Camera-wiki.org:Community discussions

Welcome to the community's discussion page, the place to discuss any subject related to this wiki, or simply ask for help about wiki editing. This page is not a general forum about cameras or photography. To reply to a question simply click the "[Edit]" button on the right side of the screen close to the question title, and ad your text below. Don't forget to sign your posts on this discussion page. To sign use the signature button on top of the editing window. Start a new discussion

Old site discussions, see Camerapedia.org:Community Discussions

Old site, wikia takeover discussions, see Camerapedia.org:Community Discussions/Future of Camerapedia and Camerapedia.org:Community Discussions/A New Home for Camerapedia‎

Discussions

Intro

Add your discussion topics here. Give each topic a header like this intro's header ===Intro===

Image Uses

Going forward, I feel there are a couple of areas where Camerawiki could use some refinement. The first is pushing for a more standardized way to embed images in pages--always including the essentials of a link back to the source, identifying the contributor, and stating the license terms. The first is mandatory to use Flickr-hosted images in a way consistent with their terms of service.

Another area needing work is to aim for greater visual consistency between pages, which currently can be a bit chaotic. There's no standard for the image dimensions used, so some pages have excessively tiny thumbnails. The wiki markup syntax is not the most intuitive (not to me, anyway) when it comes to understanding how photos align or how text wraps, and so odd collisions with text often occur. I'd like to work with folks more familiar with the wiki markup language to define some "best practices" for nicer-looking pages. --Vox 19:17, 30 January 2011 (CST)

chaotic answer: At the moment the visual inconsitency is just a dusadvantage for wikia's skinned page view. Thumbnail images are sometimes used for good reasons. On some pages they are just decoration of camera type lists. In some of these pages they can be replaced by "small" variants instead of thumbnail. There are helpful buttons over the editor window to get some wiki syntax generated. Steevithak already began to enhance the Flickr_image template. I think about a second version for uploaded Flickr image copies.U. kulick 19:45, 30 January 2011 (CST)

Since we have one obvious advantage over Wikia (less page clutter), it would be nice to capitalize on that by encouraging nice clean, open layouts. I'm concerned that we need to be welcoming to contributors with great camera knowledge, but little patience for wrestling with markup syntax to lay out pages neatly. Even a template that e.g. automatically forms two columns, (text left, images/captions right) would smooth out the appearance of many pages. --Vox 23:03, 30 January 2011 (CST)

Vox Edits

I have been going through some of the Editing Guidelines pages, rewriting a few explanations with the hope of making them clearer to wiki newbies. The goal is to encourage people who are not experienced with wiki markup to join us, by offering them more explanations and hand-holding as they begin. I am the guinea pig for this, because I'm mostly trying to clarify issues that I found a bit confusing myself at first. However I encourage all your more wiki-savvy editors to re-check my edits, to make sure I have not introduced errors. --Vox 22:47, 1 February 2011 (CST)