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Old 2009-09-30, 19:10   Link #61
SeijiSensei
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So I tried uploading a thumbnail for Trapeze but had some problems. Now I have one that's the correct size and aspect, but I can't delete the old one. Nor does my new version have the correct filename pattern so I can't link to it on the Upcoming page.

I'd like to delete these and start over, but there's no option to do so. A quick search for "mediawiki delete file" tells me that's a function reserved to admins. I'm guessing that if you let all members edit pages here, you're going to have lots of people like me who tried something out, didn't like it, but now can't delete what they uploaded.

Is the some reason why the original contributor of a file shouldn't have the ability to delete it? Maybe I just don't "get" wikis.

Oh, and when it says that the naming convention includes "title," does that mean the title of the series as it exists on the page? So it must be "2009 fall kuuchuu blank.jpg" rather than alternatives like "2009 fall trapeze.jpg"?

Edit: Wow that was non-intuitive. I actually had to upload it again with underscores even though the reference uses spaces in the name. And, of course, all my previous errors are preserved for posterity. What's especially frustrating is when it tells you one file duplicates another but doesn't give you any opportunity to replace. I'm trying not to rant here, but this little experiment tells me I'm probably not going to be participating on the Wiki in its current form all that often.

Last edited by SeijiSensei; 2009-09-30 at 19:28.
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Old 2009-09-30, 19:42   Link #62
relentlessflame
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
Oh, and when it says that the naming convention includes "title," does that mean the title of the series as it exists on the page? So it must be "2009 fall kuuchuu blank.jpg" rather than alternatives like "2009 fall trapeze.jpg"?
I've personally been taking it rather liberally to mean "a title that will uniquely identify that show compared to all the others", more to prevent stupid names like "myImage.jpg" or whatever.

Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
Edit: Wow that was non-intuitive. I actually had to upload it again with underscores even though the reference uses spaces in the name.
Yes, I know. This is terribly counter-intuitive and confusing. I noticed it by happenstance when reviewing the way other people had uploaded files, but normally we would consider this a software design failure.

<rant>In fact, I think Wikis in generally are completely counter-intuitive, and MediaWiki is the one of the worst among them. The goal of public participation shouldn't require people to need to understand abstract meta-code like this:

Code:
{{alitem|image=2009 fall to aru railgun.jpg|title=To Aru Kagaku no Railgun|date={{#dateformat:2009-10-03}}|type=TV|eps=|animesuki={{asthread|79331}}|links=[http://www.project-railgun.net/ Official Site] &bull; {{anidb|a6460}}|desc=}}
Wow that was easy!! What could be simpler?!

Usually one would design a real database with intuitive forms to allow people to edit this data in a way that's understandable to people who don't edit Wikis in their spare time. And that way you also get all the other benefits of having an actual database, like easy querying, reporting, sorting, re-organizing, and so on. But Wikis have now, for some reason, become the standard for "user-editable content", and MediaWiki the standard by virtue of the fact that Wikipedia uses it...</rant>

So... all that said, I still support this project, because I think it's a good idea to have this sort of reference, but I do think Wiki isn't a great tool for the specific job of building an upcoming anime database. But to be clear, I don't think anyone involved in this project has done anything wrong in their implementation... that's just how MediaWiki is.
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Old 2009-09-30, 21:16   Link #63
SeijiSensei
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Quote:
Originally Posted by relentlessflame View Post
But to be clear, I don't think anyone involved in this project has done anything wrong in their implementation... that's just how MediaWiki is.
I certainly didn't want to leave anyone with the impression that I thought the implementation was wrong. I have the utmost respect for the technical prowess of GHDpro and Nightwish. My complaints had to do with the Mediawiki software itself, and what appear to be rather silly defaults like restricting people from deleting material that they upload.

