User talk:Teratornis: Difference between revisions

Hello

Latest comment: 14 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello Teratornis,

It is great to have you here. Your work on Wikipedia is impressive. We are really excited to see which ¨bits you move¨ on Appropedia!

Thanks, --Lonny 17:51, 9 July 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks for the welcome. I will study the site and learn my way around. There is quite a bit of interesting content. User:The Ent came here at my suggestion, so I thought I should see what I'm recommending. I'll put some notes on my user page about things I might do. --Teratornis 07:13, 10 July 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Index to Appropedia

Latest comment: 13 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

I really like your idea of an index. I think that it would help a lot of people, and it would be great to see what you learn/suggest along the way. Let us know what we can do to help. Also wanted to let you know that we will hopefully be switching the editing interface on Sunday (if I have power and internet) to the rich editor that is on our devsite. Thanks, --Lonny 23:33, 10 July 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I took pretty complete notes in Wikipedia:User:Teratornis/Notes#Editor's index to Commons about how I ported components from the Editor's index to Wikipedia. Presumably the process of creating an index here would be similar, with the exception that fewer of the templates I would like to use would already be here, so I would have to port them over from Wikipedia or Commons. I've ported templates on several wikis, so I wouldn't expect a problem. I might need help from an admin if I need another style class in MediaWiki:Common.css. An index page isn't rocket science - the hardest part was getting the shortcut boxes to right-align when they appear under a list sub-item. I never really figured out what was going on there, despite getting some help from some template experts. But it manages to work well enough. I'll let you know if I run into any brick walls. I would probably like to port Wikipedia:Template:Google custom because I like the way it lets me search namespaces and subpage trees, and (most importantly) I can save links to searches that I run. Searching is a big part of writing an index, and it's useful to record one's searches so one doesn't re-plow the same ground too much.

I hope the rich editor will be optional. I'm a plain text markup kind of guy. But who knows, maybe I will like the rich editor. --Teratornis 23:46, 10 July 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Great, just let us know if you hit a wall. The rich editor will be optional for sure, and is much better than what we are currently using. I am a plain text person as well. Hopefully, we can make the system remember your settings, so that you don´t have to click each time to select plain text editing. Thanks, --Lonny 00:01, 11 July 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

OK. Indexing is a big job, so this will take a while even if nothing goes wrong. (And when does nothing go wrong?) --Teratornis 07:18, 11 July 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Just spotted this conversation - interesting idea. Something that might help with the duplication is some work I sometimes do with a bot, adding wikilinks and categories. It's actually a lot of work, and not my main focus, so I haven't done any for a while. But when I've run it, it's really helped with the categorization and wikilinking for specific topic areas, which should help those cases of duplication get fixed.

Another good exercise is building portals, like at Portal:Green living. It's not as comprehensive as the index you're talking about, but it's something I've enjoyed doing (especially seeing some of those getting a lot of pageviews over time). --Chriswaterguy 11:14, 4 January 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I got sidetracked on other things, but lately I've been porting the indexing machinery (templates, etc.) between a couple of other wikis that I administer, so I thought I would try to get serious about indexing Appropedia. Portals are one of the first things I'm looking at to grasp the structure here. Along with categories, which is how I ran across the spam in Acid Value. Anyway, I'm editing a first draft of an index in my personal wiki (offline, running under XAMPP), where I have all the necessary templates etc. When I have something worth looking at I'll put it somewhere that you can see. As you surely know, one problem with moving from a well-developed wiki like Wikipedia to a smaller wiki is leaving a kazillion templates behind. The index pages on Wikipedia do not themselves use that many templates, but the templates they use have dependencies. I slogged through the export import battle on my personal wiki, and before I replicate it here I'd like to discuss whether you would want me to bring in all the dependencies, or chop the index down to not need them. The dependencies include things like message boxes, which are useful for a lot more than index pages. Don't feel like you have to make that decision from my vague description here. I'll make a user subpage that lists everything I would like to import from Wikipedia so you can decide whether you want all that stuff here. I'll need to edit the list anyway just to see what you already have. --Teratornis 23:58, 4 January 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Great, I look forward to seeing that. We've imported a fair few templates, but on an ad hoc basis. The main issue I've come up against is that we don't have parser functions fully enabled - not sure why. It's on our list of requests, but we're short of tech resources on such things. I see you're used to actually running wikis, so perhaps we could ask your assistance on one or two things? --Chriswaterguy 00:20, 7 January 2011 (PST)

ParserFunctions

(continuing from the above in a new topic)

Yes, it's hard to make much headway with template porting without the ParserFunctions extension. Fortunately it's easy to install.

