User talk:Caesar Schinas/Archive 2

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

Caesar Schinas
Current Talk Page
Archives	1, 2, 3

Template:TOC-right Moved everything except conversations edited today to /Archive 1. 15:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Bot support for approval process

Hi Caesar, please take a look at http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,2666.0.html and if you see ways to make the process technically simpler (e.g. by means of a bot or of supplementary name spaces), please let us know. Thanks! --Daniel Mietchen 16:55, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

1. Well... It looks far more complicated than it needs to be, but I'm not entirely familiar with the system. I imagine the best solution would be a custom MW plugin which added approved article support.
2. A non-technical comment - shouldn't typos, grammar, etc be allowed to be changed without re-approval (though obviously only by Constables or Editiors)?
3. Another interesting topic... should images used in approved articles be protected? Personally I think not, but it's worth bearing in mind that at present images in approved articles can be changed/replaced quite easily.

Caesar Schinas 10:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I numbered your points and entirely agree with the first two. As for the third, I see the point (and the same would apply to templates) but this hasn't been a problem so far. Once the first two are sorted out, we could include into the approval process a posting of approved versions to some internet archiving sites, e.g. http://www.webcitation.org/. --Daniel Mietchen 11:49, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

No, I agree that unless problems start to occur images (and, as you say, templates) shouldn't be protected. And if they were, there would have to be multiple copies of them - each approved article would need a copy which was as it was when the article was approved - a lot of trouble.

I must admit to never having heard of webcitation.org, but it looks like a good idea to automate posting of approved versions to sites like that, if possible.

But someone will have to create the plugins(s), and as I said on the forum, I just don't have the time at the moment. Caesar Schinas 12:47, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

I didn't mean to push you into doing this, and sorry if you understood it this way. I am fully aware of the limitations of volunteer projects like this one. --Daniel Mietchen 15:07, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

No no, not at all. I just meant that whilst I'm eager to see this sorted out, I can't see anyone getting round to it in the near future. I'm very happy to give my feedback on issues like this, and I realise you're not trying to push me into actually implementing it... I was just lamenting the fact that I can't! :-) Caesar Schinas 15:14, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

unlocked the Cascading protection

I went back to the Speedydelete template and unlocked (I think) the Cascading protection on the other pages. Hayford Peirce 22:53, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Alright; thanks Hayford. As I said, I'm not really objecting to specific pages/templates - but I do think we must be careful not to protect too much when it's not entirely necessary or may not be clear why, which is one of WP's problems. In particular, I think that templates should be protected on a case by case basis rather than using the cascading option. But most of all, I think a policy for exactly what should and shouldn't be protected is probably needed. Caesar Schinas 10:57, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

You've gotta understand that I come very late to this discussion and that in any case templates are something that is far over my head. Tell me what should be protected and what shouldn't be. The one in particular that I protected (and then removed the cascading feature from) was something that Chris or someone else came up with at some point and made a particular point of wanting to keep where it is. That's all I know, or understand about it. I certainly trust *you* to play around with it, but I didn't want someone else to go in and mistakenly fool around with it. If Chris, or whoever the creator (and guru) is, says it should be unprotected, I'll be happy to do so.

In the meantime, I've deleted all of the new templates you put up for deletion *except* for the one you labeled as being an experiment by Chris that he *might* want to keep. Let's wait to hear from him on this.

When I'm deleting templates I *always* try to look to see if the Discussion tab on that page is live -- if it is, I first go there and delete the talk page, then go back and delete the main article. But *sometimes* I forget to look at the tab to see if it's red or blue. It's therefore conceivable that with the hundreds of deletions I've done in the last month or so I've overlooked a Discussion page deletion even though the main article itself has been deleted. Is there any way that this can be checked, to see if there are loose Discussion pages floating around? Hayford Peirce 17:58, 13 May 2009 (UTC)