User talk:Steevithak

Welcome

Welcome to Camera-wiki.org, Steevithak! Thank you for your contributions here so far, and I hope that you stick around, add more, and enjoy yourself. Zuleika 15:45, 26 March 2011 (PDT)

Naming chaos

Even though the fact that you were unnoticed and unwelcomed until a few minutes ago (see above) suggests that you're a noob here, I have this strange sort of hunch that you're not the typical Camera-wiki.org noob [smiley], and that you know your way around. That being so, please read and consider this comment/question/whatever of mine, which itself is (unless I'm mistaken) on a wrongly titled page. Something has gone haywire, either page organization or my cranial organization. Which is it -- should I embark on some serious renaming, or do I simply need a straitjacket? Zuleika 15:52, 26 March 2011 (PDT)

Cool. I commented on the naming issues. How do you get the welcome messages to show up? Is that automatic or does an editor have to put them there?
Steevithak 16:17, 26 March 2011 (PDT)

If you're Wikia, you program their generation and transmission. If you're Wikipedia, you have a set of complex templates, among which any user can choose his or her favorite (example) and dump it anywhere. There's nothing like that here yet and my manservant was busy shining my shoes and pressing my slacks at the time, so I wrote yours myself. -- Zuleika 17:32, 26 March 2011 (PDT)

A break from housekeeping

You're very busy this evening, Sir! If you'd like a little break from your work with mop and bucket, try this. Zuleika 18:32, 1 May 2011 (PDT)

Interesting, yeah, making galleries can be a pain since it require at least some markup. The minimal effort may be just throwing in a series of floated flickr image templates and letting them flow.Steevithak 18:40, 1 May 2011 (PDT)

Spam shoveling

Thanks for all the work killing and merging the bogus accounts! Much appreciated. --Vox 14:47, 27 August 2011 (PDT)

And thanks for the software update too—all smooth? Any notable feature changes? --Vox 18:38, 14 October 2011 (PDT)

Went well. No major changes, some improvements to category handling. I had hoped the new editor would be in this version but it seems to have been bumped to 1.18. Steevithak 22:18, 14 October 2011 (PDT)

Book PiTA for you (PiYA?)

1933952490 is the ISBN of a book that's in print and relevant to C-W. This would normally appear in a note or similar as blah blah blah ISBN 1933952490. Oh, lovely, an automatically generated link! Now let's click on it:

• AddAll: Yes, this works
• Pricescan: Uh-oh, this doesn't work. Actually pricescan.com (of which I hadn't previously heard) doesn't seem to do this kind of thing at all. Wrong/expired domain name, perhaps?
• Barnes & Noble: Yes, this works
• Amazon.com: Doesn't work. (The correct, generated-from-ISBN-alone link would be http://www.amazon.com/s?search-alias=stripbooks&field-isbn=1933952490 )

I have to say that I am increasingly dismayed by Amazon's monopoly (it has bought up abebooks.com and the Book Depository), its stunningly incompetent packaging (I speak from repeated personal experience; just one example), and of course also its unscrupulous practices; and all in all I would be delighted if it were dropped from the list. After all, links to it are provided in the AddAll page. (Indeed, Amazon hits make up a great and conspicuous percentage of those offered by AddAll; could AddAll be yet another front for Amazon?)

For a refreshingly noncommercial alternative, how about adding Worldcat? http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=isbn%3A1933952490 is the link. -- Hoarier 02:29, 12 February 2012 (PST)

Strange, the Amazon link works for me. It takes me a to a full-page entry on the GIMP book. Your alternate Amazon link works as well but takes me to what looks like a search page with the GIMP book in the search results. I wonder if there are regional differences in how the Amazon site works? Pricescan is broken for me as well. I'll see if I can find out how to add/edit the book search links. Steevithak 07:53, 12 February 2012 (PST)

[Edit conflict.] Yes, my Amazon link does this for me too. The difference between what happens for you and for me when we click the existing link is interesting. I now notice that Wikipedia's Amazon links are of "my" kind; maybe people there already encountered a snag. But the hell with Amazon, ha ha. Let's support libraries! (In the spirit of open everythingware and all that, I'd like to be able to recommend links to openlibrary.org as well, but for now at least this lists disappointingly few books.) -- Hoarier 08:25, 12 February 2012 (PST)

