User talk:Melroch

What have you done to the Common CSS? Everything's big!--S.C. Anderson 19:09, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about that. My user CSS caused me not to see the real effect of what I had done! One million apologies! BPJ 07:06, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Jaha, det visste jag inte om + i charinsert. Tack! Qwynegold 14:27, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Quid est?

Ok, Thank you for your advise! I will take care of the vowel table! :P Ciao Bukkia

DPL

I installed the extension you asked for. I didn't get to look too well into how it works, so let me know if it doesn't and I'll check it out. —Muke Tever | ✎ 08:23, 22 April 2007 (PDT)

I'll look at it this week. As usual Real Life has served me stuff that needs to be looked into first... BPJ 09:55, 22 April 2007 (PDT)

However a preliminary test of the basic function worked OK: User:Melroch/sandbox#DPL_test. I'll test some of the tentinnabulas et fistulas ASAP BPJ

Ok, thats fine but why did you delete my con-lang from the list?

Combined regional timelines

Hi BPJ,

I'd like to create an article that contains a timeline for multiple regions at once, where the user can select which regions to display (similar to collapsible tables on Wikipedia, but based on <li>

tags). The events should be listed in chronological order, so each event must probably be treated as an individual entity within a <div>
tag whose class/id value is changed). I have a fairly good idea how to approach this; only I have little experience with both wiki templates and JavaScript (which I suspect might be necessary). Maybe you as the template expert of FW could help me with this?

Basically, my idea is as follows:

Timeline article

{{Timeline|SPHERE}}
{{Event|region1|103|King of Region 1 dies.}}
{{Event|region2|110|Rebellion in Region 2.}}
</div>

(Note that "SPHERE" should not actually appear in the wikitext, but represents a variable containing the sphere(s) that the user wants to see. This is what must be changed dynamically.)

Template:Timeline

<div class="timeline" id="{{{1}}}">

Template:Event

<span class={{{1}}}>
* {{{2}}} AD: {{{3}}}</span>

Common.css

.timeline li {display:none;}
#region1 .region1  {display:inline;}
#region2 .region2  {display:inline;}

With this (I think) I'd only need a way to set the SPHERE

variable in Template:Timeline to either "region1"
or "region2"
dynamically, based on user choice. The output should then look like so:

SPHERE="region1"

• 103 AD: King of Region 1 dies.

SPHERE="region2"

• 110 AD: Rebellion in Region 2.

SPHERE="region1 region2"

• 103 AD: King of Region 1 dies.
• 110 AD: Rebellion in Region 2.

cedh audmanh 09:30, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Answer

I'm afraid you're out of luck since JS can't be included in wiki pages.

You'd need to find/write a MediaWiki extension which does what you want and persuade Muke to install it -- which latter would be the easy part. Go to [1] and look for collapsible table list extensions! BPJ 10:33, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

You may look at [2] and see if you have the skill to modify it to get what you want. I don't, being a JS moron.

(Turns out there is room for many human-like languages in my brain but only one slot for programming languages, and that is already filled by Perl! :-)BPJ 10:41, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Category cleanup

I've been sorting some of the bulk at Category:Conlangs - not by making judgements, but quite a few articles have redundant multi-categorization (typically two or three of cat:Conlangs, cat:A priori conlangs, cat:A posteriori conlangs, cat:IE conlangs, cat:Romance conlangs). I noticed there are a number of articles where you've added the top-level category. What's up with that? --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 09:11, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

No particular reason. Actually I see no evil in cross-categorization if it helps people find what they are looking for/something interesting. It does very little in terms of database size if that's what worries you.

I think of it as general cleanup. If all the hundreds of conlangs on the site were lump'd into the same category, it would not be "categorization" at all (since after all, conlangs are the main interest here!) That's what the List of conlangs is for, isn't it?

Also, given that we do have some subcategorization, I don't think "downwards" cross-categorization is helpful. If an article is in Category:Indo-European conlangs, I expect it not to be a Romance, Germanic or Slavic conlang. Finding "negativly defined" groups would be difficult if everything were also there in addition to the subcategories.

Perhaps you're right that one should not tag pages with several categories which one expects to be sub-/supercategories of eachother, but then one should probably also make sure that that expectation is true; e.g. Category: Romance conlangs is not ATM a subcategory of Category: Conlangs which it probably should be!

It's found under Category:Indo-European conlangs which in turn is under Category:A posteriori conlangs. That starts to gather some density, but we're still not quite at the point of having things like Category:Para-Gallo-Iberian conlangs with Basque influence.