My turn to rant:
I can understand wanting to preserve the history of changes to existing pages or files, but I don't understand the logic that says ordinary users can create content but can't delete their creations when that content has yet to be edited by anyone else. It's one thing to block deletions in the case where a page I've created has been edited by others, since that policy prevents abuse by the originator. (The obvious case is where I post something controversial then take it down once someone objects to my remarks.) But until something is edited by other users, I don't see any reason that the originator should be blocked from removing his or her own contributions.
</rant>

I've thought for a while about building a forms-based database that might consolidate some of the dribs and drabs of information about anime programs not readily available from a single source. Given my interest and professional training in statistics, I've thought about compiling the sales and viewing figures from the relevant threads here and tying them to information available in places like AniDB. I haven't mentioned this before in this thread because my goals are pretty distinct from the ones Slice brought up at the outset. If I do go down this road someday, I'll stick to my usual approach of building a site from the ground up with PHP and Postgres with pretty forms for data entry. (I've focused on this problem because I've been thinking about how to model licensing decisions in R1 using standard econometric techniques. It's been a while since I've written an academic paper, but I think there's an interesting one hiding there somewhere.)

Last edited by SeijiSensei; 2009-09-30 at 21:28.
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Old 2009-09-30, 21:34   Link #64
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
My turn to rant:
I can understand wanting to preserve the history of changes to existing pages or files, but I don't understand the logic that says ordinary users can create content but can't delete their creations when that content has yet to be edited by anyone else. It's one thing to block deletions in the case where a page I've created has been edited by others, since that policy prevents abuse by the originator. (The obvious case is where I post something controversial then take it down once someone objects to my remarks.) But until something is edited by other users, I don't see any reason that the originator should be blocked from removing his or her own contributions.
To play devil's advocate, I actually have a theory about why they may have done this as a default setting. I think the problem the developer were probably trying to solve here is orphaned references. It wouldn't generally be a problem if you allowed people to delete their own content provided that content isn't referenced anywhere else in the system yet. In that case, in theory, no one would even know it was gone. But the problem is that Wiki pages are giant blobs of text, and in any of those blobs, someone might have included a reference to your graphic. Now they *could* keep an index of all the places where that images is referenced and do a check before you delete something to make sure it isn't in use (a call that could be "expensive" in terms of processing time, depending on how they programmed the system). OR they could just make it so that anyone can add things, but only administrators can delete. This means that it'd be the administrator's responsibility to make sure that the deletion doesn't cause some really ugly disaster of orphaned references on a whole bunch of wiki pages, and if it does, to clean it all up.

Now I totally agree with you, from an end-user's standpoint, this is very unfriendly, because it doesn't provide the user with any room to make mistakes. And at the stage when they're most prone to make mistakes (as a beginner), they would then have to contact an administrator and ask them meekly to clean it up, which is intimidating. But this sort of feature wasn't designed with the good of the contributor in mind; it was designed for the administrator and "for the good of the system".

I should also say that another thing they may have been a bit worried about was compromised user accounts and the ability to make "irreversible" changes to the system like deleting files/pages. That being said, if an account's going to be compromised, I'd assume the administrator accounts are much more vulnerable (but I suppose the theory is that the admins should know better about setting secure passwords).

Anyway, that's just a theory of what's going on and why, but obviously I don't know for sure. But still, I totally understand your frustration. This is precisely the sort of thing that software developers should really try to avoid, because it takes away the user's perception of control and freedom and replaces it with an oppressive pressure to conform to the standard (or face the consequences). In Wikipedia's case, though, that reflects their overall cultural attitude, so it's not all that surprising.

Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei View Post
I've thought for a while about building a forms-based database that might consolidate some of the dribs and drabs of information about anime programs not readily available from a single source. Given my interest and professional training in statistics, I've thought about compiling the sales and viewing figures from the relevant threads here and tying them to information available in places like AniDB. I haven't mentioned this before in this thread because my goals are pretty distinct from the ones Slice brought up at the outset. If I do go down this road someday, I'll stick to my usual approach of building a site from the ground up with PHP and Postgres with pretty forms for data entry. (I've focused on this problem because I've been thinking about how to model licensing decisions in R1 using standard econometric techniques. It's been a while since I've written an academic paper, but I think there's an interesting one hiding there somewhere.)
That sounds like an interesting project! In that spirit, what might actually be interesting as a related project would be to take the basic anime database information being collected here and develop a sort of public API (XML? REST? SOAP?) that could be used by others in developing their own custom applications. I mean, the basic information about anime is the same no matter what, and that way people could just focus on their own custom enhancements. But yeah, if I were to tackle that, I too would start from scratch with a PHP form-based approach for the administration. There's no end to what could be done! All we need is time...
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Old 2009-09-30, 22:16   Link #65
SeijiSensei
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Good points there. In response, the system already knows which pages link to something; the links are listed at the bottom of the page for the linked file. I'm guessing they didn't really think through the situation for items that are both unedited and unlinked. Still as you rightly observe, new users are going to be pretty intimated by having to ask an administrator to delete their mistakes. If my experience is any indication, there'll be quite a few requests! Good luck with that.
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Old 2009-10-01, 03:56   Link #66
GHDpro
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First, I didn't write MediaWiki and as has been mentioned, it is the same software that runs Wikipedia. I agree that it's no exactly user friendly. But I think of it as a tool that, while it takes some getting used to, is extremely powerful and allows for great freedom on what you want to do with pages.

