Bhamwiki talk:Messageboard

See Bhamwiki talk:Messageboard archives for archived topics.

(Add new discussion to the bottom of this page by clicking the "+" above.)

10,000 articles

So, is the goal to have 10,000 articles on the site before our 8th anniversary? I noticed our founder seems to have been creating more new articles than normal lately. --Lkseitz 13:49, 9 January 2014 (PST)

• There are no specific goals or deadlines for article count. As far as I'm concerned we're just aiming to continue getting better and better. --Dystopos 08:10, 10 January 2014 (PST)
  • Per an informal poll on Facebook and a "consensus-by-fiat" at brunch, our 10,000th article was, officially, Downtown revitalization. That daunting suggestion was made by Melissa Kendrick of Sojourns, who may not have expected us to go back to the 1940s, but that's how I roll. Other suggested topics included Valley View Park, Birmingham Natatorium and Turkish Bath, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, I Believe in Birmingham, Healthcare Community Amateur Radio Club, Jefferson County Amateur Radio Emergency Services, and several things we already have entries about. --Dystopos 20:18, 28 March 2014 (PDT)

Statistics 2014

Red links

As of January 29, 2014, there are currently 38,961 wanted articles with 74,869 links to them (red links). (The majority only have one link to them.) The front page says we have about 9,797 articles, meaning we're 20.09% complete. The last time I did this (January 24, 2013), we were at 9,107 articles with 36,583 wanted ones (19.93% done), so we made some progress even though we added 4,032 red links. (Note that wanted pages represent any topic which "could" have an article, not just those that "should" or "probably will" have articles.) --Lkseitz 09:00, 29 January 2014 (PST)

wikiFactor

"WikiFactor" is a measure of a site's popularity, derived by finding which is the last page (on Special:Popularpages) to have 1000x the number of page views as the number of its ranking.

Our wikiFactor is now 34, up from 31 in mid-April 2013. --Lkseitz 09:00, 29 January 2014 (PST)

2014 anniversary

• Our 8th anniversary is one month away. Do we have any plans yet? --Wheresdib 22:01, 15 February 2014 (PST)
  • I scouted Carrigan's Pub and came to no conclusion. That is all I have accomplished. --Dystopos 15:13, 16 February 2014 (PST)
    • March 15 is a Saturday. Does early that evening (around 6:00) work for everyone? --Dystopos 13:06, 17 February 2014 (PST)
      • As of right now, March 15 will probably work for us. --Wheresdib 15:22, 17 February 2014 (PST)
        • Ooo, should have looked at the calendar sooner. We have things afoot that weekend, but I might be able to come solo. --Lkseitz 06:58, 18 February 2014 (PST)
          • Attendance is mandatory, but the date can be flexible. Let me know what's best. --Dystopos 13:44, 18 February 2014 (PST)
            • Would the following Saturday, March 22, work for you guys? --Lkseitz 08:36, 22 February 2014 (PST)
              • Works for me. --Dystopos 13:29, 22 February 2014 (PST)
                • That's Connor's birthday and the in-laws will be in town, we will probably be doing his party that afternoon since Amy has to work that morning. Can we pick a different day?--Wheresdib 11:14, 23 February 2014 (PST)
                  • Fine by me. The 29th is a Saturday. Or we could do a Sunday brunch again. --Dystopos 15:45, 23 February 2014 (PST)
                  • we can do Sunday 3/23--Wheresdib 20:13, 24 February 2014 (PST)
                  • Sunday brunch on the 23rd should work for us, too. --Lkseitz 07:51, 25 February 2014 (PST)
                    • OK, then. Now where was it I just heard had a really good Sunday brunch? Little Donkey? --Dystopos 09:12, 25 February 2014 (PST)
                      • Trattoria Centrale? Another Broken Egg in Mountain Brook? It's been a while since I've "brunched". --Wheresdib 13:49, 25 February 2014 (PST)
                      • Other suggestions have been Cosmo's Pizza, Bottletree, Veranda on Highland, Todd English P.U.B. at Uptown, Five in Lakeview, and Village Tavern at The Summit. Personally, I'd like to go to either Trattoria Centrale or Cosmo's. --Wheresdib 11:43, 26 February 2014 (PST)
• Trattoria is packed wall to wall until the food runs out. Cosmo's sounds good to me. I also looked at Sweet Tea, but they don't have a breakfast menu any more, just cafeteria lunch. --Dystopos 15:54, 1 March 2014 (PST)
  • Works for us! What time? --Wheresdib 20:22, 1 March 2014 (PST)
    • Are we still on for Cosmo's (as opposed to Cosmos) on March 23rd? If so, what time? --Wheresdib 15:33, 10 March 2014 (PDT)
      • Yes. Let's say noon to noon-fifteen. I'll make a FB event for it now. --Dystopos 18:37, 10 March 2014 (PDT)

Results

• Did anyone get a group picture?, and do we have an official attendee list? I know most but not all who attended. --Wheresdib 12:43, 26 March 2014 (PDT)

Photo from Bhamwiki's 8th Anniversary brunch at Jim 'N Nick's. Seated (L-R), User:Morriscivitas, User:Chivon Morse, User:Dystopos, Linda Weeks, J. D. Weeks, User:Alarob, Valerie Sawyer, Amy Bannick Griffin, User:Wheresdib, Dorothy Seitz, User:Lkseitz, User:Dre & Betsy Pate. Not pictured: Photographer Eric Hawley and User:Anbdesign1, In the far background, Vulcan.

