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.

Projects

Here is a list of some of recent projects in Category:Project Current.

<DynamicPageList> category = Project Current order = ascending addfirstcategorydate = true shownamespace = false ordermethod = lastedit count = 6 </DynamicPageList>

Announcements

Some of the old Village pump articles have been moved to save space:

Topics

Mediawiki updates

I've added additional Extension to the mediawiki setup here. See Special:Version for the current technical setup.

- Yves de Lyle (talk)

Reorganising Cunnan

Moved to Cunnan:Orgnisation Project

-Yves de Lyle (talk) 18:36, 6 February 2013 (EST)

Spamming, Users and how to deal with it.

Currently all new users need to create an account with a ReCatchpa, with to confirm their email. Once this is done users can edit freely. However, there are still some accounts that may be spammers. So I'm thinking of making emailConfirmed Users have to do ReCatchpa and adding another level of user group for regular users that have created or edited 10 pages that don't have to ReCatchpa. The Admins or Bureaucrats could move them to that group once the quota was reached. Any thoughts or comments? --yves (talk) 15:52, 1 February 2013 (EST)

The number of fake members certainly seems to be down. However, many new editors don't do more than just their branches/households page. I can't see many of them working on 10 pages. Also, unless you have a good way of marking it, I don't think the Admins would be willing to reassign the members. This isn't a forum so there isn't constant supervision. Also, how would the new group be any different?

- Cian Gillebhrath (talk) 19:04, 6 February 2013 (EST)

Then set the number of edits to 2.

- --Yves de Lyle (talk) 08:26, 8 February 2013 (EST)

Style guide

It appears that Cunnan could use a style guide for how to set out particular pages. For Example the Kingdom Standardisation Project could be adapted to be an SCA group standard style guide. Any thoughts or comments? Yves de Lyle (talk) 15:52, 1 February 2013 (EST)

The unofficial style guide tended to be me in the past. Others would write the page, normally rare editors who would not have any notion of style. I would make sure all branches started off with something like "The X of C is an SCA group in the Kingdom of Y, mundanely in CITY, COUNTRY". Then I broke the text up when I could, sometimes rewriting it and made sure the homepage link was under External Links, since it wasn't within Cunnan. The actual content depended on what the original author gave us. Things like History and Events were rare or too small to make their own section. Occasionally I had to remove regional point-of-view or change it to third-person perspective (ie. change "we" to "they").

So yes, you can try and establish a formal style, but other than a sidebar that will be out-of-date very soon if includes seneschal names etc, you probably won't have much to play around. After all, some branches are stub articles with only have one or two sentences that just say their location.

- Cian Gillebhrath (talk) 23:18, 1 February 2013 (EST)

My main thought would be to list the elements that should be included in a page (ie the stuff that is unlikely to change quickly). So a side bar with name, device, location, link to homepage/website. and the main part of the article having an overview, history, events (if any), rulers (K&Qs, P&Ps, or B&B), and external links. Other info like current seneschal, current members, current events, etc. change too quickly and would be best placed on the groups homesite.

- Yves de Lyle (talk) 10:07, 2 February 2013 (EST)

On the use of Categories

Where should categories be used?

For example; does the category From the Peerless Kitchen need to exist, but can it be a page (Peerless Kitchen) pointing to a bunch of recipes. I ask this because there are currently 5 Unused categories, 182 Uncategorized pages, and 153 Uncategorized categories... Whatever that means. There are categories for people to note the recipes they have redacted, which works against the idea of a wiki. It also appear that most of the articles in Category:Songs are in fact Category:Filk. Yves de Lyle 21:16, 30 Jan 2013 (EST)

Categories work in two directions. If there is a new recipe, the categories help a reader find related recipes. The reader can then move from the category to these other recipes. All that is required is category:From the Peerless Kitchen on the recipe pafge. Peerless Kitchen can be a page instead, but that would need to be updated, and each recipe page would have to link back to it.

The recipes are a an awkward point. They are an ongoing project outside the wiki, but their inclusion in the wiki is another project. By indicating which have or haven't been redacted, I imagine it makes the people concerned make sure the two projects can be kept in synch.

The inclusion of recipes is also very much in tune with the aim of Cunnan - to help medieval reenactment and recreation. Being able to read the original recipe is great, but some may need the help of a redaction. Therefore, having a list of recipes that have been redacted is helpful.

Some categories are made but no pages have yet been placed in the category. Some categories were started but no description was made of the category. Some categories were started, described but have few entries. Each of these must be evaluated on its own merits, like any page in a wiki. People had ideas and projects that these categories may be part of but may never have been finalised.

