explain xkcd:Community portal/Proposals

Community Portal
Proposals (+post) Place for ideas and suggestions to improve the wiki's design and organization on general issues.	Technical (+post) Technical issues regarding the site, including bug reports or MediaWiki extensions requests.	Coordination (+post) Community-managed page for coordinating content editing and maintenance tasks.	Admin requests (+post) Problems requiring assistance from an admin. User problems, changes to protected pages, etc.	Miscellaneous (+post) Place for general chit-chat about virtually anything that doesn't fit anywhere else.
View all community portal sections at once here

Tagline

I haven't created MediaWiki:Tagline yet, but we need to think about what to put there. That's the familiar "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." over at Wikipedia - it appears right under the title of each page. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 10:39, 1 August 2012 (EDT) Moved from Explain XKCD:Community portal --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 00:09, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

Separate discussion page(s)

I think we should create a separate Discuss the wiki page, so that each discussion can go under its own header. I'd suggest setting up a todo list where people can help out. I'd start with a suggestion:

We should be using cleaner urls. Maybe this tool can help setting that up. --Waldir (talk) 05:46, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

Whatever we do decide, I've created {{xkcd}} and {{explain}} templates to create links to the xkcd site and other explanations here on this site; that should factor at least those sites (nice central administration) as well as helping us categorize pages that use them. Was thinking of also {{wiki}} for the same benefit, even if there's already a prefix built into mediawiki... the only drawback is the bias toward the en side... IronyChef (talk) 10:31, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

I'm liking the idea of creating a Discuss the wiki page - I'll start one if someone doesn't/hasn't beat me to it and add it to the sidebar. I'd asked for better URLs at User talk:Jeff#Robots.txt, though I didn't know what they were called. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 17:17, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

I also like the idea of the {{xkcd}} tags. On a related note, I've imported {{tl}}.  :-) I also realize we don't have a secure server here, but I'd support the best practice of beginning URLs with protocol-relative links ( // instead of http:// or https:// ) anyway, especially since the xkcd website itself appears to be https-compatible.Nevermind, it doesn't seem to be. So I guess it doesn't matter. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 22:40, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

Maybe we can create a subpage of the community portal for the wiki discussion. What do you think? --Waldir (talk) 04:32, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

Also one for editing coordination (see User:SurturZ/sandbox for instance), another for mediawiki assistance (requests to admins perhaps on the same page, or on a separate one). Any other ideas? --Waldir (talk) 04:41, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

Moved from Explain XKCD:Community portal, may need to be broken out into new headers or sub-headers. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 00:12, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

Great job on creating the subpages! I think the subpages can be made more intuitive for newcomers, though. Here are my subbestions:

• merge "/Design" and "/Proposals" into "/Discuss the wiki" or "/Improve the wiki" or something to that effect.
• rename "/Technical" into "/Tecnical assistance" so it is clear that it should be used for one-off issues rather than coordination of wiki-wide changes (which should go in the section above)
• merge the "/Administrator's noticeboard" above? That would reinforce that adminship is nothing but a set of technical tools to assist the wiki
• New "/Editing coordination" subpage for organizing what to do, maintenance, keeping a TODO list for newcomers to tackle, etc -- essentially like WikiProjects work at Wikipedia.

--Waldir (talk) 04:35, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

As I see this, it would involve mostly just renaming pages. I don't particularly care what the names are, so I won't comment on that.

• I'd like to keep /Administrator's noticeboard for the time being. The primary advantage of this is that administrators can watchlist this and things which need the tools are less likely to get lost in discussion. It can always be deprecated afterwards if it isn't being used enough.
• I'd sort of seen /Design as doing what you're proposing for /Editing coordination, though I didn't explain it as well.

--Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 18:43, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

Ok, I get what you mean with the Admin page. I don't think this wiki is going to be that busy to warrant a separate page, though. But for now, let's at least simplify the name? "Admin requests", for instance :)

And yeah, Design isn't really a good name for content-related coordination. What I'm suggesting here is to have one page for meta (wiki-related) discussion, and another for content-related discussion. Does that make sense? And what name do you think would be good for the former rather than the current, too generic imo, "Proposals"? --Waldir (talk) 19:20, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

"Discuss the wiki" sounds good to me, as does "Admin requests." Or whatever, I guess.  ;-) I may not be online much for the next few days (or much this evening), so go ahead and change it how you think it should be, I guess. Having stable discussion pages sooner than later would be good. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 01:48, 6 August 2012 (EDT)

Automatic Import

Hi

I created a draft for the comic pages. It's still work in progress, but I'd like to retrieve feedback.

