User talk:EvanProdromou/Oct 2004

See also: User talk:(WT-en) Evan/Archives

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Hi Evan, congratulation for the good idea of Wikivoyage. I would like to ask you a favour. Would it be possible to include Hotel "Café del Sol" in the map you made for Monterrico, Guatemala. It could be included as number 9 on the map and is located next to the Animal Desconocido at the left side. Thanks very much and all the best for your wedding. Cheers! Thomas cafedelsol@tiscali.ch

1.3.4 bugs

 * Search doesn't work
 * Images in articles are broken
 * Recent changes header formatting is screwy

Happy upgrading =) (WT-en) Jpatokal 05:11, 7 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * OK, I see search and the RC problem, but what's wrong with images? They look good on my user page and on the main page. Any others out there? --(WT-en) Evan 05:32, 7 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * Images look fine for me, but anyway, I don't care so much for this details right now. Just wanted to say "Thank you" for the great job you have done this night. As far as I have seen, that were some pretty hard hours of work during all the night. Time to go to bed, ... and have a look on the German Wikivoyage when up again. -- (WT-en) Hansm 07:17, 2004 Oct 7 (EDT)


 * Thanks to you! And the other great people who've been working so hard on German Wikivoyage without even having a Wiki available! I think the German site looks great. --(WT-en) Evan 07:19, 7 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * Most images have now cleared up, but Off the beaten track in Japan is still barfing this at me:

Warning: imagejpeg: Unable to open '/home/virtual/site30/fst/var/www/html/en/upload/thumb/0/04/180px-Kazurabashi_IyaValley2.JPG' for writing in /home/virtual/site30/fst/var/www/html/en/includes/Image.php on line 232

Warning: stat: Stat failed for /home/virtual/site30/fst/var/www/html/en/upload/thumb/0/04/180px-Kazurabashi_IyaValley2.JPG (errno=2 - No such file or directory) in /home/virtual/site30/fst/var/www/html/en/includes/Image.php on line 246

Warning: unlink(/home/virtual/site30/fst/var/www/html/en/upload/thumb/0/04/180px-Kazurabashi_IyaValley2.JPG): No such file or directory in /home/virtual/site30/fst/var/www/html/en/includes/Image.php on line 249


 * See also my post to the Project:Travellers' pub. But thanks for the hard work! (WT-en) Jpatokal 07:48, 7 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Serious Problem in German Version
When editing a page, there appears a message on the bottom of the page saying that all submitteded work is GFDL licenced. This might become a dangerous problem, of course. Problem: The text must come from some other source than the LanguageDe.php file. I already have searched for it and didn't find. The verbously copied text is:

Bitte beachten Sie, dass alle Wikivoyage-Beiträge automatisch unter der "GNU Freie          Dokumentationslizenz" stehen. Falls Sie nicht möchten, dass Ihre Arbeit hier von anderen verändert und verbreitet wird, dann drücken Sie nicht auf "Speichern".

-- (WT-en) Hansm 10:03, 2004 Oct 7 (EDT)


 * This is fixed now, I think. --(WT-en) Evan 16:00, 7 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * Yes, looks fine now. Thank you. -- (WT-en) Hansm 17:45, 2004 Oct 7 (EDT)

License of German Wikivoyage is CC by-sa 1.0
Evan, please have a look at de:Project talk:Creative Commons Lizenzentwurf - Namensnennung — Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 2.0. I hope, things will turn out to be less critical than they have seemed to you at the first view. -- (WT-en) Hansm 04:14, 2004 Oct 9 (EDT)

Sysops
Evan! I read your messege to (WT-sv) Lamré on Swedish Wikivoyage about sysop status. In the beginning, I think it's necessary for us to have a few administrators, in order to solve some of the simple (non software) problems ourselves. Some of the people that so far have contributed to Swedish Wikivoyage are also known to me through Wikipedia. It is my firm belief that all trusted users should be granted sysop status. Of course we are also used to the democratic ways of voting before making someone a sysop of before deleting an article or blocking a user. Anyhow, I think it's important that we, at least in the beginning, have more then one admin. If you could grant me beaurocrat status, I can myself make that happen.

One problem that probably is very easy to solve is the minor edit letter in recent changes. I have changed M to m (to seperate it to otherwise similiar N), but it doesn't execute. Because only a sysop can change the minor edit letter, I cannot ask any of my "colleages" to have a try, instead I have to burden you with this small matter. I hope you see my point. :) Yours, (WT-en) Alers 14:02, 9 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * OK, so, a couple of things: first, we don't use the database messages on wikivoyage.org, so I have to edit the LanguageXX.php files by hand. It's too bad, but the performance cost of using the DB messages is too high (Wikimedia uses a special program to make those database messages work, and we can't run it on our servers). I'm thinking that's what you expect you need a lot of administrators for; I think at least for that purpose it's a moot point. I have some ideas for how we can sync up on language file changes, but mostly: they're going to have to come through me. That's OK with me, by the way -- no big deal.


