Send to a friend

From LyricWiki

Archives
	2007 2008.01-06

Contents 1 Esperanza Newsletter Updated for July 2 AlbumFooter 3 Underscores - what is the best practice 4 Fitzgerald Ella 5 The new song template.. 6 Underscores in image names 7 SOTD July 21, 2008 8 Userboxes!!! 9 Well deserved!!

Esperanza Newsletter Updated for July

AlbumFooter

This took me a bit to get right, but I finally did. You know how the Wikipedia link used had to have underscores? I fixed that with {{localurl: so we won't have to deal with underscores at all. Check this out:

{{localurl:Underscores Are A Thing Of The Past}}

Gives:

/Underscores_Are_A_Thing_Of_The_Past

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 02:14, 5 July 2008 (EDT)
EDIT: also be careful, because of the extra slash at the beginning. That tripped me up the first time 'round

Thanks for that. I have learned a lot of parser functions lately (the other being {{#sterilizeTitle}} ) --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 03:33, 5 July 2008 (EDT)

Underscores - what is the best practice

Hi, Aquatiki,

Your BotUm talk page says: "I'm currently fixing the underscore (_'s) problem"...

Can you please explain in a more detail way where's the problem you are talking about? I've used to read sometime somewhere Kiefer's discussion about that, and it was explained there that using of underscore used to be mandatory in early days of LW, but now there is almost no difference between using it or not. Now I noticed massive changes, made by BotUm, commented as "Robot: Automated text replacement (-_ + )". That may mean only one - for some reasons using of underscores is unacceptable from now on. But that's not documented nowhere; or I've missed something?

It would be great to know what is the best, or preferred, formatting policy at LW to make appropriate changes in code I'm using to format pages. Tia, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 03:13, 8 July 2008 (EDT)

The best practice is to not use underscores. At first (in that far off 'Old LyricWiki' which the cave drawings talk about) underscores were necessary for links to work. Now that they are not required the underscores are going the way of the dodo, being that a page of links with underscores is much less easy to read than a page with spaces instead. This is not to say that they are unacceptable. I would be hard pressed to think of anything that is unacceptable, except for maybe for, say, removing {{Song}} templates or something.

I must ask, since you've mentioned it: is there a reason to keep underscores?

And lastly, in the case of documentation. I do not think there is any per se.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 03:57, 8 July 2008 (EDT)

The reason I'm going through and removing underscores is because they're ugly!! Links to internal or Wikipedia pages will of course continue to work with them in, but they prevent text wrapping while editing. As Kingnee said, they used to be necessary: now they're just in the way. --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 08:15, 8 July 2008 (EDT)

Thanks for clarification (it would be funy if I said that I liked underscores! ;)). But I still think that such things must be commented in documentation. Regards, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 08:35, 8 July 2008 (EDT)

Philosophically, I agree with you (in regards to how things should be done). That is, documentation should dictate behavior. However, the precedent around here seems to be that documentation is mostly descriptive, not proscriptive (there are some exceptions). Just try to go with the flow!

Also, I think the software changes faster than some people would like, so we're often left playing catch-up! --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 08:49, 8 July 2008 (EDT)

I like philosophical point of view to the life and programming :). But sometimes pragmatic point of view (e.g. - formulating rules) saves us from vasting our time doing unnecessary coding, and you - from the same vain uncoding :). Take it easy - just philosophizing ;)--Senvaikis ^(talk) 12:00, 8 July 2008 (EDT)

Fitzgerald Ella

Hi Aquatiki,

last November you redirected Fitzgerald Ella to Ella Fitzgerald (as it should be), but didn't move/redirect all the songs on that page. (I stumbled upon one of them when browsing through Random pages – a very useful feature in catching stray errors). From what I gathered, admins have some sort of magical ritual to do that task automatically...? -- 6 times 9 14:18, 16 July 2008 (EDT)

Am unaware of the admin-based, super-secret, power-technique. However, I could turn my bot onto it, after it done with its current, big task. I'll add it to her to do list! --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 15:38, 16 July 2008 (EDT)

Admins can move large groups of pages from say, Fitzgerald Ella to Ella Fitzgerald, but there isn't an automatic way to redirect. psst, aquatiki... special pages...batch move.    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   23:40, 16 July 2008 (EDT)

Well I'll be a pickled turd scoop! I never saw that before! --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 23:43, 16 July 2008 (EDT)

that's how super-secret it really is! :-]    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   23:44, 16 July 2008 (EDT)

Um ... dude :

Fatal error: Call to a member function doEdit() on a non-object in
/var/www/html/lyricwiki.org/extensions/LyricWiki/Special_BatchMove.php on line 154

Should I tell Sean? --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 23:45, 16 July 2008 (EDT)

The new song template..

