Talk:SPLTstyle

From Spearfish Lake Tales Wiki

Revision as of 18:07, 18 May 2009

Discussion about styles used in Spearfish Lake Tales Wiki

Style questions, suggestions, comments are welcomed!

Welcome:

We need to bring the discussion of problems, bugs and how to do things to this discussion area so that we do not clutter up the forum too much. the forum needs to be for what Wes intended. A place to discuss the stories.

The Editors

Suggestion for handling characters with multiple names.

 sjl 5/18/2009

How about using Wiki redirect pages for characters with multiple names (maiden/married names), nicknames, etc.? Just to try it out, I created a link for Caserowski, Linda that redirects to Clark, Linda. Note that if you click on these two links, they will both take to to the Clark, Linda page, and with the first link there will be a line at the top showing where it was redirected from. You can click on the link in that line to get to the redirecting page, and edit it to see what is in the page. That way all info for a character can be included in one page, and will be displayed no matter which name is used to get there.

If we go with this, we might want to come up with with some kind of standard or recommendation as to which page should have the full info in it -- or maybe not, since the information will be accessible regardless of what link is used to access it, and it shouldn't be too difficult for editors to find the right file to edit. I don't have any strong feelings one way or the other.

I did find one thing out -- you shouldn't redirect to a page that is another redirect page. To try this out, I created a page for Linda Caserowski. I initially created this page to redirect to "Caserowski, Linda". When it was set up this way, going to Linda Caserowski showed a page with the redirect to "Clark, Linda", and I had to click on that to get to the real info. Note that in this file, I did not include the CATEGORY tag, so it doesn't clutter up the Characters page.

Redirects could also be used to create links in first name last name format to make it easier to include links in the articles and for searches (like I did with Linda Caserowski just for testing purposes).

Steve

Personally I think that is a good idea. It would fix the one thing I don't like about the current standard which is information split between pages.

Mike, would it be too hard to make this change now before things get too much further along?

Kirby

I'm not Mike, but I don't think there are that many character pages created yet that would be affected. I'll even volunteer to go in and make whatever changes are needed if you want. There should probably be an update to the instructions for creating character pages to reflect this.

Steve

Steve:

Let's get Mike's input before we do since he is the primary coder on this project.

Kirby

As has been found out, multiple redirects aren't practical in mediawiki.

The prime reason for the redirect function from what I have seen is to deal with pages that have been misnamed. It allows for the old name to point somewhere - the proper place - rather than be an orphan link which all instances of which would have needed to be changed.

Extra pages in a wiki are not burdensome. With the proper links at and from a page I have no problem with extras such as the nickname pages - but redirects don't affect the page count.

Since for instance for Judy Sorensen redirecting to Judith Sorensen, etc. it is no real storage difference, I have no strong preference.

Given that some people both have discovered redirection, why not? As long as the and ones for the appropriate book(s) are included, sure. We need to make sure that on the real page, say for Judith Sorensen, all the nicknames are included.

This does lead to the question about maiden/married names. Since Judith Niven is a character should their only be a redirect to Judith Sorensen? This leads to unnecessary spoilers!

Bottom line, programming it makes no difference to me. Stylistically, it hadn't occurred to me. If one or more people feel strongly about it, go ahead! Just write the style down somewhere - for now at least here on SPLTstyle.

Maybe we are about at the point where we need a separate SPLTcharacterstyle page, too! (Maybe even a character template.)

thanks Michael Slade