BoyWiki:Questions about BoyWiki

Awesome - I think. I don't quite understand why my questions suddenly popped up at the top but it gives me hope that somebody might actually take a stab at answering them. I gave up months ago. Will somebody here be my white knight?

Jim, 25 September 2006

Jim,

Which questions are left unanswered below? As far as I can see, Hínandil has adressed each either by explanation or using a link to the relevant help page. (If you did not see the links, they are the numbers in brackets next to your questions.) If anything is unclear, please feel free to ask again.
— Asch ^{talk to me} 02:33, 25 September 2006 (EST)

There is, or at least until last week was, a genuine problem with the indexing. Some articles restored after the attack at the end of July didn't index. I noticed that the article on Guy Strait didn't appear in reponse to a search for "Guy Strait". It's a fairly substantial article - the mirror at Anarchopedia is Google's number one response for Guy Strait - and it ought to appear. Today I checked and it's fixed for that article, but I don't know what other articles may have fallen out of the index. --sneeuwbol 14:26, 25 September 2006 (EST)

Hi guys,

I am creating a new article here because I don't know how else to ask questions about the site. This article will show up in the "recent changes" page, which is the page I use as a sort of "home page" for the site and a starting point for using the resource. I think this is the simplest way to use BoyWiki, but if I'm missing something obvious, I'd appreciate it if somebody would let me know.

I have a number of questions.

On the "Recent Changes" page, there are many features I don't understand. For example, there are codes that sometimes appear in front of article names. Sometimes there is an exclamation point. Sometimes there are letters like "m" or "n". Is there a place to go to find out what these codes mean? [1] [2] And once the meanings are understood, how does one insert the codes or modify them? [3]

Also, there are sometimes comment that appear after the article names. Are these comments from the authors or editors or are they made by site administrators? If I author or edit an article, can I place these types of comments after the article name in the "recent changes" page? [4]

What are "bots" and why would somebody want to show them? [5]

What would happen if I selected "hide minor edits?" [6]

What is a "patrolled edit?" [7]

What are "namespaces?" [8]

How does search work? Sometimes when I search for words I know exist in articles, I get results, but often I don't. For example, when I search on "FSC," nothing comes up. There is a list of many options that pops up with the search dialogue but the options seem almost incomprehensible to me. Besides, when I just click at random on many of the options, the results I get in response don't seem to change. [9]

Thanks,

Jim

Jim, these are pretty good questions. I was happy to see that almost every one of them is answered (at least somewhere) in our help documentation. I did not add links to the help page answers to be dismissive of your questions, but because it was an easier way to give an answer near each question.

The best way to ask a question about the site would have been to use the talk page of the main page, or of the page you actually have a question about. This page (which I've moved to be at Questions about BoyWiki) will be a good place now, too.

A bot is a program someone has written (and created a user for) to automatically edit pages. Since they do things like automatic spell-checking or tables, or other non-interesting features, they are hidden (or would be, if we had any users marked as bots). The Curators and Scribes would want to show them to make sure the account had not been used to vandalize pages.

Selecting "minor changes" hides any change that an editor marked as minor--just formatting or typo fixes, but nothing that changed what the article is actually saying. Unpatrolled edits are ones which have not yet been reviewed by a Curator. Once we have checked a page, we mark it as patrolled. You cannot search for FSC because it is only three letters long. BoyWiki doesn't index words under four letters long.

Let me know if you have any other questions, or if the existing help files can be improved! --Hínandil 21:33, 1 February 2006 (EST)

Thanks, you've answered a couple of my questions, but I still have some I don't understand.

What are namespaces? I see you linked to an article about Wikipedia but my eyes glazed over trying to read it. I'd appreciate a more practical response. What lead me to ask the question was that in the search dialogue, there are many options having to do with selecting namespaces. But I don't really know what a namespace IS. Specifically, what do namespaces have to do with the articles we write or edit here on BoyWiki (as opposed to Wikipedia) and how do they relate to searches?

Also, comments often appear after entries in parentheses here in the "recent changes" page. Are they put in by the people who wrote or edited the articles or are they put in after the fact by administrators? If it is possible for users to add their own parenthetical elaboration, how is this done?

What do exclamation marks mean when they appear in front of post titles in the "recent changes" page?

Jim

Namespaces are sort of like "containers" to sort articles in. They allow you to reuse the same name for different types of articles. For example, the article Copyrights could discuss how copyrights are used and affect the BL world. But BoyWiki project needs an article to describe its copyright policies. So we have an article with that name, but we put it into the "BoyWiki" (or "Project") namespace. So BoyWiki:Copyrights describes matters of copyrights on BoyWiki. Any article meant to offer documentation about BoyWiki or MediaWiki (the software we run) is in the "Help" namespace. Every article has a discussion page in the "Talk" namespace. Every user has his own page, but it's in the "User" namespace. At your userpage, User:Jimf3, you can publish anything you like, but the article Jimf3 would only be used to write an encyclopedia entry about you.

The parenthetical statements on the recent changes page are edit summaries, and can be added in the Summary field just above the "Save" button, as is described in the Help:Edit_summary page I linked to above.

Those red exclamation marks show (as described in the Curator handbook I linked to) which articles have not yet been patrolled. When you see them as a normal user, it is the result of a caching error that we have not been able to nail down yet. Curators always see them, and it is how we ensure that every single article revision is appropriate. --Hínandil 01:09, 2 February 2006 (EST)

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