I can't find the new template in the template list so I'm guessing it isn't operational yet?  _♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪^Talk 16:24, 17 July 2008 (EDT)

What was I supposed to do? I forgot! I made fa-fa5 at Template:Song/sandbox. What else is there? --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 22:32, 17 July 2008 (EDT)

Sorry...I found it now..|fa  _♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪^Talk 23:06, 17 July 2008 (EDT)

There's a bug. It seems like there is an extra space between the artistname and the period. I'll see if I can't fix it...

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 02:03, 18 July 2008 (EDT)

Question which prompted my query above: How does one go about moving templates to main Template category allowing for general use (i.e. out of users own Sandbox)? The reason I ask is partly because of a comment you made on EchoSierra's talk page re the awards I created, since I created these not just for me, but for everyone to use.  _♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪^Talk 11:36, 18 July 2008 (EDT)

Well, that doesn't really apply in the case: I changed the main-mega template itself. If you're making a new thing, you should use

<noinclude>[[Category:The Category for the template]]</noinclude>
 <includeonly>[[Category:The Category for pages using the template]]</includeonly>

--Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 11:44, 18 July 2008 (EDT)

Underscores in image names

One more question about underscores, now being replaced by spaces. That's ok for pagenames, but how about images? I'm not sure, but seems to me that in some cases such replace makes image invisible (replaced by broken link). Take for example MusicBrainz icon (http://lyricwiki.org/images/9/91/Kingnee_-_Musicbrainz.png). Here you can see how it looks after replace: (http://lyricwiki.org/images/9/91/Kingnee - Musicbrainz.png). I haven't checked how it affects other images, just decided to let you know about that.

BTW, thank you for nice job in {{Song}}!

Regards, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 16:22, 19 July 2008 (EDT)

Sen, I see what you mean but I don't think it'll be a problem. BotUm is just going though the main namespace (i.e., not touching Template:Whatever, Help:Whatever, etc.) As you can see from what you typed, if you just enter the URL of an image, Medawiki (the wiki software) replaces it with an unlinked, embedded image. It true that in such cases, the first space is where it thinks the URL ends. However, we don't use images that way on LW; every image is part of a template here. As a parameter, it doesn't matter whether you use underscores or spaces, only spaces are prettier to look at! Does that make sense? --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 21:30, 19 July 2008 (EDT)

Yes, it does, but: ..."However, we don't use images that way on LW"... Indeed? Who are those "we"? Surely I'm not in that company, because I wasn't ever informed about that :)

If it's banned somewhere and I've just missed that, then something must be done with pages like this , regardless of Kiefer's estimation as 'excellent' - it looks that way only until BotUm find it :) Oh, yes, I must warn Redxx too - to move this page from list of good examples to 'bads' one.

So, we are naturally returning to question about page formatting policy. Take it easy, Aq, but this time I won't hush up some reasonings about documentation, rules & policies in programming (I intentionally did that last time). Just imagine you are a member of a big team of developers, making some project of software, intended to communicate with another applications by a mean of some set of protocols. Now imagine: you are saying your team manager that documentation of your module, describing requirements for communication protocols, are just "descriptive, not prescriptive", and therefore you haven't wrote it as 'not important'. You'd be fired immediately, I suppose. Excuse me, but imo LW is very similar to that team & that set of protocols.

Please don't treat that as some harassment - just there are more issues indicating that page formatting policy should be strengthened. Regards, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 07:12, 20 July 2008 (EDT)

OK, I'm not gonna take any of this personally! I'll just answer your question in order. Bryan Ferry And Roxy Music: More Than This - The Best Of Bryan Ferry And Roxy Music (1995) looks like it was a test run by somebody before we changed Template:SongFooter. Nobody wants anyone "hushed up". Feel free to change and LW documentation pages if you see they're out of date. I agree with you about how things should be done here, but there aren't enough other people who think so. The other admins are laid-back and I can't make them more proactive. I think that the reason LW is so low on the Google ranks is because we don't strive harder to be the best of the best. But there's only so much one man can do. But maybe we'll make it two! I don't feel harassed, I just want to let you know the climate here. Don't just talk about what needs doing: just do it! People will fix it is they think you're screwing up! --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 08:43, 20 July 2008 (EDT)

