[OWW-SC] EditTools helper enabled (Greek characters, etc).

[Steven J. Koch]

I remember that being confusing to me when I signed up on OWW earlier this
year.  I was a newbie to wikis at the time, but I think OWW will be dealing
with newbies for a long time, so it is important to consider.  A downside of
changing the name is that newbies may have edited Wikipedia first (which I
think also has the confusing talk/discussion naming).  The fact that OWW was
"the same" as Wikipedia was a big plus at the beginning (and also now).

A related confusion is that on OWW it's often not clear whether to put edits
on the talk or the main article page.  In Wikipedia, it's usually more clear
given that most of the pages are encyclopedia articles.  Whereas on OWW it
seems like the main point of an article is often a discussion in the first
place (such as brainstorming ideas).  Or, in the case of grading, I don't
like to use the Talk: page, because I have a bunch of little comments, so I
use a little hack template that's like adding comment bubbles in a PDF or
Word.  (See this for an example:
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Physics307L:People/Knockel/formal).  I think in
my entire Physics307L class, we haven't used the Talk: page ever.

OK, not sure if I have a productive suggestion buried in those comments, but
I do agree with TK's post and think it may be a real barrier to edits for
new people.

--S

-----Original Message-----
From: oww-sc-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:oww-sc-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of
Tom Knight
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 10:02 PM
To: Reshma Shetty
Cc: Steering Committee
Subject: Re: [OWW-SC] EditTools helper enabled (Greek characters, etc).

I added some comments.  Has anyone else noticed that the way to get  
to a talk page is to click on the "discussion" link at the top of the  
page?  I find this rather unnecessarily confusing.  The name of one  
or the other should be changed.


On Nov 12, 2007, at 8:10 PM, Reshma Shetty wrote:

> Bill and I've modified the set of characters available at the  
> bottom further.
>
> We've stripped out many of the symbols and have added some that are
> particularly relevant to biological research like those for
> concentration, volume and temperature.  (This is in keeping with what
> Tom was suggesting.)
>
> Check out any edit page or modify the list at
> http://openwetware.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools
> (Thanks Bill!)
>
> Leave comments at http://openwetware.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Edittools
>
> -Reshma
>
> On Nov 10, 2007 7:59 PM, Bill F <bill.altmail at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Entering the HTML tag for those characters works. The character  
>> tags for
>> them are as follows:
>>
>>     Mu: &micro;
>>     Degree: &deg;
>>
>> This is a little better than the use of the table at the bottom of  
>> the form.
>>
>> An alternative that isn't any shorter than the above expression  
>> would be by
>> using an extension I modified:
>>
>>     {{deg:}} or {{mu:}}
>>
>> I've enabled this via an extension in beta. It's pretty clumsy.  
>> Using this
>> method, we can add any tags of interest. But it's pretty ugly.
>>
>> The curly braces tell the parser this is a parser extension, while  
>> the ":"
>> is present to allow arguments to be appended.
>>
>> It's possible to make this more compact if needed, but this is what's
>> immediately possible,
>>
>> We can directly augment the parser if needed if you need a more  
>> compact way
>> to label either of them.
>>
>> If anyone else has suggestions, let me know.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 10, 2007 5:01 PM, Tom Knight < tk at csail.mit.edu> wrote:
>>> On our pages, the micro (mu) and degree sign are so common that I
>>> think they deserve special attention.  I don't have a clear idea of
>>> what to do, but this feature (for me) does not help. It's easier to
>>> type &mu; and &deg;
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Nov 10, 2007, at 4:23 PM, Bill Flanagan wrote:
>>>
>>>> We've added a feature to help displaying special characters and
>>>> character string to OpenWetWare documents. If you've used this
>>>> feature in Wikipedia, it now works exactly the same in OpenWetWare.
>>>>
>>>> When you edit any page or choose to download a new file,
>>>> OpenWetWare will now display a list of characters and tags at the
>>>> base of the page. By clicking on any of these characters or tags,
>>>> the ascii code will be inserted into the page being edited at the
>>>> current cursor location.
>>>>
>>>> The range of special sequences includes the following:
>>>>
>>>> MediaWiki Markup
>>>> Greek
>>>> Cyrillic
>>>> Other special characters.
>>>>
>>>> All of the current special tags supported by OpenWetWare will be
>>>> included in the list.
>>>>
>>>> If there are special vocabularies or character sets anyone wants
>>>> add to this list, please consult with me. We can add them quickly.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>>
>>>> Bill Flanagan
>>>> OpenWetWare.org
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> sc at openwetware.org
>>>> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/oww-sc
>>>
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>>
>>
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