- Cian Gillebhrath (talk) 19:15, 6 February 2013 (EST)

Upgraded and extended

The software has been upgraded to the latest version (1.20.2), and various extension have been added to hopefully reduce the level of spam. Yves de Lyle 21:13, 25 Jan 2013 (EST)

Up and Running again

It appears that Cunnan has been down for awhile, but is now up and running again. If you discover any errors, faults or such with the software. Please message myself. If it is an error in the text of the wiki, then by all means edit and correct the oversight. Yves de Lyle 21:46, 16 Jan 2013 (EST)

Laurel Sovereign of Arms

I was looking at the page that redirects for Laurel and noticed that the Laurel Sovereign of Arms is in a page bound with the College of Arms. Might it be more beneficial to do a dedicated page for Laurel instead of being tied in with the College? Donngal 16:37, 22 July 2010 (EST)

Sure, since the Principal Herald page is now more substantive. I would make sure that Laurel redirects to Order of the Laurel with a disambiguation at the top for Laurel Sovereign of Arms. The page for LSofA should mention the SCA College of Arms. One of the pages should mention any historical links to similar ranks/titles in the RL Colleges, e.g. Garter King of Arms, Lyons King of Arms

- Cian Gillebhrath 10:35, 23 July 2010 (EST)

The Illegible Vandals

First it was the Ampersand Bandits. Now we have new class of vandals with a different MO - the Illegible Vandals! We have been getting unknown people adding just one word consisting of 8-10 characters to a range of pages. I believe the choice of characters is random because I don't recognise anything that I would find in any of my dictionaries. So the vandalism is pretty pointless. As far as I can work out, the same "user" has never struck more than once. Wierd. - Cian Gillebhrath 13:39, 27 September 2007 (EST)

Alas, we're now seeing several articles vandalized by a single IP. It's the sheer volume of IPs involved that concerns me -- we've been hit pretty hard over the last week. Kudos on everyone helping to stem the tide! Paul Matisz 19:05EDT 02 Oct 07

Yeah, I have since noticed repeat offenders. The thing that gets me is the fact that there seems to be no reason for these attacks. If they were all concentrated at particular times, then I could believe that it is was just an attempt at "denial of service" but there aren't enough of them at any one time for that. Other than restricting editing to logged in members, I can't see how any system can automatically prevent the Illegible Vandals. - Cian Gillebhrath 09:19, 3 October 2007 (EST)

On 04 Oct between 10:39 and 17:08 some twenty articles were vandalized by these jerks. In some cases, the same article was vandalized numerous times. Given the randomness I suspect this may be some kind of bot or virus... is there any way to defend against them? Paul Matisz 17:15EDT 04 Oct 07

Attacks today from three different IP addresses from 87.101.244.* . I think we might be able to put a filter on that for a few months. Tobin? Unfortunately, there seems no clear pattern to any of the other addresses. - Cian Gillebhrath 13:09, 9 October 2007 (EST)

Personal details

Pages have been created for SCA Contacts for various areas of Europe. While I prefer the information to be on the country's or kingdom's page, I have concerns about the address and phone details being put anywhere on Cunnan. They are far less likely to be updated regularly and I would much prefer this sort of personal data to be on the group's homepage outside of Cunnan. What do you guys think? - Cian Gillebhrath 13:12, 6 June 2008 (EST)

Good observation. I would think (knowing most of the people involved) that they posted it there themselves. If so, I have no problem with it. If not, that info should be deleted. Not sure how we can find out the truth though. CsikosLo 01:01, 10 July 2008 (EST)

Applicability Question

See these Caidan Tourney results: http://wiki.caid-commons.org/index.php/Results

Has Cunnan evolved so far away from its St Monica/Lochac roots that setting up a section under Kingdom of Lochac to support something like the above (but for Lochac) would be a no-go these days? I refer to Village pump discussions mid-2007 on culling some SCA-specific stuff that was seen mainly as ego-boo.

Or would it be fair enough? A wiki is a very good way to maintain this sort of thing; the question is whether we need to set up a whole new one, or use the resource that already exists, but which may no longer be appropriate. (Or, indeed, whether Cunnan would be open to any Kingdoms which wished to use it so).

- Bartholomew 15:02, 9 June 2008 (EST)

A similar idea has come to me, but instead why not merge the wikis and mirror them across the web.

This would reduce the duplication of pages covering the same basic content. Also why would people from any of the following (Midrealm wiki, Compendium Caidis (aka the Caid wiki), An Tir Culturewiki) support the efforts that Cunnan is making or vice versa.
The main Medieval & SCA content would fill the main section.
Each Kingdom could have a Portal:<Kingdom> to it's own unique flavour

- Yves de Lyle (talk) 10:27, 2 February 2013 (EST)

Templates

Greetings all. I have been working with learning the language of templates in MediaWiki and have copied one over from Wikipedia, Template:Information for image files. However, there seems to be a bit of markup that isn't working correctly, as can be seen in Image:Thomas_Hawley_Clarenceux_King_of_Arms.jpg. If someone can fix this and explain in detail how they went about fixing it, I'd like to be able to fix broken templates myself. Thanks! --Tobias Morgan 13:45, 24 September 2008 (EST)

