Oolite Bulletins

Thargoid wrote:

So my proposal would be that currently things are reverted to how they were, and that the new sortable table is put into a sandbox whilst the author of the table must lead and oversee the population of it with all the currently available data from the existing table. Then and only then should the "swap over" take place, at which point the whole community can then continue to support one single table (the new sortable one), with the other tables depreciated and supported only if the community wishes to (with the explicit note that these tables are old and may not be complete any longer).

It's either that or in trying to improve the wiki in fact the whole thing ends up broken, factionalised, incomplete and essentially useless.

This may be the best way forward.
A consensus is now a forming that the old lists and tables, after years of stirling service, are becoming a bit outdated and are being overwhelmed by the sheer number of OXPs now. But it is also clear that the new table is perhaps not ready yet to take centre stage.
What I would suggest therefore is that the new table is sandboxed for now, and the team of volunteers (Myself, Maik and Mcarans plus anyone else who'd like to lend a hand) start to systematically work through the old (now four-part) table to transfer all the data to the new catagorical table.
I'll PM Maik and Mcarans today to suggest a way to do this. Any other volunteers can PM me and I'll bring you into the system.
Mcarans, if you're OK with this can we leave you to temporarily restore the old list, and sandbox the new page either on our Wiki or where you had it before?
I'm also happy for now to act as liason between the Team and any OXP authors who may need to update/include details of their work, so feel free to PM me as well.
If we pull together on this we will end up with a vastly improved way of listing and detailing all aspects of the OXPs, which is to everybody's benefit. Let's get this right.

Ok old OXP page restored.

New one can be reached here:
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP_new (from where you can get to all the tables etc.)

Forgive me but I didn't Sandbox them as I found it easier just to rename the front page. Hope that is ok.

I've just spotted a slight technical problem...we now have two different pages both called OXP New!
The first is this one which is the Wiki OXP page that's just been 'sandboxed', but I think the page Thargoid suggested we re-instate is this one which is the old alphabetical table - the page with all the data we will need to move across to the Mcarans Table. This is also now called OXP New!
As I understand things, we can lose the current OXP page (http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP) and replace it with the old alphabetical table (http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php?title=OXP&oldid=18526), suitably re-named, pending Mcarans table being completed.

The page I originally renamed to OXP_OldPage was the one I have put back. I have never seen this other page before.

Please confirm which page should be the main page.

The alphabetical table (http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php?title=OXP&oldid=185260) should be the main page. This was the predecessor to the current page, which was an early attempt to sort this problem out.

Ok done. (I used http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php?title=OXP&oldid=18526 from your earlier message as 185260 did not exist)

That's great, thanks. This is THE definitive list, so this is also the data that needs to be moved to the new table, as discussed. The 'ships' and 'stations' columns are presumably going to be absorbed into the description as best as possible.

Is everyone happy so far?

Smivs wrote:

That's great, thanks. This is THE definitive list, so this is also the data that needs to be moved to the new table, as discussed. The 'ships' and 'stations' columns are presumably going to be absorbed into the description as best as possible.

Is everyone happy so far?

No, not at all, because this is not the definitive list, but a completely outdated version about four months older than the definitive list. Congratulations for deleting months of work! I don't know what you did to http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP , but you managed to destroy the complete history of that page. No previous versions are displayed anymore. Really great.

And why on earth do I give accurate links to the pages I am talking about in each one of my posts? Just so that they are completely ignored?

The definitive list is—as already said—not the one you have now arbitrarily restored, but the one which is found split into four pages to which I explicitely linked twice, which I thought was hard to overlook. But for your convenience, I can quote myself again:

Commander McLane wrote:

The alphabetical list ... has been split into several pages (first two, currently four), namely:
OXPs 'A' to 'F': http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXPs_% ... to_%27F%27
OXPs 'G' to 'M': http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXPs_% ... to_%27M%27
OXPs 'N' to 'S': http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXPs_% ... to_%27S%27
OXPs 'T' to 'Z': http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXPs_% ... to_%27Z%27

These list-in-four-pages was linked to from http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP in the very latest version of that page before mcarans started to re-arrange everything. And it is this version which you should have restored, not something many months older!

