User talk:Jhammock

BrokenRedirects

Hello, why there are some broken redirect here? please see Special:BrokenRedirects. Any redirect to a non-exist page will only produces page with broken link (red link), I do not know, what exactly to do?. Thanks for your attention, regards. --Hidayatsrf (talk) 18:10, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Greening of the Sahel

I wanted to correct a mistake there, but seem to not be permitted to even see history. --Manorainjan (talk) 01:05, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

The graphics in that article are tiny. I had hoped to find bigger versions at the file pages. But no. Is this intention? --Manorainjan (talk) 01:24, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, many of our (aggregated) materials are low resolution. If you can find open-access-licensed media of better quality, they would be very welcome. There's a lot of that sort of content in need of updating; it's an ongoing priority --Jhammock

OK. So this has a copyright-reason.... Anyway it would be good if the uploader would be a person and not a script. I can't ask a script about where the file came from. --Manorainjan (talk) 01:39, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Oh, you should be warned about our history. This content was migrated (as best we could) from a commercial platform, when the contributor/editor community decided to embrace open source. We lost our edit history in the move- we couldn't salvage it from the old platform; many article formats didn't transfer very well either. Also- nearly all the original contributors are unfamiliar with mediawiki and those of us who made the transition still struggle with it.

This should be written in the ABOUT section. (The history of the wiki, not that scientists and editors struggle with MediaWiki ;-)

And it explains the strange text formatting I found in the source of the article. --Manorainjan (talk) 02:20, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

EOL_About_page

This seems not to exist. --Manorainjan (talk) 01:41, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! Admin should have that updated shortly. --Jhammock

WikiIndex

I created a page about this wiki at https://wikiindex.org/The_Encyclopedia_of_Earth --Manorainjan (talk) 02:13, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Prefs

• Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist

Should be default setting. That is really important especially if most users are not familiar with MediaWiki and therefore would not even know that one can make this setting. The liveliness of a wiki depends on this notifications. --Manorainjan (talk) 02:28, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

I just tested this on a couple of pages and watch was checked by default for me. Do you see consistently different behaviour? . --Jhammock

a number of colons is the MediaWikiway to indent ;-)

It may be, that Your prefs are set to add any touched page to Your whatchlist by now. But what I'm talking here is about the default prefs for the new user. In order to see those one would have to create a new user and check it out. I do not think, that the Wiki is misbehaving regarding this. I think, the default prefs are not set well for that kind of inexperienced user which You are normally dealing with here. Those people who may have quite some expertise in a scientific field but never edited a wiki before. --Manorainjan (talk) 14:18, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll ask admin to reset new user default --Jhammock

Missing page names

Because of misconfiguration of the wiki no page got a page name. Serious shit! --Manorainjan (talk) 23:27, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

If I understand the markup correctly, this is a problem specifically on newly created user pages? Can you point us to a primer or document that might be helpful? I tried the configuration settings doc but couldn't find a section for this. --jhammock

I do not think it is limited to any specific pages. It is a wiki-global problem. That You believe to see page names somewhere, is because that text is written in the content of the page, most likely during import. It might be, that the person who imported the pages saw, that now all imported pages got two pages names, one written out by MediaWiki as usual, means as in millions of installations around the globe and another that was created by imported text, because the source of the import used to write page names on the page itself. Now, insteasd of solving the problem by filtering the double page name from the imported text, the importer must have tried to "solve" the problem by misconfiguring the MediaWiki to not write out the names of the pages which resulted in the software not to do so globally. That means, the importer of the articles must know, how to revert this misconfiguration. Can You identify, who did the imports? --Manorainjan (talk) 15:11, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

Duplicate titles rings a bell; I think we also had an issue with page titles not being unique in the old platform- and I daresay none of us surviving editors understood the distinction when we were providing feedback on the import. But it can be reset at least for new pages now. --jhammock

What do You mean "it" can be reset? --Manorainjan (talk) 17:30, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

the "write page name" setting can be turned back on. --jhammock

Then turn it on ;-) --Manorainjan (talk) 17:38, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

OK, this is mostly cleaned up and write page name is on. We're still mopping up a few pages, and we've left some alone that were "manually" titled differently from the official title, for the editors to decide about. Baby steps...--jhammock

Editorial Board

You got this shiny page with all the PhDs mentioned on it. But where is the page, with all the people who can do real work on the wiki? The technicians, admins, help-desk? --Manorainjan (talk) 23:35, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Actually, you're the first other person to show up. It's just been the seven of us since the migration... --jhammock

There were hundreds of authors and editors over the first few years, I'm told. Activity fell off after the initial filling in of timely topics in the early history of the site. --jhammock

So, what is needed first is someone who can write scripts that clean up this mess. Who could that be? --Manorainjan (talk) 19:25, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

Our admin is learning mediawiki on the job :) but he's been picking away at this. The html is an artifact of the old platform not cooperating with our departure. The content was all scraped from page source, and the authors didn't want to lose more formatting than necessary, so we were conservative. It's also partly a triage issue; we're trying to decide which pages we should keep, and which are too hard to keep up to date and should be removed. Then we can review the extraneous html in the remaining pages, and anything that can be converted to wiki markup--jhammock