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::::I'm very interested in seeing if we can apply what works so well on WordPress, even when CAPTCHA is turned off: "Bad Behavior" and, if possible, some equivalent of Akismet. --[[User:Chriswaterguy|Chriswaterguy]] 04:26, 16 February 2011 (PST)
::::I'm very interested in seeing if we can apply what works so well on WordPress, even when CAPTCHA is turned off: "Bad Behavior" and, if possible, some equivalent of Akismet. --[[User:Chriswaterguy|Chriswaterguy]] 04:26, 16 February 2011 (PST)
:::::It seems that even the simple CAPTCHA has eliminated the flood of vandalism we were having. I did not realize it would work so well. In the case of IP blocks, Wikipedia has some exemption{{w|Wikipedia:IP block exemption}} mechanism for allowing humans on a blocked IP to create an account and edit after logging in. I have no experience with it. In theory that should have let you edit on the Malaysian Wikipedia, but I don't know whether the smaller Wikipedias are as well-managed as the big ones. Maybe few or no users there knew how to administer the exemption feature. --[[User:Teratornis|Teratornis]] 09:18, 16 February 2011 (PST)
:::::It seems that even the simple CAPTCHA has eliminated the flood of vandalism we were having. I did not realize it would work so well. In the case of IP blocks, Wikipedia has some exemption{{w|Wikipedia:IP block exemption}} mechanism for allowing humans on a blocked IP to create an account and edit after logging in. I have no experience with it. In theory that should have let you edit on the Malaysian Wikipedia, but I don't know whether the smaller Wikipedias are as well-managed as the big ones. Maybe few or no users there knew how to administer the exemption feature. --[[User:Teratornis|Teratornis]] 09:18, 16 February 2011 (PST)
== A late welcome from Curt ==
Hi Teratornis,
Wow, what a bunch of great work in the last few weeks!  I recognized your name from way back but wasn't paying much attention recently when you cranked it back up.  Fantastic!  I'm particularly excited by the Parser funcs (I think ages back that we had some funky incompatibility between extensions).  So cool to be able to import templates and implement good ones.  Thanks for the re-engagement! I'm inspired to follow suit!  [[User:Curtbeckmann|CurtB]] 09:26, 16 February 2011 (PST)

Revision as of 17:26, 16 February 2011

Template:Talk header

Hello

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

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.

It appears that Appropedia needs this one:

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 TidyW 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 templateW 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

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 institutionallyW 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 paradoxW - 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 (thank you very much, Icelandic and U.S. banks for that bubble/crisis) to retrofit these with the newer, safer equipment needed. We really need to make huge efficiency cuts to keep prices 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)

Soft redirects

Thanks for improving these. Replied on my talk page. --Chriswaterguy 20:19, 17 January 2011 (PST)

quirky stubs

Re Chairs - you asked "Is this a test edit?"

Actually, Emesee likes to create stubs, and does it in good faith... we've talked about this in the past, and Emesee was fine about such pages being moved to userspace, so this one is now at User:Emesee/Chairs.

Thanks for the deletion tagging and other good work. --Chriswaterguy 05:50, 18 January 2011 (PST)

But the one that was just "appropriate...." I simply deleted :-D. I see the value in flagging a topic as needing an article, but better if we encourage the writing of an intelligent & intelligible sentence somewhere containing the redlink. --Chriswaterguy 05:59, 18 January 2011 (PST)

The irony is that on Wikipedia I lean strongly toward inclusionism. Pulling the {{Delete}} trigger feels almost like betrayal. But on Wikipedia, even the dubious articles usually have enough substance to show where they might be going. I'm surprised I didn't think of userfyingW Emesee's odd musings. My brain must have been glazing over from the other vandalized pages I was marking for deletion. Thanks for reminding me of what I should have remembered. In any case, I wouldn't actually delete a page myself if I had that power, until I had checked with someone else. Not after all the bad things I've said about deletionists. --Teratornis 09:45, 18 January 2011 (PST)

Thanks and Image Rights

Howdy,

Thanks for all your amazing work here.

The new version of mediawiki finally has a select box for selecting a license for a file that you are uploading. It links to templates, e.g. Wikipedia:Template:CC-by-sa-3.0. Do you have time to make these work on Appropedia?

Thanks again, --Lonny 01:09, 19 January 2011 (PST)

