Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/Archive/5

Timestamp needed

At some point, we need to add a timestamp to our stories as well as a datestamp. There are two headlines, right next to each other today:

Without reading through both articles, one is not sure what the current launch status is. While the relative order of the articles gives a clue that the topmost one is the most recent, you're not sure how much more recent it is. Just a thought. - McCart42 (talk) 20:45, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Articles in Category listings

I've discussed this with Amgine in the Future talk discussion and on both our talk pages. The way articles are listed in categories currently leaves a bit to be desired. They can be sorted by date, but individual date headings don't appear; only the first letter or in the case of dates, first few numbers, show up. I believe the best way to fix this is either by adjusting the MediaWiki software or deprecating category listings for DPLs. However, even with DPLs, there exists the problem that I currently don't know of a way to list the article's date beside the entry in the DPL. See Pennsylvania and Florida for examples of what I mean - the dates listed in PA aren't right, and the sorting in FL is off because of the order the category tag was added to each article. - McCart42 (talk) 22:04, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, having an article's date is now an option using DPL (See Add first category date on meta). The option lists the date the first category in the DPL list was added to the article; usually the publication date. Does this do what you were looking to do? - Amgine/^talk 22:13, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

No, sorry, Amgine - take a look at the two states I listed; the date the first category was added is often inconsistent with the publication date, particularly for older articles. Notice that the same article can actually have two different dates on the same page (in the PA page). - McCart42 (talk) 22:47, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

The date the Category:Published is added is the unofficial publication date, now, even if the article were published before we used this scheme. The list will show the date the top category in the DPL was added; to be consistent the top category should always be Published.

Because we're still getting the old articles fully integrated into the current publication scheme there will be some oddities, old article popping up as recently published as they are found and the category added. Once that is completed it should answer most of the items you have mentioned, but it will still not be the way items are listed in the categories themselves. To get the categories sorted this way will require figuring out what changes would be needed in the Mediawiki software, and offering a date-sorting method to the development team as a software enhancement. - Amgine/^talk 22:58, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Great, thanks. Maybe we should look into putting that into policy that Publish should be the topmost category; many times I've seen people putting all the cats on one line at the top of the article, which I thought was weird but didn't realize until now was harmful. - McCart42 (talk) 01:05, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

Additionally, does it make sense that two of the stories in the Pennsylvania section, when cited in two different categories, have different dates? See the Robot Zoe detects life in Atacama Desert listing at Pennsylvania for what I mean. - McCart42 (talk) 01:07, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

Oh, that isn't a problem, just how they line up at the bottom. I mean in the DPL call... like this:

<DynamicPageList>
category=Publish
category=Pennsylvania
category=Politics and conflicts
</DynamicPageList>

The publish category must be first, because that is the one the date will be from. If you put Pennsylvania first, it will figure what day the Pennsylvania category was added, not the published date. That's probably the situation for the Zoe story; they aren't all using the same first category. - Amgine/^talk 01:17, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Aha. My mistake; I didn't realize which Publish you were talking about. I've fixed the issue on the Pennsylvania page. Thanks again Amgine. - McCart42 (talk) 02:47, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

Article naming

Originally brought up at Future talk, though I wasn't at the discussion itself. I was wondering if there is any thought to changing the way articles are linked in case we find ourselves rehashing similar headlines. A good example is with sports stories. It's not inconceivable that Team A might win a match over Team B by the same score on some different date. Right now, I guess we'd just look up our thesaurus and find a synonym for "defeat" - which admittedly isn't that difficult. But it seems as though maybe articles should be linked to by a combination of their date and their title. That would eliminate any reasonable possibility of having two articles with the same name. Maybe I'm being naive about this and it isn't a big deal though. Has anyone thought about this (non)issue? - McCart42 (talk) 22:09, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Aactually this was brought up un November, 2004.. And the consensus was - no one could agree, so we left it alone. -- Davodd | Talk 03:44, 14 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Link? Or was this on IRC? - McCart42 (talk) 15:03, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

