Wiki

Hi,

I sent a message to this group a few days ago but got no replies, did
it not appear?

My message was :-

I'm wanting to fill the Base FAQ (English version) by translating the
French one. I s'pose I might want to vary the text because it seems
to me not entirely correct in some places.

All the links (I've tried) on the index page
(http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Faq) result in a
404 almost all the time.

At one point it allowed me to create text for an entry, but as soon
as I pressed the "Save" option I just got another 404.

Could someone sort out the Wiki page so I can fill in the sections?

Many thanks
Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi :slight_smile:
Sorry about that.  I still had all the Faq links as FAQ.  I've just fixed them so they don't shout out so much.

Mark, your messages take ages to get to the list so at a guess you are not yet properly subscribed, although it could just be my own system or maybe i got distracted or something.

I've never been very happy with the url name so i just tried fixing it so that the languages selector at the top would work at least so that people could switch to the French one easily.  However to conform to the rest of the wiki the French team need to change theirs from the rather sensible (but a bit shouty)
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/FR/FAQ
to put the FR after the FAQ and put the 2 letters in lower-case (which now strikes me as a little insulting to the French).  Even more annoyingly it's impossible to make the English page
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/FAQ
(just try clicking on that link to see what i mean, it's harmless but already taken).  So to try to avoid having a lot of English in the French url address i think it's best to have the rather empty English moved to
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq
and then ask the French to change theirs to
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/fr
in order to conform to the rest of the wiki and all the other various languages other than English.  I do think it's a bit arrogant that English is the only language that doesn't have it's code but that is the way it's set-up in the standard language selector.

Alternatively does anyone know how to imitate the normal language selector so that it's a bit more configurable and allows people to keep things as they already are?

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
Weird.  Internal links to sub-pages don't work quite the way i thought.  They don't split off from the page you are on but instead start back at the root.  So, 1 problem turns out to be no problem at all !!  :smiley:

The links from these 2 pages
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Faq
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq
both point at the same places!  :smiley:

Also at first i thought Alex had gone crazy as he made all the sub-pages have numbers in their urls rather than being descriptive to indicate what they do.  But now i notice that makes it much much easier to find the right Faq in your own language and then just add 2 letters to be able to give the page to someone else in theirs!  That sort of thing can sometimes be enourmously helpful when dealing with people in the Users Lists.  Fantastic :slight_smile:

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Ok, thanks for that.
I'm just following the links and putting stuff in. I've now done
one. Does it immediately become public or do you need to do
something?

Ah, and it seems to object if I put in hyperlinks. The second
article (only) points to a page in the OpenOffice Wiki, but the
editor won't let me put the link in. How does that work then?

Regards
Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi :slight_smile:
Errr, just at the bottom of the page, under the editing/comments is the "Save Page" button.  I can see the change "Markers" made at 19:46 hrs (GMT), so about an hour ago.

I'm not sure what the problem with an http address was.  Can you try it without doing any [] brackets around it?  I think internal links need a double [[]] but external ones only need a []  Also the <tt></tt> tags make the text look quite tiny in the web-browser i am using.  I'm not sure how to do "coding brackets".  I think you just put the code on a new line and put a couple of spaces at the beginning of the line. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Mark, normally changes to the wiki are public immediately after you
save them. And normally, external hyperlinks are fine, but they need
to be in the correct syntax, which is different for internal and
external links. The wiki help should give the correct syntax. I can
never remember it, so I usually look at the code on a wiki page that
has them.

Jean

Here is a page of the wiki help, with examples of how to do many
things, including links:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext_examples#Links

(There does not appear to be a link to the wiki help in the side
navigation bar of the TDF wiki, but you can find it from the main
page.)

--Jean

Ok, thanks both.
I saw the save but wasn't sure if there was any checking done,
apparently not.

I'll check the format for hyperlinks.
For this, and the small text, I'm taking the html tags out of the
French pages, so these ones look very much like them, hands across
the sea, detente and all of that. I agree about the size. I'll see
if I can find editor tags for code, hmmm, there were some in the
first article I did.

On another point, the French markup has a classname for the span tag
which is quite, but not completely, like the title of the page.
Anyone know what that's about, what it does, or if we ought to have
something similar in the English pages?

Regards
Mark

Hi :slight_smile:
Hmm, not sure what you mean exactly.  Do you mean at the very bottom of the page the

[[Category: FR/FAQ/Base]]

things?  Tbh i just ignore those.  I guess your page would need to change it to

[[Category: Faq/Base]]

But Categories might be set-up on a special page that i have no idea about yet and your new category might need to be added to that before it lets you change that.  I'm not sure but you are free to test to find out.

Note that the "Preview" button is very handy but i almost invariably find some slight error or remember "just one more thing" just after hitting the "Save page" button.  Previewing doesn't seem to save me from that.  Then i just have to decide whether to deal with it straight away or leave to next time (unless someone else fixes it before then).

Remember it is collaborative so people might change things without asking you.  With some pages i tend to do CtrlA CtrlC and then paste all the wiki-code into Gedit (a text editor a bit like Notepad) and save somewhere just in case someone really stuffs up the page irrecoverably.  However it's almost never happened by mistake.  Even fairly serious problems can be undone fairly easily or a missing tag is often quite obvious to people reading the "Recent Changes" page
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Special:RecentChanges

Looks like you are doing a good thing there :slight_smile:
Many thanks and regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Thanks again Jean, that certainly pointed me in the right direction,
although I s'pose if I'd been sensible enough to use the editor
controls I might've got a bit further ahead.

I'm cutting the html out of the French pages, translating the text
and leaving the tags there, mostly. Interestingly (?) putting in the
html tag for "bold" is what makes that small bold text, using the
editor controls does it right (doh!). I've now changed those. And I
found the tags for code display (that the French contributors are
using, anyway) and have put those in.

