Revision as of 16:46, 28 August 2008

Welcome to The Bunker! This page is for discussion about the BoC Wiki itself: policies, structures, rules, ideas, suggestions, etc. This page is inspired by Wikipedia's Village Pump, which serves a similar purpose there.

Introductions

Hello, I'm Moebius. I am also on WATMM and Twoism (with the same username) as well as the Yahoo! group (as pimlottc). I first heard BoC around early 1997 and have been a strong fan since MHtRtC. My wiki background comes from using Wikipedia, where I try to keep the BoC pages under control (also as pimlottc). I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I would love for the BoC wiki to one day become the most comprehensive repository of all things BoC. Moebius 20:25, 31 August 2006 (CEST)

Hi there, I'm Fredd-E. I'm active on WATMM, Twoism, xltronic and slsk (username: Fredd-E) as well as the Yahoo! group (username: freddd_e) and YouTube (username: Yawg81). I discovered BoC when Geogaddi came out and I am still deeply intrigued by the mysterious depth of their music. As you all know I'm also the new maintainer of the former davidac boc pages.Fredd-E 11:16, 2 September 2006 (CEST)

Formatting

I come from Wikipedia, so I am used to many of the ways they do things. In general, I think we should follow their guidelines in terms of style and formatting. In particular, WikiProject Music (and sub projects for albums and songs) has some good guidelines for how to format albums, songs, track listings, etc. In general:

• Album titles goes in italics: Music Has the Right to Children, Trans Canada Highway
• Song titles go in "quotes": "Roygbiv", "Farewell Fire", "Chinook"

Take a look at those guidelines. If we can all agree with them, I think we should make them standard for the wiki. Moebius 20:36, 31 August 2006 (CEST)

I couldn't agree more because I do like structure and uniformness a lot as well.

I've begun fashioning my pages after Kaini's excellent "You Could Feel the Sky" article. This has more to do with organization than formatting issues, but I like the look of his page, and I feel a certain uniformity will keep the wiki professional-looking and navigable. Any problems with this approach? thedisavowed 20:48, 16 January 2008 (CEST)

I agree that this formatting approach seems optimum. However, I would like to suggest adding

a section for technical references, as well as cultural. Also, it may be best to include

basic track information at the top of the page, such as the release it appeared on and track

length. See my page on Chromakey Dreamcoat for an example. Skytree 3:48 PM,

07 March 2008 (CST)

To Do

feel free to add, but also, feel free to remove items as they're completed

Main Page/Structure

We don't have a very good Main Page yet; since we're lacking a decent navigable structure, I just added a link to Special:Allpages. Moebius 20:44, 31 August 2006 (CEST)

Help pages

One thing we could use is some help pages, many of the mediawiki meta-pages like help are just blank by default. I put some content into Help:Editing from meta.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia also has a pretty good tutorial for new users we should link to, it's pretty general and not too heavy on Wikipedia-specific stuff. Moebius 21:08, 31 August 2006 (CEST)

Thanks, I enjoyed reading this and it was very helpful as well. Fredd-E 00:41, 1 September 2006 (CEST)

this is my forte; i've written most of the help pages on lostpedia. i'll get stuck into this given time. --{[User:Kaini/sig}} 05:49, 3 September 2006 (CEST)

Uploads

Is it possible that we can enable image and other file (audio clips, dcr/flash) uploads? Moebius 23:14, 31 August 2006 (CEST)

This is impossible due to php safety restrictions on the narfum webserver. I tried enabling it but I got the following error: open_basedir restriction in effect. I contacted my host and he said this will not be resolved because the PHP setup on narfum.org has been set to strict safety and as such this is disabled. Fredd-E 00:23, 1 September 2006 (CEST)

Hmm, then maybe we can find some stable web space outside the wiki to upload items for inclusion in the pages. But still, I'm not sure Mediawiki supposed external images as well as it does internal ones (i.e. for thumbnailing and such). Moebius 05:44, 1 September 2006 (CEST)

I'm very fond of imageshack. And external images work on this mediawiki installation; you just have to put the url to the image without any brackets. It can only be shown in actual size though; no thumbnails. See more info here or an uploaded example here based on a imageshack uploaded picture. Fredd-E 12:15, 1 September 2006 (CEST)

It's a bit of a pain to have to manually link thumbnails to full sized images. And I would be much more comfortable with having the images in a place one of us controls, rather than a web site that could disappear one day. Besides, what if the wiki gets ultra-popular and we use up all their bandwidth? :) I suppose in the short term, though, that will work for images.

