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#1 2005-12-18 14:29:31
- andymiller
- Member
- Registered: 2005-12-05
- Posts: 17
[wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
Hi
Just raising this to be helpful, not to criticise.
The image links from the MAMP set up page are all broken.
At the moment they are all set up like this:
<code><img src=”/wiki/images/thumb/180px-MacSQL_mamp_image1a.png></code>
I couldn’t see anything in the wiki itself about how to report problems (yes I know the philosophy is that if you see a problem you pitch in and fix it, but I suspect this is a problem with naming, so I think this is something only the person who posted the images could fix).
Is there a mechanism for reporting problems/issues like this?
Last edited by andymiller (2005-12-18 14:36:25)
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Re: [wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
I’m not sure about an official bug report mechanism in the Wiki but Destry it the person “in charge” of the Wiki. Just email him through the forum email form.
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#3 2005-12-18 19:12:10
- andymiller
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- Registered: 2005-12-05
- Posts: 17
Re: [wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
Thanks Andreas – I’ve done that.
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#4 2005-12-19 05:56:07
- Mary
- Sock Enthusiast
- Registered: 2004-06-27
- Posts: 6,236
Re: [wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
Reporting wiki problems here, as you have done, is also appropriate. Sometimes it’s a problem that only a couple people can fix, but other times anyone with an account at the wiki can fix whatever is wrong.
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Re: [wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
It seems to have been a problem with all images added in the wiki for article purposes, and it likely is an artificat of the upgrade process when we leap-frogged from version 1.3.9 to 1.5.2. MediaWiki seems to have a very strange, archiving process on the backend; it does not just store images to one folder as our minds would think is logical, instead it auto stores them to a weird structure of folders with meaningless names. I don’t get it. This complex process probably didn’t transfer exactly during the upgrade.
Anyway, what seems to be fixing the problem is simply reuploading the images. I say simply, but it’s eating up several hours of my time today as I track all the files down from the weird image tree archives, put them on my own machine, and then reupload them again.
Although a bit of a pain to make these corrections, there’s a lot of new features in the new 1.5.2 version that I’m just now discovering as I address this problem, and it makes me think we need some new information about image management in the wiki so authors/editors can take advantage to the fullest.
As a start, I’ve added the new wiki image gallery link to the left navigation under “utilities”. This is a wiki page that shows all the images that have been uploaded for article purposes. If the image is correctly linked and viewable in a given article, a thumbnail of the image will be discernable in the gallery. This is a handy interface to managed such images. A mime type can even be configured in one’s browser to link your browser with the preferred image editing application so authors can more easily keep their images up do date and visually correct. Anybody who adds images should probably take adavantage of this if technically feasible.
We also need a better image naming strategy for new images. There’s some pretty piss-poor image names being used; having no forethought to wiki structure, article association, nothing. This can open a huge can of worms if authors don’t come up with some better protocols, or we risk overwriting eachothers’ images. For now, take a look at some of the images already in the gallery and note how they attempt to keep images for a given article conceptually grouped by a similar naming convention. I’ve actually made some changes to many to help in this direction, but not all. People need to police their own images, get something meaningful going as a start for everyone else.
As for wiki syntax, there’s some cool things you can easily do to position images on a page. We should probably get some custom help put down, but see _WikiPedia’s Extended Image Syntax for some great pointers to get started. Keep in mind not every possibility is going to be the right choice for positioning depending on size of image, whether a “pre” tag is used nearby after the image, etc. I think we should come up with some standards so pages are not radically different looking between authors; that’s not what a “manual” is about. One thing that I see being useful is the position right or position left feature for images that are small or have a greater vertical dimension than horizontal. Good stuff. There’s also a thumbnail feature too that could be useful for overly large images, though in my opinion, such images should be avoided to begin with, if possible.
Finally, every image used should be making use of the “description” in the syntax, which is essentially the images title attribute (and perhaps alt attribute, though I’m not sure about that). Descriptions be brief and indicate the images position in the article, like so…
- Figure 1: Blah blah blah
- Figure 2: Yabba dabba doo
- Figure 3: you get the picture
- etc
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Re: [wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
Bugger,
I thought when I copied the images folder over I took care of that. grrr. Next time just install over current installation.
Shoving is the answer – pusher robot
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Re: [wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
Yeah, was going to, but a lot of the files needed renamed to reflect proper positioning and such, and the only way you can do that is upload a new file. So, I did a little house cleaning. ;)
There’s still one group of images that need added, but they are named in reflection of the old “chapters” structure, so they need renamed and reuploaded too. But I don’t know what article they go to at the moment, so they are still not linked up, and I have to run for the night. If you want to track them down, you can find the ghosts in the image gallery.
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#8 2005-12-19 22:35:50
- andymiller
- Member
- Registered: 2005-12-05
- Posts: 17
Re: [wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
<quote> Destry wrote:
> It seems to have been a problem with all images added in the wiki for article purposes, [snip]…
Anyway, what seems to be fixing the problem is simply reuploading the images. I say simply, but it’s eating up several hours of my time today as I track all the files down from the weird image tree archives, put them on my own machine, and then reupload them again.</quote>
Oh dear I’m feeling guilty now…
Thanks Destry.
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Re: [wiki] How do I report broken links or problems in the Wiki?
No worries, man. A lot of good learning took place from this. I like good learning.
Oh, and to everyone else, the images are now all back in working order.
@ andreas: I made some revisions in the Import Subtab article. Hope no offense is taken.
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