• Special:Version - Appropedia is running MediaWiki 1.16.0, and really does not have ParserFunctions installed yet (quick test: 1. The bare code appears, so Appropedia lacks the code to parse it 11:14, 9 January 2011 (PST): it works now. Yay!).
• mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions
• mw:Extension:ParserFunctions
• mw:Special:ExtensionDistributor/ParserFunctions

It appears that Appropedia needs this one:

• http://upload.wikimedia.org/ext-dist/ParserFunctions-MW1.16-r62695.tar.gz

The procedure is just to download the file, un-tar it, and add a line to LocalSettings.php. I'd be happy to do it, it would take about five minutes assuming no weird problems, but that would require giving me shell access to your server(s), something you wouldn't want to do without some vetting first. Let me know how you go about vetting people.

Incidentally, I haven't finished looking through all the to-do pages yet, but have you thought about making a portable (offline) version of Appropedia? I imagine there are Appropedians who venture far from Internet access, who might like having this material on a mobile device. See for example the portable WoWWiki. --Teratornis 15:14, 7 January 2011 (PST)

After I wrote the above, I saw Appropedia:Offline browsing. I should probably not ask questions until I first read the entire site. --Teratornis 21:03, 8 January 2011 (PST)

:-D Feel free to ask away - I was going to point you there but got distracted yesterday. Glad you found it.

And the good news is that User:Jason Michael Smithson has installed ParserFunctions - the quick test above no longer shows the bare code. That gives us a fair bit more functionality, I think, which I'll eventually play around with...

Some of the Wikipedia templates with parser code are scarily complicated - hoping we don't need to go too far down that track. But of course, it all depends what they can do, and regular users don't have to look at the code.

Thanks for the prompt re ParserFunctions. --Chriswaterguy 09:36, 9 January 2011 (PST)

Yay! Now the porting fun begins. Yes, some templates are internally complicated, but as long as they work when we port them, it doesn't matter much what's inside them. Most template users on Wikipedia don't understand what's inside some templates either (waves hand). The templates I've edited are "locally robust" in the sense that if you want to make a small change, add another field, etc., usually you only have to find where to make the change, and you don't have to understand all the rest of it. Templates are built from wikitext which is a markup language rather than a true programming language with complex flow-control constructs, which means template code can look ugly but it usually is not too spaghetti-fied. The main complication to worry about is figuring out a template's dependencies. Sometimes these are subtle, for instance wikipedia:Template:Navbox relies on HTML Tidy^W changing how the MediaWiki parser works, and does not work right on wikis that don't have it installed. But fortunately someone wrote a portable version of the template^W that I had no problem porting to other wikis. I'll start a user subpage to list the templates I want to import, and why. Ideally, I shouldn't break anything that's already here. Adding new templates is generally less dangerous than fiddling with existing templates. --Teratornis 11:14, 9 January 2011 (PST)

Actually the porting fun needs a little more administrator help to get rolling. I'll run into a series of things that I need an administrator to do, such as add style classes to MediaWiki:Common.css. These things are generally not difficult to do, but only a handful of people have the access permission to do them. --Teratornis 00:20, 11 January 2011 (PST)

Spammed pages

Latest comment: 13 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I was looking through Special:UncategorizedPages which led me to Acid Value which was informative in its first revision, but then User:83.233.30.34 spammed it. The latest edit appears to be a null edit by you, but you seem to have left the spam. I can understand your edit comment, but I don't understand leaving the spam. Special:Contributions/83.233.30.34 shows some more spammed pages. --Teratornis 08:31, 4 January 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks for catching that. The page for imported via Special:Import so I didn't actually look at that page, and didn't get around to doing a spam cleanup after the merge.

Btw, just found your comment (thanks to Lonny) on File talk:Wikipedia.png, and replace the image as suggested - thanks.

Great to have you here. Have you joined our mailing list? It's been quiet, but I'm planning to start posting some updates there. --Chriswaterguy 10:57, 4 January 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Thanks for the explanation about Acid Value. If I see blatant spam on Appropedia, should I just revert it, and put a {{delete}} template on it if article's entire existence was spammy? (Like you did here.)
• I had not seen the Appropedia community Google Group yet, or if I did I had forgotten about it. Thanks for the link. I will probably read the group online unless I need to post something. I prefer to discuss things on-wiki since I like the ease of markup to make links etc., but if the group is where to discuss certain things I'll use the group.

--Teratornis 00:09, 5 January 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]

"If I see blatant spam on Appropedia, should I just revert it, and put a {{delete}} template on it if article's entire existence was spammy?" - yes, that's the best strategy.

