User talk:FKOL

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to MidrangeWiki! Thanks for your contributions. Since I don't know anything about WDSC, I'll leave the contents to you experts, but will probably pop onto those articles for minor wikisyntax cleanups. Grab a shovel, lend a hand, there is plenty do to. :) Holler if there is anything you need.— MrDolomite • Talk 11:47, 9 January 2008 (CST)

You are Welcome

I will do what I can. I am still learning Wiki protocols. I dont really know how to use these Talk pages. It seems to me that a Wiki is not really a Talk medium. Also I have not updated a section that ascribes acknowledgement and references for bits of info I posted. Mostly I got stuff from the Midrange mailing list archives other than the stuff I personally added. I saw a reference from David about not to use Copyright stuff, but anything posted on Midrange could be 'mercilessly edited'. I try to use links to references rather than copying from them and in the few cases where I copied from a reference I used only a few lines to indicate what might be found if one saw the actual article and I tried to acknowledge it. I think there is a 'fair use' clause that allows some use of copyright material provided that the it is used within the context of original work and is not a blatant use without any acknowledgent and a claim or implied claim of original work. FKOL 22:00, 9 January 2008 (CST)

Yep, the wiki is not nearly as easy to use for discussions as say, any of the forum or bulletin board software. There are several semi-agreed upon ways to manage the talk. For user-to-user communication, I find the easiest way to to it is to leave a note on someone else's talk page (so they see the You have new messages) and then know that they should respond back onto your talk page. It can make the history of the conversation hard to follow, because you have to jump between two pages. I'll do an example later using the question you left on my talk page about the CLP Category on the Main Page.— MrDolomite • Talk 09:59, 10 January 2008 (CST)

OK GOT IT. how to add a signature

OK got it. 4 tildes ~~~~ is a signature

FKOL 22:07, 9 January 2008 (CST)

Yeah, sigs can be tricky. I have added MidW:SIG which should be one stop shopping for all about signatures. Please leave any feedback about signatures over on MidrangeWiki talk:Signatures, it is always good to have a new set of eyes look things over. Thx.— MrDolomite • Talk 09:53, 10 January 2008 (CST)

Reply to User_talk:MrDolomite#CLP_Category_and_others

Since the Main Page is the first page anyone sees, the wiki software, known as MediaWiki, has the page configured to be one of a small set of pages which only a user with administrative edit privileges can edit, to prevent spam or vandalism.

The Main Page could definitely use an overhaul to make it easier to navigate and give the face of the wiki a little pizzaz. Ack, I sound like one of those web designers :) See Main Page/Draft as a page anyone can edit and use Talk:Main Page/Draft as a common discussion area.

Like any other programming code, the wiki syntax is a matter of style, function and opinion. Rather than have people remember to type the [[:Category: text to link to a category, the template {{ccl}} does it automagically and is a consistent way to make the link, and to show that the destination is a category link instead of a regular page. Oh, and did I mention that I'm deep rooted as a lazy programmer (tm) from way back? {{ccl}} is much easier to type than all that colon, Category, brackets and whatnot (-:

— MrDolomite • Talk 10:15, 10 January 2008 (CST)

References and Citations

Thank you for the kind words. I don't know if I'd qualify as a SuperHero, but I know my brother would say I'm a super pain in the...nevermind. I've found wikis, especially this one, to be a convenient way to share info that you always seem to need handy. It's like a Virtual Post-It Note and an extension of my memory all at once.

Ah, citations and references, you are jumping right into the deep end of the pool. It's actually not that bad, though if you look at WP:CITE they make it overly confusing.

Two methods, either an inline external link or using the references section with intraarticle wikilinks. Either way, the wiki software takes care of doing the numbering.

Inline link

Just put the web address inside of single brackets, but do not put any spaces after the link itself. This way the wiki software squishes the link down very short and gives it a number for display purposes. If someone wants to know the background information, they just follow the link.

Example using inline link to an external site.

There are 21 members of the current Presidential Cabinet. [1]

Many of these also serve on the National Security Council. [2]

There are 21 members of the current Presidential Cabinet. [http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/cabinet.html]

Many of these also serve on the National Security Council. [http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/]

References links

A little trickier, as there are two parts, one that goes inline with the text, and the other that collects all the references' details.

Example using the <ref> and </ref> tags.

There are 21 members of the current Presidential Cabinet.

Many of these also serve on the National Security Council.

There are 21 members of the current Presidential Cabinet. <ref>http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/cabinet.html</ref>
Many of these also serve on the National Security Council. <ref>http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/</ref>

Example of a single References section to collect the tags using {{reflist}}

References

====References====
{{reflist}}

Closing comments

And of course, like any programming language, there are all kinds of tricks and expansions on the information above. Check out 3590. It uses the references links, but uses <ref name> to re-use the same link in multiple spots in the article. And, anything inside the <ref> tags can either be an http link, plain text, wiki text or any combination. Happy Referencing! And like I always tell my sister, just get the content down and worry about the formatting later :) — MrDolomite • Talk 00:05, 11 January 2008 (CST)

Page Access Counts

I noticed that the count of page access is no longer showing. To tell the truth I was getting a kick out of seeing the number of access per day on the tips. It was a guide if people were using the stuff or not. Anyhow, no matter if it goes for good. {Frank}

