Difference between revisions of "User talk:Nkinkade"

Pages to delete

I noticed you've done some deletions recently, according to the log, so I thought I'd notify you of some more pages that need that treatment. You can find them in Category:Pages to be deleted (which I just created). Thanks! JesseWeinstein 00:39, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

• Thanks, Jesse! I shared this with a couple other folks and the pages you identified should now be gone. The "Pages to be deleted" Category is a good thing. 190.2.228.207 02:35, 28 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Yeah, I noticed that Nathan had gotten on it; I've got more for you all now... ;-) Thanks for the reply, though! JesseWeinstein 02:39, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

BTW, the ConfirmEmail bit seems to be broken -- at least, I haven't gotten my confirmation email, and it's been a few hours... Any ideas? JesseWeinstein 02:39, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Cleaning up the mess

The page Special:NewPages provides a good list of the ~150 pages that need to be deleted. Any spare time you have to chop a few would be certainly appreciated. JesseWeinstein 17:25, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Excess empty lines

I believe the wiki pages use too many empty lines. For example, look at the http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FFAQ page. On top and on the bottom of the page title, there's a lot of empty space.

Then again on the top and bottom of the translating link, which could be a smaller block of text, but I suppose this was made to accomodate the text in case a page is translated into a multitude of languages.

Then finally under the first paragraph, there seems to be at least an extra unneeded empty line.

I understand that empty lines help to keeps things tidy, but excessive empty space makes the site looks bland, plus, in that particular page, it could greatly benefit navigation if all the questions fit one page, so users don't have to scroll.

I also understand that this would be a wiki-wide change, but I believe that the entire wiki would benefit.

As a side note, I'm writting here because I saw you made some changes to that page, however I would also want to know how I can suggest new questions for the full FAQ.

• The extra spacing above/below each entry is created by the <h2> elements that Mediawiki generates from the wiki markup. It could be altered via styling, but personally I don't see a problem with the spacing. It doesn't seem excessive to me, and we haven't had yet had any other complaints about it. nkinkade 16:24, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

• I can clean it up a bit. I agree somewhat that it's more space than it needs to be. A lot of the time this is just due to MediaWiki inserting p elements that have padding or margins in the stylesheet.Akozak 18:09, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

• Also, you can suggest edits to the FAQ or FFAQ using the talk page.Akozak 18:09, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks for your replies, I'll make suggestions to the FAQ later.Coz 14:57, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Admins & Bureaucrats, etc.

Would you mark User:‎Reginald Leones and User:‎Hamilton Abreu as trusted users who's newpages are automatically patrolled. Or just make me a Bureaucrat, and I'll do it myself. JesseWeinstein 07:50, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Also, User:Amy Rose, User:Brian Rowe should probably not be an admins any more, as they are no longer working at CC, and haven't edited in years. Accounts User:Ericsteuer and User:Nathan Kinkade should also have the admin bit removed, unless there's a specific need for you both to have two different admin accounts... I'm not sure what User:JED3 is, but it certainly shouldn't have the admin bit set. (It has one edit, and one page deletion, make shortly after it was created. I assume it was some kind of testing account.) JesseWeinstein 07:50, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Jesse, you previously already had admin rights, you now have Bureaucrat rights as well. I'm not sure where/how to mark Reginald and Hamilton as trusted users?? Is that something you can do now? I removed the admin bits for Amy and Brian and Nathan Kinkade. Ericsteuer is http://creativecommons.org/about/people/#ericsteuer and JED3 is http://creativecommons.org/about/people/#johndoig. Thanks! nkinkade 15:46, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Great, thanks. JesseWeinstein 17:29, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

For the moment, I've marked Hamilton and Reginald as bots, which achieves the intended effect, although also has some side effects. To remedy those, we'd need to make a few changes in the site configuration files; specifically, creating a new user group called "Trusted" or some such with the "autopatrol" bit set. I'll write up an cut-and-pasteable patch to do that later. JesseWeinstein 17:43, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

GNU GPL and GNU LGPL

Hi Nathan, the section FAQ#Can I use a Creative Commons license for software? refers the reader to licenses:

• GNU GPL (at http://creativecommons.org/license/cc-gpl/)
• GNU LGPL (at http://creativecommons.org/license/cc-lgpl/).

