This is the old BIRD, which will remain here at swifft.net.au/bird for a year or so. You almost certainly want the new BIRD at bird.net.au
BIRD:Waterhole
From BIRD: linking the biodiversity community
.The Waterhole is a place to gather at the end of the day and talk things over. Feel free to ask questions, make comments, or sound off on the topic of your choice.
- Also see older discusssion, BIRD:Site design
| Table of contents |
Fungi Page
I know this sounds wierd but..... I would like to start a small page on local fungi species. It would cover information like, when they pop above the soil crust, what species are common/rare, Koori use, symbiotic relationships, habitat etc. Does anyone out there know a good fungi specialist who can assit in identification of species?
Black Crowe 17:26, 12 Jul 2005 (EST)
- It's a great idea! I think Carol from the Field Nats has a good knowledge of fungi - but whether she would have time is another question. Tannin
The FungiMap (http://www.rbg.vic.gov.au/fungimap_/welcome) project sounds like a project you would be interested in Black Crowe. The project is collecting sightings of the top 100 readily identifiable fungi species across Australia. Tom May of the Melbourne Herbarium is a fungi specialist who would also be interested in any unusual sightings. Chris Lindorff
Endless space
BIRD is growing and I just upped our web hosting contract to give us five times more space than we have had so far. How much did this signficant expansion cost? $20. Yes, that's how cheap web space is: $20 a year for five times as much as we had. It's been fantastic to watch BIRD growing with contributions from so many people these last few months. Don't stop now! Tannin 15:17, 4 Apr 2005 (PDT)
Great news Mr T. I have only recently got more active using BIRD and am glad to hear we have more space. $20??? Thats amazing! Well I guess I better get to work and add some more articles! "Black Crowe 15:47, 2 Jun 2005 (PDT)"
- Go to it. Space is cheap and the web is endless. Tannin 16:02, 2 Jun 2005 (PDT)
Logging in
We have a spammer trying to post advertising all over the place at present. As a short-term measure, I have told the software to require users to login before allowing edits. (There is a major software update in the works, but I won't have time to implement it for a little while yet, so this is just short-term.)
On the other hand, I don't know that we gain a great deal by allowing anonymous edits in any casse. Sure, a lot of people contribute in good faith without logging in, but I suspect that this is mostly just forgetfullness.
Thoughts?
Tannin 06:42, 23 May 2005 (PDT)
- I strongly support the requirement of logging in before any editing. I tend to check for recent changes without logging in and agree that it would be very easy to forget if the urge to edit became irresistable.
- Incidentally would there be some merit in reversing the order of items on this page so that the most recent additions are shown at the top of the page? User:Thommo
Yes Peter, there is undoubtedly merit in the idea. It would make it easier to see the latest additions, and sometimes help brand-new users post in the right place more easily.
On the other hand, bottom up discussion pages are more difficult for the reader to follow, as the sense of longer (and especially multi-part) discussions tends to do a sort of vertical zig-zag. Secondly, it's a bit hard for editors: we no sooner teach people to add comments to the bottom of talk pages than we throw an upside-down one at them. Many other wikis have tried bottom-up discssion pages, with mixed success: some peope like them, some people don't. On the whole, I favour top-down on simplicity grounds, but there are certainly good arguments both ways and I'm happy to listen to other views.
Meanwhile, your query has reminded me to archive off the older discussion, making it easier to find the most recent posts here. Tannin 21:44, 23 May 2005 (PDT)
- Thanks Tony - the archiving of the older discussions certainly helps to find the most recent additions.
- Because it is some time since I posted anything to BIRD I had forgotten how to sign off and it has taken me a while to find the relevant info. I have a vague recollection of seeing the typing conventions listed somewhere but I can no longer find them.
- Thommo 22:54, 23 May 2005 (PDT)
Three tildes (~~~) to sign, four tildes (~~~~) to sign and date. Tannin
Recent Changes
To reduce the number of listed 'recent changes' could I suggest that contributors delay clicking the 'save page' button until they have completed all stages of the editing process. The text box containing the editable text is still shown below the 'Preview' and there is no need to save the contribution until the final preview looks acceptible to the contributor. Don't forget that whenever the changes are purely cosmetic a tick in the minor edit box will also avoid cluttering the 'recent changes' page.
Thommo 03:55, 2 Jun 2005 (PDT)
- That's good advice, Peter — especially the minor edit part. (I'm reluctant to advise people to put off saving too long, as you only need to have a system problem of some kind — like the power failure here in Ballarat East last night — and you have lost all your work that isn't safely saved away somewhere.)
- On the other hand, it is also cause for celebration. BIRD is one year old, more-or-less exactly, and today was the first time I have ever seen Recent changes scroll off the screen between morning and afternoon. There was a substantial amount of good new material added today, and better yet, it came from several different contributors. This is how wikis are supposed to work!
- Right now, I feel a little like a father when a child takes those first few tottering steps. It's been a year of slow (crawling) progress, but BIRD stood up and walked for a while today. There is a lot more crawling still to come, of course, but I feel very pleased with progress so far.
- Speaking of progress, this is as good a time as any to mention the twin projects I'm working on at present: a comprehensive rewrite of the help system; and a review of the way the site is organised and indexed, particularly with the first or second-time visitor in mind.