I will try porting them to my offline wiki, where I have the necessary privileges to install the dependencies. I may already have the dependencies installed there. At first glance, I see the license templates require subpages in the Template: namespace, the mbox family of base templates, and template documentation templates, which I already enabled on my offline wiki when I was porting other templates there, such as navbox templates. I had already planned to port/enable those things on Appropedia, except that as an unprivileged user I cannot do everything myself. On Appropedia, I have to wait for someone to respond to my requests for administrator assistance. There are only a few administrators and all must be busy. It is possible to rewrite simpler versions of Wikipedia's templates with fewer dependencies, but that is a lot more work than setting up the target wiki to handle Wikipedia's templates in their present form. I think it is also inexpedient in the long run - falling behind Wikipedia's template style is similar to falling behind in the version of MediaWiki. Sooner or later, the need will arise to do something that requires being caught up, and then catching up will be hard. It seems the MediaWiki developers are building in dependencies on having certain templates installed on the wiki now, which kind of forces the issue. --Teratornis 13:43, 19 January 2011 (PST)
I was hoping to assist on Appropedia without having to ask for administrator privileges, in the early going anyway. There are many things I can do as an ordinary user, such as cleaning up the shortcuts which I have been doing recently. But template porting is hard to do as an ordinary user, since many Wikipedia templates depend on things the ordinary user cannot do. An interim step might be to grant me access to the test wiki. I could MySQL dump it to an offline wiki that I could use locally for safe testing. Then I would be able to minimize my burden on Appropedia's administrators by documenting the exact steps to implement the things I need. At present I can only provide somewhat general instructions with my administrator requests because I cannot see Appropedia's internal setup. --Teratornis 13:50, 19 January 2011 (PST)
Hi Teratornis,
Sorry for the slowness on those requests. They are now complete.
The interim step seems very doable. Are you at the point of needing it now?
Thank you, --Lonny 00:02, 20 January 2011 (PST)
Thanks, I see the breadcrumbW on Template:Olpc bundle/doc now, which points back to what MediaWiki can now recognize as the parent page. While looking around Appropedia's templates before my request, I saw that Chriswaterguy had created that page back in 2008, but it wasn't a true subpage because subpages weren't enabled on the Template: namespace. So I was referring to that page to see when the breadcrumb would appear. At this point Appropedia should have enough pre-requisites to let me make progress until I hit the next snag. Among the things I know about will be some more style classes to add to MediaWiki:Common.css. I'll list those as I come across them. My interest in the test wiki remains, but in the near term I was mostly thinking about that as a possible workaround if no administrator could help me with occasional requests. I think I can do everything on my Tasks page without having higher access, as long as I get a little admin help now and then. I know everybody is busy so I don't care if it takes a day or a week to fill a request, there are plenty of things to do in the meantime. I'll be happy to have access to the test wiki whenever it is convenient for you to grant it, but it should not be absolutely necessary for a while. Whatever works for you. --Teratornis 00:47, 20 January 2011 (PST)
Thank you! Please ping me if we are taking too long on an admin request and let me know if we get to the point that that method isn't working. --Lonny 00:59, 20 January 2011 (PST)
I got the first license template to work:
Getting the rest to work should be straightforward, albeit tedious. --Teratornis 23:21, 1 February 2011 (PST)

Technical work and introduction

Hi Teratornis,

I would like to introduce James Gourlay (check out his awesome background - User:James.Gourlay). I have met with him a couple of times during his U.S. travels. He is ready to start working with Appropedia on technical issues. Can you maybe get him started on indexing or something more straight-forward at first?

Thanks, --Lonny 22:53, 25 January 2011 (PST)

Outstanding, I'll see what he wants to do. --Teratornis 23:01, 25 January 2011 (PST)

Thank you

Teratornis,

Thank you for the heads up on the citation template and all the other fantastic work you are doing here to get Appropedia up to speed with Wikipedia. It is making a huge difference. --Joshua 04:21, 28 January 2011 (PST)

You're welcome, and thank you for your excellent contributions to the project. Feel free to suggest any needed bits I overlooked. --Teratornis 10:29, 28 January 2011 (PST)

Bot vandalism

Appropedia has changed back to anonymous users needing to do math to post. This is how we had it set before the update. Returning to this setting should abate much of the nonsense vandalism... and hopefully not reduce the low rate of useful anonymous edits we have had. Thank you for your vigilant help.

--Lonny 19:10, 5 February 2011 (PST)

That sounds like the right approach. --Teratornis 20:55, 5 February 2011 (PST)
I might add that when speculating about the unknowable number of anonymous constructive editors who might be put off by the CAPTCHA step, we should speculate conversely about the unknowable number of constructive editors who might have been put off by the nonsense vandalism. I've never seen anything like a rigorous justification for the belief that modest security measures will lead to a net loss of constructive contributors (it's a common argument on Wikipedia from proponents of openness, who don't seem to imagine that too much openness might also drive away some people you want). If Appropedia grinds to a halt now, I suppose we'll know. --Teratornis 23:52, 5 February 2011 (PST)
The mw:Extension:ConfirmEdit#URL and IP whitelists section says you can set up an IP whitelist in LocalSettings.php. That would allow some constructive anonymous editors to skip the CAPTCHA step. Unfortunately this is not a convenient way to maintain an IP whitelist. An on-wiki special page, accessible to administrators, would be more convenient. --Teratornis 09:56, 7 February 2011 (PST)
I worry about IP blacklists, whitelists and blocks, because IP addresses can change.W A couple of years ago I was blocked from editing the Malaysian Wikipedia because of an IP block - not sure whether it was a case of dynamic IPs (I've heard they're used in Australia) and found it extremely frustrating. I'm certain that no one else in that house had looked at the Malaysian Wikipedia, let alone vandalized it.
I'm very interested in seeing if we can apply what works so well on WordPress, even when CAPTCHA is turned off: "Bad Behavior" and, if possible, some equivalent of Akismet. --Chriswaterguy 04:26, 16 February 2011 (PST)
It seems that even the simple CAPTCHA has eliminated the flood of vandalism we were having. I did not realize it would work so well. In the case of IP blocks, Wikipedia has some exemptionW mechanism for allowing humans on a blocked IP to create an account and edit after logging in. I have no experience with it. In theory that should have let you edit on the Malaysian Wikipedia, but I don't know whether the smaller Wikipedias are as well-managed as the big ones. Maybe few or no users there knew how to administer the exemption feature. --Teratornis 09:18, 16 February 2011 (PST)

A late welcome from Curt

Hi Teratornis,

Wow, what a bunch of great work in the last few weeks! I recognized your name from way back but wasn't paying much attention recently when you cranked it back up. Fantastic! I'm particularly excited by the Parser funcs (I think ages back that we had some funky incompatibility between extensions). So cool to be able to import templates and implement good ones. Thanks for the re-engagement! I'm inspired to follow suit! CurtB 09:26, 16 February 2011 (PST)

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