Link:Wikinews:Dateline Poll -- Davodd | Talk 00:13, 30 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm...it seems as though most people did believe it was an important issue, but no one could come up with a technically sound method of putting the date in the article name/link. I think we should continue to think of options for this, especially now that the "article date" issue is unambiguous. That was a major point of contention in December 2004, but now that we actually have a separation between Developing and Published, dating an article is no longer ambiguous. Personally, I'm thinking we could make some sort of adjustment to the software so that article links look like "YYYY-MM-DD/{Article Name}", and the date and title are both picked off from that link. That would be a fairly major change, however, and definitely something we should discuss. I don't even know that it's a good idea, it just seems like the best way to incorporate the date into the link. Someone else mentioned an idea very much like this in the original discussion, but was mainly shot down because article dates were ambiguous back then. - McCart42 (talk) 15:14:38, 2005-07-30 (UTC)

Template:Copyvio

There appears to be a problem with the current copyvio template in that it can not handle the "equals sign" (=) in URLs... so that

{{copyvio|http://www.generic.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1121476619&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&region=home}}

generates a page where {{{1}}} is displayed in the copyvio notice in place of the actual URL cited. Try it yourself in a page -- Show Preview and you'll see what I mean.

I don't know what the problem is, but I think we could probably fix it by changing the line in the copyvio template that says:

: {{{1}}}

to:

: {{{url}}}

Of course we'd have to change the current pages that link to Template:Copyvio and amend them such that the links look like this:

{{copyvio|url=http://www.website.com/whatever/whatever.php}}

I hope I'm putting this in the right place -- it seems technical to me! --Chiacomo (talk) 03:32, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think the problem somehow has to do with URLs that have question marks or ampersands. Just put copyvio|1=http://blah and it'll work. -- IlyaHaykinson 16:54, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Also, an ampersand should be entered as & instead of & by itself, even in a url. -- Scott Hibbetts July 29, 2005

Commons are at it again (they want to block the WeatherBot)

See Commons:Village pump#WeatherBot : NOT the right way. They're an enthusiastic bunch over there, aren't they? Dan100 (Talk) 15:03, 18 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Beasts! SAVE THE WEATHERBOT!! Even if they don't have the weather in Britain... Seriously, news organisations should tell you what the weather's like. They just should. ClareWhite 16:00, 18 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Tell'em to get a life. Paulrevere2005 19:52, 18 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Can the WeatherBot images be uploaded to WikiNews workspace? If no other wiki project is using weatherbot images it would seem that Commons might have a point; if 50% of the images there are old weather images, maybe we ought to use our own site instead. - McCart42 (talk) 03:07, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

Can't we just modify the bot to upload new images to just one location, like CurentWeather.png? -- NGerda 03:39, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

Sounds nice. We needn't keep all (once used) images. --Aphaia 04:00, 19 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I forgot to say - no we can't. This was tried right at the start, but due to cacheing issues it doesn't work. Dan100 (Talk) 21:11, 22 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

To McCart42, it isn't acceptable from my view: As far as I know, De and Ja use it. Perhaps more. By the way I would like to have "Eastern Asia" weather map including Japan, Korea, China Mainland (specially its eastern half, including Beijing and Shanghai) and Hong Kong. who should I talk with? --Aphaia 03:59, 19 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good point Aphaia - I hadn't thought of the other languages. - McCart42 (talk) 21:04, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

Automatic spell checking

It seems to me that there should be some sort of automatic spell checking, and new edits should pass through it. The results of failing edits could be displayed in the same format as Recent Changes. Then people could check those pages and fix them up if necessary. Reading pages on WikiNews and seeing glaring spelling errors is irritating to me, and probably looks somewhat unprofessional to most other readers. Comments? -- Unknown

This is already an outstanding feature request. See Mediazilla:1677, and vote for it if you want it to be implemented, plus try to convince developers to work on it. I like your suggestion. -- IlyaHaykinson 06:23, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

excellent suggestion, i always make spelling msitakes or typo's.--Ryan524 06:32, 22 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Today I spelled "Chicago" as "Chacago" in a headline and didn't catch it for a couple hours. *blush* -- Davodd | Talk 07:09, 22 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

From Mediazilla:1677:

``The idea is to give to contributers if they want to, the ability to use a simple spell checker, in order to give more credibility to wikipedia. The idea is to make the configuration file of such tools in wiki so that it could be updated and enhanced easily for all languages``

I think that Mediazilla:1677 (which would be a good start, but to really take advantage of Wiki's collaborative self-correcting characteristics, it would be better to place the burden of corrective action on the whole of Wiki's readership. This is especially true for non-native speakers of the language in which the article is being posted, where even if they were to opt to use the spell checker, it may not do them any good (ie. they write "leef" and are offered "leave," "leaf" and "lief"). -- Unknown