IMHO one category to many on a page is probably a lesser evil than something not being found because it is assigned only to a category which is not properly subcategorized. After all the purpose of categories is to help people find stuff, not to create a taxonomy. (I should add that I'm wary of taxonomies, since in most cases (biological taxonomy obviously being an exception!) several taxonomies are equally possible and each reveals something about the matter classified, but choosing one taxonomy over another will narrow your vision.) BPJ 11:19, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

That shouldn't be a problem since wikicategories can have multiple parent categories. I imagine in addition to the "lexicon origin" categorization, some kind of typological categorization may be useful to introduce eventually. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 11:40, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

NASS

Although you comment that you abandoned it, Ᵹ (Latin capital insular g) is now in Unicode (Ᵹ U+A77D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER INSULAR G). I just thought I'd let you know. Calculator Ftvb 21:22, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Site issues

I've done some work and was able to get DynamicPageList back up to normal, mostly—I did have to 'nowiki' the DPL on your page and on Calculator Ftvb's, as I was not able to get either of them to display due to the errors.

The webhost was not able to give any insight on why the errors were happening, but I still think there's a resources barrier somewhere along the line—while I was trying to load your page with everything going, the whole site's memory use nearly doubled. I did some testing on the page to see if I could isolate it or if it was just the amount of DPLs involved — I found that just the "pages I created" section is enough to bring up the error, as is the "pages I modified but did not create", and the "pages I created which were last modified by someone else". (Leaving those nowikied and displaying all others works — but I suppose I can't guarantee it will if the server's getting hit from elsewhere too.)

Anyway, due to these resource issues and the apparent security issues with DPL (in its use of raw HTML) I'm wondering if it might be worthwhile to start looking into transitioning away from it. —Muke Tever | ✎ 17:25, 27 September 2010 (PDT)

Linking to categories

I had no idea there was a way to link directly to categories. >_>;

On all the pages where I've done a link as though it were an external link to another website, do you think I should ... change this? Or, in your opinion, are they okay to stay how they are?

I think that eventually they should be changed: links to wiki pages should be wikilinks, and not only on principle, but because the "What links here" link in the toolbox won't work correctly otherwise. However I don't think you have to do it immediately; it's lower priority since the 'external' links DWYM as is. BPJ 13:43, 28 October 2011 (PDT)

Thanks for creating that page, though- I seriously had no idea that it was even possible. x_x - bornfor 16:25, 27 October 2011 (EDT)

I wonder if I should after all add a parameter for an optional custom link text? I'm divided because it usually should be quite clear that it is a link to a category page, and the Category:whatever format is the best and most convenient way to show it. BPJ 13:43, 28 October 2011 (PDT)

Language Summary Template

Hej! Är det du som har ändrat den?
Qwynegold 05:03, 14 November 2012 (PST)

Charinsert

Hi, are you still here? My charinsert doesn't work anymore. Below User specific insert characters it just says User:/charinsert in red letters. :(
--Qwynegold (talk) 14:39, 19 June 2014 (PDT)

It looks like the feature that allowed this was removed in Mediawiki 1.18, per their bug 19006. Apparently despite its utility, it is trivial to use the 'current user name' ability for evil.  :\ I don't know if there is another way we can write the template to duplicate the functionality, but the feature will be broken unless we do so. —Muke Tever | ✎ 18:35, 19 June 2014 (PDT)

Oh, I see. :(

--Qwynegold (talk) 14:13, 20 June 2014 (PDT)

Bâzrâmani in the Ill Bethisad Universe

Hello! I'm a member of the Ill Bethisad project. My caretakership is Greece, if you're familiar with it, but I'm also tackling the grey areas of religion in this creative cooperative. Recently, while I was going over our Iran, I noticed that Bazramani is listed as a language spoken there, but unfortunately, no other details are given. The only sentence where your intellectual property is listed is on our page for Persia. It only says "Bâzrâmani is a Romance language somehow spoken in Persia."

Are you aware that several years, someone added your conlang to our project? If not, are you okay with it? If you are okay with this, would you mind if I pitch you some ideas for the culture behind these Romance-speakers?

I don't have much, truth be told. I really only think that they'd be Eastern Orthodox, as opposed to Oriental Orthodox or Assyrian Christians. The Diaphysite Church was upheld by the empire while the Armenians and other Christians of the east outside of the border were left to their own devices and not always invited to ecumenical councils, if ever. I imagine that these are the descendants of Latin-speaking colonists sent to Syria for some reason who were carted off to Mesopotamia and then eventually further east again to the other side of the Euphrates into Persia. The second migration isn't so hard: the Safavids moved a great deal of Christian Circassian, Georgian, and Armenian prisoners to the Iranian Plateau, with the latter converting to Islam. In IB, the ethnic Persians stayed Zoroastrian for the most part, so there's no incentive for anyone forcibly settled east to convert to anything, really. I have found no evidence for any Latin-speakers in Syria at any time before the Islamic conquest of the region, but that doesn't mean it never happened, or that for some reason it couldn't happen. I at first figured that they'd be like our world's Vlach populace of the Balkans, Vulgar Latin speakers that were quasi-nomadic and who took on the culture of the ruling peoples, be they Greek-speaking Romans, Slavs, or even Turks.

I'd love to discuss this further with you. Thanks, Misterxeight (talk) 20:04, 7 April 2017 (PDT)

All in all, if you approve of our project keeping your idea in it, which is of course completely your choice, would you mind helping me come up with a backstory for these people to give our world a more realistic depth? For starters, what is the ethnicity called?