User talk:John James

Welcome!

Hello, John James, and welcome to the Mises Wiki! Thanks for signing up – we're glad to have you! If you need help getting started, take a look at our help pages.

Community discussion takes place at the MisesWiki Commons, so feel free to post any questions you might have there or on my talk page. Please sign your messages on talk and discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. Again, welcome!

Template:Wikipedia text

Hi John: thanks for the heads up regarding a bug. Could you give me an example of a page that is having the issue you describe so I can look? I'm only aware of one potential issue with this template, and that is that for pages with multi-word titles, it's important to use underscores instead of spaces. So, for example, instead of:

{{Wikipedia text|Supreme Court of the United States|Edition ID}}

type

{{Wikipedia text|Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States|Edition ID}}

Let me know if that helps. --Forgottenman (talk) 07:02, 9 April 2011 (MSD)

Yeah that took care of it. Interesting I missed that. I actually went back to the template page and noticed the underscores are there in the example...I would have sworn they weren't there before, but I can see the page hasn't been updated in months so I obviously just overlooked it. Thanks for the response. --John James 08:49, 9 April 2011 (MSD)

I believe I have fixed this template. It no longer requires underscores, and it still allows for the use of id as a named parameter (which you added). One thing I removed from your version is {{#switch:{{lc:{{{section|}}} }}; I'm not sure that linking sections is necessary, but if you want it back I'll figure it out. Let me know if you notice any other issues. --Forgottenman (talk) 01:56, 11 May 2011 (MSD)

Awesome. Sounds good. If you get a chance, have a look at the to do list on my user page. You might be able to help with at least one of those things. --John James 02:32, 11 May 2011 (MSD)

Actually, it's still broken for punctuation... our urlencode magic word doesn't work like on Wikipedia for some strange reason... --Forgottenman (talk) 17:46, 12 May 2011 (MSD)

I think I noticed that with my {{wplink}}...it has a problem with punctuation too. Even with "PAGENAMEE" it still returns "%27" instead of an apostrophe...and wikipedia doesn't like that...which means pages like America's Great Depression come up with an error when you click that link. But then again if you use the same syntax for the mises wiki it pulls up the page fine (i.e. mises doesn't have a problem with code instead of actual characters.) --John James 05:02, 13 May 2011 (MSD)

On Categories

Hallo John James, very nice work on all the newly created content pages! There is one thing, though, I am not so sure about - does it make sense to create so many new categories, most of which will stay empty for the foreseeable future? (See e.g. the categories on the Peter Schiff page.) Pestergaines 00:38, 12 April 2011 (MSD)

I've removed these categories from that page. Categories are only helpful to readers when there are a significant number of articles in each one. I don't see a need for copying Wikipedia's bureaucracy and structure in our much smaller wiki. --Forgottenman (talk) 00:51, 12 April 2011 (MSD)

Yeah that was really the only one I left them all on. I wasn't sure about that figured they were mostly pretty general categories that other things would fit into without too much difficulty. --John James 09:10, 12 April 2011 (MSD)

Infobox template

Hallo John, you have recently updated the Infobox template to a much larger feature set. That is all to the good, but it seems all the country boxes are now broken. (See e.g. Ireland.) What can be done to fix this? Pestergaines 14:36, 3 May 2011 (MSD)

FYI: I'll do a revert on the Infobox template, hope that things will work fine afterwards. Please let me know if that's not the case! Pestergaines 12:55, 6 May 2011 (MSD)

I undid your undo on the template:infobox, as that setup was not constructed to best allow specific infoboxes to be created. That template is best used as a meta...I had already used it to create one for books (as you can see at Principles of Economics), and the undo made it inoperable. To fix the countries, I created one for countries, and one for islands, but they are not yet fully debugged. I went ahead and put the beginnings of one on the Ireland page anyway so you can see how it will go.

I have a feeling at least part of the issue in the bugs lies in a lack of some specific classes in areas such as the common.css...which you need admin status to be able to edit. I posted a message on the talk page of Wikiadmin, but haven't gotten a response. would you be able to tell me how I might go about getting the proper permissions to be able to fix stuff like that? --John James 17:15, 6 May 2011 (MSD)

I'm not sure if there is an official policy for this, but the Mises Institute is the overarching institution for the wiki. The most suitable place for this sort of request would be the mailing list. At the moment I don't see a big need for more administrators. The mailing list is in any case the best place to propose your changes to the common.css and get feedback from the site admins. And by the way: Wikipedia suggests to test changes on user's personal skin.css first, that could make things easier for you while the discussion goes on.

