Talk:Main Page/Archives/2009

Please do not post any new comments on this page. This is a discussion archive first created in 2009, although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date. See current discussion or the archives index.

Introductory comments

I think moving the number of texts into the initial comments was a nice idea. Here is a suggestion for slight improvements in those initial comments:

Wikisource is an online library of free content publications, collected and maintained by our community. We now have 1,038,995 texts in the English language library. For further information please consult our inclusion policy (which defines the scope of our library), our help pages for information on getting started, and the community portal for ways you can contribute. Feel free to ask questions at the Scriptorium (our community discussion page), and to experiment in the sandbox.

If this is adequate (feel free to make further changes to the draft of course), then please put the text into the Main Page. Dovi (talk) 10:43, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Besides the above, a link at the bottom of the page also needs to be updated:

[[:m:Wikisource#List_of_Wikisources_by_size|List of Wikisources]]

should read instead: [[:m:Wikisource/List|List of Wikisources]].

If someone could take care of these corrections it would be great. Thanks and Happy New Year to all! Dovi (talk) 06:14, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Done. I tweaked the wording a bit; what do you think? —Pathoschild 15:17:35, 03 January 2009 (UTC)

Looks just fine. Thanks, Dovi (talk) 07:56, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Song of the Day

I'm not sure if this is supposed to happen, but all I'm seeing in the Song of the Day section is [[]]. ErikTheBikeMan (Talk) 16:22, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Me too, and after poking around I'm still not sure why. Any ideas, anyone? --Spangineer^wp (háblame) 14:35, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

I think the problem has to do with Template:Song of the day/pagename. I don't know ParserFunctions very well, but somebody who does might want to take a look at why it's not extracting the information from Wikisource:Song of the day.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 15:10, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

It looks like it's supposed to extract from the section markers, like in Wikisource:Song_of_the_day/2008/November but more recent lists don't have those sections. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 18:00, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

I've left a comment on Wikisource talk:Song of the day and Durova's talk page, as s/he seems to be one of the main people behind Wikisource:Song of the day. There aren't too many more songs in the queue, so I'm a bit concerned about the future of this feature. --Spangineer^wp (háblame) 02:26, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

No responses to either of my queries. Is it time to change this to a monthly feature? Or could we build it in somewhere else? --Spangineer^wp (háblame) 03:49, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I've removed it from the main page. Although my changes to the template will allow it to fill in some gaps by trying a few other songs, I don't see anything scheduled, except for one in March. We probably should figure out what to do with it before replacing it, although I suspect that interest in this project is tied to availability of a music formatting extension, which is mostly beyond our control. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 20:33, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

NOTOC and NOEDITSECTION

__NOTOC__
__NOEDITSECTION__

---

An admin should remove these at the very bottom of the page - they already appear once just above the interwiki links. Cirt (talk) 09:18, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Done John Vandenberg ^(chat) 09:24, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! Cirt (talk) 09:31, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

2009 Archives

I created Talk:Main Page/Archives/2009. Can an admin add a link to it at Talk:Main Page/Archives, below 2008? It appears that the page Talk:Main Page/Archives is currently full-protected. Cirt (talk) 09:34, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I changed the protection to "confirmed users only" so you can do it yourself ;o). Yann (talk) 09:37, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

.. and while you are there, you could fill in 2008 ... ;-) John Vandenberg ^(chat) 09:39, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I added 2009. Not too many subsection headings in 2008, so the TOC should be okay for navigation on that page. Cirt (talk) 10:42, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I went ahead and filled that in, since it doesn't take much effort; it's produced by the same script that archives the scriptorium, etc. -Steve Sanbeg (talk)

how come on the list of authors there is no one called Ian Fleming?

errr, why is ian. Fleming not on there? Don't tell me you have not heard of him almost every one on earth has. He is oblivously the writer of james bond, you know the MI6 guy who goes on secret missions all over the world, but they are manly in asia and europe. He created twenty something novels, each one more gripping and thrilling as the next. These books have been named as one of the greatest series of books in all of the history of man. They have made each one into a film which have been incredibly succsesful, and you are telling me that you have not got anything on this grat man on all of wikipedia!--Assassinman (Talk) 18:22, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

