Talk:Old Main Page

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Dutch translation

@ Orkie: Seeing as The Netherlands has a GP2X community too (and (although) indirectly, Pandora), it might be useful to add a link to it. I'm even willing to do (some) Dutch translations for the Wiki. ;) --SharQueDo 11:57, 17 April 2008 (CEST)

Sure, I'll do it when I get chance. Orkie 20:23, 17 April 2008 (CEST)

Finnish translation

I would like to do a finnish translation of the page, I just need you guys to link the main page to http://pandorawiki.org/Fi:Main_page and create the finlands flag symbol.

Great, same as above. I'll dig out a flag icon and set up a new category later today. Orkie 20:23, 17 April 2008 (CEST)

I think I will have time to start the translation project in Sunday and I will be working on it for some time. For starters I will be translating about pandora and Faq, but I will also add thinks that finnish people always ask me to faq. I plan to update as the english version updates and add stuff in the user category, in the developer category I will just put links to the english versions because you just have to know english to do that stuff. (besides, I don't think that I'm the right person to translate developer stuff) Gaeryc 21:45, 17 April 2008 (CEST)

Icelandic translation

i have translated the Main Page in to icelandic

http://pandorawiki.org/Is:Main_Page --Andri12 06:58, 20 April 2008 (CEST)

Spanish Translation

Anybody working on this?
If not, what dialect should it be in? (I can only do some of the Latin American dialects, not much of any Spain/Castillian) You may consider having two namespaces: one for the European dialect (Es:) and one for Latin American dialect (La:)
Nat1192 02:11, 1 October 2008 (CEST)

French translation

There was already a basic French page. I'm slowly updating it and a bunch of other pages. KodeIn 21:38, 23 January 2011 (MET)

Allow editing

Please allow all established users to edit this page. The requests are completely backlogged, and the front page is getting more and more outdated. Esn 08:24, 5 July 2010 (MEST)

Thank you for updating it, EvilDragon. Esn 12:13, 15 July 2010 (MEST)

Just a thought... we could make templates for the different sections to this page (About Pandora, links, user links, dev links) and then have this page use those templates. That would mean any logged in user could edit it, which is slightly dangerous for reasons of spam but does make it so it can be edited by everyone, they just couldn't get at the layout of the page. --Cheese 09:11, 20 July 2010 (MEST)

Or just add a couple of users as explicit editors. The template suggestion seems OK, since anyone could revert spam, but we don't have 24/7 coverage of recent changes.--Tsh 12:19, 20 July 2010 (MEST)

I agree that would be the best choice, but ED is the only active admin and I don't think he's familiar enough administering a wiki or he would have done it already, that or he's too busy. I've gone ahead with the template idea and sent him an updated main page, it should be up within a day or two. Hopefully the spammers won't realize they can now access part of the main page and start spamming like crazy. --Cheese 07:37, 21 July 2010 (MEST)

Will X Run on the Pandora?

We have an article with this name. http://pandorawiki.org/Will_X_run_on_the_Pandora%3F It really SHOULD be added to the main page, under Users. It's begging to be used more often! I've already put it on the Port Requests page.

Blue Protoman 22:49, 22 January 2011 (MET)BlueProtoman

The main page uses templates to bring in the links, so we don't need admins to update it. See (or edit): Template:MainPageUsersLinks. Feel free to add it there if no one objects to it. --Cheese 04:00, 23 January 2011 (MET)

Wow... I had no idea. Thanks a bunch, Cheese. The Will_X_run_on_the_Pandora? article is quite rough at the moment though, so I don't know... Esn 04:45, 23 January 2011 (MET)

Oh, I see that someone cleaned it up a bit so that it doesn't overlap with the software list articles. That was a good idea. Esn 04:48, 23 January 2011 (MET)

That was me. Also, I didn't know it ran off a template. If that's the case, I'll add the page now. Thanks. Blue Protoman 15:20, 23 January 2011 (MET)

Move Hardware hacking from Users to Developers ?

That's said--Linux-SWAT 19:14, 16 February 2011 (MET)

It has nothing to do with developers, though... i.e. I had to do some so-called "hardware hacking" as a user because my stylus was stuck when I got my unit. Also, DaveC is known for hardware hacking but is certainly not a developer. Esn 00:05, 20 February 2011 (MET)

Ok, so the french main page has to be changed--Linux-SWAT 00:40, 27 February 2011 (MET)

Wiki Translation tips

Anyone ?--Linux-SWAT 19:41, 16 February 2011 (MET)

What's your question? Esn 00:06, 20 February 2011 (MET)

I don't know how to proceed efficiently... Read a lot of wikis but never edited seriously :/--Linux-SWAT 00:39, 27 February 2011 (MET)

Maybe have several tabs open, one with the original page, one with the translated page that you're creating, one with Google Translate? Esn 23:19, 17 March 2011 (MET)

What happened to the logo?

Title. The logo's missing in favor of a placeholder, and I don't know why. Anyone care to explain? Blue Protoman 14:58, 17 March 2011 (MET)

ED updated to the latest MediaWiki and changed the captcha to something more complex at my request, to get rid of the constant spam problems that we've had the past few weeks. It seems to have worked, but the logo seems to have gotten lost in the process. He's understandably quite busy, but I hope that eventually he'll find some time to put it back in (I'd do it, but I suspect I don't have access to that part of the site - though I'm not entirely sure). Esn 23:17, 17 March 2011 (MET)

Instructions for setting a logo image are here. I don't think I have access to LocalSettings.php, though. Esn 23:24, 17 March 2011 (MET)

It's nice to see that we're running the newest version now, I didn't realize ED had access to the server. Yep, you need write access to the files on the server to change the logo URL, there's no way to set it from the admin interface. --Cheese 23:29, 17 March 2011 (MET)

Houston, we have a problem!

"Upload file" on the wiki no longer works. When I try, I get a message saying "The upload directory (public) is not writable by the webserver." I've notified ED about this. I hope he checks his PMs from time to time. Esn 07:26, 25 March 2011 (MET)

By the way, this is now fixed. And we have a logo again. :) Esn 06:14, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

Second Problem

Translation disappears !!! --Linux-SWAT 22:58, 6 April 2011 (MEST)

What? Where? Esn 07:47, 7 April 2011 (MEST)

Clicked on the french page to edit this and there like when i have time

http://pandorawiki.org/Fr:Main_Page gives Fr:Main Page There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or edit this page.

Clicking on some other flags gave the same answer :/ --Linux-SWAT 21:21, 8 April 2011 (MEST)

Bizarre. I'll have to ask EvilDragon about this... Esn 21:36, 8 April 2011 (MEST)

I also have to add that every contribution to the french page has been removed from my history... weird --Linux-SWAT 13:01, 9 April 2011 (MEST)

these pages have disappeared as well. I'm certain that they were there before the latest update, but now they're gone along with the edit histories. Esn 06:43, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

So do we have to start over again TT ? --Linux-SWAT 22:51, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

Let's give ED a while to see if he can figure out what went wrong, first... it's possible that he might be able to recover those pages. Esn 06:42, 23 April 2011 (MEST)

I would suggest to use the template:languages that adds a list of translations on top of the page. Due to a bug it doesn't hiddes all remaining languages, but this will work if we fix the wiki config --ABC 00:11, 23 April 2011 (MEST)

For my proposal about what the "languages" template should look like, please see the "Updating Mediawiki" thread below this one. Esn 06:43, 23 April 2011 (MEST)

At least some of the missing pages can be seen on Archive.org in the 2009 snapshot of the wiki. For example, here's the French-language main page. Maybe until someone figures out what happened (EvilDragon tried, but with no success so far), those can be used to reconstruct what was lost... Esn 08:23, 1 May 2011 (MEST)

Right to change the mainpage

Hi Orkie,

I would like to help to clean up the wiki and therefore outsource templates, reorder mainpage etc. Might you grant me the right to do so, please?

Orkie is no longer around, ABC. Neither is Chip. The only admins active now are myself and EvilDragon. Esn 05:20, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

You're free to improve the wiki of course, but please add a discussion topic in the relevant talk page before you decide to start on any radical changes that may be controversial and difficult to undo. This is better for all sides, because if you go in too rashly, you risk having all your work undone if someone heavily disagrees with what you propose. So if you have anything radical in mind, it might be better to start a "fork" page first (like this one), then if nobody objects it can be brought over to the main article.