Thanks, Aq, - very good advice in your comment; sad only that I just can't follow it. Read my Unanswered questions, may be some other discussions, and you'll see that some things I'm talking about just can't be solved by ordinary user as me, without admins. And it concerns not only such pure admin-owned things as API or bots. Even such 'simple' things as documentation, rules and policies should be seriously discussed in community and approved at least by part of it. So, if I can't change API, which doesn't show all songs of artist due to page splitting into subpages, I'm just speaking about that to admins. If the same problem raises due to HTML tags-based formatting in song list, I'm doing the same. If you name this "just talking" - it's up to you. One thing I know for sure - I'm not going to revert edits made by admins...:) I just really want to make LW better, and I'd be very glad if you show me how can I do my best :)--Senvaikis ^(talk) 17:49, 20 July 2008 (EDT)

I'm going to assume that the term "laid-back" was just a bad choice of words and refrain from ranting and raving about the hard work and dedication to the site that each admin has proven themselves to have. Instead, I'll just point out that API isn't an admin thing, but a Sean thing. His talk page has a section dedicated to it, as a matter of fact.    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   00:30, 21 July 2008 (EDT)

Maybe if I were paid to do this, and I was able to support myself by just doing LW all day (believe me I would), I could be more 'proactive.' However, I still do all that I can, and have invested countless hours into LW. Aquatiki, if you think that some particular thing is not getting done, maybe you should handle it. That's what I did in my own way, and LW is better for it (I would hope). That's how this kind of community is supposed to work.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 01:02, 21 July 2008 (EDT)

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Guys! I was not saying that people don't work hard here! Sen and I were having a philosophical discussion! We're not saying that people don't work hard here! I think he and I are both used to more heavy-handed, top-down hierarchies. LW doesn't work that way, mostly. We don't operate by having decisions handed down from on high, policy pages being changed, and then everyone falling into line. I run my own wiki that way and that might explain why I have one or two people besides myself who contribute! All I was saying to Sen is that his expectations are incorrect for how the admin's here work: we don't dictate a lot of minutiae to people. I am very sorry if anyone misunderstood my statements to be insinuating that anyone is lazy. --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 01:18, 21 July 2008 (EDT)

I do understand that this is not the top down format that one would expect. Even I sometimes expect top down rulings. I am not disagreeing with your assessment of our policy. I am not saying that you think the other admin are lazy. What I am calling you on here is:

...and I can't make them more proactive. I think that the reason LW is so low
on the Google ranks is because we don't strive harder to be the best of the best.

I am willing to ignore the 'laid-back' comment, but the rest of it is hard to dismiss. You make it sound like the other admin and I have been ignoring you, despite some sort of claim from you that things should be done differently (if you can show a conversation where you say things should be differently, I will retract this in full).

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 02:36, 21 July 2008 (EDT)

I guess this is going to be the confrontation I've seen coming Discussions like LyricWiki_talk:Community_Portal#Google_Search_Result just don't go anywhere. Folks here are concerned with making pages better and doing hard work, but things like still using MediaWiki 1.7 and not having any page-ranking system show that we are laissez-faire when it comes to "meta-administration". That is, we stop spam, we document what we are doing, but we don't proactively set a course for what we want to be come, measure our progress towards it, and complete it. I'm not being ignored, I just know that that's not how we operate. Sorry if this is rude, but it's what I see. --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 03:01, 21 July 2008 (EDT)

The Google Search Result wasn't a discussion, because it didn't propose anything. It's basically "I think LyricWiki should do better" and probably got a few nods that yes, it would be good if the site were a bit higher. Nothing to comment on, however, so no one did. As for MediaWiki 1.7, it was tried once to update to the latest version and things conflicted and crashed the site for about a week. Just today Sean wrote on his talk page, however, that another attempt (hopefully this time without the crash) is in the works.

As for ...we don't proactively set a course for what we want to become, measure our progress towards it..., that's because the site isn't ours. It's Sean's. We have to follow what his needs are and what his vision of the site is. We have some "power", for lack of a better word, but essentially we are like team coaches, with control over what happens on the field and calling plays and all of that, but we certainly don't own the team. If you want (to keep the analogy going) to move the team to another city, then talking to the coach won't get you very far.

Sean, although he loves the site and works hard to keep things going smoothly, also has other obligations that help pay his bills and therefore this site's bills as well. If he had more support and more contributions for this site, I'm sure he could/would spend even more time here being as "proactive" as you envision. If you have something that you'd like to see implemented and want community feedback, then discuss it in the Community Portal. If you have something specific that you think should be fixed and is tech-related, then leave a note on Sean's talk page.    Kiefer    talk    contribs    admin   23:29, 21 July 2008 (EDT)

Sean is a busy guy with a real life. He is the only bureaucrat, the only one with FTP access. This is sometimes called the "GodKing"/Benevolent Dictator of a community/wiki. He's a good guy, but he has real life things to take care of. The way I see it, we are at a bit of an impasse. The other, popular lyric sites operate for-profit and must use expensive server-farms to handle their volume of traffic. They're likely to be a lot more cut-throat because they're competing for ad-revenue. We're not-for-profit and we have one server which we max out. If we had a rigorous strategy for SEO, maybe we wouldn't be so obscure and could actually change the internet.