I'll carry on working through a few pages a day. That could go quite
quickly, at least until I get to the "tutorial" :frowning:

Regards
Mark

Hi :slight_smile:
I find that is the best way to learn.  Just by doing and then finding something doesn't quite work and stumbling on the answer later, perhaps by seeing a different page where the thing did work.  Dipping into the wiki help guide helps too but experimentation is the main way.

Sometimes what should work in theory doesn't quite work in practice, as you have already found.  Different wikis sometimes have slightly different systems and then Moin-moin or something crops up occasionally just to confuse things. 
''' = bold
'' = italics

I guess the <tt> tag was meant to be italics?  I avoid italics
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

IIRC the <tt> tag is for monotype (fixed spacing); I think it stands
for "typewriter text" or some such. Also, IIRC it has been deprecated
and something else should be used instead. I'd have to look that up to
be sure -- especially about what has replaced it.

--Jean

IIRC the <tt> tag is for monotype (fixed spacing);

At the very least I'll stop using those. If I make the time I'll go back to
those couple of articles and take them out.

Thanx!
Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi Tom,

Hmm, not sure what you mean exactly. Do you mean at the very bottom of the page the

[[Category: FR/FAQ/Base]]

No. I mean at the top of the French pages, in the title the span tag has an id (not a
class, sorry) that is a very long string, almost the same as the title (within the
bounds of tag requirements). You have to look at the page's source code (could easily
be press control-U when looking at the page) to see it.
I don't know what this would be used for.

Things? Tbh i just ignore those. I guess your page would need to change it to

[[Category: Faq/Base]]

I hadn't considered this.
D'you think *really* it ought to change to Faq/En/Base?

And, kinda related, if I'm looking at the English page and want to see the French page
and don't have the link you supplied to hand, shouldn't I be able to click on "Fr" in
the list of languages as the top of the page? Looks like all those links are broken...

With some pages i tend to do CtrlA CtrlC and then paste
all the wiki-code into Gedit (a text editor a bit like Notepad) and
save somewhere just in case someone really stuffs up the page irrecoverably.

Hmmm, no backups?

Looks like you are doing a good thing there :slight_smile:

Thanks :slight_smile:
Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi Mark,

With some pages i tend to do CtrlA CtrlC and then paste
all the wiki-code into Gedit (a text editor a bit like Notepad) and
save somewhere just in case someone really stuffs up the page irrecoverably.

Hmmm, no backups?

There is version management built into MediaWiki, allowing easy
restoration of previous versions of pages, file uploads, etc., and TDF
is pretty diligent taking regular in server backups, so not too many
worries there.

Hi :slight_smile:
Yes, it's just that i am totally paranoid and tend to keep excessive back-ups.

On the Joomla wiki one of their admins decided to delete a couple of my pages because they didn't want practical advice with screen-shots of how to use Joomla in real-world cases using 3rd party hosts in case that might be construed as "advertising" or seen as Joomla endorsing those 3rd party hosting services.  Wikipedia and many other encyclopedias have articles about many mutually exclusive beliefs but i
doubt anyone thinks Wikipedia is endorsing or advertising those beliefs.  The Joomla people don't see it that way.

It's only admins that have that sort of power and everywhere else except Joomla they seem to take care to be reasonable or at least to understand the nature of wikis.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
I never use the wysiwyg editor but i'm happy for other people to use it.  If tidying needs to be done afterwards there are plenty of people that are happy to play with the wiki markup/ code.

Mark, it's good to see you are diving straight into the code too :)  I seldom know the proper names of things so there is no need to apologise.  It is possible to give a page a title that is slightly different from it's Url.  The French Faq might be doing that to show proper Title Case rather than CamelCase-mixed_with_numbers-and_strange_inconsistent-charaters.

English 'should' really be Faq/En but that would make it inconsistent with the entire rest of the LO wiki.  If we did that then the French pages would need to be Faq/En/Fr.  Sadly we have to stick with the way things are set-up in the rest of the LO wiki.  They had to choose 1 way when the whole thing was set-up and they opted for "English as the international language" despite most of the people involved back then being non-English themselves.

The languages links at the top don't work because the French team used good common sense when they set-up their pages instead of looking at how the rest of the LO wiki was set-up.  We need to either
1. Rewrite the language selector and re-organise the entire LO wiki for many English pages as well as all pages for all other languages
2.  Convince the French Team to change their main Faq page address to Faq/Fr
3.  Sneakily add a new page called Faq/Fr and copy&paste the contents of the page FR/FAQ to it and just hope their links still work.

I am in favour of option 3 and then use that to ask them if they think it's ok.  It's a bit cheeky but it makes it much easier to explain.

My own backups are fairly unreliable and i rarely trust other people's either.  Even so i tend to lose things occasionally but that is more down to my own filing and reliability than anything.  The official LO wiki back-ups seem fine. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Hi :slight_smile:
Agreed.  It makes sense to get the bulk of the work done as quickly as reasonably possible without getting bogged-down in detail.  "Release early and release often".  If the first pass gets done and people start using that Faq then they might tidy as they go.  It might draw more people in.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

Ok, just answered my own question.
Reading the manual would help, and using the editor factilies :frowning:
It's going a bit better now.
At some point I might (aka "should") get round to making new screen
shots so that it's in English, but...

Mark Stanton
One small step for mankind...

Hi :slight_smile:
The Odts have screen-shots but it's probably difficult to access them usefully.  Anyway at least the French screen-shots give a rough idea of how things look.  They could be sorted on a 2nd or 3rd pass otherwise it's going to slow things down.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: