Battlestar Wiki:Chiefs' noticeboard

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This noticeboard is a location to discuss and coordinate administrative tasks for the Battlestar Wiki.

It is our hope that this place can serve as a location for administrators to coordinate their efforts on the maintenance tasks of the Wiki (it's not ALL fun and games), as well as a spot for our contributors to be able to bring things to the attention of the admins if something needs to be done. Need a protected page edited? An article or picture deleted? Admins will watchlist this page so that your request won't get lost in the shuffle.

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Current Administrators

Senior Chiefs

Senior chiefs are, in Wikipedia's terminology, bureaucrats who have the ability to make other users into chiefs. They also have the ability to check user and other advance functions not under the purview of the chiefs. Currently senior chiefs are:

• Joe Beaudoin
• Shane
• Spencerian

Chiefs

Chiefs are administrators who have access to move, delete and restore pages as well as blocking malicious users. The current chiefs are:

• Active
  • Catrope
  • Gougef
  • JubalHarshaw (Primary Wiki Frakr! Contact)
  • Mercifull
  • Peter Farago
  • Serenity
  • Steelviper
• Inactive
  • CalculatinAvatar
  • Day
  • Talos

See list of all chiefs on Battlestar Wiki

Javascript Reported Vandals

No recent reports.

Hangar Bay

What ever happened to the Hangar Bay? All links there redirect to the English wiki and http://hb.battlestarwiki.org/ redirects to the main portal. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 15:07, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I think I deleted the sub-domain.. surpriselly, we still have files over there. Wonder if we should bring it back to life. Shane (talk) 15:22, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, bring it back, because we can work on some skin ideas over there. (The Colonial Paper thing, alternate color schemes, as well as a cleaner "print preview" version.) I'd recommend that you nuke whatever's there now and start clean. For instance, the MW software on the HB probably dates back to MW 1.5 or 1.7. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 18:41, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Wiki Status

So it seems to me that the Wiki's been working like a champ. Never crashed, apparently. It seems to be somewhat slow at times, but far better than the "Razor" airing, I thought. Anyway, what do you guys think about things? -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 18:44, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

It crashed for about 1 mintue because of a server fault, but it came right back. And it wasn't from the wiki. It was from me. :D Slow... yes. Online.. yes. editable... yes. Shane (talk) 19:01, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, well, then we only have to worry about Shane now... Great. j/k -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 19:09, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Aside from the slowness, there were a few instances of unresponsiveness. That is, it didn't load at all. But that was some hours after the episode aired. All in all, not bad, though I didn't see how it fared directly during the airing.-- Serenity 19:20, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

That I can say... I was editing without any problems. I think the double airing really spread out the load of the server. Shane (talk) 20:21, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Dang it, I warned him on Friday not to crash the server! :) In seriousness, the wiki's been doing great! --Spencerian 23:31, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed that bit of unresponsiveness too, which is saying enough about its timing (it was 4 AM here when HTBIM aired, and I didn't notice anything weird until like 4 PM). What I'm interested in most right now is the effectiveness of the BW:AIRLOCKs; do we have any data on how many people viewed locked articles or tried to click edit links on them? --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 10:55, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I prefer the articles being locked for another reason. It's less work to write an article properly from the ground up, than going through a badly written one or a mismatch of various points and correcting that. Be that turning disjointed pieces into a coherent text, fixing typos and grammar, or just adhering to our style guidelines. I know that doesn't sound very nice and goes somewhat against the principles of a wiki, in that everyone can make edits, but it's also a good thing when an article has one voice and seems like it was written by one person. -- Serenity 11:06, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

It was definitely a matter of survival in the past. While me might try to phase in unlocking some of the pertinent articles, we should do it slowly, in phases, in the coming weeks. The last one to go should be the episode guide. I'd be tickled to have the option of having it unlocked during airing, but not at the cost of crashing the server. Perhaps we should brainstorm some strategies of how we can harness the flood of input without everything being so disjointed. Maybe hold off on having the summary written by everybody, but allow different people to get their observations in (in separate areas) in a way that avoids edit conflicts. Then, after the episode is aired people can assemble the summary. --Steelviper 11:38, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, something like that could work. Notes and Analysis are easier to copy-edit (and I guess everyone knows how necessary that is) than the summary and probably also more important to have directly after everyone saw the episode. -- Serenity 11:44, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree that the episode guide should be airlocked so someone can write a proper summary (same for battle articles), but I think articles like Jeanne could afford to be editable. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 11:52, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Color Scheme

