Cunnan:Village pump

In Medieval villages people would gather at the Village Pump to discuss those items that were important to their lives. On Cunnan the Village Pump serves a similar purpose: Giving users a place to meet and discuss current events, policy and content.

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Please add your comments under what is here now (unless someone has a better system :)

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Announcements

• Some of the old VIllage pump articles have been moved to Old Village pump discussions to save space.
• The new wiki server has now gone live.
• Not all the Village pump articles were moved across from the old server (as they were no longer relevant)

Topics

Headline news

OK, I want a new major category for an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I want to do a series of pages, with the high points of the news of the day for a place and other things that someone living there would know. I dont so much want wars and battles, but when the new bridge got put up, who the King is sleeping with this week, who the top poets are and whether or not the harvest was good or bad. I've got some scrawled notes for 1589, and I'd like a set of pages I can do ... a "News from a Place and Time" section would be ideal. And could I please appeal for some way to easily put footnotes into Wiki ? I'm a footnote junkie, because that empowers readers to go do their own research.

Anton

Thats an interesting idea. I'd say the best way to go about it would be to link to pages with names like [[News from 1066]] of [[News from 1066, England]] from the different centuries. If there were lots of these pages we'd have to start dividing the centuries into decades. Anyway, the best thing to do now would be to create a sample page of headlines so that we can all comment on it. - Tobin

Working with Wikipedia and other online material

How do people see this site working with content on http://www.wikipedia.org (or other sites I suppose)? If wikipedia has good content on some topic of interest, do we just address the re-enactment aspect and use an external links section to point people to the wikipedia page? Problem there is that as people surf they end up leaving this site and there won't likely be links to bring them back. Alternatively, we could copy over content from wikipedia so that linked content would point to the Cunnan version, but the obvious problem here is redundant maintainence. Whatever the consensus, it seems the style guide could say a little more about this. JakeVortex 10:34, 30 Oct 2003 (EST)

When I've moved in info from the wikipedia I've tried to re-word it so that its a bit more SCA relevant. I'd say that the best way to work with wikipedia content is to move it into Cunnan and work from there, that way we can add whatever we feel is needed to the article without worrying about the goals of the wikipedia. - Tobin

On a related topic, would it be possible / desirable to make all external links open in a new window? Conrad

It would be possible but it is not something I'd like to do. It would mean making some changes to the wiki software which would make it very hard to upgrade. - Tobin

The main problems I have with some of the stuff in Wikipedia is that it is either (a) wrong, being often based on cuts from, say, 1905 editions of encyclopediae, which are in turn based on research conducted in the 1800's, or (b) not applicable to SCA folks.

If it is wrong or dated, it seems better to fix it there than to make a new copy here. I agree with the comments that the value of pages here is to make the content relevant to SCA folks. ~ JakeVortex

Now I don't have a problem with a lot of it. It's relevant and accurate and stuff, and we needn't reproduce it here. e.g. the various biographical articles which are quite detailed. Some of their other articles contain a number of innacuracies and/or prejudices, however. Also, an article on, say, the third crusade, for which wikipedia gives the dry facts, is really only useful here if you take the view of how you would handle your persona if he or she were living, say, in the levant in the time of that crusade.

For that reason I'll continue my current approach of linking to wikipedia articles where appropriate, copying and revising where necessary, and re-writing from scratch with links to the original where I feel it benefits Cunnan for me to do that.

Del 16:59, 17 Nov 2003 (EST)

Standard format for attribution

For those that haven't been following the conversation happening in another part of the wiki the topic of attribution for original text has come up. Since we have, at least, one person who insists upon having this style of attribution in the article (and not just the article history) I think there should be some discussion of a standard format.

I don't like the idea of this being used for articles that have been written for the wiki (since the original author will always be recorded by the software in this case and it is contrary to the wiki ideal) but I do think that it would good for this to be included in articles started using content previously published elsewhere (since the original author may not have been the person who added it to the wiki).

The format I propose is as follows:

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Attribution

Much of this article is based on an original article by Person XYZ, you can find a copy of the original article at some location (Possibly the article history?)

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What do people think of this format? When should/shouldn't attribution be included? - Tobin

Personally, I think that if somebody wants to have their own perspective with attribution on the wiki I would like to see it done the following way:

The person would put either a stub or non-controversial entry for the topic in question (eg. the reformation started when Martin Luther accidentally nailed his laundry list to the church door). At the bottom would be a See also list including something like Anton's perspective of the Reformation.

Given his writing style and depth of knowledge and writing style I would go out of my way to look at what Anton has to say on a subject. Having extra pages along these lines would IMO add an extra dimension to the wiki, while still retaining its original flavour. Everybody still gets to have their input on the main article page, while individuals are able to put forward a consistant, well thought out point of view in a single article. Best of all no extra coding is required. Conrad Leviston

Software Upgrade

I'll soon be upgrading the wiki software. This means that the wiki will be locked for a short while and that things may appear to be broken. - Tobin

The software upgrade seems to have been successful. If you spot any weirdness be sure to mention it here.

It might be a good idea for everyone to log out and then in again to help clear up any user preference issues - Tobin

I just noticed that some of the skins don't seem to be working (Cologne Blue is almost useless), I'll try to fix this quickly. - Tobin

Skins are fixed again. The database is now read/write so people can begin editing again. - Tobin

For people who asked me if the article count was accurate: It wasn't but it is now. We have 1033 articles (a bit of a difference!). - Tobin

Categories

The current stable version of the Mediawiki software, which Cunnan is running, doesn't include the experimental Category feature. This means that there are some articles that contain [[Category:whatever]] which no longer do anything special. I've deleted the Category: articles but pages linking to them will still need to be cleaned. - Tobin

Enhanced special pages links

It is now possible to link to specific cases of the special pages. Eg [[Special:Whatlinkshere/Heraldry]] will create Special:Whatlinkshere/Heraldry, a list of all pages that link to the Heraldry article. - Tobin (See my contributions, another example of the enhanced special page links ;-)

RFEs

Two enhancements I'd like to see:

• A piece of javascript to place the cursor into the search box on entering the main frame. It would be a few liners in the main template. I'll see if I can dig out the code and paste it here.
• A search for links type page where I can find what links to a certain article without creating the article. e.g. I've written a bunch of pages with links to, say, lollard, lollardry, lollardy, lollards, etc, and I want to find them all in turn if I have to but fix the links so I only create one "lollard" page.

Finding a specific users contributions

I was trying to find an anton's first news headlines article, and anyway i realised I couldn't work out how to view a list of anton's contributions. I'm not fussed if you decide to keep this private, but I believe you've been running under the idea that anyone could *easily* find out what annother contributor has been editting. New software issue? Lack of Links ot help me? i don't know - tell me. And I'm still trying to that article... Tiff

At the bottom of every user page is a "User contributions" link. You can also link to these like so: [[Special:Contributions/Some user name]] e.g. Special:Contributions/Tiff. Anton's contributions can be found at Special:Contributions/Anton (a few of his edits have been made when he wasn't logged in these can be found at Special:Contributions/210.9.142.25. Remember though that edits made by someone who is not logged in could actually have been made by anyone, we shouldn't be quick to assume who an anonymous user is). Anyway, Anton's page of sample headlines can be found at Cunnan:Period headline news (it wont show up when you search unless you specify that the software should look in the "Cunnan:" namespace. This option appears at the bottom of the search results page). - Tobin