Improvements and Suggestions
Have an idea for improvements or suggestions on how to handle content? Do you need tools or answers? This is a place to talk about them.
1830 BOM
Since we don’t have a category icon for discrepancies between the 1830 Book of Mormon and the later versions, I’ve started using the interpretation icon, since Steve’s category was actually “Interpretation and Textual Problems”.
—Dave L.
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Link Standardization
I know this sounds a bit silly, but how should links to other chapters be phrased?
For example, should a link which points to The_Bible:Exodus_1 be written in the main body of the annotation as The Bible:Ex.1:xx, The Bible:Exodus.1:xx or just Exodus 1:xx?
I’ve noticed that all are used and I think there should be a standardized way of doing it (which, incidentally I think should be the third option as it looks simpler and should only have The Bible if the annotiation is in the BOM for example).
Likewise, do we mention the name of the chapter when it has already been mention in the text? For example, in an annotation talking about Ezekiel, should the title of the link be written with the prefix Ezekiel (as above) or just have the numbers of the chapter and verse?
Joseph_Whittle
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Coloring Scheme/Design Issues
I really like the style of the wiki. My concern is that contradictions, a fairly important category, IMO, has the worst text highlight color. It’s difficult to distinguish from the surrounding text. A sky blue might work, though it wouldn’t match the icon.
Other concerns: The color of injustice, the fact that hyperlinks and absurdity highlights are the same color.
This may be an extreme suggestion, but is the diversity of text highlights really necessary? To me it seems like a somewhat useless holdover. Perhaps one color for text that corresponds with an annotation would work better. I think the pictures and descriptive annotation should be sufficient for conveying the categorization, since they follow immediately after the Biblical text. Alternatively, you could generalize the coloring scheme to moral versus logical issues, or something like that.
Also, the red links on medium gray in the navigation bar at the top (the second one from the top with the search box) is blurry and hard to read. Bolding that text might work better.
The “Redirect from”/“Redirects to” text isn’t appearing in the right spot.
-Err for Reason
Hi Err, we are open to different ideas for showing annotations, and we have implemented your suggestion for the contradiction annotations!
– the web team
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Create ‘published’ category?
• We deal with these kinds of content management systems all the time at my office, and we have a ‘published’ procedure so we can quickly see what content is in that state. Should we add a ‘published’ category so when someone is completely finished with an edit, the edit is moved from [ [Category:To Be Reviewed|To Be Reviewed]] to [ [Category:Published|Published]]?
- from PG
That does make sense, especially in a moderated community. But in TSP, everything is already published, so one could argue that a “Published” category on top of every page is not needed. What do others think? If the community feels like this would help, adding categories is very straightforward.—the web team
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Leave links to original content?
Question: when editing a page here, do we preserve the link to the original page from skepticsannotatedbible.com? i realize the site is being migrated to this wiki and in the end those links will probably not be necessary. but should we go ahead and delete links to the original page as soon as we finish editing or should we leave them in so that its easy for someone else to peruse the page and compare it to the original?
until the question is answered i will keen the original links at the top of each article i edit. this means that it will take one more pass to delete that line, but it should be easy enough later.
on a different subject; i have not been able to find info on what the “notes”, “redirect”, and “rename” fields at the bottom of the editing screen do. i’m just curious about their function.
- from uri 2008-07-02
uri, good questions! Your approach to the link makes sense. We recommend leaving the link for now, but please don’t stress out if you’re a contributor who has been deleting the link.
edit 7/8/08 wrfostersmith—I have been moving the original link to the [ style=hidden ] tag at the top of the page, along with the categories. That way the line doesn’t appear on the page, but the original link address is preserved and can be referred to while editing a page if needed.
“Notes” is a place to put revision-specific notes. For example, “Genesis was misspelled. Corrected 7/7/2008 by uri”. There are no specific guidelines at this time about whether or how to use the notes field, but as the content matures it will be more and more useful.
“Redirect” sends requests for one wiki page to another. If you redirected Genesis 1 to Revelations, folks would be very confused! Not recommended ;)
“Rename” is how you give a page a new title (and, incidentally, how you could move a page into a different namespace).
—the web team
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All new content pages should have some sort of categorization, including annotation pages. I’ve suggested The Bible -> Annotations -> Contradictions, etc., but any system would be better than nothing. Surely people might want an easy way to get a list of all the contradictions in the Bible! These could also be linked to the Highlight Key.
—from David Loewenstern
Great point! This is recommended—and, to make these categories more useful, we linked to them from the “Highlight Key” on the left and added instruction on how to use them to the style guide. Please note: wrfostersmith’s clarification below regarding namespaces and categories is correct and important.—the web team
edit wrfostersmith 7/14/08: I think we need clarification on where these Category links (like Category:Annotations -> Contradiction) belong. Some people are putting them in the “hidden” section of the actual scripture pages, which makes them show up in the Category index under “Annotations.” My understanding is that these are only for the non-scriptural pages with extra content. (Clearly if we added the “contradictions” category to every scriptural page where it occurred, nearly every page in the bible would appear in the list.) I have been fixing these when I find them but it would be nice to have clarification in the style guide that these category links only belong in the extra-scriptural content pages.