However, the two URLs fail. I was wondering if the correct links are these:

• GNU GPL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
• GNU LGPL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/LGPL/2.1/

or others? Hamilton Abreu 03:01, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Links are now corrected. Thanks. nkinkade 15:44, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Please re-check the LGPL link. Hamilton Abreu 03:21, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Ooops. Sorry, fixed the wrong LGPL link. nkinkade 16:20, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

By the way, the section at stake repeats the info in the similar question in the FFAQ. Wouldn't it be preferable to replace the answer by a "please refer to..." so as not to duplicate things (the above issue with the links still applies to the FFAQ, so answer is still needed)? Hamilton Abreu 03:10, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

There is some duplication right now, but actually we are going to release a totally reorganized and updated FAQ in the next couple months. The FFAQ will go away and be integrated into a single FAQ page. nkinkade 15:44, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Spam activity

Hi Nathan, what is going on with the administration of the wiki? There's some spam activity not being addressed for quite some time. Hamilton Abreu 05:48, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out, Hamilton. I'll see what we can do to stay more on top of this. That said, we can certainly use the extra help, and it appears you have already been going through some of the spam. Thanks. nkinkade 15:43, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

If someone could review the pages listed under Category:Pages to be deleted and either delete them or remove my classification as warranting deletion, the deleted pages would stop being listed under Special:RecentChanges. In itself, that may go some way towards discouraging these activities. But that only works if they are effectively deleted as soon as created, rather than being marked for deletion and staying there. All deletions may be undeleted at any time, so no major risk there.

I've noticed than Nathan Yergler starting bloking spammer accounts but that won't help: this is being done by bots that create a new account for each edit and then effectively discard it, precisely for that reason. Hamilton Abreu 22:31, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

I was looking over Category:Pages_to_be_deleted earlier today and was wondering if there was some automated way to delete all of them rather than having to go through manually and delete 200+ items. I couldn't find any solution. There is an internal CC thread about this and I'm waiting to hear back if I should delete those pages/files one by one, or if that will be tasked to someone else. Thanks. nkinkade 22:40, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

If you put me in the admin group I can take care of it. It's easier than inserting the template in every page. By the way, my comment yesterday was incorrect: they've starting reusing the user accounts, so these need blocking too. Hamilton Abreu 21:30, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Done. You're an admin now. Thanks for the help, Hamilton! nkinkade 21:42, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

CC.php

Hi Nathan, I'm trying to investigate the cause of some problems in the CC skin, such as the footer contents turning up at other points of the page under IE7, or the top line of links being somewhat too busy. Could you please e-mail me the php file on the web server at wiki.creativecommons.org/skins/CC.php ? -- Hamilton Abreu 04:30, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Mailed. Thanks, Hamilton. nkinkade 14:44, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Varnish cache server

Hi Nathan, in the last two-three days I've been getting this error more and more frequently:

Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 545698795
Varnish cache server

One has to wait a considerable amount of seconds for pages to load and save, then suddenly it improves, then goes back to being slow. Trying to understand it, I came across this answer which seems to indicate that Varnish keeps timing out, while connecting to the backend server, or waiting for bytes to be sent. Do you know what is going on with the backend server? Unusual loads? Anything that can be fixed? Thanks. -- Hamilton Abreu 22:21, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

We use the http-accelerator Varnish in front of Apache. The error you reference above is generic and simply means that Varnish could not communicate with Apache for some reason, it could be any reason. We've been experiencing some performance issues on the server that hosts the CC Wiki. I'm busy looking into them and, hopefully, resolving them. nkinkade 22:32, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

You're a star! This thing is flying now. Hamilton Abreu 15:39, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

It's not flying now because of Varnish, but because 2 days ago I moved the CC wiki to a less heavily loaded server, so now it has much more breathing room, and Mediawiki likes and needs a lot of breathing room! But I'm really glad to know that there is a very noticeable difference in the performance of the site. I think we should be done with those Varnish errors and sluggishness of the site. Thanks, Hamilton! nkinkade 16:38, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Enabling semantic links for the "Template:" namespace

One more request (see previous request above, created earlier today). Could you please enable semantic links for the "Template:" namespace? You can see in namespaces with semantic links enabled what needs to be changed:

[...]
NS_TEMPLATE => true,
[...]

If you have concerns about this:

• Template translations should follow the same translation scheme as all other namespaces. There is no reason not to do it, as far as I am aware.
• This is necessary in order to create templates that don't require translation. I must be able to discover programatically what translated template corresponds to an existing English template. For example, I've created Template:Messages for user interface messages. The pt version of it is in Template:Pt:Mensagens. A template which is used in a "Pt:xxxx" page can print the appropriate Pt: message using {{Translation of|Template:Messages}}. Well, this last template works for other namespaces but does not work for the "Template:" namespace, because semantic links are disabled by default.