Hi Frank. I'm not an administrator at the wiki, just a typer of trivia :-) To be honest, I didn't see the access counts, so I must have had something configured different from you. If you want the page access counts turned back on, you probably need to chat up one of the administrators. The administrators are here: http://wiki.midrange.com/index.php/Special:Listusers?username=&limit=250&group=sysop

Buck 12:19, 13 February 2008 (CST)

• Hmm, you are right, there used to be page counts, but now I'm not seeing them either. User:David might have turned them off if they were lagging the box or filling the database. Or it could have been inadvertent when enabling the "credits" feature [3]. I'll drop him a line.— MrDolomite • Talk 14:58, 14 February 2008 (CST)

Main Page

Howdy, I saw your edits to Main Page/Draft and have added them to the Main Page. Thx.— MrDolomite • Talk 14:43, 14 February 2008 (CST)

32K limit

Re: User talk:MrDolomite#32K Limit -- Yeah, that's a built in warning from the base wiki software, it won't actually do anything bad, but it is annoying and can cause longer page load and edit times. To get around it, I have moved the two largest sections to sub-pages. That way things stay logically together, but stay under the warning limit. For now, you have to use the full path name WDSC tips/Editor to link to the sub-page, but there is a MediaWiki setting that can make that a relative reference name instead. I'll let you know when that's done and how to best use it. Thanks.— MrDolomite • Talk 09:05, 29 February 2008 (CST)

All set on the sub-pages. You can now use the relative reference [[/Editor]] on the WDSC tips page and it will work. Also, check out Wikipedia:Help:Magic_words#Page_names_and_related_info. The magic word {{BASEPAGENAME}} is also handy to use on the sub-page to get back to its parent. But there will be a link with that already at the very top of the article.— MrDolomite • Talk 10:41, 29 February 2008 (CST)

WDSC tips

Re: User talk:MrDolomite#Show TOC from sub-pages on Main Page, and link -- Aha, ok, I understand now what you mean. What can be done is to make a template to put on the top of each page that is the the TOC of the article's main page. Since it is a template, it can't be updated automatically like the built in __TOC__, but since there won't be many new sub-pages being created, it's easy to update. I'll make a template and let ya know.— MrDolomite • Talk 12:08, 11 March 2008 (CDT)

WDSC Articles at Bottom of Page

Re: [4] Hmm, I'm not quite sure what you meant by "Articles"? Do you mean the word "Article" that has a link to it next to the other links like "Discussion", "Edit", "History"? Or did you mean something else? It may be that you and are are using a different skin on the wiki, see Special:Preferences and then the Skin tab, which changes how things look for each individual user. I am using the Monobook (default). Let me know if yours is different and on exactly which page (WDSC tips or something else?) you are looking at. Somehow everything should be able to be changed, just a matter of figuring out where and how. :) — MrDolomite • Talk 09:44, 13 March 2008 (CDT)

WDSC screenshots

Re: screenshots. Aha, said the blind man! Now I understand what you are seeing and what you are asking. It has to do with the differences between a "regular" article and a "Category" article.

• When a page is a Category page, like [[Category:WDSC]], any text on the page goes at the top and the automagic listing of articles in that category go at the bottom, sorted by the first letter of the category sort key.
• When a page is a "regular article", the layout of the page is defined by the text and wikicode entered on that page. A table of contents, if defined, will appear where the __FORCETOC__ or __TOC__ is located, or by default at the top of the page if not defined, or not at all if __NOTOC__ is used.
• To complicate things, right now, the "regular" WDSC is being redirected to the [[Category:WDSC]]. This was done a ways back. Since editors would link to WDSC, but it really didn't have enough information to stand on its own page, it made sense to send it to the category page, which had some basic info and the list of related articles in that category.
  • And to further complicate things, if there are 4 or more headings on the text of a category page like there was in this version, that is enough for the MediaWiki software to create a Table of Contents box.

A regular example is CLP vs. [[Category:CLP]]. The article version has some content, and down at the bottom, it is included in the category. The category itself has a short amount of info, and not enough headings for a TOC, and then the article list follows, probably immediately visible depending on one's screen size and resolution.

Without a major overhaul to the CSS of the wiki, the layout of a category page can't be shuffled around. Best that can be done is to move the content on [[Category:WDSC]] back to the regular article WDSC page and stop the redirect.

Let me know if that answered your question and what you think would be best. Thx.— MrDolomite • Talk 10:04, 17 March 2008 (CDT)

error on page WDSC tips

Re: [5]. Hmm, that is a puzzler, from what I remember you are using the Monobook skin with Internet Explorer. I did the same thing on my PC, but didn't get that error message. From what I found here, there, and over there, it would seem some kind of javascript error. On the wiki side, it is caused by edits to javascript pages, which end in .js. I did make a change to a sitewide page on the wiki the other day to MediaWiki:Common.js, but I undid the edit because it didn't do what I wanted. And of course, the Microsoft support page on the error is full of technobabble and pretty useless. Holler if you received that error on other pages, or if you can grab a screen shot of the error, maybe that will give us the next clue.— MrDolomite • Talk 09:21, 26 March 2008 (CDT)