User talk:Dougald: Difference between revisions

Howdy and page name suggestion

Hi Dougald,

Nice to see your intense work on the book on Appropedia!

Please move some of the general page names to something more unique, for example Thank You to New Public Thinking - Thank you.

Thanks, --Lonny 18:02, 22 February 2012 (PST)

Thanks, Lonny! And yes, I'll fix those page names.

I don't know if you can help with this, but the reason for the overly general names was to generate pages with the right title in a PediaPress book. I'm still learning how MediaWiki works - so, is there a way I can give a page an alias that PediaPress will pick up (e.g. 'Thank You'), whilst having an appropriately specific actual page name?

Appreciate any advice you can offer! --Dougald 18:22, 22 February 2012 (PST)

I think that's not possible, unfortunately. Minor changes like changing the first letter to lower case are possible, but that doesn't help you. It's going to be essential to use a more descriptive name for each page.

As a partial solution, I strongly suggest you create a template notice for the top of the page with an explanation of the project and some navigation links - and it should also add a category to the page it's placed on. Then when it's time to publish an edition, the template itself could be blanked, and it would then disappear from each page with that one edit. After publishing, the template is restored. That blanking and restoring is simple, and could be done as often as you want. This TheFWD header is a simple example (and note that the current revision is blank). A navigation template is almost a must, and soon... but I'm not saying it actually is a must, in case you or someone else has a better idea. :-)

There's still an issue with pagenames, though... some ideas:

• Will it get to one point where you have a definitive edition that you want to print? In that case, you could temporarily move all the page names from, e.g. New Public Thinking - Thank you to Thank You, press the button to create the PDF (or whatever format is needed), and then we immediately rollback all the page moves. This is hard if you want to do multiple editions as the work changes.
• Be creative - think of a prefix, or a different way of describing each page so it makes sense on its own. There could be a common pattern, or not. Note the page titles for The future we deserve - there are still some issues there to work out, but the titles are more specific.

Sorry we can't be more helpful! --Chriswaterguy 22:03, 29 February 2012 (PST)

Hi Chris - thanks for the advice & suggestions! (And apologies for the slow reply - we had our book launch on Weds and I've been catching up on other projects since...)

I think your first idea on the page names may actually be the answer. I don't know about Vinay's FWD project, but in our case there was a moment when we put together the definitive edition - so briefly giving the pages a general name at that point and then rolling them back would have worked fine. (Feels like a bit of a hack, obviously, but if you guys are OK with it...)

I did fix the very general page names after Lonny's original note, but I'll go through more thoroughly tomorrow, adding a header and adding "New Public Thinking 1" to the start of all our page names.

Thanks again for your help! --Dougald 14:43, 3 March 2012 (PST)

Subdomain idea

If we can't find a solution we're all really happy with for pagenames and navigation in books, then there's a more ambitious (but pretty awesome) solution: Set up a separate wiki on a subdomain of Appropedia for books of this kind- like how Wikipedia has different subdomains for different languages. That would give you a lot more freedom in terms of naming, categorization, scope of content and the various other conventions of Appropedia. I like this idea, but it only works if we get some significant help, in time and skills. (Financial assistance would also be helpful in getting this done, and appreciated, but it isn't essential if we have the right help.)

For now, though, a template and descriptive pagenames would be really helpful - let me know if you need help with that. If we eventually go with the subdomain, we can move the pages over and then you can rename them more freely. Thanks! --Chriswaterguy 22:03, 29 February 2012 (PST)

NPT1 header

Based on {{TheFWD header}}, I suggest the following. You might like to copy and paste it to, say, {{NPT1 header}}:

<noinclude>
{|
|[[Image:NPT1 logo.png]]   
|align=center|
{|
|- valign="top"
|<center>
<small>'''''This is an entry in [[New Public Thinking - Reflections on 2011]] - a collaborative book project about INSERT YOUR EXPLANATION.  See [[INSERT AN INDEX PAGE]] or [[Talk:{{PAGENAME}}|discuss this entry]].'''''</small>
</center>
|}
|}
----
<includeonly>
[[Category:New Public Thinking - Reflections on 2011]]
</includeonly>

==Usage==
This is the header for the [[New Public Thinking - Reflections on 2011]].  To use it add the following code (including the curly brackets) to your page:

<tt>'''{{tl|{{subst:FULLPAGENAME}}}}'''</tt>

[[Category:Navigation templates]]
</noinclude>

Cheers - and thanks for sharing your work here! --Chriswaterguy 21:47, 29 February 2012 (PST)