Difference between revisions of "Talk:ConChair"

Revision as of 10:48, 19 February 2007

Looks like my addition to the Executive Committee article kinda partly collided with your work on Con Chair.

Or...I wonder if you're thinking of the same structures I am? To me, the chair or executive committee have basically the same jobs; and for that reason I think they kinda belong together in one article. With a discussion, somewhere and eventually, about why some cons choose one and some the other (chair more common by ample safe margin I think?).

dd-b 20:01, 10 Oct 2005 (PDT)

multiple timelines

There are at least 4 different timelines in this wiki.

1. ‎Art Show - Timeline (Talk)
2. ‎ConChair (Talk)
3. ‎Dealers room (Talk)
4. ‎Web Site (Talk)

I think that we should consolidate them into a single master time line check list. Starting from the one on the con chair page but breaking it out. The auxiliary time lines may or may not continue to exist where they are. It should be terse and read like a punch list. Heavily linked to other pages. A single location for contributors to collaborate, and a single location for users to refer. --Tbmorgan74 11:23, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Arisia has a timeline document of the sort you describe, and I could import it if you like. When I added the Con Chair timeline, my intent was that it should be only things the con chair must attend to personally, to make embedding it in the con chair article reasonable. I believe the intent with the other timelines here is that someone who has just volunteered to run an area should be able to get as much information as possible about running that area from the article about the area without having to refer to other articles, and that any exceptions to this idea should be accompanied by links to the articles that an area head would need to refer to. The issue is, however, that the management function of determining that everything is proceeding according to schedule wants the information in one place, and the people doing it want it in all different places, and these two functions want the data not to diverge when it is edited. Which means maybe a wiki is not the right tool to encapsulate it. --phi 12:14, 14 February 2007 (PST)

I agree that timelines are more suited to a database rather than a linear text format. A database will prevent data divergence. Even a 2 dimensional spreadsheet would be entirely suitable. But those are hard to collaborate on in a wiki. Wiki tables are a nightmare to maintain, and casual editors will be deterred. Even in industry we struggle with this problem with our MS project schedules. --Tbmorgan74 12:28, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Mediawiki has a certain amount of ability to embed pages in other pages. Perhaps this could be used to manage multiple views of timeline data? --phi 14:02, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Google Spreadsheets

On an unrelated matter I came across just now Google spread sheets. Apparently it is a multi user collaborative spreadsheet with revision control.
http://docs.google.com/
It even reads existing excel workbooks. But It does not do graphs and charts. nor VBS probably. But I could see several people working on textural data in rows and columns while using the sort features and formulae --Tbmorgan74 15:06, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Sadly the sort feature in Google Spreadsheets is slow and affects all viewers, so it is not able to present data in different sorts simultaneously. --phi 15:08, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Very true, sad indeed :( Is this helpful :

http://jspwiki.org/wiki/BrushedTemplateSortableTables

But that seems to be on JSP wiki, not media wiki that we are on.

--Tbmorgan74 15:18, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Im replying to myself. This is better information :

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Sorting

With an example here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_list_of_Dutch_provinces --Tbmorgan74 15:21, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Test table

Results

Conrunner does not seem to be running mediawiki 1.9 Maybe the best thing is to update conrunner installation. When the above table becomes sortable, then we will be getting somewhere. --Tbmorgan74 15:35, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Problems at my host. I would upgrade to at least 1.8, but my host isnt running the right support software for it. --Bill Taylor 16:47, 14 February 2007 (PST)

I think we are upgraded to 1.9.2 now. Try some edits and see if things are working. I had some trouble with the ISP getting this to work. I backed up as of a few hours ago, so we won't lose much, if we lose anything at all.

As for your table, I think we still need to build the templates to support it. --Bill Taylor 18:00, 16 February 2007 (PST)

Hurrah! It works. That table was just copied from wikipedia. The important thing is that the little Triangle arrows exist and would sort a table if there was good content in it.--Tbmorgan74 09:09, 19 February 2007 (PST)

Where were we?

We were talking about a table-based all-inclusive timeline. I will propose a table format here for such a thing shortly and we can sort out the format before we populate it.--Tbmorgan74 09:09, 19 February 2007 (PST)

I think if you want to embody dependencies then the tasks need unique identifiers. The problem with using text for those is that to make them unique they have to be long, and the longer they are the more prone to typos they are. The problems with using numbers for those are that it's only a partial ordering, and that this tool isn't able to renumber. I suppose we could use an alphanumeric code. Arisia's timeline (note: dates mostly but not entirely relative to the '06 convention; we will need a different date representation) dispenses with dependencies because for the most part they're self-evident. --phi 09:48, 19 February 2007 (PST)