories has been rather frustrating. Have also posted over to Bill's discussion area that I'm happy to be a good follower in order to learn the ropes well. But I forgot to mention that my preferred way of learning is jumping in and doing. (That may be obvious from my initial attempts.) I fear, though, that I'll step on others' toes in the process. Any advice, pointers, etc. is appreciated. Jillaine Smith, Washington DC. Jillaine 03:11, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome
Hi, Robin, Thanks for the welcome! And yes, in my day, I have learned a thing or two about wikis :-) Next time I ride the bus (Monday?), I will have to snap some pics of "Central Station" and a bus, as you said. Cheers, Curran (Wikipedia • WP Talk • WI Talk) 04:03, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Reference Scharf, 1888:111
Personal I supose. Looks better if its all part of the link. Also Sharf, 1888 goes to the bibliographic card, whereas I often set up Scharf, 1888:111 to go to the specific page of an electronic version of the document. Works well with links to Google Books, not so good if its on Ancestry or something that requires a subscription. Bill 19:09, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

MVP
I'd like to nominate AMK152 as Most Valuable Poster. :) Chadlupkes 18:03, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Most Wanted
Actually, while I may have edited a few of those, the input was from another user (Wigton, as it happens, but not in my personal line). On the otherhand, it does seem like a mistake I might have made early on. On the other hand, its also something I can correct. Categorization is something that I think that we can automate given the standard format for person titles, we should be able to ensure that every people article gets at least a surname captured in categories. Possibly can automate capturing other plausible categories for any given title. But that's another item on the eventual to do list. This was a lot easier to do when I had the technical support I needed living a few doors down the hall. Now I have to figure out these things myself. Whine, whine, whine. Bill 15:17, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Check your page counter
I haven't been updating that page, now that the trend is clear. We still need to get a global response on site statistics. I've sort of been hoping Wikia would introduce something useful along these lines, but it looks like they expect us to go with one of these page counter org's. Zephyr's approach is proably the right way to go for the moment, but I believe we can get much more information. Just a matter of devoting time to the problem.

HOwever, someone in Wikia must have a way to get this kind of information since they questioned the numbers. I personally don't believe 500 to 1000 hits per day, but that's what they said. What we'd like to check would be the difference between page accesses and page edits. What we'd really like to know is the number of folks coming to the site browsing for information but not editing. Bill 15:23, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

genealogy.wikia
I have now added my user page details. I have now, based on my past memory, have some details to work on genealogy.

--Dore chakravarty 21:20, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Aabh's Tree template
Your neat-looking template has just one disadvantage: it's the same name as a Wikipedia template that seems to do a lot more and is used for hundreds of WP pages that I would like to copy over here.

May I please change the name of yours (and immediately adjust all the (8?) pages that use it)? You can choose the name. Template:AaTree perhaps? (Or maybe you will look and decide that they can/should be adapted to the WP one?)

Robin Patterson 15:16, 28 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Ah! I sorta forgot that I did that! I'm sorry Robin! Of course you may change it! Could we name it Template:DavisTree or something like that? Aabh 14:05, 1 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Template:DavisTree seems OK to me; WP doesn't have one. Length doesn't matter when one is pasting. I'll put the project on my TODO list. Robin Patterson 13:07, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Your noting
Thanks. Shall try in due course what is suggested.

--Dore chakravarty 20:56, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Davis Family Tree
Yes, I looked at that when you first mentioned it. Its a nice idea, but would only work for one person's family, and even there, for only their immediate and personal descendancy...The reason being is that reflexsive coding's such as {{{PaternalGreat Grandfather}} are not unique. If I were to use that (now that its been used in the Davis family, I'd end up splicing someone elese's lineage unto my own. Ditto everyone else.  So while this may work for the Davis family (at least the one who developed the coding, it will now work for no-one else---unless they add some unique identifier, like their name. I supose {{{Bob Smith'sPaternalGreatGrandfather}} might do the trick---until we had two Bob Smith's trying to use this approach. Also, keeping track of all of those "great's" is going to get cumbersome. I note that the person who suggested this did not carry it very far---probably because its too hard to use, but perhaps further development will help. There are always clever things in the magic words category that help solve problems. Maybe one of them would work here. AMK152's approach to createing a Vita table being a case in point. At some point I'll have to start exploring how that was done. Bill 12:54, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Category/ie on Peize Wikia
Hi Robin. I noticed that you did some work on category stuff on the Peize Wikia. Thanks for that although i'm not quite sure what you were trying to achieve with that. I managed to get the first two Familytrees into shape. Looks promising. As you already noticed the word 'Categorie' (as you undoubtedly know Dutch for category) no longer works as such. Somewhere along the way something must have changed in the setup since there are a lot of pages that use the Dutch version and at the time that worked OK. Do you know who i can bother with questions about such setup stuff or where this is documented? Harm 23:49, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Counter
Robin, please look at Angela's comments related to the Page Access Counter. You'll have to read her comments in the edit notes, though you'll get the gist of it by reading my comments on the discussion page.