How long do you think will the fixing process work? If it takes a long time, I suggest going back to the original setup. Another template could be used as the base for the book infobox (which I like, by the way); or we could quickly migrate all countries so we don't have a host of broken pages all over the place. Please let me know. Pestergaines 18:09, 6 May 2011 (MSD)

I fixed the infobox islands template, so Ireland looks fine. The normal country infobox will probably require the permissions I was talking about, so I'll look into that. But keeping the current meta infobox template doesn't break any pages, it just means an infobox doesn't show up on a page that uses the old format. --John James 05:48, 7 May 2011 (MSD)

Very nice work! Please also include the data, that was in the infobox before (e.g. the indices). Then we can fix the other countries that lack that data and the broken reference that is the result. Pestergaines 17:33, 7 May 2011 (MSD)

What do you think? --John James 21:57, 7 May 2011 (MSD)

Excellent! Now we only need Life Expectancy and Unemployment. (If you use the same page from the CIA Factbook, consider reusing the "ref name="CIA_IE"" part - but only if it's worth it.) Pestergaines 13:12, 9 May 2011 (MSD)

Hi, I've created the {{Infobox Country}} template, and requested from Forgottenman a migration of all countries to it. In this way, all countries can show their whole content and the new templates are untouched, at least until this migration is finalized. Pestergaines 23:46, 22 May 2011 (MSD)

It would be more helpful if you could just correct any bugs in the one that already exists. Check out United States to see how it can function. --John James 23:52, 22 May 2011 (MSD)

Sadly, I am not an familiar enough with templates, so I don't know what its bugs are. The old one showed its contents quite well, and I want to restore that. The new template set is certainly superior, but until it is finished I want to have the old content visible and avoid broken content. Pestergaines 00:18, 23 May 2011 (MSD)

---

Dear John James,

we seem to be discussing the topic on several pages now with little progress, so let me state this clearly to prevent misunderstandings: updating and adding content is absolutely welcome, effectively removing useful content is not. If some content is outdated, replace it. You may experiment to improve the wiki, but you have to be very careful if your changes affect a large part of it for extended periods of time and on numerous pages (we're talking some 200 pages here). Please refrain from such large-scale changes in the future, or discuss them with others first.

I hope I made myself clear. I am absolutely not against the idea itself: the new template looks great and will come in handy. I'll create a new discussion in the Commons about the content of the new Infobox for countries.

Thanks,
Pestergaines 15:41, 23 May 2011 (MSD)

A few things

I was looking over your user and talk pages and wanted to mention:

• Regarding Common.css and Common.js: Wikipedia's versions of these pages are quite complex, and often refer to other css and js pages in the MediaWiki namespace. If you find that we need to add something here, it's probably good to move slowly and make sure there aren't any negative side effects.
• That said, this wiki doesn't have individual css and js files enabled, so you can't test new css for yourself first. Enabling this might be worthwhile, but there may be a reason for it not being available... would need to ask the developers.
• Regarding using images from Commons: it is possible, actually, via this extension. There may be security issues related to using it, however, so we need to investigate.
• It's already possible to link to other wikimedia projects. For example, commons:Main Page and wiktionary:Main Page. Wikisource is the only major one that fails, I believe, because the shortcut doesn't assume that you want the English site. Unfortunately it appears that making editing the available keywords is rather complicated, so we'll probably want to have a good reason to do this before going to the developers. --Forgottenman (talk) 18:03, 11 May 2011 (MSD)

Thanks for all the feedback. I agree we should ask about enabling personal .css/.js pages for testing. That's great to hear about interwiki linking...I didn't really bother to try using various identifiers to see if they actually worked in linking. Is this ability (and the markup) mentioned somewhere? We might add it to the Help:Introduction page, no? Also, any idea what the reason is for the image upload issue? That one kinda bugs me. --John James 04:03, 12 May 2011 (MSD)

Also, regarding the extension to use Commons images...what exactly would need to be done before we start using it? --John James 04:07, 12 May 2011 (MSD)

Navbox

FYI, your edits to Common.css (Navbox) broke some templates (see MisesWiki:Anniversaries/May 30, for example--the links at the bottom used to be in a nicely formatted box). For some reason it's not letting me revert, so please address this if you see this before I am able to. Thanks. --Forgottenman (talk) 06:30, 26 May 2011 (MSD)

I think I fixed it. Let me know if my change broke something else. --Forgottenman (talk) 06:35, 26 May 2011 (MSD)

