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The coffee shop is kind of a "lounge area" where anyone can ask questions about the site or anything else, and anyone else should feel free to respond. Here we can also discuss what SeattleWiki should be.

Dicussions moved to other pages

Archived discussions

Ongoing discussions

Featured article wanted

It may be time to change our featured article. Any ideas? See the Featured articles wanted page!

matias 12:01, 10 May 2005 (PDT)

List formats for categorized events?

for lists of events under a certain category? For example, I just made some updates to the Beer festivals page, which has a list of (two so far) annual beer fests in the Seattle area. The festivals are listed first by date, then by festival name, and finally a bit about the festival location.

Do we want to list events in a page such as this by date or by event name? Seems to me if I were looking for the NWSource.com Summer Brewfest, it'd be easier to find it in a list by name than by date order.

-- Don | Talk 20:09, 15 May 2005 (PDT)

Some changes to site organization

I've been making some changes to the way SeattleWiki is organized...

The first is that I got rid of the General resources page, and instead moved all the content to new or existing articles, all of which are part of the new general resources category page. This will hopefully encourage people to create and improve on pages rather than just adding links to that one big page.

I also got ri of the Useful websites page, instead moving all the links to the relevant pages (or creating new ones). This serves a similar purpose as above, encouraging use of individual pages rather than one big monolithic one, and hopefully reducing content duplication.

Lastly I started renaming some pages, like those of movie theaters, to indicate in the title that they are a movie theater, and also the neighborhood in parenthesis. This makes the Movie theaters category page more useful, since you can see at a glance where those theaters are. This technique can be used with other location-specific pages like restaurants, parks, etc.

On a related note, I have also recently enabled subpages. Subpages let you associate a particular page closely with another "parent" page. This is useful for creating sort of "mini wikis" for neighborhoods, with pages that may repeat between each neighborhood (for example "Eating Out" or "Parks"). Feel free to read the SeattleWiki:Location-specific pages help document for more info, and the Lake City page for some examples of using subpages.

Please feel free to comment on any of these changes and you like or dislike, either right here on on each article's talk page.

-- matias 22:58, 18 May 2005 (PDT)


Categories

Is there a high-level strategy for the use of Categories that we can adopt or that I can help implement? It's something I haven't been using for much of my edits or topic creations, but seems like something that can be incredibly useful. (i.e. some of the broad "topics" might be better suited to be category pages?)

-- Chris, aka HunkDuJour 10:15, 19 July 2005 (PDT)
I don't think there's too much written on stone about categories... In general I've been creating categories for neighborhoods (Category:Queen Anne, Category:Capitol Hill, etc), and for types of places or venues (Category:Parks, Category:Restaurants, etc). In addition there are pages that as you mention are well-suited for category pages, like Category:General resources. If you want to convert other similar pages feel free to comment on the page's talk page and anyone interested can discuss it. Otherwise feel free keep categorizing stuff!
-- matias (talk) 14:42, 19 Jul 2005 (PDT)

You folks could make much more use of categories. A few minutes ago there were 44 uncategorized categories; I hate to think how many uncategorized pages you have. There's probably no need to do some of the list-conversion suggested above: create a category with a similar name (and put it in a bigger category or two to improve findability), because it gives you an automatic alphabetical listing while letting you go on with lists in whatever format and order you like but with easy navigation between.

I've earned several hundred Zeal Points creating and populating zeal.com categories for WA (under username robinp), so I may be a bit biased, but I've also been doing things in several Wikipedias and wikicities in the last two years and I've enjoyed seeing what a difference categories can make. I suggest that someone create a page Help:categories so that an outline of how to organise them can be offered to newcomers and discussion (such as this) can go on its Talk page.

Robin Patterson 01:25, 13 Dec 2005 (PST)

Which Fireworks

I notice that there are two fireworks on July 4th.... Which one is better... Ivar's or the one by WAMU?