I don't believe that either Angela, or the previous commenter on this subject, has provided very good documentation for their statements. When I check the counter it seems to be accurately recording what I can see happening---ie page accesses, either because of edits or because of page views.

As an experiment, go to User:WMWillis/Page Access Summary. Check the counter number for page accesses, then refresh the page and see if it changes for you. Bill 02:29, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, now try visiting other pages and coming back. Bill 02:37, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps foolhardy but...
I volunteered to run a bot to help out with any maintenance tasks you might have laying about. I made this blunder in my response to you concerning immigration/ emigration cat renames. I also raised the question of adjectival placenames- I don't really care which way things are, and I frankly don't recall why the other wikis decided in favour of the noun form, but I do care that whatever the pattern is, that it be one or the other and not both. EG- either Swiss Ancestry or Ancestry (or Ancestors?) from Switzerland.
 * I created a page User:Knife Maker/Bot maintenance with some preliminary responses on the subject. The list is incomplete, and I have not reviewed some of the tasks you mentioned. But I already have a ton of stuff to think about. Your thoughts welcome.-Mak 17:23, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps foolhardy but......
On my talk page I volunteered to run a bot to help out with any maintenance tasks you might have laying about. I made this blunder in my response to you concerning immigration/ emigration cat renames. I also raised the question of adjectival placenames- I don't really care which way things are, and I frankly don't recall why the other wikis decided in favour of the noun form, but I do care that whatever the pattern is, that it be one or the other and not both. EG- either Swiss Ancestry or Ancestry (or Ancestors?) from Switzerland. -Mak 20:48, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Just to satisfy my own curiousity (this is, after all, Robin's page), why do you care which form? Why does it need to be one way or the other? Wouldn't both be appropriate depending on the context? I can certainly see using either form. Bill 22:55, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't recall the arguments on either side. But I do know that the answer shouldn't be "Both".  It's untidy. -Mak 17:10, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Piped Links
AH! Thanks for that tip Robin. Having to repeat the last bit of a link behind a pipe, just to get rid of the full link title (thus making the text awkward), has been kind of annoying. Now I know how to eliminate that annoyance. Bill 14:03, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

New accounts. PhloxBot and I am changing my moniker to Phlox
Bot conventions are to include user name as part of the Bot. Knife Maker Bot or KnifeBot seems pretty awful, so I just chucked the whole Knife Maker moniquer. Contact me henceforth as User:Phlox ok? -Mak 20:08, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

PhloxBot is now operational
It is ready to do all cat moves / spam scans / whatever.

You probably will want to put a bot flag on PhloxBot so bot changes can be filterred out. As far as I know, the flag doesn't do anything more than that. -Phlox- (formerly Mak) 03:43, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok- I set PhloxBot to work on it. I changed the task description per your note. let me know asap if it is doing anything wrong. -Phlox- (formerly Mak) 07:39, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Completed. I took the liberty of doing the redir and set up the mainenance structure like we did in commons.  If you want it done some other way, feel free.  Regarding the surname template, it's only sets up the category, so I supposed it was for some future purpose of doing something else fancy.  But with a bot you can generate those on pages at any time later by walking the surnames tree.  My call?  I'd investigate with the author and ask around but if I didn't hear anything compelling I'd say nuke them all, replacing with Category Surnames.


 * By the way, if you turned on the bot flag, it isn't working, becuase this morning I finished up a pass, and when I try to hide bots from the recent changes list, it doesn't hide phloxbot changes.

-Phlox- 20:56, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * That's weird about the flag... As bureaucrat on another site, I just had a screen like the one for user preferences, and I could assign admin or bot status from a pull down list. No template, no tool.  Odd.  Ohhhhh.... Wikia accounts are global to all wikias.  I get it.  They probably want to have it so that such powers would be local to a particular wikia, but the rest of the user attributes would be global.  Yep.  That's probably why it is different than other wikis. Regarding admin attitudes, I left a response on my talk page. Oh and check out the Category:Requested moves.  I think that ought to make such cat manipulation a lot more streamlined.

-Phlox- 05:23, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Template commons et al
(replies to points on Phlox talk page)

"1. I doubt if we need "alsoWP" on a page that links to that WP page in its acknowledgment; but if you like the extra link I'm happy with it (coz I luv that shimmering globe)"
 * Yeah- I kind of went off the deep end for a while last night. But there is something about it- I like it because it boldly calls the users attention to high value.  Leveraging connections with WP gets folks in the Wiki groove.  We are competing with some entrenched sites, and we have to make some pretty good arguments for getting them to spend time here.  The more they think about interconnections with non-proprietary content, and the the success of "Everyone can edit" approaches, the more they will see it is goodness and light.


 * Excellent! Robin Patterson 06:53, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

"2. What's the advantage of changing "commonscat" as you did?"
 * I didn't change commonscat, maybe Commons? Commons had no cat whatsoever, so I couldn't find it.  added +  so it would appear along with the other interwiki templates.  I never can remember all the names of these templates, so I use the rely on the cats for templates to find them.