Also, maybe we could autmatically import comics using the JSON data Randall gives us ([1]). This way, we could also include transcripts. --SlashMe (talk) 15:23, 1 August 2012 (EDT)

Hm, I should add a link to my draft: User:SlashMe/Testpage ;-) --SlashMe (talk) 06:54, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

I updated the page, including links to the next/previous comic similar to Template:ComicHeader. I used comic 472, because it has a lot of metadata (link, news, HTML title, etc.). --SlashMe (talk) 07:32, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

Just to remind everyone, I'd be ready to import the comics, but I don't want to until I got more feedback. Please have a look at User:SlashMe/Testpage and tell me your opinion. --SlashMe (talk) 06:02, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

I think your test page looks great. I'm a big fan of it. Any way to fit the text in the text box rather than having it run all the way to the right? --Jeff (talk) 18:19, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

I just made a change concerning line breaks, at least it works in Firefox and Chrome. Could somebody please test it in different versions of Internet Explorer?

If you agree, I would start uploading tomorrow. I'll send you a mail. --SlashMe (talk) 18:31, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

Moved from User talk:Jeff. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 00:38, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

The discussion is now at Explain XKCD:Community_portal/Design#Header template. --SlashMe (talk) 04:20, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

XKCD Store link

I think there should be a link to the XKCD store on the left-hand navigation bar, just under "Main page". We don't want to inadvertently cost Mr Munroe money and force him back to his day job instead of drawing more XKCD :-) --SurturZ (talk) 20:23, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

I don't see a prominent store link on the blog, so I'll wait for Jeff's input before adding that one. If we do add it, should we phrase the link "XKCD store"? --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 20:27, 2 August 2012 (EDT)

[2] - I'm cool with it, but maybe we put links to both xkcd and the xkcd store on the left, would be weird just to have the store link right? --Jeff (talk) 20:01, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

Heh, yeah. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 20:12, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

Moved from Talk:Main Page. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 00:42, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

I added both. I'm not quite sure about their placement, though - having them beneath the "Community portal" makes logical sense but doesn't look that great. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 01:42, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

I don't think the store link should be that prominently displayed. The sidebar is important real estate, and we should put only the most essential links there. There's no reason we'd need have the XKCD store link readily available on every page. I suggest removing it from there and adding it somewhere on the wiki (we could have a page about it, for example, and place it in the meta category). --Waldir (talk) 12:36, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

Centralize discussion?

There seem to be three main places for discussion about the wiki, and we need to centralize these so people can all be in sync and prevent having a mess nobody can navigate. I suggesting redirecting this page (talk:Main Page) to the Community portal, and add a large notice to Jeff's talk page also suggesting using the Community portal instead. Current discussions can be moved there. What do you think? --Waldir (talk) 16:07, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

Seems a good idea to me. --SlashMe (talk) 17:00, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

There are some suggestions on how to organize the community portal here (basically using subpages for different purposes, similar to Wikipedia's various Village pumps). Please comment :) --Waldir (talk) 17:04, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

I agree - my talk page is probably not the best place for general wiki discussion, this is better, but best to keep everything together! --Jeff (talk) 20:10, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

I'm importing wikipedia:Template:Village pump to set something like that up. I'll put a working draft in place, feel free to modify as needed, ofc. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 21:24, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

Moved from Talk:Main Page. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 00:46, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

"Random comic?"

Not to clutter the sidebar, but what would you say to adding a "Random comic" right under "Random page", linking to //dynamic.xkcd.com/random/comic/ ? --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 01:46, 4 August 2012 (EDT)

Naw, xkcd already has a random comic. I think we should have a random explanation. ;-) All kidding aside, I was wondering: generating a random member of a category...? Has that improved since the early days when I tried to do something like that. -- IronyChef (talk) 03:19, 4 August 2012 (EDT)