If for example MediaWiki featured a WYSIWYG interface, it would have made the use of templates more difficult and less obvious. Plus having the page in raw format makes it easy to copy it into a text editor and do mass-replace, something that would be a bit more difficult with a WYSIWYG interface. If on the other hand the wiki would be much more structured (database wise) then you'd loose a lot of freedom on what you can put on there - you'd need to build something different for every kind of data.

But yeah, as MediaWiki treats files as pages and keeps track of links between pages, it should be allowed to delete your own uploads if they're not linking to anywhere yet. Maybe there is a hook or extension to do this, but I've been using MediaWiki for only the same time as mentioned in this thread (a few weeks), there is plenty left to explore - only recently I found out that parser functions (like {{#if: }} ) and references (<ref></ref>) are not default functionality and need to be enabled through an extension even though they're frequently used on Wikipedia.

Anyway another speculation on why they haven't made self-deletes easier (at least for files): there wasn't an undelete function build in until later in the MediaWiki life cycle. So they probably wanted to be extra careful and only allow deletes for admins, and perhaps that idea stuck around to long.

Anyway, the "delete load" isn't to much right now: only six images so far. Plus the Authentication plugin I write will automatically make every AnimeSuki site staff as well as forum moderators and admins a member of the "Moderator" group, which has the privilege to delete pages (and I presume that includes files). So relentlessflame can also take care of any deletes

While we're on the topic of file uploads - although I mentioned on the main page of the wiki that uploaded images should result in a thumbnail of 180 pixels wide to about 120~130 pixels height, you should not upload them as such thumbnails. I recommend a minimum width of 300 pixels for uploaded images, unless you can't find any bigger image.

The reason for this that you can specify your own thumbnail size in preferences, which allows thumbnails up to 300 pixels wide, but won't upscale. But I have to admit that I've made some mistakes in that area myself, as you can see from the placeholder image
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Old 2009-10-01, 08:06   Link #67
Slice of Life
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Just FYI, when we started this, I had never edited any wiki apart from very straightforward changes to wikipedia, like adding a paragraph. But I had no problems understanding the code relentlessflame cited seeing a working example. All known unknowns became known knowns just by looking at them so far, I "only" have problems with all the unknown unknowns that might offer ways to do things more elegantly.

But I fear we're running into a meta discussion along the lines Latex vs. Word here.
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Old 2009-10-01, 16:34   Link #68
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GHDpro View Post
While we're on the topic of file uploads - although I mentioned on the main page of the wiki that uploaded images should result in a thumbnail of 180 pixels wide to about 120~130 pixels height, you should not upload them as such thumbnails. I recommend a minimum width of 300 pixels for uploaded images, unless you can't find any bigger image.
Yeah, I've been trying to get images that are as large as I can, but I've been struggling a bit to find material to work with for some of the shows (in some cases, grabbing screenshots from trailers and such, which aren't always high-res). I usually do a test in Photoshop just to make sure the aspect ratio is correct, but still upload them in the size I have. But yes, this is good practice.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Slice of Life View Post
Just FYI, when we started this, I had never edited any wiki apart from very straightforward changes to wikipedia, like adding a paragraph. But I had no problems understanding the code relentlessflame cited seeing a working example. All known unknowns became known knowns just by looking at them so far, I "only" have problems with all the unknown unknowns that might offer ways to do things more elegantly.
Oh I wasn't meaning to imply that it was incomprehensible -- it's certainly "learnable" if you just follow the pattern others set before you. I too didn't have any real problem... but I would hope that I wouldn't given that I write code all the time. But even though I "get it", that doesn't mean I would claim that it's really "user-friendly". Anything that requires people to understand an obscure one-off syntax raises the bar, and I wonder if it'd be easier to get more participation were it simpler. That being said, whether that would be an increase in the quality of the contributions is a different story.

