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This page is Appropedia's site development tasks and bug reports.

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Look into implementing site-wide citations and DOI for pages

See Appropedia:Village pump#Following up on references display. --Emilio (talk)

Make our images appear in Google image search for Creative Commons images

It may be as simple as some udata or data tag attached to our cc template in images. --Emilio (talk)

Update: I believe we need to enable the {{Information}} template for the File namespace. —Emilio (talk) 03:12, 22 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Emilio Following https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/image-license-metadata and after quite a while of trying, today I was able to hardcode the licensing data for one specific file (File:Lubetkin Highpoint II December 2005.jpg), test it out at Google's Rich Results Test. Next I'll generalize and integrate the markup to the Template:Information so that all new files benefit from it. Also, while researching this issue, I found a compilation of advanced google search features that we could progressively take advantage of. Check it out! Sophivorus (talk) 15:50, 4 January 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Emilio Hi! Today I managed to generalize the image metadata via a new Template:Image license metadata and integrated it to most of the file licensing templates (such as Template:CC-BY-SA-4.0) rather than the Template:Information. Now all files using these templates should be understandable by Google (though it will take a few days for Google to catch on). I also normalized and improved the text of said licensing templates and organized the licensing categories. Tomorrow I'll try to finish with this task, since there're still a few loose ends. Sophivorus (talk) 16:45, 7 January 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Oh wow, thanks so much! This is beautiful. Emilio (talk) 17:57, 7 January 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Emilio Hi again! Today I finished updating the licensing templates. I also renamed all the "images" categories to the more general and appropriate term "files" (so Category:US images is now Category:US files, etc) and simplified and organized a great deal the file categories, as can be seen from Category:Files. This brings us another step closer to a simple, useful, scalable and maintainable file management system! Sophivorus (talk) 15:55, 8 January 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Emilio It looks like Google is starting to notice the new licencing metadata! Sophivorus (talk) 20:12, 30 January 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Emilio @Kathy Nativi Hi! I just noticed that the new images indexed don't link to the basic image page, but to weird non-canonical URLs. This is because Google is crawling all links on Appropedia, rather than the basic canonical URLs. In other words, Google is crawling links like:
https://www.appropedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:IGSvent_in.jpg&veaction=edit
when it should only crawl:
https://www.appropedia.org/File:IGSvent_in.jpg
To fix this, I just created https://www.appropedia.org/robots.txt following the recommendations at mw:Manual:Robots.txt#With short URLs
I tested the rules at https://technicalseo.com/tools/robots-txt/ and https://es.ryte.com/free-tools/robots-txt/ and it's all looking fine, but we should still keep an eye open on Analytics and Search Console for any issues. Sophivorus (talk) 11:59, 10 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Sophivorus Hi! I checked the Google Search Console, and I think https://www.appropedia.org/robots.txt is causing problems because it couldn't read the sitemap. Also, the health score has dropped drastically to zero, and we now have several orphan pages. Kathy Nativi (talk) 19:23, 15 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Kathy Nativi Hi, thanks for noticing! I just added an exception to the robots.txt file for the sitemap. Search Console hasn't caught on yet and I think I cannot force it, but I trust in a few minutes or hours it will. Let me know if you notice anything on your side! Sophivorus (talk) 19:47, 15 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Sophivorus Thanks! Let's give it a couple of minutes or hours. I'll keep an eye on it ;) Kathy Nativi (talk) 19:49, 15 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Kathy Nativi It looks like Search Console has already found the sitemap. Did the "heath score" recover? Not sure where to look for that. Sophivorus (talk) 13:26, 17 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Sophivorus Yep! We're back at 55 :) Kathy Nativi (talk) 15:27, 17 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Emilio I'm afraid Google is still not detecting the CC license for our images. According to https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/image-license-metadata there's two ways to tell Google about the CC license. One is to modify the metadata of the file itself (as opposed to the file page). This would require a very custom extension and meddling with the files as opposed to the database, something I've never done on MediaWiki before and would require time and caution. The second way is to output the metadata on every page where each file is displayed, not just the file page. This requirement is probably because if the googlebot encounters the same file on many pages, it may refrain from storing any metadata if it finds it's different on each occasion. This may also be fixable with a very custom extension, but it would also require time and care. The solution I've attempted so far was to output the metadata on the file page only (via Template:File data) and then tell the googlebot that the File namespace has priority (using the sitemap priority feature) but it seems it doesn't work. So what to do? Should I devote more time to this trying to develop a custom extension? Or should we give up for now? Cheers! Sophivorus (talk) 15:07, 12 August 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Accept ToS when creating account