Ok, now that the survey is about over -- we've had more than 1,000 respondents, by the way -- the main bulk of the complaints have been leveled against the default color scheme. Frankly, I can see where they would complain. As much as I may personally like the color scheme we presently have, it does have its draw backs. Among them:

• The text is too small. Our median age group is 30-40. We need to have bigger font size. Basically, the smallest font size we should have is 10-11pt. Not 8pt felgercarb.
• The color needs to be changed. Basically, we need a light background with dark text look.
• The scheme does not work in high-lit environments. For instance, I took my laptop outside and had to switch to the white bsgmonobook theme. Just wasn't usable any other way.
• Further, we need something that is auto adjusting... Basically, a skin that has auto width for larger resolutions and widescreen formatted screens.
• Personally, I do also have problems reading it for long periods of time... Black on white (or dark color on a light color) is default for a reason, after all.

So, with that in mind, I personally feel that we need to retire the current skin as our default. This isn't to say that it should be deleted, as we should keep it around as a skin option to others that like it, but the respondents have made several good points that should be brought up.

Now all I'm suggesting here is a color pallet change. The format we're using right now is fine. Just the colors need to change.

And I know that Shane's probably not happy about me saying these things, but the people have spoken and I can't really disagree with them on this. :-| So, do any of you have thoughts, questions, or concerns? I'm looking for feedback here. :D -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 06:26, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't understand the complaints about the font size until I switched to the new widescreen skin. Monobook's size is bigger and just about right. What I also noticed is the fontsize itself. What's annoying is that it's practically impossible to distinguish quotation marks and apostrophes in the editing window. However, I like the color scheme, but some more variety doesn't hurt. -- Serenity 09:54, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

It wouldn't be impossible to do a "fluid" skin" I have to really change the skin file format so the header can be adjusted correctly -- which is what I been avoiding to have to do -- and then it can be the default skin (not my fixed width). :) . With colors though I like the blog colors as the light skin. We could even bring up the default text size from 8pt to 10 or 11. Any higher it look like big font. I'll take a look at the results to see what I can do also. Shane (talk) 12:28, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Forum slowness

The Battlestar Forum is displaying some very weird (and most of all, slow). I can view the main page and the forums all right, but threads load extremely slowly. The wiki, however, is not slow. Very weird... --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 20:45, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

No kidding. I am talking with the CIO of Woopra to solve the problem. If not, I will disable it from loading. Shane (talk) 22:21, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Expelled

At the very best, advertising Ben Stein's film "Expelled" is insulting and tasteless. Do we have to run this ad? --Peter Farago 18:03, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I can block it. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 19:02, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I've blocked it. It should take a few hours to go into effect though... If you do happen to see it tomorrow, please let me know what the URL is so that I can block that too. (I've blocked any ad promoting expelledthemovie.com, although the people behind it might have come up with a different url so that it doesn't get blocked. I've seen that before... doesn't happen that often, though.) -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 19:07, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I guess that this means "Expelled" is expelled ;-) -- FrankieG 20:13, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Malay Wiki

Given Starkiller's steadfast and dedicated work, I think it's time to get a malay wiki off the ground. Thoughts? -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Battlestar Pegasus} 16:58, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

He's been translating a lot of stuff lately, so provided he's got the necessities (like BW:SAC and friends) covered, I support creating a Malay wiki. On a technical note: the translated wikis we currently have use English names for the Portal and Quotes namespaces. It's possible (and actually quite easy) to translate those namespaces names as well. For the Malay wiki, we could do this right from the start, whereas for the other wikis, we could create aliases from "Quotes" to e.g. "Zitaten". --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 17:51, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

No objections here. :) Shane (talk) 19:03, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Fully Integrated even with the InterWiki bot. Shane (talk) 18:02, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

You didn't do the namespace thing (yet), though. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 18:16, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I am waiting for translations. Will there be a way to mass move all the namespaces on the other wikis so I don't have to do manual moves?  :) Shane (talk) 19:21, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

There's no moving involved at all. The namespace of a page is stored as a number in the database(0 though 15 for the standard namespaces, 100 and above for custom ones), and you're just changing the text associated to that number. It would be good to set up a namespace alias so would automatically go to . --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 20:11, 15 April 2008 (UTC)