Anyway, apologies for leading the thread into a meta discussion. This is what we have at the moment, and I think it's worth the continued experimenting for now.
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Old 2009-10-01, 18:25   Link #69
SeijiSensei
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Quote:
While we're on the topic of file uploads - although I mentioned on the main page of the wiki that uploaded images should result in a thumbnail of 180 pixels wide to about 120~130 pixels height, you should not upload them as such thumbnails. I recommend a minimum width of 300 pixels for uploaded images, unless you can't find any bigger image.
So I've replaced my image with one that's larger and in the 1.4:1 aspect ratio, but when I look at it in the Wiki it's horribly pixelated. Clicking on the image itself returns only the 180x128 thumbnail, not the full-sized image. The Wiki page reports the correct size for the original of 629x449, but it won't show me that version, just the thumb. I'm confused.

Are the thumbs created on the fly and stored in place of the originals, along side the originals, or only generated dynamically when the page is viewed? If the answer is that only the thumbs are stored, then why does the Wiki report the actual size of the original if that's not really available? What advantage does it serve to upload the full-sized images if I can generate a decent 180x128 thumbnail myself in the GIMP?
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Old 2009-10-01, 18:38   Link #70
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The images look okay to me.

Afaik MediaWiki creates the thumbnails itself (using ImageMagick) and stores the various thumbnails separately.

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Old 2009-10-01, 22:20   Link #71
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By the way, I removed the "Proposal:" label from the thread, because as we can see, it's now a Project.
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Old 2009-10-03, 05:14   Link #72
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Thanks to Slice of Life for suggesting this project and its great to see it implemented (being pretty busy lately, I just noticed it >_>).

Even though I'm pretty busy, but I always keep the New Announced Anime's anime list updated, so I'll also help keep this list as updated as possible too.
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Old 2009-10-04, 11:43   Link #73
Slice of Life
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Thanks to you, after all your list was one of the sources i build the first list on. Maybe you want to add your thread to the link section?

I've seen you've already added the January TV shows too. I'll try and spare some time to expand this list next weekend. When Chartfag keeps up with his promised schedule he'll post his winter V1 chart in about 4 weeks, and I'm sure it will take less than 48 hours before somebody opens a "Expectations and Anticipated Series" thread. We should put together something up to date until then too.
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Old 2009-10-04, 13:28   Link #74
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I see, I'm happy to hear that the upcoming anime list helped

Ok, I'll add a link in the links section to the Upcoming Anime List.
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Old 2009-10-31, 16:13   Link #75
Slice of Life
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Winter is approaching, the list of winter anime is, thanks to NeoSam, more of less up to date but there are still no pictures. So I'd like to strongly encourage you to add a few. Or we disable that feature.
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Old 2009-11-06, 03:07   Link #76
Slice of Life
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So I'd like to strongly encourage you to add a few.
That was fast.
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Old 2009-11-06, 10:18   Link #77
SeijiSensei
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The last two forum links, for Omamori Himari and Vampire Bund, were reversed. I've fixed that.
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Old 2009-12-07, 12:48   Link #78
tyciol
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Using it to list upcoming anime is pretty cool
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Old 2009-12-07, 14:32   Link #79
Secca
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I think it looks great in presentation. It just lack of relevant informations like animation studio for example. You see when people checking out upcoming new anime, they want to know what's the anime about, what genre, studio, director, trailers? I really like the idea. I hope this will be like Moonphase for english speaker. ^^
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Old 2009-12-07, 15:39   Link #80
SeijiSensei
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Most every entry contains links to AS, ANN, AniDB, MAL and the official site where you'll find all the information you seek. There's the obvious problem of reinventing the wheel.

Also since it's a wiki, any one of us can add the type of content you're looking for. Why not give it a try?
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