This isn't wikipedia; try w:Ian Fleming. This site only lists authors of works that can be reproduced here. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 18:34, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Future directions

Boo. I'm in ur wiki, editing ur Main Page ;)

I've started fiddling with some of the more interesting pages, such as this one (and MediaWiki:Common.css). I'm open to ideas about what we might like to do here next. Should I be thinking about bringing back the Song of the Day? Adding new modules? Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:14, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Is there enough demand/activity/maintenance for adding new stuff? I'd like to split off the "themes" idea from {{New texts}} into its own subsection. Cirt (talk) 08:26, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm actually unclear on just what the high volume/in-demand stuff is. I've been bookmarking the various pages linked-off the main page and reviewing them. I like what you're doing in there; splitting more modules off, rationalizing the order of them. I am curious why you went with 49%/51% instead of 50%/50% which seemed to be working fine. There's always IE, though. The main thing I have my eye on is the old rules in MediaWiki:Common.css — most are not used anymore and should be cut (no?). I'd like to put a bunch of new ones in place for things like h2-elements and remove a lot of the inline styling. There caching issues? Not everyone will get the changes quickly and changes to the main page that require new css rules will not work unless they have the new style sheets. Anyway, I've been playing with this for a couple days, so have at it and I'll come back in a day or two. I'll ping Durova about the Song of the Day. Pleased to meet ya — Cheers, Jack Merridew 08:38, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Pretty much in agreement with above. As for 51%/49%, it's to give just a tad bit more room for the Featured text, on the left. Cirt (talk) 08:46, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Great; have fun in there. I see no reason we can't have more modules than are used at any given moment; i.e. drop in an alt module for a week and drop something for the duration. That seemed the idea with the smoke-free theme. Cheers, Jack Merridew 08:54, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

re song of the day: I think the song of the day petered out when the expected extension to format music (i.e. ABC or Lilypond) never materialized. I'd be hesitant to resurrect that until that issue gets resolved, unless there's enough interest to fill out the queue for awhile into the future. re caching: it's not so much an issue as something to be aware of; just make sure any inline styles are in the CSS for at least a few days before they're needed by the main page, and it should work out. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 21:51, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

I've got thread going with Durova on en:wp; she's uploaded some new ones. I don't know about the extension you're referring to; we can just go with text in cases where that's what we have. As said above, I'm thinking of a bit more fluid content on the main page; she suggested that the songs become a weekly feature.

I had seen at w:Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes#CSS caching is !important that 31 days is recommended before invoking new classes or adjustments. They may be guessing a bit on that page. I'll go slowly with css changes where this may be an issue; I'm considering leaving inline css backed-up by duplicate stuff in the style sheet for a while; once all is settled, the inline styling can be cut. Cheers, Jack Merridew 11:17, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

bugzilla:189 - Enjoy, John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:30, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

As far as Song of the day - I notice none of the other subsections on the Main Page have time period labels in their headers - for example, Featured text is rotated on a regular basis but does not say Featured text of the month, just Featured text. If instead of calling it Song of the day, we called it Selected song - then we could have more flexibility as to the time period of rotation - say one week or one month. Cirt (talk) 10:38, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Ya, I'm not really thinking of 'days' as much as getting songs back in there somehow (see above). Seems that there's not really enough material to warrant a daily appearance, anyway. Some of the modules have serious legs and will always be present; Featured text, for example. I'd like to see one chunk of the main page viewed as open to more variety. Songs one week, something else the next... we would need to have enough ideas queued-up to keep it interesting. Another approach would be a module that offered different content on different page views; see, for example, my en:wp talk page editnotice — hit preview a few times; you get a different editnotice each time. Cheers, Jack Merridew 11:17, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Hrm, I'd be against rotating sections in and out of the Main Page itself, but it could be an interesting idea within a subsection. For an example of how this could work, see w:Portal:Norway. Cirt (talk) 22:11, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