I'm sorry but I don't know what error you are talking about. How about you use the Cunnan:sandbox to set up some examples and describe what you were expecting to happen and what has happened. I suspect it might be that Cunnan's MediaWiki version hasn't been updated for 3 or more months. - Cian Gillebhrath 09:14, 25 September 2008 (EST)
- The problem using the sandbox is that the template is primarily used in the Image namespace. If you clickthrough to the Image page listed above then go down to the information section, you can see that it looks odd and cluttered, with bad markup. Whereas if you go to the original image on Wikipedia and look at the information section, it's much cleaner. --Tobias Morgan 12:10, 25 September 2008 (EST)

Personas and households

This year has been a quiet one for Cunnan but an old issue has had to enforced by me as a moderator a few times - that Cunnan is not an archive of pages describing SCA personas (see Village Pump 2007), but we do allow pages on SCA groups like households. Unfortunately, sometimes the household pages contain a lot of details on their members and things that are more specific to the individual than the household.

Sorry to those whose pages I mention here but I need examples. Firstly, House Fettered Fleur. I have editted this page a few times to makes its format match those of other pages. It had a paragraph on one of the leading members which mainly discussed and promoted her SCA-related business interests. Since I could not see how this related to the household, I treated it as advertising and deleted the text. A page had also been created for another of the household's leaders Menken but I changed that to [[User:Menken]] since he was the one had just edited it.

More recently, a page was created for the Natt Sang household. This includes a descriptive paragraph for each member that mentions their general character, how they like to participate in the SCA and their musical skills, but no more. I have reformatted that but not deleted any content.

My question to the community (and especially the mods) is whether Natt Sang is saying too much. Small households sometimes say a little about the roles and habits of their members, but generally as appendages to a list, e.g. House Reverie, like a standard SCA regnum. Sometimes little is said about memebers at all e.g. House Awesome. Bigger households have simply too many members to list them all.

So should Natt Sang's member details be abbreviated to something like the following?

Lady Rhyslyn of Soundstream:

Instruments: celtic flute, Irish whistle, celtic harp, guitar, bass, singing.
Roles: Husmor, Emmisarian, seamstress.

If not, then should it be editted in any other way?

- Cian Gillebhrath 18:25, 1 November 2009 (EST)

Recent editting has brought to light two more persona pages that do not seem to qualify for inclusion: Randal Sinclair Hawkins and Kari Kyst. While they seem to have been great people and have been duly recognised in awards for their contribution to the SCA, nothing in their description indicates that they have played a extremely significant role in the development or history of the SCA or their kingdom. All edits so far have been done by Rohesia and Donngal and I don't know whether these editors are also Randal and Kari. If so, then these descriptions should be moved to their User pages.

If there are no objections in the coming weeks, I will delete those two pages.

I have since also noted Logan Ebonwoulfe. He certainly seems moreso a person of great note if he is included in an outside publication, but I know nothing about this Warlords card game. What do others think about keeping a page active on him?

- Cian Gillebhrath 10:37, 20 November 2009 (EST)

A new one to consider - Michael of Bedford. 10 times a king, first King of Atlantia, Laurel, Pelican, Knight. But is that enough to qualify him for inclusion? Did he introduce something that is widely used in the SCA? Is he known to all in the Society? Is he known outside of the society? - Cian Gillebhrath 10:18, 23 November 2009 (EST)

- I've been thinking on this subject a bit and trying to figure out a good rule of thumb. As a first pass: if the page consists of a simple list of awards, or even a few simple lists, that's probably not enough. An explanation should be needed. For example, the page for Cariadoc of the Bow doesn't list his awards, rather it gives his accomplishments with appropriate explanation and links. (Full disclosure - I created the page so I like the format, but I don't actually know His Grace.) With respect to Michael of Bedford's page, it's just a list of awards, which I'd suggest is inadequate. There may be other information which could be added to the page to make it clear that the page should remain, but as written I don't think the page works. AlexandreDavigne 00:14, 24 November 2009 (EST)
  - That sounds fair enough. Then it would just be down to us to decide whether the accomplishments are sufficient. Anyone else have a view? - Cian Gillebhrath 10:13, 30 November 2009 (EST)
    - Sorry about that, I did not realize till reading here today that general persons were not eligeable for inclusion in Cunnan, feel free to delete the page I created on Duke Valharic, just trying to add content Donngal mac Ronain

Wine

I want to make my own home made wine ,, were do I start ??? this will be my first time and I want to know how to start from being to end with fruits - gilpaulrod@yahoo.com, 12 Nov 2005

Try C.J. Berry's books available from any good wine making shop or online. - Bcholley, 14 June 2010

Herbs

Would it be possible to merge the herb pages (e.g. borage) with their page of historical quotes (e.g. borage (Maplet))? I think having all those extra pages is superfluous especially seeing as most of the quote pages are only a few lines long. Could they be added to the end of the original herb page with a new heading instead?

The idea with these entries is that they can be accessed either via the herb, or through the book title, so that one can browse the entries as one would a book. If you look at A Greene Forest and Askham's Herbal you will realise that merging these pages involves an awful lot of work for dubious benefit.