• • Thanks for coming, everybody! Sorry about the planning snafu. I think it worked out. --Dystopos 20:08, 28 March 2014 (PDT)
    • Ah this shows why I did not know about the group pic, apparently I wasn't paying attention. Thanks as always for a great time with great food! --Wheresdib 03:34, 29 March 2014 (PDT)
      • Just noticed how good lookin' ya'll are. --Dystopos 17:21, 4 June 2014 (PDT)

Historic maps

So, while the page says this page is copyrighted by UA, the actual maps are from the U.S. Geological Survey. Doesn't that make them works of the U.S. Government and therefore in the public domain? --Lkseitz 07:57, 19 February 2014 (PST)

• You are correct. The USGS suggests crediting their authorship. www.usgs.gov/visual-id/credit_usgs.html. --Dystopos 08:17, 19 February 2014 (PST)

Downtown grid

So, is this street grid table worth working on further, or am I wasting my time? Some of the text is supposed to be rotated 90 degrees, but it's only implemented in select browsers at the moment. The final product would have it rotated in more. In other words, if it doesn't look good in your regular browser, try another. --Lkseitz 13:17, 4 June 2014 (PDT)

• On the one hand I think it's pretty awesome and I hate to discourage you. On the other hand, I think its limitations are inevitably in the foreground. Someday we'll want to show the city limits on there, and then the Smithfield grid, and then curves and overlay districts and… and.... Is there a possibility of having an image map which accomplishes the same thing? Is that another Mediawiki upgrade issue or just not our language, I don't know. --Dystopos 17:21, 4 June 2014 (PDT)
  • I should mention I've been mentally preparing to start an article on the arrangement and subdivision of Birmingham Blocks. --Dystopos 17:22, 4 June 2014 (PDT)
  • Ugh, I just looked at it on a smaller monitor. I knew it was big, but the smaller monitor really hurts the layout. And I'm acutely aware of the limitations. For example, you'll note that Park Place is missing. That was one of the major things I decided not to tackle before getting feedback. I think it's simply too big to work.
    
    

Yes, it's possible to use an imagemap, I just lack any sort of artistic skills to create an image for it. (And I don't think Google's going to let use a Google Maps screenshot.) A quick check shows that the ImageMap extension is bundled with MediaWiki starting with 1.21. We're only on 1.10, so we would either have to install it or upgrade.

Speaking of blocks, I worked at one point to do a table for those. I discovered they're too complex to make a generic template, but we could do them on a one-by-one basis. Use that link above and go back to the January 2011 version of the page to see them. They don't have to be as big as what you see there. That was just a result of my starting with the generic version for all possible addresses. --Lkseitz 20:33, 4 June 2014 (PDT)

Downtown Homewood streets

Okay, how about this one? It looks good in every browser I've viewed it with, even on my phone. I even got that weird angle for Lynn Boulevard. (But anybody got Safari?) The purpose of these maps is simply to have a visual representation of the street layout of the area, not be geographically correct. Think of it as a subway map; good for figuring out how to get somewhere, but not so good for geocaching. :-) As far as individual buildings, I only marked those that take up entire blocks. Sadly, Independence Plaza does not fill its entire block, at least not as I've broken the map down here. (Actually, Our Lady of Sorrows doesn't either, but the map is so geographically out of whack in that corner I figured it was close enough.) --Lkseitz 06:32, 13 June 2014 (PDT)

• Looks cool to me. Does it go on one page or as a template on lots of pages? --Dystopos 09:23, 13 June 2014 (PDT)
  • Hmmm, good question. It's mainly designed for the not yet written Downtown Homewood page (although I think most of the links I've created have been named Homewood Central Business District). I suppose it could potentially go on all the pages of the streets featured, but it's probably too big for that. So I guess just the one. --Lkseitz 14:11, 13 June 2014 (PDT)
    • Yes, probably too big. I could see a cropped-down version of it on the SoHo article, maybe, but I'm not sure the purpose in that case. --Dystopos 14:23, 13 June 2014 (PDT)

Main Page typo

For the Joe Langston blurb, "veterans" should be "veteran". --Wheresdib 13:10, 21 July 2014 (PDT)

• Thanks! --Dystopos 14:17, 21 July 2014 (PDT)

Code for Birmingham

• I saw this and wondered if a collaboration of some sort might be in order: "How could apps and data make the Magic City better? Code for Birmingham will try to find out." --Lkseitz 15:32, 23 July 2014 (PDT)
  • Yeah, I think we have some stuff for them. A little busy right now, though. --Dystopos 06:53, 24 July 2014 (PDT)

Outage

• We suffered a mysterious outage most of yesterday. With Dreamhost's help I "restored" the site to the most recent back-up, which was supposed to have been less than a day, but turned out it was 13 days. The database didn't lose anything, but if you added any images during that period, they may need to be re-uploaded. --Dystopos 14:22, 5 August 2014 (PDT)

drug relapse

• A mysterious hack has been reported where once again polls to the Bhamwiki database are having links to pharmaceutical sites inserted as they are reported back to bots. Matt Sheets hasn't found the problem, but has created a clean mirror of the site on a fresh installation of the current version of Mediawiki. Should be able to replace the main installation soon. I expect he'll re-download the most current database, but you may want to save your work as a text file until this is accomplished just in case. --Dystopos 08:11, 30 September 2014 (PDT)
  • Current plan is to disable log-ins beginning at 8:00 PM CDT in Saturday, October 4 and make the switch then. Hopefully back up and running with current software not too long afterward. --Dystopos 14:20, 1 October 2014 (PDT)