The biggest concern I've run into with the fireworks, is not how spectacular the show is, but rather, how long I'm stuck in traffic on the way out. There are more ways to get out of lake union than the waterfront, so that's my favorite one. I *think* the Lake Union show also gets more money thrown at it, and that's the one with the coordinated radio soundtrack, but ultimately it's going to be a matter of taste. In the past, I've gone up the space needle to watch *both* shows at once, I don't know if the general public can do that anymore.

I'd agree with the previous comment. The two shows are so similar in their content that for most people, the thing to consider is the traffic getting in and out, and which vista you'd rather see: Elliott Bay or Lake Union?
The surface roads around Lake Union and the Elliott Bay waterfront get insanely crowded in the hour or so leading up to these shows and for the two hours or so after the shows as people try to make their way in and out. If you live far enough away that vehicle transportation is required for either show, make sure you consider that in your plans.
Don | Talk - Contributions 13:51, 20 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Date formats: Typed out versus links and wiki user prefs

It occurred to me that if we formatted dates and times as links, they'd show up according to users' preferences, and we wouldn't have to worry about misunderstandings due to such things as the order of month and day in short dates (for example, 10/07/05 could be either Oct 05 or Jul 10).

The only problem with using links for dates is we'll end up with a slew of empty pages, or we'll have to create pages for each date.

If we wanted to create pages for each date, we could use them as a historical timeline of sorts. The page linked to each date could be a brief summary of major historical events for that date in the Seattle area.

And of course we can certainly continue the way we are, which does avoid confusion because we're typing out month names. But the wiki can handle date formats for us if we use the links method.

Thoughts?

Don | Talk - Contributions 13:57, 20 Oct 2005 (PDT)
Wow, I didn't even know that mediawiki would automatically format dates like that; is that perhaps in MediaWiki 1.5? I tried this 10/21/95, but it didn't seem to work; I also couldn't find any date preferences. This wiki is still running MediaWiki 1.4.
-- matias (talk) 09:42, 21 Oct 2005 (PDT)
The way I read the date-as-link thing, it seems to work when the month and day are one link, as October 23, and the year is its own link, as 2005. I didn't catch if it was version-specific; I'll check into that — I've also tried changing some prefs to see if they have any effect on dates formatted as links and saw no changes.
-- Don | Talk - Contributions 05:21, 23 Oct 2005 (PDT)

It doesn't need 1.5 but it does need the month written out (although I suspect one of you clever programmers could modify things so as to allow abbreviated months if really keen). And I agree with most of the above comments. A "slew of empty pages" isn't quite what you would get, though. You would get what I like to call "latent pages". Every so often you can click on one then click "what links here" to see if there's enough material out there to build into a decent-sized stub for anniversaries for that day or a timeline for that year. So - someone create a Help:dates page and start putting explanations on it along with discussions on its Talk page! Robin Patterson 01:25, 13 Dec 2005 (PST)


Spam Filter?

The spam filter is too strict. Its not letting me edit the Tourist_attractions keeps whining about links every time i try to save.

I'm using Wikipedia's spam filter. If anyone has issues with it please check the blocked URL list I'm using for SeattleWiki and let me know if it's including any legitimate URLs that are preventing you from making changes. -- matias (talk) 10:14, 21 Nov 2005 (PST)

I just found out the spam filter URL list had a problem that was matching all URLs. It's been fixed. Sorry about that.

-- matias (talk) 10:15, 21 Nov 2005 (PST)

Templates

Hello - I was wondering if there is a list of currently created templates somewhere around here? --RBoltz (T | C) 19:14, 7 Jan 2006 (PST)

Appropriate to List Biznesses?

Is it o.k. to list one's business on an appropriate page? In particular, I work with a bunch of small-business professionals who might be interested listing their offices here, in whatever place may be appropriate. But I don't know whether that's consistent with the site's purpose. What say?216.254.10.236 20:13, 20 June 2006 (PDT) << actually that was me talking; I forgot to log in Rewinn 20:14, 20 June 2006 (PDT)

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