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There is some confusion about Categories vs. Namespaces. “The Bible” is a namespace, not a category, and should not appear after the Category: tag. I removed it from the existing pages that had this notation.
But I agree that the “Annotations” category and its subcategories are useful, and I have been tagging my extra-scriptural pages with it as well.
I have also noticed a problem with page names for pages that are linked to from annotations on the scriptural pages. pMcode considers “The Bible:What the Bible says about the end of the world” to be different from “The Bible: What the Bible says about the end of the world”. (Note the space after the colon in the second example.) Unless we standardize this syntax, there could be wasted effort creating the same page twice, once with the space and once without, if the author didn’t know that the other one had already been created. It seems that pMcode expects no space after the colon, so care should be taken to conform to this whenever creating wiki pages with the double-bracket syntax.
I’m also feeling like we need more specific guidelines about how to style the extra-scriptural pages. Include icons or not? Include tags or not? Use the quote style or not? Citations before or after quotes? Always link citations to their wiki pages? The more people we have doing this, the more ragtag it will look to the outside observer if we don’t all do it the same way. I don’t really care what the guidelines are—just that there are some so that there’s a look of consistency to the pages we’re creating ourselves.
—wrfostersmith
Good questions. We’ll add some guidance to the style guide re: extra-scriptural styling. If anyone here feels strongly about a particular style, please feel free to suggest it here or edit the style guide accordingly.—the web team
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"Currently working" notes
Tell me if you think this is overkill, but if a page is taking me a while I am adding a hidden note to the top of the page to say I’m currently working on it - in case someone else comes along and starts to edit.
I imagine the wiki will deal with concurrent edits, or maybe the "Lock Article" should be used to prevent it, but I’ve found it a useful thing to do.
—DMK
Good idea DMK, I’d say that if you are actively working on a page and remove the note when you are done, you don’t have to hide it, you can just save a version that say you’re editing that page on the top.
Version control is determined by the last check in, btw, so last save wins when there are two editors.
—the web team
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Please check the Annotations pages before adding a new Annotations page. The SAB is not always consistent about how it refers to these pages, and we don’t want multiple identical pages with slightly different titles (e.g., “What is new” vs. “What’s new”).—Dave L
edit 7/17/08 wrfostersmith: An example of this are the Annotations pages “Does God know everything” and “Does God know and see everything”. Identical content, slightly different titles (because they were referred to differently in SAB).
Nice catch wrfostersmith, things like this abound in the SAB because Steve has worked on it for 10 years – hard to be consistent in that time span! I think combining them is a good idea - make sure you include a note in the Notes field –the web team
Is there a way to see what pages the Annotations pages are linked to from? If so, all pages could be made to refer to the same Annotation page and one of the two could be deleted.
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What do we do when there is a link to a response on an annotation page?
Do we have a category for SAB responses?
Frank
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Broken Links
I’m seeing lots of broken links for references to The Bible:etc…] Those going to be resolved later? I’m being as faithful to the original as I can.</ironyIntended>
Also, I’m hoping for a forum for postings and more documentation/direction from the web team. The dashed underlining styles aren’t working for me.
—esnyder
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You may want to look at About the annotation links. Also, when you’re finished with the page, the references shouldn’t look like The Bible:etc, just etc. You do that changing the link like this:
[[The Bible:etc|etc]]
The vertical bar separates the link name from the way it appears on the page.—Dave L
Ahh. Thanks - esnyder
Thanks for answering Dave! Esnyder, i agree that the dashed underlines are not working, we wanted to try out a new style for showing annotations, but its not clear enough, we are changing it back. Also good idea about the Forums! We’ll bring it up with Sam as an area for development, you can also click the “Discuss this Article” link in the left column to talk about the contents of any page. - The web team
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More Design issues:
The coloring scheme for the injustice highlight doesn’t work. It’s one of the most common highlights, but it’s also very difficult to tell from plain text.
There’s no reason you need to use _only_ colors for highlighting. SAB uses a combination of color and background color; you could use that, or color + font, or color + underlining. You, could, for example, use underlining for all highlights, in which case injustice would still stand out even though its color isn’t very noticeable.
You may also want to rethink the color for interpretation, which is almost invisible. In fact, none of the very light colors are a good idea on a white background. Family,language, and homosexuality are rather hard to read for those with older eyes.
Suggestion: use underlining + color for dark colors; use background color + black foreground for light colors.
—Dave L
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Tip: If you have a programmable keyboard like the Logitech G15, make macros for the Wiki tags you use. Makes editing a lot faster and easier.
-Frank
Great idea. Even if you don’t have a programmable keyboard, copying the source into a separate file and editing it makes things much easier. Even notepad’s search-and-replace functionality helps a lot, and a more powerful editor with macros (I use emacs, but I’m an old fogey) makes quick work of even those nasty Quran pages.
I also keep around template pages so I can just copy and paste the basic format for things like contradiction pages and Wiki references.
- Dave