Existing templates that include tables using the navbox class are still broken. Don't have time to fix it now... I think we will need another class. --Forgottenman (talk) 06:40, 26 May 2011 (MSD)

Darn. Sorry about that. Do you have an example of where there's still an issue? I might be able to pinpoint it if I can see it. --John James 06:45, 26 May 2011 (MSD)

See the bottom of MisesWiki:Anniversaries. The table.navbox you added has "width: 100%", which overrides the default. I think navboxes are traditionally 100% width, so it's probably best to come up with another name for what I was calling "navbox". --Forgottenman (talk) 15:24, 26 May 2011 (MSD)

I think that took care of it. Check it out, as I'm not sure how it was supposed to look. Lemme know. --John James 23:09, 26 May 2011 (MSD)

Award templates and images

Hallo John James,

I've started to copy award images and templates, when I realized that that may not be necessary. (At least the images, which could be linked from the Commons, right?) I also don't know if the templates need the hi-res versions of the images, since they refer to it in the code... so I thought to check with you, since you might know. :)

We need a bunch of general awards and create our own spin-offs. How can we do this with the least amount of work? Pestergaines 00:45, 28 July 2011 (MSD)

Your hunch is right. All those barnstar images (as well as all the generic shapes like check marks, x's etc.) are free images hosted at the Commons. That means we don't have to upload any of them. All 10 million+. This is why I have been so adamant about getting that function turned on. WHICH IT NOW LOOKS LIKE IT HAS!

Unfortunately I know of no way to utilize actual templates from one wiki to another, and no way to import them other than manually copying the code (at least that's the only way I can see available to us without access to the the MediaWiki installation). But still, copying template code isn't so hard, and now that the Commons function is on we don't have to upload any of the images. --John James 02:39, 28 July 2011 (MSD)

I've created another template - Template:The Tireless Contributor Barnstar - and the image was effortlessly linked into the page. Shiny!

It also belongs to categories like 'MisesWiki templates to be automatically substituted' and 'MisesWiki substituted templates', probably because of templates down the line - are these necessary? Pestergaines 11:30, 28 July 2011 (MSD)

Well, technically speaking, no categories are "necessary"...that whole feature is just there to make the wiki more accessible. So yeah, while they may not be useful currently, they may be in the future. I can understand not wanting to add really narrow, specific categories to actual articles (like we talked about with Peter Schiff, for example) but for technical pages I say go ahead and include them. It would be far too difficult to try to go back and categorize them later. It's best to just have them tagged, even if the category itself doesn't get created for a while. It's not like it hurts anything. --John James 12:44, 28 July 2011 (MSD)

Okay with me. Pestergaines 12:47, 28 July 2011 (MSD)

Also just noticed: the loading of 'alt' (high-resolution) images for the barnstar templates does take some time. Just something to watch out for. Pestergaines 12:57, 28 July 2011 (MSD)

Removing spam

		The Anti-Vandalism Barnstar
		For his ceaseless vigilance in removing spam, John James is awarded the Anti-Vandalism Barnstar! Pestergaines 11:45, 28 July 2011 (MSD)

Book covers

Jeff confirmed that Mises Institute book covers have the CC-BY license, so I changed a few of your recent uploads to reflect this. Let me know if you have any concerns. --Forgottenman (talk) 20:22, 9 August 2011 (MSD)

Yeah I wasn't sure about that, so I figured to be on the safe side. In that case, we might as well upload them all to the Commons. --John James 21:23, 9 August 2011 (MSD)

Good point. --Forgottenman (talk) 21:31, 9 August 2011 (MSD)

More and more books

		The Diligent Librarian Barnstar
		For his ceaseless work on creating pages for libertarian literature, I award you the Diligent Librarian Barnstar! Pestergaines 11:57, 10 April 2012 (MSD)

Awesome! How in the world did you find that one? --John James 19:51, 10 April 2012 (MSD)

When the idea of awarding Barnstars was first floated around, I've scoured WP for all sorts of awards that would fit this wiki, and this was one. And seeing the activity lately, you are pretty much the only one left - with an impressive collection of books to show for it. Thus, an award seemed in place! :) Pestergaines

Yeah, that's certainly my main contribution so far. That and templates, I guess. I just have no idea how you found that one. I had to google it...I couldn't even find it through Wikipedia. It bothers me they're not all included in the same place. Is that one on a collection page I missed somewhere? Or did you just stumble across it by itself? --John James 04:40, 11 April 2012 (MSD)