explain xkcd:Community portal/Coordination

Community Portal
Proposals (+post) Place for ideas and suggestions to improve the wiki's design and organization on general issues.	Technical (+post) Technical issues regarding the site, including bug reports or MediaWiki extensions requests.	Coordination (+post) Community-managed page for coordinating content editing and maintenance tasks.	Admin requests (+post) Problems requiring assistance from an admin. User problems, changes to protected pages, etc.	Miscellaneous (+post) Place for general chit-chat about virtually anything that doesn't fit anywhere else.
View all community portal sections at once here

To do list

I suggest a todo list to be added here so newcomers will have an idea of concrete things they can do to help. I'll start by moving some items I've been collecting on my user page. Feel free to add more :)

Things to do

• Complete all entries from the List of all comics
• Special:WantedPages lists pages that have links to them but haven't been created yet.
• More topics that could be covered here besides the comics themselves:
  • our twitter account
  • the xkcd irc channel (and its wiki)
  • the xkcd blag
  • the xkcd forum
  • other sites explaining xkcd ([1], [2], [3], [4], maybe invite members+content of the other wikis in once we're established?)

Maintenance

• images:
  • All image filenames should to be moved to the capitalized versions. This will allow comics to automatically include the image based on page title.
  • Redirects should be made from the "number.png" format to the titled format.
  • Images should be categorized (comic images, character images, illustrations for the explanations, etc.)
• categorization (make sure these lists are empty):
  • Special:UncategorizedCategories
  • Special:UncategorizedFiles
  • Special:UncategorizedPages
  • Special:WantedCategories
• building the web of links:
  • Special:DeadendPages (pages with no links to other pages)
  • Special:LonelyPages (pages that aren't linked to by any others)
• other
  • Special:DoubleRedirects
  • convert wikipedia links to the {{w|Lorem ipsum}} format
  • use lowercase xkcd everywhere on the wiki (see How do I write "xkcd"?)

There are more maintenance reports at Special:SpecialPages, for inspiration :) --Waldir (talk) 06:45, 6 August 2012 (EDT)

Date categories

I'm not sure the "Comics by month", by weekday, etc. Will be much useful, unless for those interested in running some stats. It might be more interesting to have specific months, such as Category:Comics from May 2011 and so on. What do you think? --Waldir (talk) 06:45, 6 August 2012 (EDT)

That was actually next for me: #time:year-month, but I wanted to study the globalization implications. I prefer over-categorizing rather than under-categorizing, since it's comparatively cheap. The assumption is that categories are the same as tags on the old site, and that mediawiki affords us some extra ways to automatically categorize pages in addition to the manual forms starting to emerge (by character, by subject, etc.) To paraphrase an old prof: you can't study what you don't measure; I've been wanting to see if, for example, Monday comics deal certain subjects, while Friday comics deal with another, etc. Not everybody's cup of tea, but of value perhaps to some, and insanely cheap to support both mentally and for the software. -- IronyChef (talk) 13:51, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Page names

I think we should use the comic number and the title as the page name. Like so: "112: Baring My Heart". This would allow comics to be sorted by order in categories, but the pages would still have human-readable names for those of us who don't memorize all xkcd comic numbers ;) Thoughts? --Waldir (talk) 07:23, 6 August 2012 (EDT)

I agree, for another reason: for instance YouTube could be either the title of a page explaining how YouTube is referenced in xkcd, or the title of the explanation for comic #202 (titled "YouTube"). I don't know if I'm being clear here, but as we do not control the titles of the comics, that could create confusion with other pages. So using something like 202: YouTube would ensure disambiguation without being really complicated or awkward... And actually prefixing the comic title with its number seems quite relevant to me.

Additionally, that would solve potential problems such as Exoplanets: comic 786 or 1071?

Cos (talk) 14:33, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Beat me to the punch; agreed. Numbers are unique and sequential, but not altogether that meaningful. Names are meaningful but (as we've seen) not unique. Some combination of both would be called for. We'd need to have the plain numbers redirect to the new topic (some double-redirects would need to be fixed up?) and the names would too (with at least one disambiguation page for now, and who knows: maybe more to come?) -- IronyChef (talk) 13:55, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Following up on the YouTube discussion above, I'm wondering if we should leverage namespaces more: main:topic is implicitly xkcd:topic (ie main:YouTube discusses the xkcd comic, while ref:YouTube is the place where the pop-culture reference of YouTube is discussed.) Either that, or some other name decoration, such as YouTube Explained, or ... -- IronyChef (talk) 13:59, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. Number and the name together. --Jeff (talk) 16:08, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Looks like we have consensus. I'll move the pages (I've been meaning to learn how to use mwclient anyway :D) --Waldir (talk) 18:01, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

✓ Done, all current pages have been moved. However, I am not sure whether we should keep a space after the colon. What do you guys think? Should it be "112: Baring My Heart" or "112:Baring My Heart"? --Waldir (talk) 18:20, 7 August 2012 (UTC)