Google Group: The wiki is good for discussion too, but the Google Group is helpful for announcements, and reaching people who might otherwise not notice. I like wiki markup for discussion too, but we need something more friendly to non-tech people, so I'll be trying my hand at setting up Simple:Press on our dev blog in the next few days. Cheers --Chriswaterguy 00:26, 7 January 2011 (PST)

Great thoughts on appropriateness!

Just FYI, I adapted comments by you, to add to the appropriateness article. Thanks. --Chriswaterguy 03:34, 10 January 2011 (PST)

You're welcome. This talk about definitions has me also reconsidering my habitual use of the term "developed country", which seems to imply that the industrialized countries have arrived, and everybody else should strive to be like us. In fact no nation on the planet has yet achieved anything like sustainability. Most of our wealth is based on burning fossil fuels, and thus will not last appreciably longer than fossil fuels themselves, unless we figure out how to create wealth without fossil fuels. A country whose present economic model cannot persist more than another century or two, and might collapse in as little as a few decades (depending on what happens to petroleum supply) is hard to describe as "developed" while suppressing laughter. We are also exporting enormous costs to future generations by piling up billions of tonnes of fossil carbon in the atmosphere. --Teratornis 00:16, 11 January 2011 (PST)

The actual meaning of these terms currently:

• "Developed country" - a country that burns lots of fossil fuels.
• "Developing country" - a country that is trying to burn lots of fossil fuels.

--Teratornis 10:24, 11 January 2011 (PST)

Global warming pages

Re wikifying a "Global warming denial FAQ" as mentioned on your tasks page, that's a great idea. In the long term, Appropedia's probably not the place for it, but until there's a strong & active climate science wiki to share it on (hopefully soon) then you're welcome to build it here. The general philosophy is to support related work, but then transwiki when there's a better home for it.

We do try to keep things civil and NPOV of course - I'm sure that's not a problem for you, but we'll just need to watch those pages carefully if more people come to edit them.

And of course there's the practical response to climate change, which definitely belongs here. --Chriswaterguy 08:34, 10 January 2011 (PST)

My preference would be to just ignore the debate and get on with mitigation, both institutionally^W and personally.^W Unfortunately, the flood of climate science disinformation makes personal action more difficult, both by delaying policy changes that can give more opportunities for personal action, and by eroding cultural support for institutional and personal action. Most of my local real world friends, for example, seem utterly baffled when they become aware of my low-carbon lifestyle choices (such as living car-free, jet-free, almost heat-free). They ask me why I don't behave according to their received cultural norm, as if they cannot even imagine a reason. It seems pretty clear to me that if we don't correct the ocean of ignorance and disinformation pertaining to climate change and the unsustainability of fossil fuels, interest in these topics will remain a fringe issue, probably locking humanity into the worst-case emissions and climate change scenarios. --Teratornis 11:38, 10 January 2011 (PST)

Hello. Thoughts regarding discourse

Hi. I totally agree with you. Somehow all the sceptics are focusing on irrelevant details or facts that are extremely shady or coming straight from lobbyists. (global warming, climate change, peak oil, nuclear power or socially irresponsible business) ( I am in no means a conspiracy theorist, but i can see where most normal people get their arguments from )

I also agree with your concerns and thoughts regarding "developed/undeveloped". But somehow it is little easier to continue to use established titles instead of inventing new ones that noone will understand. It is common to still use the I-countries (for industrialized) and U-countries (for Undeveloped/developing) simply because most will know what you are talking about. (but of course there are huge nations that are both at the same time, for instance Brazil and India ) It is the same with "green" and other topics. "Natural Gas" is proposed by some to change into "Fossil gas" but it will be very difficult to change that habit now.

Now we have had very cold and snowy winter so far, here in Sweden. Many people joke about the lack of global warming or ridicules the climate change reports. They just don't realize that most other places is getting far much worse conditions, and it is worsening (on the global scale) (For instance Brisbane, Australia are getting evacuated, many island nations in south asia are dangerously close to sinking under ocean level)

So I try to focus my arguments and projects on saving money on the utility bills. Or the health benefit with walking and bicycling instead of using motorised vehicles. The money that I save on all the hidden tax, costs and depreciation involved with owning a personal car are huge. I could afford taxi any time when it is too crappy weather (but i don't really do it)

I have noticed that it is slightly more accepted in society to be extremely cheap or obese than to be an openly extreme energy-activist and anti-consumerist. Almost all that I talk to are thinking that I am attacking or critisizing their personal behavior and lifestyle, when I simply say what I have done to improve my life. Some get aggravated because of my own choices I make that does not harm them. (i simply have goals to live far below all global and national averages in costs, emissions and footprint)

Who would think that any person would feel attacked when their overweight friend says he is going to loose some weight? No, they would be supportive and help with this ambition!