Thanks. -- Hamilton Abreu 22:23, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

This should be done now. I added this to LocalSettings.php: $smwgNamespacesWithSemanticLinks['NS_TEMPLATE'] = true; Let me know if this isn't working for you. Thanks. nkinkade 22:41, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

It's not working. Click Template:Messages, edit and then immediately save the page, then click "Browse properties". The "Has language::" and "Has translation::" properties should be defined. Maybe we're going about this the wrong way. Hamilton Abreu 23:21, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm. Honestly, I know very little about SMW. Just to be sure, what I did just do was to copy the entire $smwgNamespacesWithSemanticLinks array to LocalSettings.php and change NS_TEMPLATE to true, as opposed to just trying to set it individually like I had done before. I don't know why the previous change wouldn't have worked, if it was going to work at all, but I figure we can at least remove that doubt. But if that doesn't fix the issue, then I'd be at a loss as to how to get this working without learning a lot more about SMW, apparently. But I'm more than happy to implement anything you propose. nkinkade 18:19, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Brilliant! That worked. Thanks a lot, Nathan. Hamilton Abreu 21:22, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Translation mechanism

I need 15 minutes of your time to 1) bring you up with what I've been doing; 2) request your authorisation to migrate it to the wiki.

The translation mechanism had a few problems, which I believe are now fixed:

• Property:Has language was being incorrectly assigned. This was fixed with Template:Assign property Has language. You can verify this by visiting Property:Has language.
• Something happened to the wiki's CSS that was leaving no space between the page contents and the line of categories, and a large (6em) empty space between the line of categories and the footer. I've fixed this in MediaWiki:Cc.css, so if someone asks, that's where to look at.
• The languages box for translations, which notifies users of available translations, underwent a major overhaul. Justification:
  • It's height was excessive, the profile was exagerated on the page, and initially it was placed at the top of pages, which made matters worse. For this reason, sometimes Akozac and Nathan Yergler moved it to the bottom of some pages, so now it's inconsistent. I've minimalised it in height. I now plan to move it to the bottom of all normal pages, and to the top of Category and File pages (because the bottom of these pages is used by MediaWiki for its stuff). The same is done at mediawiki.org and works fine, mostly.
  • Inside this box, rather than listing the names of the translated pages, which is confusing, we'll just display the names of the languages themselves.
  • These names are now automatically sorted, rather than listed in the order they're added by users.
  • I've added a feature that allows translators to record which revision of the original page was used for the translation. If they record it, the box will show a link "(synchronize)" next to the current page's language in the list. This link produces a diff list containing all changes in the original page since the given revision. This allows translators to easy bring a translation page back into synch with the original, because it shows what has been changed.
  • I've changed the pieces of text displayed in the box, so that they adapt to the language of the page. So, it shows "Languages:" and "(synchronise)" on English pages, "Línguas:" and "(sincronizar)" on pt pages, and will do the same for other languages once users translate those sentences.
  • The top and bottom margins were removed, so that we get rid of the weird spacing issues now present. This way, editors will be able to easily manage the spacing, and the absence of margins will stop causing weird blank space when used at the top and bottom of pages.
  • Right-to-left is supported in both templates, though this may need further work.
  • I took the liberty of adopting this new translations stuff in Pt:Página principal, Template:Pt:Traduzida de and CC Wiki:Pt:Tradução, so that you can review it. You can also review previous/current comparison tests at User:Hamilton Abreu/Pt:Tests (some of these will appear to be wrong, because they're being used in a page with the wrong name, but they're correct).

I believe we have here a solid and complete solution, that covers all namespaces, allows the original page to be the English page or one in another language, supports right-to-left in both templates, and should not require major changes for a long time to come. What is your opinion? Can I have CC's authorisation to migrate this to all translated pages and standardise the location of the box on pages?

Thanks, Hamilton Abreu 11:55, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Everything looks great, Hamilton. It's really fantastic that you have taken the initiative on these things, and it's a huge help to CC since we really need interested community members like yourself to help us keep the CC wiki looking good and sensible. I'm okay with you implementing everything outlined above. However, ultimately I'd like to implement any CSS changes in the skin itself rather than on MediaWiki:Cc.css, but that is something I can easily do once you've launched the changes. In short, go ahead implement those things at will, and once that is done I'll integrate the CSS changes into the skin itself. Thanks! nkinkade 20:39, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Thank you Hamilton! I'm tempted to introduce barnstars to the CC Wiki for this. Mike Linksvayer 20:58, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

No problem, guys. The migration is now complete. One final step is needed, by you: I require a new set of eyes to spend a few minutes going through the new CC Wiki:Translate and changing (or letting me know) whatever about it is unclear, unnecessary, needs clarification, etc. The page should be leaner, but it needs to be complete and accurate, so I've found it difficult to reduce the size. Thanks. Hamilton Abreu 19:54, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I added an Overview section to the beginning of that page. The idea is to give a quick start for impatient people, or those that may not fully understand some of the more wiki-specific terminology. Feel free to edit the over as you see fit. But generally, do you feel that the Overview section meets the request you have above, but without sacrificing the necessary details? nkinkade 18:52, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

I believe it needs to be short, or people may be put off. But the Overview helps to get a high-level understanding, which is useful. Let's see how it works out. Thanks for you time, Nathan. Hamilton Abreu 23:28, 3 May 2011 (UTC)