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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Projects

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

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

Announcements

• Some of the old Village pump articles have been moved to save space:
  • Moved during 2003
  • Moved during 2004
  • Moved during 2005
  • Moved during 2006
  • Moved during 2007
  • Moved during 2012
  • Moved during 2014

Topics

Policy Page

I've added Cunnan:Policy so we can have somewhere to list Cunnan's Policies.

- Yves de Lyle (talk)

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:Organisation Project

-Yves de Lyle (talk) 18:36, 6 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So yes, you can try and establish a formal style, but other than a sidebar that will be out-of-date very soon if includes seneschal names etc, you probably won't have much to play around.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)

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)

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)

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.

New Spam Vandals

I have killed off three spam vandal user-pages today. If I have erred, please revert and let me know. I am unable actually to delete the pages as I lack the authority-level.Simoncursitor (talk) 22:27, 1 September 2014 (MIST)
Another 4 today -- Simoncursitor (talk) 17:27, 8 September 2014 (MIST)

My Spambot kill count is currently at 14. Is there anything we can do to prevent the creation of all of these ghost accounts? Hastilude (talk) 13:44 15 September 2014 (EST)

There are limits on a created account, which appears to be why we have many ghost account that do not create or add content. I am working on a way to remove the accounts that do not create content, but since there are over 15,000 of them I do not want to do it by hand. Most of the spammers/spambots are creating User:Talk pages, which are the only ones left open. I'll close that shortly. -- Yves de Lyle (talk) 13:05, 17 September 2014 (MIST)

Blanked 7 userr-pages today which look to be bot-created -- an occupatiuon, some personal notes, reference to a holiday or location, followed by a spam-link which appears to be in a Malaysian typography. -- Simoncursitor (talk) 17:46, 14 October 2014 (EST)

Trying to block the adding of external links for new users, but need to upgrade first. Planned for the weekend. --Yves de Lyle (talk) 10:06, 17 October 2014 (EST)