 * Second, I understand your idea that all trusted users should be granted sysop status, but... we kinda don't do it that way here. We really emphasize that everyone should be making decisions, taking responsibility, and taking action. I don't mean any disrespect to my fellow admins, but I think there are quite a few other users who have put in more time and effort and make more important contributions than the people who have their admin bit flipped. In fact, it's extremely rare (I'm having a hard time coming up with an example) that any of us uses our admin super-powers except to do what the community tells us to. I guess what I'm saying is that being an admin on Wikivoyage is much, much less important than being one on Wikipedia or other Wikimedia wikis.


 * Lastly, and to be most blunt, I don't feel comfortable giving you the ability to make admins. sv: is the first Wikivoyage language version where none of the original team has any significant experience with Wikivoyage in another language. So, I don't have enough personal experience with you to know that you understand the Wikivoyage culture, and that you'll pass that along to the other admins you bless. More importantly, the Wikivoyage community hasn't really given me the mandate to do that. Although we've had the go-between be an admin himself for each new language so far, and we've had one admin elected on one of the non-English versions (fr:), it just hasn't come up. I'm going to bring it up on Project:language version policy, and let's see how it works out.


 * I'm sorry to sound like a jerk, but... that's kind of the way we do things around here: lots of talking, discussing, consensus. Things move slower here than on a Wikipedia, and we also have a much closer integration between the different language version communities. I hope that doesn't put you off too much. --(WT-en) Evan 20:59, 9 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * No problem. As you point out, I have little experience of Wikivoyage, thus I'm very much stuck in the Wikipedia way of thinking. I'll just add this to the info about what an admin is and is not, and that, so far, you are the only beaurocrat on Swedish Wikivoyage. Another question; where do you want me as a go-between to report the progresses made in the Swedish Wikivoyage? --(WT-en) Alers 05:09, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * That'd be the Project:Logbook. Just add a new entry for the date you're making the report, and write up what's been happening. What have the controversies been? What are the interesting areas of development? What are the challenges and what are the achievements? That kind of thing. --(WT-en) Evan 11:09, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * We currently have three entries in the logbook on the main page. With two more languages, more go-betweens will be making reports. Should we have more log entries? -(WT-en) phma 18:16, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * Err... I dunno. Wanna say that we keep 3 entries or entries for the last two weeks -- whichever is longer? --(WT-en) Evan 18:18, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Hierarchy
I seemed to have annoyed you by mentioning Los Angeles in the pub. I'm glad you're happy with the districts (although I can't find a map that gives me a sensible idea of where they fall, however, since I won't have anything to contribute to that article in the foreseeable future).


 * No, you didn't annoy me at all. If I can't explain policy (or, rather, the heuristics for making good hierarchies) well, that's my own fault. Or else we don't have very good policy (or heuristics).

I'm not just idly baiting people on the metropolitan area question, I really am stuck on what to do about refactoring Sydney. Your implied test was "legal and traditional boundaries". The "traditional boundaries" test gives an answer that's huge (people will tell you they live in "Sydney" for about a 50-100km radius, and further, they wouldn't take so kindly to being told that you only live in "real" Sydney if you're near the harbour -- that bit is called "the city" sure, but everything is equally Sydney) and the "legal boundaries" test gives a very small business district with very few tourist attractions. Thus, I really would like to know how people have been making these decisions, but either I'm asking in an irritating way, or the answers are so obvious to everyone that they can't explain them.


 * You seem to be really adverse to making the Sydney Metropolitan Area into an article. I don't know anything about the political divisions in the city, but maybe WikiPedia:Sydney could be of some help?


 * Sydney already is that article (you can think of "Sydney" and "Sydney Metropolian Area" as being synomymous, it's pretty much true). So that article pretty much exists, except that the districts are Sydney/ names and it sounds like you'd prefer Inner West (Sydney) to Sydney/Inner West and Balmain (a suburb in the Inner West) rather than Sydney/Balmain.


 * The big problem with Sydney as a region article is getting us locals to think of Sydney as a region with little cities inside it. The government does think of it that way, but we don't. -- (WT-en) Hypatia 03:25, 12 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Anyway, in some ways I think Los Angeles may have some similarities to Sydney, hence why I raised it. -- (WT-en) Hypatia 14:01, 10 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * Well, we lucked out with Southern California. There are sub-state governmental divisions called counties in most states in the US (they're called parishes in Louisiana), and although they're sometimes kind of meaningless, in the case of Southern California they provide very definite cultural divisions, too. So once we had that, we could talk about Southern California as a group of a few counties, then make articles for each county, and then add the city articles for each city in the county. This made life a little easier.