Agreed, no thumbnails is a pain. i still have wikia's approval though... if the site gets big enough, moving it there remains an open option. but i like here, it's a good place to grow the wiki. --kaini 05:52, 3 September 2006 (CEST)

But that still leaves us in the lurch for audio, video, special files (swf/dcr). YouTube is okay for some things but the quality sucks. Sites like megaupload/yousendit are just annoying as hell.Moebius 15:47, 1 September 2006 (CEST)

Some policy stuff

At the moment every track on every album page is a wikilink; looking at it realistically, not every track deserves an article. with most tracks, the page is at worst gonna be an infobox, and at best, a one-liner. therefore i propose we restrict track articles to those with lyrics or with notable information (examples: 1969 deserves an article because it has lyrics and some nice cultural references. Aquarius deserves an article because we can mention the connections with the musical Hair, and there's a nice article on religious/hippy/acid connotations there. but Ready Let's Go, or Into the Rainbow Vein? imho, if there were articles on those, they would remain eternally stubs. --{[User:Kaini/sig}} 04:33, 3 September 2006 (CEST)

Yes but we've agreed at the Formatting section that we put the song titles in quotes and make an article of it. You never know what someone is able to find about any given track. And we need to put all the tracks like this because of the consistency. It's too hard to decide which tracks deserve to have a link and which don't; that's too subjective imho. Fredd-E 09:07, 3 September 2006 (CEST)

I don't see why there isn't material for every song, or at least most songs. Take a look at Fredd's existing pages about comments and lyrics, there's something there nearly every track. If we don't have a page for individual songs, those are going to go into the album pages and they'll start to get really long. This way we can have a clean seperation between comments on tracks and comments on albums as a whole. And even if some songs remain eternal red links or stubs, what's the problem with this? At the least, it's a consistent way to do things, and if in the future there is something to add for one of these tracks, having it linked is a good hint to a contributor of where the comment should go. Moebius 15:51, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

Various

• Create all release pages
• Put a good redirect system in place
• Allow external linking

External linking (and interwiki linking has always been enabled. You just can't post external links which are listed on the blacklist from my spamblacklist extension. If a good link gets blocked you can add it to the whitelist so it will get allowed by the spamfilter. Fredd-E 09:31, 2 September 2006 (CEST)

Songs or tracks?

Should we use the term songs or tracks? Songs is usually the general term used for most music, and is the term Wikipedia uses, but it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense for BoC, since there isn't really singing in any of them. Moebius 16:05, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

I think they can be interchangeable. What do you think, Fredd? --Thedisavowed 16:16, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

Within the text of article, yes, it doesn't matter. But I mean more in terms of categories, infoboxes, articles names, etc. Here we should pick one and be consistent about it. Moebius 16:33, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

I'm okay with either Tracks or Tracklisting. For now I've edited it all to Tracks due to consistency. Fredd-E 23:47, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

But uhm Tracklisting isn't correct English so I guess we better stick to Tracks then ;-) Fredd-E 23:48, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

Interview pages

Given the number of references already to different interviews, and the anticipation of many more, I think it would make sense to actually have the contents of the interviews on this wiki. As a start, I've created a page for the Forcefield interview - "A Bunker Full of Memories". I also created a redirect at Forcefield 1998 as an easy way of citing this interview in other articles. See, for example, "The Color of the Fire". Take a look at it and let me know what you think about the formatting and such, so can establish a style for the rest of the interviews. Moebius 18:20, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

I think it's a good idea EXCEPT that I prefer the formatting on Fredd-E's pages (i.e. bolding the question asked, etc. It's easier to read. But other than that, yeah, let's make this wiki the mecca of BoC info. --Thedisavowed 20:48, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

Well, we can play with the formatting, but one thing to keep in mind is that not all of the interviews are in q/a format. Some are more free-form essays with quotes thrown in at appropriate times. I put all the questions in {{question}}

and the quotes from BoC in {{boc}}

, so we can play with those templates to change the formatting around. Moebius 21:28, 4 September 2006 (CEST)

I also prefer the format I've used on my page but I also understand Moebius his point about that not everything is in q/a format. It's also a good thing you've created a template Moebius so we can format the interviews; if all the content of the interviews is going to be on the wiki then we should really use that format template (it's the same I used on the pages btw; with div classes).

Possible redundancy?

We're adding so much to the wiki nowadays, don't you think the actual pages will get redundant soon? And what about the Boards of Canada page on the English wikipedia? Why don't we incorporate all the info from there on this wiki as well? Fredd-E 11:59, 5 September 2006 (CEST)

I've been including the information on Wikipedia proper in the articles I've written so far. I've tried to make the articles as exhaustive as possible. It's very possible that the old Fredd-E pages could become redundant at the rate we're going, but we have far from exhausted what they have to offer. We'll have to see how it goes down the road. --Thedisavowed 14:12, 5 September 2006 (CEST)

Well, anyway it turns out to be I'll definitely keep the php boc pages as well. Some people still prefer that and I still like them so I'm not going to delete them or anything but expanding the wiki is of course a great thing to do as well. Let's just keep them both in order ;-) Fredd-E 16:25, 5 September 2006 (CEST)

ParserFunctions

Fredd, could you please install the ParserFunctions extension? It adds some useful functionality for templates, especially the #if function. Moebius 17:02, 26 July 2007 (CEST)