I'm not interested in "moving the team", but I stand by my statement that Sean isn't very proactive. He's a busy guy, so he might oughta consider sharing the reigns of power. He has an active life outside of LW and that impacts us here. But how do you say, "Dude, can you let someone else have some control over the project you started and over the server you own?" I'm not advocating a change in the way anyone acts within LW, nor do I have technical problems. I hope Sen and I were talking about "meta-administration" and since there is nowhere to discuss that, my talk page is as good as place as any. --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 00:44, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

Hey, guys! I'm getting feel a little ill at ease looking what a debates I've involved Aq in. What I wanna say for all of you - I do know that all of you are donating your leisure to make LW better; so if someone's expressing some unpalatable note - please don't treat that as some personal challenge. I vote for free and manly thought exchange, but without losing spirit of goodwill, creativity and... a little sense of humor. Otherwise I'll be afraid to say anything here :)--Senvaikis ^(talk) 03:21, 23 July 2008 (EDT) P.S. Note for King: I was forced to remove "style=overf l o w : auto" - spam filter disliked it:)--Senvaikis ^(talk) 03:21, 23 July 2008 (EDT)

SOTD July 21, 2008

Hi Åqúà ŧĩkī ! I'm just here to tell you that your nomination of Death Cab For Cutie:Title And Registration has won Song of the Day for July 21, 2008!
Thanks for nominating a song and for contributing to LyricWiki!
-ÜberBot 02:54, 21 July 2008 (EDT)

Userboxes!!!

Wow! Userboxes! Why didn't I think of that!?! I stole some and put them on my page. I shall try to think of some more myself. Welcome! --Åqúàŧĩkī - É - Ŧ 13:55, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

Good job transcluding my boxes, I hate when people subst: them and screw up code and whatnot >:(, lol.

Feel free to edit them as much as you want. I only used one color scheme for all of them and could really use variation. PatPeter 14:01, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

I started some new one's with the pattern [[Template:UBX:blah blah blah]]. Can we move yours there? --Aquatiki

Alright I fixed your message, the problem is if you do [[Template:UBX:#1]] subpages do not kick in, rather if you did [[Template:UBX/#1]] it would work much better. Also, we might want to consider making it [[User:UBX]] and not [[Template:UBX]], since sockpuppets are generally frowned upon in I would have to talk to Sean about it.

Even another possibility is just placing them in Template namespace by themselves, like Template:User #1. -PatPeter 14:32, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

Take a look at some L's. Do any of them (or some other L) strike you as good for you userbox? And how about a slash? --Aquatiki 14:34, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

Why would it be sockpuppetry to make them templates? And why wouldn't we want to make them all start with the same prefix? I can see using /'s not :'s to get the subpage effect, but if Sean doesn't enable that in the server settings, it doesn't matter what we use: no subpages. --Aquatiki 14:36, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

The first one looks good, as we could easily adjust it to the current color scheme, just have to make parts of the userbox black. Also what do you mean by slash? You mean for Template:UBX? I think a new category for these userboxes would be best. Of course this would also mean that we need to make LyricWiki:Userboxes. Oh and you can sign your name with ~~~~, just last time you signed it the four tildes did not process, and obviously I cannot sign your name for you so I put it down like I did. -PatPeter 14:50, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

Look at this userbox, subpages are enabled "< User:PatPeter". And no it wouldn't be sockpuppetry to make them templates, but making them Template:UBX is sort of a copy of User:UBX from Wikipedia, mumble mumble scratch out, the reason User:UBX is a user on Wikipedia is because the argument was that too many userboxes with format Template:User userboxname were in Template namespace, so instead of Template:UBX it would be better to do Template:User userboxname for important boxes, and make a User:UBX for userboxes like "I like pie", or "I like singing in the shower". -PatPeter 14:50, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

hee Yes, I can sing great in the shower...  _♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪^Talk 15:49, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

Redxx Wikipedia pwned your page lol. -PatPeter 18:01, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

Haa haa..you are a proper comedian Peter..you almost got me  _♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪^Talk 18:13, 24 July 2008 (EDT)

Well deserved!!

Sweet! Another gold CD! >-P --Aquatiki - T - E 06:57, 26 July 2008 (EDT)

No, look again.. ;)  _♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪^Talk 08:02, 26 July 2008 (EDT)