Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 00:54, 6 February 2009

Welcome to Misplaced Pages!

Hello Kathyedits, welcome to Misplaced Pages!

Here are some tips:

• Take a look at the Simplified Ruleset.
• Read the Tutorial, How to edit a page and the Manual of Style.
• Find out how to revert, move and merge pages.
• Sign your posts on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~).
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• Ask questions at the Village pump or Help desk.
• Use the Show preview button
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• Create a User page
• Be bold
• Ignore all rules

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Misplaced Pages is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. Misplaced Pages convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills.

If, for some reason, you are unable to fix a problem yourself, feel free to ask someone else to do it. Misplaced Pages has a vibrant community of contributors who have a wide range of skills and specialties, and many of them would be glad to help. As well as the wiki community pages there are IRC Channels, where you are more than welcome to ask for assistance.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me on my talk page. Thanks and happy editing, Alphax  06:11, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

List of basic human rights topics

I've added a few links. Your turn. The Transhumanist    08:20, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Based on the scope of the links you included, to match that scope I've renamed the article to List of rights-related basic topics. The Transhumanist    08:34, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

WP:UPDC

I designed the UPDC to help users design their user pages. There are lots of ideas there, and sample page elements complete with wikicode (hit the edit button to see it).

Another approach is to copy and paste someone's user page onto yours, and then modify it until it looks distinctly different. That's what I did with mine. It's a modification of one of User:Dorftrottel's user page designs.

You can do that with mine if you like. Then you can change things like the colors, the pictures, the fonts, and whatever else you want to tweak.

At the UPDC Hall of Fame, I've collected some of the best user pages from all over Misplaced Pages. You might find one or more of those that you'd like to base your design on. By the way, there's one on there I designed for somone. See this.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Let me know if you need any help.

The Transhumanist    09:44, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your quick reply, and such a helpful one, too. I've taken a brief look at the UPDC Hall of Fame, and I can see that my time will be very much occupied for a long time with all the ideas there.

Again, thanks.

Kathy (talk) 23:02, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Lists of basic topics

Hi. Here's an update of what we've been up to in this WikiProject...

We've created a page for every country of the world! They're not complete, and most of them aren't even in the main namespace yet, but...

A team of editors has been working on them, and they've come a long way.

We're about to run a competition, called "Around the World", in which participants will compete in the completion of specific data items across all of these country lists. For example, one task would be adding the population figure on each page.

The awards images are almost done, and the pages themselves need a couple sections completed before they can be moved to the article namespace and the competition can begin.

We could sure use your help...

Track down the administrative divisions types for each country

The first task is on the "Administrative divisions of" sections.

In each of these sections, there's an initial hierarchical list of the division types in that country, followed by subheadings for each of the types. Unfortunately, the types listed are those from the template I used to create these pages, and they aren't accurate for many countries.

The defaults that I used were:

• Provinces of x
  • Districts of x
    • Municipalities of x

For each country, change the links to the names of the administrative divisions for that country, adding more links if there are more than 3 division types. Those that are subdivisions of another type are indented under the parent type. In most cases, you would leave municipalities in place, because that's a generic name for "city". We'll blue-link those later. (Blue-linking is creating a redirect so that a link turns blue - that way, the link remains standardized on all the pages in the set).

Also change the subheadings in the same section to match the initial list, including the "main article" links presented just below each subheading.

To find out what the administrative divisions are for a country so you can add them, try looking on the government of x or politics of x pages for that country, and on the country's main article as well.

Add the administrative divisions to their respective subsections

For each country, find the list of administrative division for each type, and add them under that type's subheading.

For example, copy and paste the provinces listed at Provinces of Angola under the "Provinces of Angola" subheading on that country's list page.

See the countries listed at Lists of basic topics for examples of how this has been done for those. If there's a map showing the administrative divisions, grab it too.