As I said, I don't know what you did to even make the page history disappear, but I'll go diving into the Wiki and see whether the damage you've done can be undone.

EDIT: Okay, it seems you have somehow renamed the page to http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP_new , which means that the revision history of http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP is now contained in this new page. I think this is not a good idea, so I will try to re-rename it. The revision history of http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP should always be stored in that page, or it will get lost.

mcarans wrote:

The page I originally renamed to OXP_OldPage was the one I have put back. I have never seen this other page before.

I guess this is part of the problem. I would have expected that before you endeavour to perform a major overhaul of an important part of the Wiki, you would at least inform yourself about its history, the previous states it was in, what has changed already, and why these changes were made.

This might be a misunderstanding on my part of what Mediawiki would do on rename.

I took the page that existed at the time at http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP and renamed it to http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP_OldPage. I had thought that the history would thus be preserved at http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP_OldPage so that if renamed back, it would be as if nothing had changed. That page is still there.

Then there was separately the confusion over http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php?title=OXP&oldid=18526.

Commander McLane wrote:

As I said, I don't know what you did to even make the page history disappear, but I'll go diving into the Wiki and see whether the damage you've done can be undone.

No, it cannot be undone, because mcarans has edited the current http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP already, and the page cannot be overwritten again.

I repeat that I think that this is very bad.

Can one of the Wiki-administrators completely delete http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP and then move http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP_new back to http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP ? Then we could finally restore the state of 11:33, 5 August 2010, edit by Splateagle.

Shall I try the undo facilities or will this make things worse?

mcarans wrote:

Shall I try the undo facilities or will this make things worse?

I think everything anyone does now can only make things worse. And there is no undo facility for moving a page, once the old page has been edited afterwards. It says so explicitely in the moving instructions.

And I only hope that the Wiki administrators have deleting powers. I am not sure.

* (cur) (prev) 10:02, 19 August 2010 Mcarans (Talk | contribs) (87,611 bytes) (undo)
* (cur) (prev) 08:05, 19 August 2010 Mcarans (Talk | contribs) (4,486 bytes) (undo)
* (cur) (prev) 08:02, 19 August 2010 Mcarans (Talk | contribs) (21 bytes) (moved OXP to OXP new)

If I undid the above one by one from the top, wouldn't OXP_new come back to OXP?

Then once OXP_new is back at OXP, I can undo all of my edits using the history taking it back to 11:33, 5 August 2010, edit by Splateagle which is still in the history of OXP_new?

mcarans wrote:

* (cur) (prev) 10:02, 19 August 2010 Mcarans (Talk | contribs) (87,611 bytes) (undo)
* (cur) (prev) 08:05, 19 August 2010 Mcarans (Talk | contribs) (4,486 bytes) (undo)
* (cur) (prev) 08:02, 19 August 2010 Mcarans (Talk | contribs) (21 bytes) (moved OXP to OXP new)

If I undid the above one by one from the top, wouldn't OXP_new come back to OXP?

No, that's not how Wikis work. You would only create two more entries in the history (which would then consist of four entries, where the topmost one would be identical to the bottom one, and the second one identical to the second-to-last one), because every edit is preserved in the history. Therefore there is strictly no "undo" on a Wiki, only a new creation of an old version, but that new creation becomes yet another version.

The mistake you made (and I believe that it was an honest mistake) was not taking into account that through moving the OXP-page to your OXP_new-page you were moving its history as well.

You could have transferred everything back until you made the next edit on the OXP-page, but now it is too late.

Ok. Are the current wiki admins Ahruman and Selezen? Is there anyone else?

I will PM them and ask "Can one of the Wiki-administrators completely delete http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP and then move http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP_new back to http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/OXP ?" as in your earlier message.

[EDIT: I've PMed Selezen. Anyone else I should try in case he is away?]