Is it possible that we create a ToS (Terms of Service) were we also include the information about the copyrights? I'm working on the Copyrights page now, but I think it would be useful if when people create an account they directly agree to releasing their content under a CC BY SA 4.0. The same is true for the "save changes" section, that needs to be improved:

Appropedia copyright.png

I'd put a different text there, it should read:

"By saving changes, you agree to the Terms of Use, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 License. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license."

Terms of Use should link to a page we don't have yet but that we should create, where we explain that users a) should not upload copyrighted stuff and b) that Appropedia might decide unilaterally and on its own to update the CC license version to the most updated one, etc., among other things.

Also, happy new year folks!

(also I can't find the signature button anywhere but who else could be talking about copyright & tos)

Progress or checklist template

Develop a template that detects and communicates to users the missing elements of a proper documentation. Sophivorus (talk) 17:05, 18 February 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Emilio First version at Template:Project checklist. Waiting for some feedback from Catherine or you. :-) Sophivorus (talk) 13:21, 1 March 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Update Template:Event

I was looking at mw:Template:Event and wanted to hear your opinion on the best way to implement it since Template:Event exists for a different purpose. What do you think? I'm looking to implement a template to track events happening on our platform (such as by Fashion Revolution or GSTC. —Emilio (talk) 00:57, 4 March 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Emilio Our Template:Event isn't really used anywhere in the wiki, so we may replace it. But before I do, I'd like to know, where would the template be used? On the main page? Sophivorus (talk) 11:31, 4 March 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I was thinking of using them to show future events at portals such as the FR, maybe as a sort of "upcoming events" widget. Emilio (talk) 17:56, 4 March 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Add dropdown options to some databox options

@Sophivorus, Lonny One example that Lonny pointed out was Status. Is it possible to show these options when filling them out? —Emilio (talk) 23:14, 20 April 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Emilio @Lonny Hi! Unfortunately this isn't possible yet, but there's work being done on this front so I'm optimistic we'll have this feature eventually, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T271825 Sophivorus (talk) 11:19, 21 April 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Improve h2 and h3 readability

Hi all! I've noticed that text-heavy pages are hard to read so I added some CSS formatting at User:Emilio/common.js, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on how it can be improved further. One example is the horizontal line that Wikipedia uses, but I am not yet sure about it. What do you think? —Emilio (talk) 17:06, 14 May 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Emilio Do you mean the h2 and h3 CSS rules at User:Emilio/poncho.css? I think the main difference introduced by these rules is the bold text of the headers, would you agree? I think they do help, but before implementing the changes or suggesting further ones, do you have an example of one of those "text-heavy pages" that would benefit from the improvements? Thanks! Sophivorus (talk) 14:37, 17 May 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Sophivorus Sorry for not responding before. I think that most pages have this problem, but OpenClimate is a good example of how a mix of h2 and h3 can become a soup. I have added a couple of rules (larger bottom margin and a lighter color for h3 basically). As I mentioned before, Vector solves this problem by using a horizontal border below h2 but I don't know if we should go there yet, as there are other ways to make the visual hierarchy noticeable. Emilio (talk) 16:38, 25 May 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@Emilio Looking at OpenClimate under your new styling, I don't think there's any confusion at all between the hierarchies. I wouldn't go for the horizontal border either because I think it's unnecessary and kind of inconsistent with the rest of the skin. I think your solution works very well, if you agree let me know and I'll be happy to integrate part of it to Poncho (the rest will stay at MediaWiki:Poncho.css per being Appropedia-specific). Also, as a sidenote, I'm of the opinion that "flat is better than nested" and that titles shouldn't generally go beyond the h3 level. Cheers! Sophivorus (talk) 15:02, 1 June 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I agree with everything! If you think this is good, let me just think of a couple more changes before rolling it out. Maybe a left or bottom margin or something of the sort might be useful since I do feel like something is missing and I can't put my finger on it. —Emilio (talk) 17:49, 1 June 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Plagiarism checker

