(Jan. 28, 2015, 12:28 a.m. by 50.0.7.63

In hopes of staving off side arguments, any threads devolving into accusations or the rehashing of old arguments can /Get Off My Lawn (and go to that sub-page).  There is also an Archive.

  • Please — DATE ALL REMARKS! It's tough on us newcomers to not know WHEN some thing was being discussed. It's also very confusing to come in in the middle of a discussion. Even on 'info' pages, observations without dates (e.g., 'dead crows' (which was in 2005)) can lead to confusion. Thanks for all your work. This Wiki is great. (2010-08) —LoisRichter
    • And sign your comments! —MM

I'm really upset right now folks, if someone could tell me that I did not do something I should not have, please do so, I would really appreciate it. I was under the impression that DavisWiki is a COMMUNITY EFFORT AND ANYONE CAN EDIT IT??? 

I did an extensive update to the https://localwiki.org/davis/Davis_Alliance_%28Harry_Potter_Alliance%29  and had trouble uploading the image, so I contacted JabberWokky and he helped me fix the issue - I had had trouble updating the image. But he helped me and the situation was fixed. But before the situation fixed itself, I posted a message on the Harry Potter Alliance Facebook page apologizing for the issue and requesting a tech-savvy person to help out. Immediately Maddi Porter, one of the members posted a nasty reply in which she said to leave this to the officers. Shortly after, I received another message on Facebook from another officer, who was polite so I won't share that officer's name, which reads, word for word, "Hey! While the officers appreciate what you're trying to do, please leave all social media and external websites to the officers. Haha, it's kind of our jobs. Next time if you have a suggestion for something that needs improving please just let us know and we can deal with it. Thanks!". 

If you look at the EDIT HISTORY, you will see that I updated a LOT of information, almost all of which was outdated. Can someone please look at this? Can someone please tell me that DavisWiki is a community effort? Or are there really pages that we just can't touch? That seems to defeat the community aspect of DavisWiki though???

-- Patrick (1/27/15)

  • It REALLY depends on the page--who seeded it, who reads it, who maintains it.  I have seen business owners get very defensive about their pages in the past, as if they are the sole curators of their image on the Wiki.  Years ago, Cowell Student Health Center tried to have a student-employee map out produce-sellers and have seasonal recipes posted weekly--I posted a couple original recipes and was told to back off because this was A Special Project--and then the page got some copy-paste recipes from the General Internet, and abandoned by the founding editor.  A handful of students who were involved in campus politics come back and try to white-wash their presence from the Wiki once they get into the real world and realize that undergraduate shenanigans are not professionally flattering.

    Theoretically, anybody can edit any page; we by consensus reserve the page format /users/AdamSmith to be edited by the AdamSmith, whereas /Adam_Smith is a page about a public figure, by the name of Adam Smith, and his publicly known actions.  Adam Smith can whitewash his personal page during his tenancy in Davis, but should be cautious about edits to his content page, and sometimes personal pages get un-deleted if there was significant content lost.

    If a page is dated in content, editing it bumps the page onto the Activity page, and suddenly once it's been found and identified, a lot of tweaking happens all at once.  I don't think you were wrong to update the information about the Harry Potter Alliance,  As a campus organization, "The HPA @ UCD" is --I believe-- a disallowed name format.  "The Davis Alliance" tells me NOTHING about the group.  I would recommend that the page name go back to "The Harry Potter Alliance" because "in Davis" is a given based on the geographical tags within the name of this Wiki. -JudithTruman 1/28/15
  • In short: yes you can edit it.  You can't have sole control, nor can anybody else.  It's a collaborative project.  Some people try to avoid that and can be nasty or occasionally reasonable with their position.  But in your case, it makes sense for people (that is, everybody) to edit it to the best, most up to date, and honest representation of the subject.  There are a few naming guidelines that Judith mentions that are helpful tools developed over time. -jw 2015.01.28

