Wednesday, June 29, 2005
I don't take sides
An intereseting situation on Wikinews at the moment.
Take DPLs: DPL stands for DynamicPageList, which is a way to produce a list of articles in a category. Originally, they listed articles in the order of last edit. NGerda wanted to use these on the Main Page, but I objected on the grounds that because of the listing-by-last-edit thing, the order of stories was constantly changing and that then made it a right PITA to tell what was new when you checked back after a few hours.
However, this weekend, the software that runs the Wikinews site was upgraded and as part of that DPLs now list articles in the order in which they were added to a particular category - ie they now list in a sane manner. All my objections gone, so let's do it (and we did). To list a story on the Main Page, you now add {{publish}} to it - that's it. Great! So I thought it would be a good idea to use {{develop}} - already used - to list articles on a DPL in Developing stories as well. To publish a story, just change {{developing}} to {{publish}}. Simple, huh? I re-wrote all the instructions on the site to reflect this.
Well, no, Amgine doesn't like it, and even though I asked him not to, he went and reverted the lot straight away. He didn't even take heed of my note to only revert the parts about {{developing}} - he just used the 'rollback' button that undos all of an user's edits, in the process removing the info about using {{publish}} (which is here to stay), too. Nice.
At the moment we have an un-easy compromise - both a manual list and the automatic DPL in Developing stories.
On the other hand, NGerda is still pushing to let people record "interviews" for Wikinews Audio - basically, one guy asking questions of another, who can say whatever he likes. I kinda fail how this fits in with Wikinews! Audio Wikinews has a lot of potential, but it should only be the reading aloud of the text of stable articles, no more.
So as you can see, I am at the moment basically objecting to everyone :-).
Good job I don't regard the site as a popularity contest - I only have the best interests of the site at heart.
Take DPLs: DPL stands for DynamicPageList, which is a way to produce a list of articles in a category. Originally, they listed articles in the order of last edit. NGerda wanted to use these on the Main Page, but I objected on the grounds that because of the listing-by-last-edit thing, the order of stories was constantly changing and that then made it a right PITA to tell what was new when you checked back after a few hours.
However, this weekend, the software that runs the Wikinews site was upgraded and as part of that DPLs now list articles in the order in which they were added to a particular category - ie they now list in a sane manner. All my objections gone, so let's do it (and we did). To list a story on the Main Page, you now add {{publish}} to it - that's it. Great! So I thought it would be a good idea to use {{develop}} - already used - to list articles on a DPL in Developing stories as well. To publish a story, just change {{developing}} to {{publish}}. Simple, huh? I re-wrote all the instructions on the site to reflect this.
Well, no, Amgine doesn't like it, and even though I asked him not to, he went and reverted the lot straight away. He didn't even take heed of my note to only revert the parts about {{developing}} - he just used the 'rollback' button that undos all of an user's edits, in the process removing the info about using {{publish}} (which is here to stay), too. Nice.
At the moment we have an un-easy compromise - both a manual list and the automatic DPL in Developing stories.
On the other hand, NGerda is still pushing to let people record "interviews" for Wikinews Audio - basically, one guy asking questions of another, who can say whatever he likes. I kinda fail how this fits in with Wikinews! Audio Wikinews has a lot of potential, but it should only be the reading aloud of the text of stable articles, no more.
So as you can see, I am at the moment basically objecting to everyone :-).
Good job I don't regard the site as a popularity contest - I only have the best interests of the site at heart.
// posted by Dan @ 3:26 pm 