That is pretty much what I had in mind; it's quite similar to my en:talk editnotice. It may just be a question of defining the modules on a flexible manner. Thanks for the link to that. Cheers, Jack Merridew 09:57, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Another option would be to have it be purely random, and cycle through a bank of preselected songs for section Selected song. This would require very little maintenance and increase some dynamism to the Main Page. Cirt (talk) 12:29, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

That is effectively random, isn't it? it was keying off the time; mine keys off of total number of edits which on en:wp probably changes faster. I'm liking this direction; the idea being more dynamic behavior with out the work. I'm about to post to ws:s — the edittools seem broken. Cheers, Jack Merridew 12:44, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

It would refresh with a new selection every time the page is purged. Cirt (talk) 14:15, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I loved the Songs, though daily seemed to be too frequent sadly. I'd also be in favour of changing template:new texts so that instead of listing author/date/title for eight works, it just included a half-sentence excerpt from three new works. "Mammalian Cross-Species Engenderation, 1907" isn't likely to catch my interest half as much as "...when female gibbons tried to mate with male hyenas, the results were laughably pitiful half-breeds..." Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Carl Jung.} 17:59, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

I much prefer sticking with the current setup at {{New texts}}. However these are all good ideas about a Selected song subsection. I will get towards setting something up for that. Cirt (talk) 22:58, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

60/40 split

I disagree with the recent change to a 60/40 split of spacing on the columns, this is too much of a change. At times the {{New texts}} template will need the extra space, and it will look quite awkward indeed to have the text/images squished into that small of a space. Leaving the columns with the current spacing configuration is the best way to go. Cirt (talk) 12:14, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

The impetus of that change was to swap the Collaboration and Main categories modules so that the amount of content in the two columns more often matched better. While previewing it, I took it a further step and adjusted the percentages which also seemed to balance things out better at a variety of resolutions. If the 60/40 will not work well, fine — New texts gets images sometimes? I still would like to see the modules swapped. Cheers, Jack Merridew 12:52, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

I really think that 51/49 is a much better spacing format to use. Cirt (talk) 20:56, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

My primary concern was moving Collaboration to the left side and flopping Main categories over to the right to balance the column height better. Also, I find 51/49, as opposed to 50/50, odd as a few pixels only makes things look slightly lopsided (and it's contributing slightly to the unbalanced height of the two columns). Getting the columns to match better was why I trimmed the extra padding on the modules and especially why I tightened up the bottom of New texts, which had loose white-space about. It was also why I boosted the Featured text size a bit. The height of the modules is going to vary over time and one column will be shorter than the other unless we make a more serious adjustment to the layout mechanism (no advocating, just saying). Cheers, Jack Merridew 08:11, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

51/49 works better as I've experienced in lots of portal work on en.wikipedia. Cirt (talk) 12:02, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

Multilingual news

Hi, the link at the bottom of the page for multilingual news and announcements should be changed and updated.

Instead of: [[:oldwikisource:Wikisource:2009|News & Updates]]

It should read: [[:oldwikisource:Wikisource:News|News & Announcements]] (News & Announcements).

The change needs to be made by an admin at Template:Wikisource languages (which appears at the bottom of the Main Page).

Thanks, Dovi (talk) 07:53, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Done. Thanks, Jack Merridew 08:43, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Nice work by Jack Merridew (talk • contribs) with the upkeep and attention on this page. :) Cirt (talk) 23:51, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I've a next step in mind that cuts the tables around the individual modules. The code would be something like:

<div class="divMPmodule">
<div class="divMPmoduleInner">

== Featured text ==
{{featured text}}

</div>
</div>

and would use the css in my monobook.css at the moment. But I don't like the nested divs. This is to mimic the current look that is relying on the default cellspacing="2" of tables to get the borders 4px apart. If I end up going this route I may hide the syntax in a template. Cheers, Jack Merridew 08:53, 6 October 2009 (UTC)