Difference between revisions of "ConRunner talk:Community Portal"

Latest revision as of 14:22, 17 May 2009

New Terminology

Of course we should include (and explain) all widely used terminology. However, I'm seeing a lot of terminology that so far as I can tell isn't used in con-running, but is being imported from mundane event-planning and business circles. Some of this terminology really grates on me ("member services"), and others of it conflicts with well-established and widely-used con-running terminology ("operations"). I think it's fairly important that we not introduce new terminology unless there's a compelling reason; things are confused enough as they are! --dd-b 00:27, 14 Oct 2005 (PDT)

In retrospect, introducing functional analysis has obviously engendered a bad reaction. People expect to see things they way they have always been. Breaking out specific needed functions independent of the department that usually executes them confused people, especially when the names sometimes overlap and somtimes don't. Made perfect sense to me, but I'm the one that did it. But then I don't believe it would have been received significantly better had it been grouped the same way, but labled A, B, C, D, E, F --Bill Taylor 08:18, 14 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Hard for me to tell how I would have reacted to different terminology. So far as I can tell, my reaction is to the labels themselves and not to the grouping; but I haven't actually examined the grouping very carefully yet. It may have a significant contribution to make to understanding how conventions work. --dd-b 10:05, 14 Oct 2005 (PDT)

New category tag or something for "controversy"

I've been thinking it might be useful to add a tag for articles that are about some significant controversy. The purpose is two-fold.

First, acknowledging a subject as controversial can help alert people to the need to be careful with what they write.

Second, it can help us find the articles that need a closer eye kept on them (in case anybody carelessly or maliciously gets too promotional for their point of view).

Maybe a special template which puts a notice in the article might be a better approach (if those are findable). I don't know the software system well enough to know what we can really do here.

Before getting too technical on how, do people feel that something like this would be a good thing?

--dd-b 10:18, 14 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Minimum convention organization

Lets say some group is setting up a new convention. Is there a bare minimum organization this group should try to establish to be sure they are "covered"? I'm thinking that maybe a Good / Better / Best checklist article would be nice to have for the rank newbie. Think teenagers trying to step up from a weekend gaming party in the garage to a local tournament in a rented banquet room. A brand-spankin'-new small "convention".

--Bill Taylor 10:28, 15 Oct 2005 (PDT)

Calendar

The ISP hosting this site has made it easy to add WebCalendar http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php to the overall site. I think it might be nice to add a look ahead (or look back) calendar to the site. Unfortunately, I don't see an easy way to make it work within the wiki engine proper. It would run on the side and just act as a giant datebook. Anyone visiting from the www.conrunner.net main page would have two choices, the calendar and the wiki. There would be links between the wiki Main Page and the Calendar main page. But once you were inside the wiki there is no (obvious) way to put entries into the calendar or to read the ones that are there. What do people think? Good? Bad? Keep looking? Find a way to integrate them?

--Bill Taylor 15:46, 9 Dec 2005 (PST)

Fan History

Hey, you have a lot of potentially useful information here. It really isn't getting much attention. I was wondering if you might be willing to help over at the conventions section on Fan History? --LauraHale 14:15, 21 June 2008 (PDT)

What did you have in mind? We have a pretty well developed Convention Calendar, but that isn't really historical. --Bill Taylor 12:25, 22 June 2008 (PDT)

PaserFunctions

Has the ParserFunctions extension been added to this site? --Farix 21:58, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't see it in the extensions. What would be the value of adding it? That are very few customizations in this wiki. --Bill Taylor 21:24, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Many of Wikipedia's modern templates now use some form of parser function in them. It allows the templates to alter their behavior or text depending on the parameters that are passed to it. For example I've been thinking of copying over an earlier version of the template http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_Convention, which uses parser functions to hide the empty fields. The current version is based off of another template[1] that also uses parser function, but I don't see an advantage in copying over both since there isn't a need for other infoboxes. --Farix (Talk) 22:22, 17 May 2009 (UTC)