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Liberator8200

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Okay, time for a newbie question. I didn't find my answer with a quick search of the forums. Is the lack of categories in the RM Wiki on purpose or simply because no one's bothered? I can think of a few different ways to categorize magazines (country, publisher, title, date).

For example, right now there's USA, UK, and International Magazines pages that have to be updated manually. If instead, there was a USA magazines category, users simply add that category tag to the entry for the title and the Category:USA magazines automatically updates with each change, keeping them in alphabetical order. (Mind you, we wouldn't have the cover scans any more.) Similarly, if each issue included a category for the date, you could, for example, just go to the Category:January 1989 page and see all the magazines published in January 1989. (Or at least those that had Wiki entries.)

Dates get a little trickier. For bi-monthly magazines, we'd probably want to add both month categories (e.g. May 1991 and June 1991). Quarterlies might take some discussion to figure out. It gets particularly nasty when, for example, you get an Australian magazine that says "Winter 1980," because winter there is summer in the U.S.

Personally, I'm finding the Wiki a little hard to get around in and incomplete. Categories might help with this. (Yes, I have some experience using MediaWiki.)

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  Liberator8200 said:
Okay, time for a newbie question. I didn't find my answer with a quick search of the forums. Is the lack of categories in the RM Wiki on purpose or simply because no one's bothered? I can think of a few different ways to categorize magazines (country, publisher, title, date).

For example, right now there's USA, UK, and International Magazines pages that have to be updated manually. If instead, there was a USA magazines category, users simply add that category tag to the entry for the title and the Category:USA magazines automatically updates with each change, keeping them in alphabetical order. (Mind you, we wouldn't have the cover scans any more.) Similarly, if each issue included a category for the date, you could, for example, just go to the Category:January 1989 page and see all the magazines published in January 1989. (Or at least those that had Wiki entries.)

Dates get a little trickier. For bi-monthly magazines, we'd probably want to add both month categories (e.g. May 1991 and June 1991). Quarterlies might take some discussion to figure out. It gets particularly nasty when, for example, you get an Australian magazine that says "Winter 1980," because winter there is summer in the U.S.

Personally, I'm finding the Wiki a little hard to get around in and incomplete. Categories might help with this. (Yes, I have some experience using MediaWiki.)

Honestly its only because of our inexperience with all the different features of Mediawiki, I am open to using categories on the wiki......I just don't know how to implement it.

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  Phillyman said:
Honestly its only because of our inexperience with all the different features of Mediawiki, I am open to using categories on the wiki......I just don't know how to implement it.

Okay, I've done a bit of categorizing with Blip, Sega Visions, and Sega Visions #1 to give you an idea of my vision of how it would work. (I was going to start with Atari Age, but that page seems to be protected from editing.) I'll go ahead and do some more issues of Sega Visions to perhaps give you a better feel for it. And now I've done additional issues of Sega Visions and Nintendo Power.

Edited by Liberator8200
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Guest s1500

MediaWiki is strange. Sure, easy for a typical user to make a rough article for starters(ie just a little hypertext), but going into the meta aspect of it(categories, etc), you swear they are trying to make it intentionally hard.

On my junk wiki I have on my linux server, I had to overwrite the wiki logo .png file after numerous tries to change the logo the right way(change the variable).

Does anyone know how to get templates to work? All searches bring up docs that are incredibly verbose, but never tells you in a quick, blunt format.

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  s1500 said:
Does anyone know how to get templates to work? All searches bring up docs that are incredibly verbose, but never tells you in a quick, blunt format.

Yes, I do, but I'm not an expert. And the reason the template documentation is so verbose is because they're very powerful, offering a lot of options. Let me see if I can summarize. In all cases, you can create a new template by entering "Template:Name" (where "Name" is the name you want to give the template) in the search box and clicking Go. If you're logged in, it should then give you a link to create it.

First, you have templates that are just the same text over and over again, like the magazine index tables. Just create what you want and hit "Save Page." Then you can use it in the pages by entering "{{Name}}" (no quotes, of course).

Then you have templates with parameters, meaning places you want to have custom text. For users, it's usually easiest to have named parameters. To do this, you once again enter the text you want, but where you want to customize it, insert {{{param1}}}, where "param1" is a unique name. Parameter names can be anything except just numerals (e.g. 1, 2, 3), as those are used for unnamed parameters, which I won't get into here. Then, to use the template you do something like "{{Name | param1=Nintendo}}". You should get your template with the word Nintendo in the spot you specified for param1. You can also specify defaults for parameters like {{{param1|Sega}}} in your template. Then, if the user doesn't specify param1, it will automatically fill in the word Sega.

That's templates in a very basic nutshell.

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Hey Liberator8200 nice to have you here. It seems as though you have a bit of experience with this sort of thing which will come in handy. I had little to no experience with Wikis until I came to this site and have been learning bits and pieces here and there. But yeah it's very time consuming to learn how to really use the thing. I personally prefer HTML but I guess I've been using it for so long that can only be normal :P

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  Liberator8200 said:
That's templates in a very basic nutshell.

Good stuff. Thanks. Looks like I'll have some fun doing some templating at home, to save all the choppy cut & pasting I have been doing with a lot of pages.

Now only if I was brave enough to try to do batch image upload, which I've seen the hoops to jump through....aaaand I'm gonna skip doing.

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Okay, I got most of the overall magazine entries (not individual issues) categorized. These were protected and I couldn't edit them: Atari Age, Club Nintendo Magazine, EGM2, Mega Play, Official Dreamcast Magazine, Official Dreamcast Magazine (UK), and Official Sega Magazine (UK).

BTW, I forgot to mention one thing about templates. If a template is included on a page that the template has a link to, it's not rendered as a link to itself, but just as bold text.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Retromags Curator

Liberator, THANK YOU!

We are in desperate need of people who really know Wiki formatting, and it seems like you know more than anyone else here. Like Phillyman, I'm majorly inexperienced; everything I know about Wiki, I learned from doing cut-and-paste and trying to figure out why a given thing worked and how to edit it into something else that I needed. While this is a great way to learn simple things, it's not so straightforward for learning more complex tasks. :)

*huggles*

Areala

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  Areala said:
Liberator, THANK YOU!

We are in desperate need of people who really know Wiki formatting, and it seems like you know more than anyone else here.

You're welcome. Now could someone see about unlocking those pages I . . . . Well, look what someone went and did to my Wiki account! I'll try not to go insane with the power. :D

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  Liberator8200 said:
You're welcome. Now could someone see about unlocking those pages I . . . . Well, look what someone went and did to my Wiki account! I'll try not to go insane with the power. :D

Yeah I gave you elevated permissions on the wiki about a week ago. Just so you dont run into any roadblocks.

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