 * Understood; you did replace the simple one; see below. Robin Patterson 06:53, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

"3. Are you sure we don't want a main article on the subject, from a genealogical perspective?"
 * Lost the context- main article on what subject? In general, some of my new articles are just work in progress and I have no idea how to properly organize it during the data gathering phase.  I don't know if subpages is a great idea to encourage.  Haven't thought about it a lot. It is a little obscure....  Maybe one of those is what you are talking about?


 * Yes, that's template:catmore, (which gives "The main article for this category is ..."); restored. I'm not very keen on subpages either, because the category system is so quick and versatile. Robin Patterson 06:53, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

"4. What's the value of adding "nowiki" to a category link that starts with a colon?"
 * I nowiki'd the link to an example category- because the red text made the page look unprofessional. I was too lazy to look up a good (blue text) live link.


 * Fine. There possibly isn't a live link in that series yet (unless I've done one for a census year). Robin Patterson 06:53, 9 September 2007 (UTC)


 * -Phlox- 19:35, 8 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Might have been better on your talk page! Anyway, I've just looked again at http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Category:History_of_the_United_States&curid=15410&diff=45821&oldid=38597. I've restored templates commonscat (a simple way to link to a commons cat of the same name without any pipe) and catmore (ditto for main internal article). Study them if you like. Robin Patterson 06:53, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh yeah. Now I remember.  The formatting looked odd and I started to look at using something a little more nifty looking that formats both interwiki links tidily- like wikipedia:Template:Commonscat1A.  Then I looked at our copy and it was broken and I didn't want to figure out what was going on with that- really the whole thing was a side track- I only wanted to cat my Ohio history article was all then I kept seeing stuff that was a little wonky.
 * So what is going on with those cat moves in that maintenance category Category:Requested moves I set up? Do you want me to just set the bot churning on those, or should I hang loose? -Phlox- 08:23, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

United States Census
I know you were copying what WP had, but you violated the placename rule. ~  Ph l o x  16:57, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

"Object of [Placename]"

Proposal- the way I had it. Most significant differentiator first. Time. Use accepted abbreviations UK instead of United Kingdom, same with US to shorten cat names.

1850 Census of the US etc, then subcats for thus and such state & County.

What you will see on the tab list of your browser is Category 1850... Category 1900...  Your proposal Category:United S...  Category United S....

Sorry, but you must have thought about this before you did it. Just because WP does something doesn't mean we should. In general, if you want to look at some well thought out categories, take a look at the european cat structures. The US one went first and so they made a lot of mistakes that the others benefited from learning from. We can too. ~  Ph l o x  16:57, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

no precedents
As far as I know, there are no precedents on placenames specific to census's. There is very little categorization of them on wikis. The precedent I was stating was that the europeans generally have much more rationalized categorization schemes. Not that they are not without peculiarities. For example for some odd reason the French categorize all their art by century using roman numerals, but then mix it with a french ending eg XXieme epoch. Anyway- my main point was "United States Census" does not follow the placename pattern. There are censuses. So in the case of censuses do we have an exception? So is it the France Census (Noun form oddness) and the Luxembourgian census (adjective torture)? ~  Ph l o x  05:51, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * thanks for letting me know my mail was not enabled. I put it in at set up but didn't know it had to be validated before folks could send mail to me.   ~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   08:37, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

common.css
I think we are good to go for a first cut. What I want you or bill to do is in Forum:Hey Robin or WM- edit MediaWiki:Common.css. You have to have sysop flag to do it.

User:Phlox

Person names and searching
On the person name convention, I don't understand why you felt what I said was unresponsive to your inquiries. What you were asking questions about has to do with the wikia engine, but this isn't about the wikimedia engine at all. It is only about how easily folks can find us. As I pointed out, a lot depends on how we name things. Maybe Yahoo or MSN search works better, but just as no one formats pages so they look ok only on Macs, we can't "format" our articles so they are effectively invisible to the search engine that most folks use. If you think I was being evasive on some point, give me a concrete list of things to answer and I will answer them directly, point for point. <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x  04:54, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
 * good point. I never thought about why the edit reports looked so grungy- yeah it's trivial to put something in the summary.  Now, all I have to do is remember to do it.   <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   15:45, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Common.css.
Not a right-hand sidebar on my screen for the example page: almost plumb in the middle. OK, it's to the right of the text, but no way "right-hand". Cologne Blue has its good points and its bad points. I guess a page with no infobox would see it further to the right.

Seriously, now, let's have this template, but let's not make it a Wiktionary - we don't need to read the actual page names the other WPs use.

Excellent work in principle!

Robin Patterson 07:59, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Robin. Robin Robin.  Please fix Common.css.


 * COMMON.CSS COMMON.CSS. I am not kidding. Everything will look screwed until you bring this site in line with WP style sheets.


 * This is extremely important. Just follow my instructions and copy my monobook.css to your monobook.css.  Then you will see that the table works just fine.  Put it in common, and everyone will get it too. <font color="#0A9DC2">~  <font color="#0DC4F2">Ph <font color="#3DD0F5">l <font color="#6EDCF7">o <font color="#9EE8FA">x   09:02, 12 October 2007 (UTC)