MediaWiki:Community-corner

Personal note from the tech admin I apologise to all users for having been unexpectedly pulled away for a few weeks, and especially these first crucial weeks of the new series of Doctor Who. The situation could not have been avoided, as I was dealing with a family crisis and its aftermath. I thank you for your indulgence as I try to place myself back in the work I was doing before it was interrupted. If there have been any technical issues you've noted in the past few weeks, please feel free to leave a message on my talk page. 14:19:22 Thu 12 May 2011 14:19, May 12, 2011 (UTC)

New features implemented as of Background and colours have been returned to their proper state. Details will be forthcoming over the next few days of exactly how backgrounds should be built. I thank whoever provided the intervening backgrounds for trying to keep the backgrounds current. Weekly changes to the background, however, are probably not the most efficient use of our editing time. An announcement will be made here when the background template is ready. It's very important that the backgrounds are in a very particular place and are a particular colour, in order for the background effect not to interfere with the reading of pages. Just to give one rule of thumb, the background images themselves should be simple, monochromatic line drawings, and they should be place on a background colour of #B0B0B0. More to come. . .   Previous changes spoiler now replaces pre-broadcast spoiler and pre-release spoiler, as there's really no need for two separate templates. Especially since both the older templates slapped exactly the same category on pages. The two older templates will remain as redirects until this summer. NameSort, discussed below, is being implemented by bot. It is temporarily causing a warning message to appear on pages that already have a DEFAULTSORT key. This problem will be cleared up shortly, but must be addressed by a second run of the bot. A cool little sorting template has been added which will automatically sort articles about people by their last name. It's called NameSort. Be sure to go to the template page to read the documentation. A new range of stub templates has been steadily growing over the weekend. This greater specification of stubs should make it easier for people looking for ways to improve the wiki to find a subject in which they're interested. A new help page on these stubs is forthcoming once they're all implemented, but for now, you're invited to look at category:stubs and category:stub templates for an idea of the way in which this project is progressing. If you have additional ideas for stub templates, please send them to CzechOut. Top-of-page templates, like delete and update have all been switched over to the same glowy, pictorial style of real world and nc. Again, the goal here is a uniform look. One message box, conjecture, still doesn't have a picture yet because I can't quite think of a single image that iconically represents conjectural titles. If you have any suggestions for a pictorial representation of this concept, please send your idea to CzechOut. Image licenses have been switched over to a single style, controllable by a single CSS element. Since there was no genuine "colour-coding" going on — but just people choosing random colours for different licenses, it's all been switched over to a design that's in harmony with other message boxes. Following on magazine issue nomenclature changes from last week, the bot's been incredibly busy this weekend linking references to magazine issues to the new names. So, there's been a transfer of links from DWM Issue 1 to DWM 1. Random samples of various issues has allowed for the complete elimination of redirects that included the word "issue". People interested in this topic are directed to the page Magfix, which chronicles this project in greater detail. If you regularly edit magazine issues, please note Tardis:Manual of Style, the result of closing two forum discussions, Forum:DWM Issue 000/DWM and Forum:DWBIT: Odd man out. The short version: issue names should now be styled, [Acronym + number]. So DWM 1 or DWA 123 or DWBIT 34. No "issue", no long-form magazine name. When you're editing articles, and putting in new pictures, please use the format NOT. It'll really help out! For the reasons why, please see Forum:Tech note: Image nomenclature. Thanks :) Check under the edit pull-down menu for some new features that weren't there before! One of the coolest:  edit intro.  Now you can specifically edit just the lead of an article! Looking for a way to help do some much needed cleaning?  Go to Tardis:Duplicate images.  Look at any of the duplicate series and then add delete to the duplicates that currently aren't being used. reflist has been updated to the latest version at Wikipedia.  This means that it is now possible to define more than just two columns, and to define the widths of those columns. This feature still does not work in IE and (probably) Chrome, but it does work in all Mozilla browsers, like Firefox.  It's been improved, however, to now include Safari for the first time on this wiki! Timeline pages have finally gotten their navboxes styled. We've implemented a new navbox for the day pages, like 1st January. This means that all timeline pages now have new, elegant navboxes. It also means that these pages are now practically bare — since most of their previous content was just a list of days in a month or years in a decade. You can help by starting to write in-universe entries for these pages, such as the ones at January, September and April. In order to avoid clutter, some templates that used to go somewhere around infoboxes now are tags which appear just slightly outside page boundaries. Chief amongst these are wikipediainfo, protect and lock. All these tags are clickable, but they're fortunately not adding to the clutter of "template stack", that sometimes gets really out of hand, especially on shorter pages. navbox, an import from Wikipedia that allows for much more flexibility and uniformity amongst navboxes. I haven't gotten around to re-writing the documentation so it makes more sense for our particular wiki, but the code is fully installed and appears to be working perfectly. In fact, most navboxes have been switched over to the new format. There's only one major category of navboxes yet to be switched, and that's just because of a policy question that needs to be settled in the forum. If you haven't voted yet, please go to Forum:Aliens and enemies templates: the final battle and vote today! If you'd like instructions on how to submit a new background image, send a message to CzechOut.