Generally do not add towns and cities to the municipalities section, as there are usually way too many of them (and will unnecessarily bloat the page). Instead, provide links to the various pages (Cities of x, ], Villages of x, etc.

Complete the "Government of x" section

This section also has temporary data, and needs to be corrected/completed.

The name of the position of the head of state and head of government of each country needs to be corrected, and the specific office holders added.

The branches of government subheadings need to be corrected/filled in.

Etc.

The above tasks are fun, because it's interesting to see how other countries operate. I've completed about 25 of the country pages so far, and I've been intrigued and even amazed at some of the approaches different countries follow. The U.S. is definitely behind in many respects.

Please help out as much as you can, and help us get Around the World started!

Sincerely,

The Transhumanist    17:31, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Concerning the Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Lists of basic topics

(the RfDs have already run their course)

RfD nomination of Navy of Sudan

I have nominated Navy of Sudan (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) for discussion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at the discussion page. Thank you. Ron Ritzman (talk) 00:07, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

RfD nomination of Navy of Belarus

I have nominated Navy of Belarus (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) for discussion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at the discussion page. Thank you. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • 16:01, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Navy redirects

We've been "bluelinking" the Navy of x links in the basic topic country lists, by creating redirects for them, even for the countries that have no navy.

There's been a little controversy over the navy redirects for the landlocked countries (many of which have no navy), as you can see above. But it's all been worked out. Each country with no navy gets a redirect to wherever it is reported that it has no navy, or failing that, to its "military of" article.

The country lists are coming along slowing but surely. It shouldn't take too much longer before they will be complete enough to move into article space (!), but I can still use all the help I can get. (hint hint).

The Transhumanist    20:46, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

We could sure use your help in bluelinking the links in these lists (each link appears in one of the various country basic topic lists):

• User:ChiragPatnaik/Navies
  
• User:ChiragPatnaik/Armies
  
• User:ChiragPatnaik/Air Forces

Outline of Knowledge / Geography WikiProject Collaboration: Country outlines

As you probably remember, last spring we started work on the "Geography and places" branch of Misplaced Pages's Outline of knowledge. (WikiProject Lists of basic topics has been renamed to Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Outline of knowledge). The geography branch is in the form of a set of outline pages including one for every present-day nation or state in the world. That's 247 pages! This has been a huge undertaking, involving dozens of editors using advanced wiki-tools.

These pages have come a long way, and it won't be long before the whole set is complete enough to be moved to article space into the encyclopedia for the benefit of all. But there's still a lot of work left, and we could use all the help we can get!

While some editors prefer to work on one country at a time, most of our team members take on a particular entry and complete it across all the pages. This has come to be our standard type of task. To facilitate this process, we apply tools such as AutoWikiBrowser, Linky, and WikEd, all of which can be used to process a large number of pages in various (direct or indirect) ways.

In case you are interested in what we've been up to, here's a progress report:

Lately, development has been slow but continuous:

On our recruiting initiative, Penubag has done a fantastic job on the images for the awards we'll be using for our project's collaborations and contests. We now have 3 awards: a medal, a trophy, and a race ribbon. They all look tight. The trophy needs a small adjustment, but other than that, all 3 award images are complete and ready to use to create awards with.

Spartaz has warned us of (threatened to take) G4 (speedy delete) action if we run a competition that resembles the previously deleted Awards Center page. So whatever we do, any contests we run must differ substantially from the methods used there.

One type of competition I've been exploring is "edit racing". I'm in the process of working the bugs out of this concept - the first race didn't work as expected - you see, because we only had an award for first place, so the opponent didn't think it worthwhile to continue once it was clear who the winner would be. And since editors are in different time zones and usually need to start the race at different times, we need to base winning on personal start times - he who completes his assigned edits in the least time (rather than first), wins. And last but not least is quality control. What good is racing if the participants' edits are ripe with errors? So I'll be exploring possibilities such as using a referee (assigned to oversee a particular race), having participants watching each other for errors to knock them back, etc. I'm not sure yet.

Rich Farmbrough has been applying his bot expertise to filling in blanks in the country outlines (the population and area entries). I'm amazed at the number of edits he pumps out each day on a myriad of projects - ours makes up but a small time slice of his activity, and yet he has saved us many hours of manual work. Perhaps we should look into how he gets so much done.  :)

Zlerman has chosen to work on specific outlines, and has taken on Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. He also has been keen on noticing and reporting design issues pertaining to the whole set of country outlines. Keep up the good work!

Highfields is in charge of capitals, adding them to all the outlines. He is also our first race winner. Check out the award on his user pages.

In case you didn't know, this project has expanded to include work on any and all sets of pages represented on the country outlines. Once the set of country outlines go live (in article space), traffic will likely increase for all the links included on them. The quality and usefulness of those pages will reflect heavily on the country outlines. The outlines, which are essentially lists of links, are only as good as the links they present, and therefore we've branched out to solve the biggest problems with those as well. So far, we've taken on:

• The creation of disambiguation pages for country adjectivals ("German", "French", "Taiwanese", etc.) We're about half done with these.
• Wikifying the CIA World Factbook statistics on the "demographics of" country pages. We've been renaming those sections to provide a key string that AWB can use for targetting (for skipping and filtering). Once that's done, we'll be able to break the clean-up down into simple AWB search/replace tasks, because we'll be able to target just those pages that include the CIA stuff.
• We've also been renaming the "Cuisine of" articles to their adjectival forms ("Chinese cuisine", "Italian cuisine", etc.), for consistency and because the adjective-based terms are generally the most commonly-used names for those cuisine types.

Blackadam2 and Thehelpfulone have been helping out with the "demographics of" pages mentioned above.

And we have a couple speed addicts (addicted to wiki-velocity, not drugs)...

Both Robert Skyhawk and Thehelpfulone prefer (and excel at) simple AWB search/replaces. Robert hasn't actually joined our team yet, but he has been helping out quite a bit from the sidelines (via the WP:AWB/Tasks page. Unfortunately, there has recently been a non-AWB chore that has been holding things up on the AWB front - an edit to all the headings which had to be reverted before too many new edits were made, because any new edits would make the reversion more difficult. The headings have been restored, so now the way is clear for AWB operations, and there are many search/replace tasks in the queue. AWB assignments have started again!

There's a similar bottleneck on the "Demographics of" pages (the "keying" mentioned above), but that's almost cleared too.  :)

With my internet access somewhat crippled as of late, I've been finding it difficult to keep up with you guys. However, I expect to be accessing a Linky-capable workstation on a faster server (I'm on it right now, as you can probably tell from my contributions list for the past couple of days), and so I should really pick up speed. Feels goooooood.  :)

Recruiting has been a bit slow (but steady), due in part to my crippled access, and because we've been waiting for the images for the awards to be completed. I expect the team to grow more rapidly as the bottlenecks are removed.

Well that's what's been happenin', and here's what's in the pipeline...

We've got a long list of entries that need to be completed across all the outlines and related page sets. If you would like to dive in with advanced wiki-tools to process this whole set of pages on one or more tasks, drop me a note!

As for me, I'm about to begin work on a set of lists that corresponds to all the standard links on the country outlines, and these will be presented on the Topic outline of countries which will be organized exactly like the country outlines. Aside from being an extremely useful navigation aid, it will allow editors to easily see the state of country coverage on Misplaced Pages - each list will be one link-set, and each list can be used with our wiki-tools to process the pages listed. I'll provide you with a link once I get up to speed on this.

In the meantime, keep in touch!

Cheers,

The Transhumanist    00:54, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

To bluelink them, create a redirect to wherever the information is covered. If there is no entity, redirect to where that is (or should be) covered.

If you have any questions, please contact me. The Transhumanist    20:58, 23 September 2008 (UTC)