Update: Found it. The bad news is that it's hard coded in the MediaWiki source so any changes would be wiped out and need to be remade each time we upgrade the software. But it is possible if it becomes a significant problem. I'd like to wait until we have the MediaWiki v1.18 upgrade in place and then revisit this. 1.18 is already available but I've been holding off because of the ongoing work with the category tool. I'm uncertain if we'll be able to keep it across the version upgrade (at least not with out some extra work). One other interesting thing about the booksources page: several wiki have hacked the code to insert their Amazon and Barnes & Noble affiliate IDs, creating a small revenue stream for their organizations. Might be too close to advertising but worth bring up on the mailing list and flickr group perhaps to see what people think. I've added booksources to my ToDo list Steevithak 08:17, 12 February 2012 (PST)

Oh, &^*@ Amazon, how about Powell's for example? http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=1933952490 . Sorry, too sleepy now to do more than fire buckshot in the general direction of one of the world's most loathsome retailers. G'night! -- Hoarier 08:25, 12 February 2012 (PST)

When you do get around to it . . . the (horribly long) ISBN-only link to this book within Blackwell's, an online dealer that isn't (yet) part of Amazon. Ditto (though it turns up nothing) for Strand. And there should be a source in Australasia too. ¶ Actually I can't see any inherent reason why C-W should have its own page for this. WP has one that it immensely more comprehensive and is of course supervised by a lot more people. (Which isn't to say that it's free of problems. Libraries in particular seem to like to change from one server to another, rendering the older links obsolete.) If it were possible, I'd have C-W's autogenerated page for any ISBN be abandoned and instead turned into a redirect to the WP equivalent, which has links to Copac and much more. (Of course, it's easy to do this "manually": ISBN 1933952490.) -- Hoarier 16:04, 12 February 2012 (PST)

testing

testing out my own talk page to verify where new sections are added

Citing sources

There's one thing about citing sources I can't understand now.
Are all the sources to be quoted under ref tags in the Notes or References section only, or can there be Bibliography or Sources section at the end, with all the sources just listed one after another? As I see, both methods are being used in the camera-wiki articles. Grzesio (talk) 01:35, 3 July 2013 (PDT)

Citing specifically with ref tags and footnotes is preferred. Many of the older articles still have random types of references or none at all but we're trying to slowly move the articles to a more standard layout similar to Wikipedia's. Having a bibliography section is fine but would make more sense if the article is about a person or company who wrote books and articles or about whom many books and articles are written. They provide sources where a reader can find general information about the subject. References are intended to provide a citation that contains evidence of a specific fact you added to the article. For a more in-depth explanation of citations see the Wikipedia documentation on citations Steevithak (talk) 06:18, 3 July 2013 (PDT)

Re:Infobox

The specifications section is a good idea, but I think it should be standardized, otherwise there would be inconsistencies between the pages. Lenses will probably only need one infobox, with mount, brand, aperture, focal length etc. For cameras I'm thinking about starting with the biggest of the camera types : SLRs, P&Ss, and RFs. We could have a digital/film template for each camera type to go in the specs heading, and a common template for all cameras with basic info like size, brand, mount, and interchangeable lens or fixed, and then put the detailed specs in a specs template under the heading

Gooseta (talk) 16:01, 10 July 2013 (PDT)

Yes, that's what I meant as well. The len spec section is a template now and I'd welcome some work towards the 2-part template idea I describe for the camera articles. I'd suggest starting a thread our Flickr discussion group so we can get some consensus on it. Steevithak (talk) 16:05, 10 July 2013 (PDT)

Sure, I'll do that now. Also fixed the image size issue.

Gooseta (talk) 16:06, 10 July 2013 (PDT)

Awesome! And glad to have some more help on the Nikon pages. We have a lot editors working on more obscure brands but the major players like Canon and Nikon don't always get the efforts they deserve. :) Steevithak (talk) 16:09, 10 July 2013 (PDT)