Would a poor or rich person feel attacked when their friend says he is going to save or earn some more money? No, their personal economy have got nothing to do with anyone elses!

Sorry for ranting on. I have some thoughts regarding wiki-technicalities too, i will think about it first for a bit and check if it already exists somewhere. --Yeahvle 02:41, 11 January 2011 (PST)

Your perspective and experiences generally mirror mine. That is somewhat frightening, as I would hope Sweden would be more progressive than the state of Ohio in the US on environmental and sustainability issues. I guess the main functional difference is that Sweden has historically had higher motor fuel taxes than the US, which has forced Sweden's economy to evolve in a somewhat more energy efficient direction. But the average citizen in either country might be happy to drive a large 4x4 and fly around the world on jets and generally enjoy a high-consumption lifestyle without regard to the global and future consequences. Unfortunately I don't think there is any way to dodge the real issues. If we merely focus on the money-saving benefits of a less environmentally destructive lifestyle, that has two drawbacks:

• People who are wealthy enough don't care as much about saving money, so as incomes rise due to economic growth, everyone is back to wasting energy.
• The Jevons paradox^W - an increase in energy efficiency effectively makes energy cheaper, which encourages people to consume more energy. For example, I had an online discussion with a gentleman who wrote that he saves so much money by living car-free that he can afford to fly to Europe more often. He seemed to say this without any sense of irony.

I don't think there is any way to move society in the direction it needs to go (i.e. to stop burning fossil fuels) unless we somehow manage to persuade the vast majority of people to feel the same degree of revulsion for burning fossil fuels that they would feel about kicking puppies. Burning fossil fuels is in fact a shockingly horrible activity, and we need people to react to it with the shock and horror it warrants. The mere fact that such persuasion is difficult at the moment does not make it unnecessary. The most important element in persuasion is repetition. If people hear a message enough times from enough sources they regard as credible, they tend to start believing it. That is how almost everybody came to believe burning fossil fuels is desirable and harmless. We cannot shy away from telling people the truth. They will only believe the truth if they hear it enough times and from all directions. Consider that everyone raised in a "developed" country has watched tens of thousands of commercial advertisements since earliest childhood exhorting them to fly, drive, consume, etc. and convincing them that this is what the beautiful desirable people do. Even if people are consciously cynical about advertisements, and imagine they are not fooled by them, corporate interests continue to spend vast sums on adverts because their sales figures prove the adverts work. --Teratornis 10:23, 11 January 2011 (PST)

And I too need to go outside and shovel a few more centimeters of "global warming" off my walks. Too many people see some snow and think global warming is a hoax, hence their jokes about it. One response is to confront the misconception directly, for example by mentioning the steadily increasing ratio of daily record high temperatures to daily record lows. Across the US as a whole this ratio has increased every decade since the 1970s, with the increase faster in the western half than the eastern half. Warming in the western US is more of a problem because that is the drier half, and warming is associated with decreased precipitation, longer droughts and heatwaves, reduced mountain snowpack, and larger and more frequent wildfires. In the meantime, the eastern US keeps getting impressive winter snowfalls to excite the climate change disinformers. --Teratornis 11:01, 11 January 2011 (PST)

Yes, yes... And the U.S. have had very high subsidies on liquid fossil fuels. Sweden were also early to develop bigscale hydro-power-plants in all major rivers during first half of 1900's. Actually it is lucky that we had no oil or coal to exploit. And our solidarity-political system was also really great: all workers shared some of their income tax to make hospitals and schools free. Car and fuel taxes went to constructing very safe and free roads.

I do not really agree fully with the Jevons paradox, I guess it is only true if you imagine electricity supply is a constant and much higher than the demand. In Europe we are approaching retirement for many nuclear power plants, and governments seem to not being able to invest any money to retrofit them with newer, safer equipment needed. We really need to make huge efficiency cuts in waste to keep price flat. And thankfully the really rich peoples emissions and waste are a very small amount per capita. I think that most people would want to save a few pennies on unneccessary boring costs, so that they can spend it on other "fun" stuff.

Regarding snowy weather, it must also be mentioned that a local mass of air of a certain temperature can only contain certain percentage of humidity. If the temperature in near-earth-atmosphere is colder than 18 below zero (°Centigrade not °F) it is not enough humidity for snowflakes to form. So if average winter temperature was colder than that in your area, and it now have gotten some degrees warmer : it will snow much more now!

And when I "lecture" people about it they seem to understand it. You should also try to "inform" them, but gently!

When it comes to commercials: we do not fall for the products. We get the idea subconsiously that : "everyone else" seems to be using this item, and see how happy and gorgeous they seem to be. I want what they have. --Yeahvle 14:01, 11 January 2011 (PST)