Oolite Bulletins

@ Commander McLane.
I think a lot of this mess is partly my fault, but I am not alone in contributing to it. It all revolves around a simple mis-understanding.

When you wrote

Commander McLane wrote:

The alphabetical list which Thargoid is referring to, and which used to be on the original OXP-page 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

I thought it was THIS page (the old single-page version that was on 'the original OXP-page') that you considered definitive and wanted restored. This was a genuine mis-understanding as you referred previously to the Alphabetical List (singular), and in the quote above your comment regarding it being made into first two, then four pages gave the impression that you were also un-happy with this splitting of the list, preferring the original one-page version. At no point did you specify it was the split four-page list that was required.
Your quote above also suggests that they are different forms of the same thing, whereas now you're saying that the single-page list is out of date.

Therefore in all good faith I suggested to Mcarans that he re-instate the original single list, the one I thought you wanted back and the one which I believed you considered definitive.

It is ironic that a project to simplify the listing of OXPs is being over-run by complications. All I would say is that several of us are trying to put a lot of work into improving this for everybody, and we are keen to get it right.
If things have gone wrong (which clearly they have) it was down to Human failings on the part of pretty much everybody involved, and I would urge all parties concerned to try to keep the discussion friendly, and to be constructive and productive.
Let's get back to the spirit of 'The friendliest Board this side of Riedquat', pull together and make something genuinely worthwhile for everybody.

In my previous post, I wrote:

Just to clarify something, the original "big" (all in one) alphabetical list linked to by Smivs isn't the one I and McLane were referring to. You are correct that whilst this is detailed it is a complete pain to update and keep looking correct. He and I were both referring to the next evolution from that, which he linked to a few posts back (the one broken down into 4 parts, with each letter having it's own little table).

Obviously I was wasting my bandwidth in my previous post.

But what's done is done, so I would now suggest that everything stops before in the effort to make things better they get made even worse.

It is more likely that the better solution could be to restore the damaged pages from a backup of the wiki if a suitable one exists. However that will of course require serious admin power, and Winston, Selezen and Ahruman all seem to be enjoying Real Life (tm) at the moment.

Thargoid wrote:

In my previous post, I wrote:

Just to clarify something, the original "big" (all in one) alphabetical list linked to by Smivs isn't the one I and McLane were referring to. You are correct that whilst this is detailed it is a complete pain to update and keep looking correct. He and I were both referring to the next evolution from that, which he linked to a few posts back (the one broken down into 4 parts, with each letter having it's own little table).

Obviously I was wasting my bandwidth in my previous post.

But what's done is done, so I would now suggest that everything stops before in the effort to make things better they get made even worse.

It is more likely that the better solution could be to restore the damaged pages from a backup of the wiki if a suitable one exists. However that will of course require serious admin power, and Winston, Selezen and Ahruman all seem to be enjoying Real Life (tm) at the moment.

Hi Thargoid,
Yes I think we've worked it out now (what pages you meant).
The pages do still exist on the Wiki (I just clicked on Commander McLane's links above and the pages are all there, so it should be easy to re-instate them, shouldn't it? In what way are they damaged?. A quick look at 'N to S' shows 'This page was last modified on 31 July 2010, at 19:58.' at the bottom.

Thargoid wrote:

The histories of the various pages are getting garbled.

It is quite likely that with care the pages can be untangled and set as they should be. But it needs to be done carefully to ensure that they don't get even more tied up.

The problem may not be the pages themselves but the links to them from any other page. As long as they're restored exactly as they were before (same name including case) then it should be OK, but any variation will break links.

So linking back to them as they are with the names (both page titles/headers, and URLs etc) unchanged since July 31st from the main Wiki page should be OK, yes?
Would you advise me to do this?

My advice is to not do anything right now, and wait until a Wiki administrator has sorted things out, if possible.

One of the features of a Wiki is (as I said before) that there really isn't any actual "undo", but every information is preserved. Therefore you're generally safe when editing pages, and this is the reason (well, one of the reasons) why Wikis can be edited by everybody: if a mistake has occured, everything can be reversed.

There is however, one exception from this general rule: moving pages, or renaming them, is the one action which can seriously mess things up, and can not be easily reverted. That's why in the how-to pages of Wikis you often find a warning that, while you are welcome to edit everything, renaming and moving pages should be done very cautiously.

In our case no information has actually be lost, so nobody needs to feel guilty of that. The only thing is that by moving the page "OXP" to a new address "OXP_new", also the history of the page "OXP" has been moved. It appears now to be the history of the page "OXP_new", while the page "OXP" doesn't seem to have any history at all. It looks like it was created for the first time today (August 19th, 2010). Why is this bad? Because sooner or later we will get another member of the board who will try to re-organize the page. Now if he examines the history of the page, in order to find out how the current organization came into being, and how it was organized before, he won't find any information on that anymore. Therefore he will be ignorant of the lessons that have been learned so far about organizing this specific page, and will make mistakes that would be easily avoidable if he could follow what has happened so far.

OK, that all makes sense. I'll leave well alone.

Good news. Selezen kindly restored OXP_new to OXP and the history is there. Cmd. McLane, please can you revert the page to the correct version or instruct me on how to do it without messing it up.

Done. I've restored the version just before your changes, and also restored the talk page.

Now your project can be perfected in some sandbox, and put on the OXP page when it has left its work-in-progress-state.

Commander McLane wrote:

Done. I've restored the version just before your changes, and also restored the talk page.

Now your project can be perfected in some sandbox, and put on the OXP page when it has left its work-in-progress-state.

Great. Thank you very much.