@Sophivorus Hi! Do you know of any way to implement this or any other tool of the sort? —Emilio (talk) 18:43, 13 July 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

PageSpeed

@Sophivorus Hello! Could you take a look at the data that PageSpeed provides? It seems that there are some things that we need to improve and we need your help. Kathy Nativi (talk)

@Sophivorus, Kathy Nativi I've been looking at some reports. I'll try to think of some first fixes we can do:
I hope this helps.— Emilio (talk) 23:26, 5 September 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Maps that use property and value

@Sophivorus Hi! I made these tests (one comes from the documentation and it seems that the use of property and value is what is giving us problems. If you leave property only, it works well, though.—Emilio (talk) 04:27, 24 August 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Fixed! Sophivorus (talk) 15:34, 25 August 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Add an anchor to Template:Item

This can be done using Template:Anchor. The idea is that people may want to reference a specific item on a page, perhaps related to the item name? See this example as reference. —Emilio (talk) 06:06, 8 September 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Emilio Done, see Open Climate#Call03. I ended up adding an "id" parameter to Template:Item because using the title or even the icon parameter to generate the anchors would frequently result in ugly or even broken anchors, since both parameters may contain wikilinks and other markup. Sophivorus (talk) 14:56, 27 September 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Twitter widget not working

@Sophivorus Hi! I noticed the TW widget is no longer showing the most recent tweets in https://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia:Social_media. Can you take a look at this? Thanks! Kathy Nativi (talk) 17:33, 13 September 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Kathy Nativi Fixed! Sophivorus (talk) 15:10, 27 September 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Returning from subpages' talk pages

@Sophivorus See Talk:Are You Ready An In-depth Guide to Citizen Preparedness/Assemble Disaster Supplies Kit for an example. I can't find a way to return to the page from there. —Emilio (talk) 03:04, 12 November 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Fixed! Sophivorus (talk) 11:55, 7 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Redirecting from

@Sophivorus, Medical Makers I finally understood the CategoryLockdown issue that was pointed out by User:Medical Makers a while ago: when users enter a private page which they can see and click edit, sometimes they are redirected to the private page error page. This must occur due to expiring cookies (they probably haven't clicked on "remember me" when logging in). Then they have to click on "Log in" which redirect them to the front page, from which they have to go search for the link they were at originally. This makes it originally very confusing, and then a bit cumbersome for users.—Emilio (talk) 01:15, 7 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

@Emilio @Medical Makers Hmm I think I understand but I can't think of a fix right now. How often does this happen? Sophivorus (talk) 11:57, 7 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Very often! I've seen it every time I'm on a call with them. Emilio (talk) 16:54, 7 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Wrong link on subpages' talk pages

See the red link at Talk:How_to_make_a_papasan_chair_solar_cooker_(Zachary)/Reflecting_materials. —Emilio (talk) 01:41, 11 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Fixed! Sophivorus (talk) 15:30, 20 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Galleries on tabs disappear at browser zoom

I just found this issue when browsing the front page. Here's a screenshot of the problem.

@Emilio I fixed this bug incidentally while fixing the other bug with the homepage gallery (image sizes flickered slightly after the page loaded). If another other problematic case appears, I'll do a deeper fix. Cheers! Sophivorus (talk) 19:53, 12 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Widget and templates for literature reviews

Now that widget forms exist, it would be super nice to explore its use to create (and organize) literature reviews. For example, with a template similar to Template:Place that doesn't use citeweb yet but that can help organize: apa citation, article type, summary/comments/findings, and perhaps something like keywords or anything that we can use to power a literature search, perhaps? Someone looking for interesting literature about specific topics might want to use our semantic search to find comments from the community on the topic and then have a button to go read it outside of Appropedia? --Emilio (talk) 18:10, 8 May 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Required software parameter for medical courses

One thing I'm noticing as missing from Template:Medical course data is an indicator for software that is different from the equipment.—Emilio (talk) 20:27, 22 June 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

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