- The help system rewrite is about half-way through now. You might have noticed some odd things happening on that front as I've gone along. It should be more-or-less finished within a week or so.
- The site design project hinges on the power of the category system, which is something we haven't seen in action here on BIRD yet. The first step is to categorise every article (and also relevant non-articles, such as help pages); then to organise the categories into some kind of logical order; then to present the category pages themselves as attractively as possible. Although it doesn't look much yet, maybe 70% of the work on this task is complete already. (Help:categories, by the way, is almost useless at present. It's on my list of help page rewrite jobs.)
- The idea is, now that we are gaining a large enough body of content to make the site worth looking at, to make it easy for visitors to find our content — a frequent and entirely justified complaint about BIRD up till now.
- This will involve the demise of the Main page as we know it, and the entry page too. Our poor little main page is simply not up to its current task of welcoming the first-time visitor, explaining what BIRD is, providing a comprehensive index of our content, and everything else that gets asked of it. The entry page (the one at bird.net.au with the changing pictures) will take on some of that burden. (Yes, after considerable heartbreak, I have figured out a way to lay that page out so that it becomes useful and informative — i.e., earns its keep as a front page always should — but also retains the pretty-but-useless picture show, which seems to be a popular feature.)
- The very ugly little page at contents will take on much of the the role that the main page currently serves (and will probably take its look and feel from the existing main page). I'm not quite sure of the final shape of the entry pages yet (i.e., entry page, main page, contents, category system) but, little by little, it is happening. As always, my motto is build first, draw up the plan when you know what it looks like.
- Tannin 04:46, 2 Jun 2005 (PDT)
Major software upgrade complete
It doesn't look very different, but we are now running on brand-new software — V1.45 instead of the previous 1.3. MediaWiki straight out of the box is an unfriendly beast at the best of times, and requires extensive customisation before it is usable by non-geeks. So if you saw some weirdness over the last couple of days, that was me knocking the rough edges off the new code - and there were plenty. BIRD uses some fairly extensive custom modifications of the basic MediaWiki package, and the base code has changed a great deal over the year since we last upgraded, so everything had to be re-customized from scratch. It's pretty much complete now (I think and hope!).
The next major software change will be an entirely new current events system designed to make it lots easier for newcomers to add events. I'll have to write that from the ground up, so it's a long-term project, perhaps 6 to 12 months off.
Nothing to do with the software upgrade, but I'm still tinkering with the index system, by the way. I hope to get that knocked into a semi-final shape over the next week or two. Tannin 06:40, 11 Jun 2005 (PDT)
Image uploading
Hmmm ... I see that the new software has messed up the image upload page fairly comprehensively. I forgot to check that one. I'll see if I can re-code it tonight, probably making a mix of the old and the new code. In the meantime, congratulations to those hardy individuals over the last couple of days who managed to make sense of it anyway. Tannin 02:12, 13 Jun 2005 (PDT)
- OK, it's usable now, if not pretty. I'll try to improve it a bit further a little later on. Tannin 17:07, 13 Jun 2005 (PDT)
Template:SWIFFT
Hi Ian and other SWIFFT people. For a while now I have been pondering the SWIFFT template and thinking that, in its original form, it wasn't really suitable for all the pages it goes on. Seemed to me that we needed two templates: the same one we have had for a while now for the flora and fauna pages and the lists (complete with the "please don't edit the important bits unless you know what you are doing on this page" request, plus a more general-purpose one for other pages that still fall within the SWIFFT ambit but really only require a more general branding rather than a specific message to go with it.
So tonight I moved Template:SWIFFT to Template:SWIFFTdata (for fauna articles and the like) and made a new, slim 'n trim Template:SWIFFT (for general-purpose use). I'll go through and switch the individual pages over to the appropriate template in a little while. As always, feel free to reword the templates if required, and I really will try to find time to make the SWIFFTdata one look nicer soon. Oh, and there is no reason why we have to restrict ourselves to just two templates - if a third or a fifth one is likely to be useful, go right ahead and make it, or ask me if you are unsure. Tannin 22:14, 20 Feb 2006 (EST)
Missing pages
Has anyone noticed that the number of articles listed on the entry page and the main page is going down lately? Don't worry: BIRD is still growing, it's just that we have some old pages which are not articles in the normal sense, and one by one I'm moving them out of the main namespace so that the wiki software doesn't count them anymore and they won't show up if you hit "random page". Tannin 09:03, 30 Mar 2006 (EST)
- We reached a high of 465 articles a couple of weeks ago, after the flurry of new contect (mostly BEN Biodiversity Reserves related), but I've been ruthlessly pruning out irrelevant things and either deleting them (if they are completely pointless now) or (more typically) moving them off to a new title with an "events:" prefix, for example, the former "March 2005" list of events is now at Events:March 2005.Why bother? Because both the number-of-articles counter and the random page function ignore items that are not in the main namespace - i.e., they ignore help pages, talk pages, events pages, and so on. The net result is a less impressive article count, but a more accurate one, and visitors using "random page" have a better chance of finding something interesting and relevant. Tannin 18:18, 24 May 2006 (EST)
![[Main Page]](/bird/skins/common/images/wiki.png)