 * I really think it's a lot better to have a Hermosa Beach article for that city than to have Los Angeles/Hermosa Beach just because Hermosa is "part of" Los Angeles. It's easier to make links, and it's easier for people to find. There's just no reason to overuse the "/" syntax. --(WT-en) Evan 16:11, 11 Oct 2004 (EDT)


 * I guess most of the problem is that Sydney has something like 200 suburbs. If we really need to write articles at the suburb level, then it will be an enormous amount of time before Sydney is even moderately complete. (I've lived there for 7 years and I've visited perhaps 40 of them. Getting a short list of places to sleep, resturants, and bars for each suburb is a list of over 1000 individual outlets. I just looked at North Sydney, the area I live in, and found 20 suburbs I'd never even heard of.) On the other hand, the wikivoyage hierachy doesn't leave us much choice at least as I read it.


 * Or is there some way to only write up the popular suburbs? Previous experience suggests that as soon as I mention a place name someone will red-link it. I'd really like a division for Sydney that lets us write up popular suburbs (Bondi, Balmain, Manly... there's probably 30 or 40 with major cultural interest) but that doesn't make Sydney incomplete until we've written up 200 suburbs. -- (WT-en) Hypatia

Ann Arbor
Alright, thanks for the advice. I think I misunderstood (WT-en) Huttite's note; I left a slightly annoyed rebuttal on his/her talk page. --(WT-en) Tloger

Server Shutdown?
It looks as if you had been shutting down the server for a while. I hope, this was not because of my sweet little (WT-de) Landbot which is initializing the country article pages with a skeleton on the German site. (You know, I like bots ;-)) Anyway, it is already running for about 8 h and if you should worry about, stop it by editing de:Benutzer:(WT-de) Landbot/Run. -- (WT-en) Hansm 18:37, 2004 Oct 12 (EDT)


 * No, the server hasn't been shut down. --(WT-en) Evan 10:29, 13 Sep 2004 (EDT)

Recent Changes broken?
Special:RecentCcanges appears to be frozen around 23:13 on 12 Oct? It's missing new pages listed in Special:Newpages and a whole lot more... (WT-en) Jpatokal 07:41, 13 Sep 2004 (EDT)

Spam filter problems
Here's the first spam filter problem: Chiang Mai's venerable (and quite legit) "Porn Ping Hotel", URL p*ornpinghotelchiangmai.com, is triggering it... (WT-en) Jpatokal 21:23, 13 Oct 2004 (EDT)

New skin
Hello Evan, at the moment Wikivoyage is using the same monobook-skin as Wikipedia. I think we should develop a new skin for Wikivoyage to be more distinguish that this isn't Wikipedia (example). I'm thinking if using a blue color (from the logo) for the borderlines (which are now grey) and a larger version of the logo as a background. You can import my skin from too see what it could look like. I can't make it work properly in Internet Explorer, though. Is it a good idea? (WT-en) Väsk 07:03, 15 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Congrats
Hey! I know I've said it before, and now I'm saying it again. You'll get snail-mail to this extent eventually, when I am done procrastinating.

Happy wedding! -- (WT-en) Mark

Congratulations to you both! -- (WT-en) Colin 03:26, 19 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. User-colon-Evan ! So, did you go anywhere exotic on the honeymoon ? -- (WT-en) DavidCary 18:09, 23 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Navigation bar
Hello, I was wondering why the navigation bar was changing all the time, especially concerning the part Other sites/languages. Sometimes you get 4 languages, sometimes only 1 or 2. Why?


 * Because sometimes there's an analogous article in one of other other language versions, and sometimes there isn't. If we don't have an article in Swedish about Lubbock, it doesn't make sense to have a link to that article. Sometimes it's just that nobody's put in the inter-language links necessary. --(WT-en) Evan 14:07, 19 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Search broken
Hi, this is Magnus from Wikipedia. I didn't find an email for this, so I'll just bug you ;-)

I tried to find an entry about "Duisburg" here, but both the Go and Search button gave me a
 * For query ""
 * Badly formed search query

Same for "London", which I then ran as a test. Can you forward this bug to your mailing list/tech guys? Thanks, Magnus.


 * Magnus, I don't know if you'll ever come back to see this, but it's listed on Project:Bug reports 1.3.5 -- (WT-en) Hypatia 09:18, 23 Oct 2004 (EDT)

search does not work... wiki is useless (2004.10.23.21:31)


 * Yes, saw it, thanks! --Magnus


 * Magnus: it's fixed now. --(WT-en) Evan 15:49, 25 Oct 2004 (EDT)

more congratulations
Evan, just read your good news. Congratulations! The WikiTravel site is a fantastic idea, too. One of these days, when I get up the nerve, I'd like to add some bits and pieces on Siberia, St. Petersburg, Greece (of course! Crete and Nafpaktos in particular) and Poland... In the meantime, all the best, Margarita


 * Is this M-a-r, g-a-r, i-t-a? (Sorry, I can't sing it that well on the wiki.) That Margarita? --(WT-en) Evan 16:17, 25 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Yup. That Margarita (although the hair is not as big these days). M

Test Wikivoyage
Did you ever get a test Wikivoyage up for bots to try out? -(WT-en) phma 07:50, 28 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Bot identification
Hey!

Would you mind terribly identifying the new bots as bots in the db, thusly:

UPDATE user SET user_rights='bot' WHERE user_name='InterLangBot';

Thanks