  • 1/28/15  I find that I'm participating in the Wiki much less than I did prior to the change in format.  By "participate" I mean "looking at Recent Changes and checking out what got changed."  I find the page spacing on the Activity page to be just wide enough that I don't want to scroll past one screen.  Is there a wiki-norm on how long new business page get to hang out being sloppy before the hard edit scissors come through?  It bugs me when redirects are mis-used in lieu of keyword optimization. ((The) Butler Tax Alliance/Service is one that is currently irritating--because I just saw it and had tried to make the first Butler page wiki-format; the redirects are the same paragraph I pulled apart to make less commercial.)  -JudithTruman

    • 1/28/15 I also read and post less since the changed format and tools.  I thought I would get the hang of the changes, but it doesn't look like it will happen any time soon.  I find trying to follow recent changes so tedious that I give up after about 15 minutes.  Over the decades I have enjoyed the information available on news groups, web searches and wiki sites. The first 2 sources have deteriorated but web searches are still worth the effort needed to weed out the promos.  I think the Davis Wiki is still an outstanding source, but I miss the fun it used to be. My sincere thanks to all those who contributed so much. I hope it survives.  SueHjerpe  

    •  2015-01-28 - I will admit that I'm having trouble following the changes to the wiki now.  I've also seen strange things on the Activity, like (new) edits to my profile that don't seem to have happened.  The lack of an easily accessed summary of changes is also causing problems.  While I'm trying to get used to the new tools, both of those seem to be ongoing issues for me personally that aren't disappearing with familiarity.  There are other things, but I'm really trying to just let the new software become familiar. -jw
      • 1/28/15 Doug Walter had wondered about the "Talk Button"  and where it went.  (I just noticed a lot of this page got archived.)  I think it would help a lot of the frustration and arguments that we're having on increasingly un-findable pages.  I cannot figure out how to re-locate images.  Full-bore HTML is not something I know how to work with, and the GUI option is a non-starter for "click and drag."  I am wondering how many active gnomes are still Townies/Students -JudithTruman
  • Hey Judith, the talk button was removed because it was only used a couple times a year (if that). It was also a source of lots of confusion, because when it was used it was used to add information that should have been on the original page.  It was one of those features that the people who most wanted it were people who knew how to just create a page called "Pagename/Talk" by hand. So to answer the original question: the best way to create a talk page is to just create the page by hand.  It may make sense to bring something like this back, but I think it should probably be something more seamless than just a separate page with a name that ends with "Talk"-- something more like this, which we've been playing with: https://twitter.com/philipn/status/324810954502197248, where people could discuss and comment on sections of the page.

     

    RE: images, not 100% sure if this is what you're asking, but if you want to move an image from one page to another then you'll need to download the image from one page and then upload it to the other, at least for now.  There are other ways to do it, like copy and pasting the image URL, but downloading and re-uploading is probably easiest.  This is how it worked on the old system, too. It's far from perfect, but there haven't been a whole lot of images that needed to be shared between lots of pages so far.  --Philip

    • What I want is to be able to move images from left-justified to right-justified and understand better how to resize things.  The way images are now described in the code is confusing.  Kappa Psi Epsilon in particular, I'd like to thumbnail the rush-week image and send it down-page shortly before the officer slate, and then move their crest across to the upper right, shrink it by about a third, and keep the stripey box top-left justified. -Judith

    • It's interesting to find that a feature that I used several times was eliminated because I was one of the few using it. Okay, maybe a good decision, and we need to (1) go through and remove references to it (because I'll bet they aren't just on Wiki Ethics!), and (2) I strongly assert that something needs to replace it, and that since you deleted it, then you, PN, should make a more-specific suggestion for editors to adopt, or modify, or reject. I'm not mad, but I'm seriously surprised by this particular turn. Who knew that "all those Talk pages" were a source of confusion and barely used... Or maybe you mean the button was a source of confusion, and Real Editors made them "by hand?" Unclear to me -- DW

      • I had assumed that we *had* to use the "create Talk page" button because creating a page by hand wouldn't thread correctly.  I liked seeing the mis-used Talk pages because it pointed out where there were active problems and newbie editors that needed attention.   Converting the Wiki from Wikimarkup to HTML, incidentally, feels like going from English to Italian--there's enough linguistic similarities that you can survive for a bit, but then you get to the edge of understanding and everything else is lost.  -Judith

        Anything further on this topic?

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