User talk:Dan Tobias

CSS

We need to figure out how to deal with disambiguation pages. It is obvious that CSS can be either Cascading Style Sheets or Content Scramble System, and I don't think this particular wiki should give preference to one known value over another if the abbreviation can be expanded to an unambiguous name. That's why I linked to CSS on the DVD page, rather than linking directly to Content Scramble System. Unless we plan to sort this out immediately, it might be best to leave that link in place, so that we don't lose track of it. Thoughts? Gphemsley (talk) 02:05, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps the current CSS article should be moved to Cascading Style Sheets, and a Content Scramble System article created, with CSS as a disambig article linking to both. But in that case, any specific links to a particular kind of CSS should link directly to the proper one of the articles, not the disambig one. Dan Tobias (talk) 02:18, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Done. And created Template:Disambiguation to keep track of disambiguation pages. Gphemsley (talk) 16:00, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Interwiki links

Just a heads-up: You can link to Wikipedia (and a select number of other wikis) using the regular wikilinking syntax by using the relevant wikiprefix. For example: Wikipedia:User:GPHemsley or Wikipedia:Archive Team. That way you can differentiate more intimate links to Wikipedia from truly external links to other websites. GPHemsley (talk) 17:48, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Given this site's founder's opinions of Wikipedia, I'm not sure he'd like to get "more intimate" with it, but I'll keep that in mind anyway. Dan Tobias (talk) 23:07, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: Wikipedia - I had a paid writing gig last year and in the guidlines there was a strict prohibition from using or citing Wikipedia. They had good reasons for that... Cipher (talk)

It's still a useful reference if you take it with a big grain of salt. Dan Tobias (talk) 01:51, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

If you take Wikipedia with a big grain of salt, then you must take every other wiki (including this one) with a whole salt mine. GPHemsley (talk) 15:07, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

Sidebar

Another wikitip: You can change the links in the sidebar by editing MediaWiki:Sidebar (admins only). You might choose to remove "Current events" and "Help" and add some of the links from the Main page, for example. It takes a somewhat special syntax, though, so you'll probably want to consult mw:Manual:Interface/Sidebar for guidance. GPHemsley (talk) 22:26, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips. Dan Tobias (talk) 23:40, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

re Talk:Text-based_data

How do you feel about splitting the Markup languages section out of Document and a few of the file formats out of Text-based data into a Markup page/category? For instance textile and markdown have different ontologies but are more similar than not. I'm willing to move stuff over if you define the category. As you mentioned on Talk:Text-based data, 'Categorization is getting pretty chaotic' Sethwoodworth (talk) 00:58, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

A lot of stuff in the ontology probably needs rethinking... any attempt to categorize things starts to get messy and inconsistent after a while, and shows the biases of whoever set them up in the first place and whatever lines of thought they happened to be having at the time, which might not end up being relevant later. (See the Dewey Decimal System categories, for instance; it devotes lots of number space to different aspects of Christian churches, then shoves all "Other Religions" in a small section.) Yes, markup probably deserves its own category (though HTML then would belong there, but it's also in the Web category; should things be in just one category or multiple ones?) Dan Tobias (talk) 02:01, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Hrrm, I see. Maybe things need multiple categories. The CDC's public health image library uses multiple ontologies pretty effectively [1] For now I wont sweat it too much. Search works pretty well. Sethwoodworth (talk) 16:14, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

OK, I added a Markup page. Dan Tobias (talk) 15:58, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

IPA

I noticed that you created IPA to describe some iOS/iTunes format that I'm not familiar with. However, IPA can also refer to the International Phonetic Alphabet, which probably falls under the text encoding/language script portion of this project. It should probably be disambiguated. GPHemsley (talk) 03:23, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Deletion request

Hey Dan, this category was created in error. Would you mind nuking it for me? Lewis Collard (talk) 22:42, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Self-links

You may not be aware, but explicitly bolded "self-links" (like this - User talk:Dan Tobias) aren't handled consistently by different web browsers. In some they are bold, and in some (IE, and sometimes Firefox) they are really-really bold. I don't think the wiki software expects you to do that.

Yes, I've noticed that... I kind of like the font Firefox (sometimes) uses for this, which is what got me to start doing it (in imitation of somebody else who first started doing it here a while back; I don't remember who), but perhaps that's an unintended effect? On Firefox on a different machine it doesn't show up, so it seems to depend on system-specific things (like what fonts are installed maybe?). It would be good to be consistent in style, though, so how do you think main titles should be marked up? Dan Tobias (talk) 18:25, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

I have no preference as to how they're marked up, but I do prefer to see them rendered as normal bold (like Wikipedia), not extra bold. Jsummers (talk) 18:56, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Fair enough. I think I'll do it that way from now on; my main concern is to stay consistent, not so much to favor one style or another. Dan Tobias (talk) 19:08, 4 January 2014 (UTC)