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)

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)

HTTPS Support

Hi there! You appear to be in charge of all things technical here, so I figured I would reach out to you to see some background and also if I can help with two things that I personally would like to see happen: https support and mobile support (I use the wiki primarily on my phone and it's quite difficult to read). Are those things that there has been any research on in the past? Xiong Chiamiov (talk) 18:13, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

• HTTPS is on the roadmap, we have two MediaWiki version upgrades and one PHP upgrade ahead of it. I've been too busy with my day job the last year or so to get much done but lately I've had more time and I'm trying to burn through some of the items on our list and get it done. The mobile support improves in the later versions of MediaWiki that we're trying to get to. Over half of our visitor are on mobile devices now (phones and tablets) so it's definitely something we want to do. --Steevithak (talk) 16:22, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Article Count Not Updating on Main Page

As you are updating your ToDo list, one minor glitch I've noticed is that the Main Page "Browse our 9,6xx articles" falls behind the actual current number (I assume because of caching), sometimes for weeks until the "featured articles" are changed. Cheers! --Vox (talk) 15:41, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

• I'll add it to the ToDo list. My guess is that it's a template tag picking it up that only gets checked when the page is edited. I'll see if we can come up with something more dynamic. --Steevithak (talk) 16:22, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

It seems to be "live" when I look at the page when logged in, but for visitors who aren't it gets stuck. Thanks! --Vox (talk) 17:56, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

• I think I've got this fixed. As we thought, the Main page was refreshed on every view for logged in users but for everyone else it was cached and only updated when the page was edited. As a fix, I've added an hourly job that purges the Main page from the cache to force an update. So I'm hoping that means the article count will never be more than an hour behind the real count. Watch it for a while and let me know if it's working better. --Steevithak (talk) 04:05, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! If there is any load/performance hit from this, I'm sure doing it once or twice a day is plenty often. --Vox (talk) 13:23, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Flickr User ID in Photo Attribution

Whenever you have some time to think about a Deep Problem, our "image by" attribution has some maddening issues caused by Flickr's different ways of identifying an account. Someone's Flickr stream has:

• Its original numerical user ID
• A personalized URL which is a one-time choice
• A theoretically "real name," but can be anything and be changed any time: "Gilles Péris y Saborit"
• A Flickr Handle (which they seem to be deprecating but which still shows up, e.g. on the All Sizes page): "Cletus Awreetus"

Problems include:

• A regular contributor, e.g. OZBOX has stopped using that handle but we can't update attribution on pages where it appears
• Redlinks to an unknown name in the wiki image template invite editors to start a new image-by page, even when the same photo contributor has dozens of contributions under some long-abandoned Flickr handle
• I have looked everywhere but can't find the code which "helpfully" pre-fills any new wiki Image-by page. It's completely broken and well-meaning editors often create pages with useless URLs (in addition to missing existing well-populated contributor categories)

This is tricky conceptually to know what is The Right Way, but if there's a method to scrape the Flickr URL from an image template and check if it matches an existing wiki image-by contributor that would be awesome… --Vox (talk) 14:19, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

• If I remember the Flickr API correctly, the only thing we can count on is the actual ID value (e.g. 42250269@N06 in your example above). But once the user adopts a user name and personalized URL, it's very difficult for the average person to discover that ID value. I think the only real solution would be to write a custom MediaWiki extension that interfaces with the Flickr API directly and finds the ID for us. That way our templates could always use the unique ID, even if they show the current real name or Flickr handle as well. We could probably do that but it's going to be after I get the next round of updates done so that we can get HTTPS support. --Steevithak (talk) 17:18, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Understood! I think one of our issues is that 12 years ago the Flickr Handle was the most visible account identifier and so lots of image-by categories got created using that (e.g. I notice OZBOX still exists, but it's the "real name" displayed on photo pages now). Occasionally people write out their real name on their About page (no way to automate discovering that) but I've used it when the displayed Flickr name is problematic, like "Bob" or something that seems temporary.--Vox (talk) 17:57, 20 February 2023 (UTC)