By the way, what do you mean about "outsourcing templates"? And what specifically on the main page don't you like? Esn 06:12, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

Sorry was my fault, you already use templates so I could just do some little reordering. I would like to remove the language flags, I try to get template:languages working instead, which is checking if the pages have translations or not.

I understand your point of view, concerning critical edits. Currently I just do refactoring and reformatting so nothing that affects the content or structure to heavy. I guess a discussion would be necessary before renaming some of the pages.--ABC 09:37, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

Updating Mediawiki

Hi, are there any concerns on updating this instance to a more recent version? I'm always confused to have the searchbar at the left side without outocomplete and SVG is currently unsupported :/ --ABC 18:22, 19 April 2011 (MEST)

Well, I personally think the new look of Wikipedia is pretty ugly and inefficient, so I'm a fan of keeping the cosmetics as they are. ;) EvilDragon actually updated to the latest MediaWiki just recently to combat a spam problem that we had. It might've messed up a few other things, though (see discussion in the above topics). The SVG thing isn't that great, if true (I've never tried uploading an SVG file). Do you actually need SVG for something specific? Esn 06:08, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

Yes thats a big UI step, I see. But for me it's not that nice to switch between different styles. Anyway thats not that important :)

Yes SVG will allow everybody to upload and update schemes, diagrams etc. that would be static otherwise. It prevents to use a lot of material of the Creative Commons database that could be used using interwiki links. --ABC 09:37, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

Is anything happened on the SVG issue already? Sorry past weeks were busy --ABC 14:20, 11 May 2011 (MEST)

Ok template:langues worksbut it lacks the collapsing feature. This is done by template:hidden but I guess it seem to lack a few CSS definitions? Check it out at wikipedia --ABC 21:39, 20 April 2011 (MEST) --ABC 21:39, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

Please tell me what you're trying to do, as I don't really understand it. You're recently copied over a number of language-related templates from Wikipedia: Template:LanguageExistingEn, Template:LanguageLink, Template:LanguageExisting, Template:Languages. Are you trying to have the links to different languages be on the left column of the page, as is the case in Wikipedia? If so, it doesn't seem to be working. What you've done here is rather ugly. Please do any experiments on a test page rather than a functioning page that's in use. And no way are we EVER going to have more than a few languages, anyway, so it makes no sense to me to have so many redlinks... Esn 06:31, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

You are right, it would be better if I used a testpage only and not a productive one :/ Well yes I try to get a top menu working, that adapts to the language a page is translated for. For example [1]. The redlinks will disappear if the CSS/JS is extended and SVG is fixed. I guess the files were interwiki by wikicommons, if not i will add them, of course. Sorry if my action sometimes look a bit hectic, I promise to be more patient :) --ABC 07:32, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

Okay, thanks for explaining. I would prefer to handle different languages like they are on Wikipedia (as a sidebar) - although if that's not possible (or too much work), that language template is an acceptable alternative. If we end up using the language template, I think it should be present not on every single page, but only on the ones that are translated into at least one other language. Esn 07:44, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

Sure, that handling is up to us. But see, this would make it very easy to others to create translations. But I'm not a big fan of internationalization (for that a small community) due to the outdating of pages. --ABC 08:45, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

To be honest, I think those little flags that are currently on the main page look much nicer than the language template does in the link that you provided. If we end up using a top-of-the-page template for other languages, I'd rather have the flags than the language names. Esn 08:29, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

Again, if the templates are in use, it's up to us to change their representation layer Template:Languages/Interface. But yes flags seem to save space and look a bit sexier :) --ABC 08:45, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

Just trying to picture it here, I think the best option would be to have the links to different languages be on the right side of the page, like an infobox. So it might say "Translations of this page:" and then a few flags. That seems like a nice, clean way to do it. I think that's better than putting it over the entire top, because this way it doesn't hinder people who start reading from the top of the article. Esn 10:05, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

Not sure if that is a good argument as a lot of wikis I saw use a very similar template. Anyway if it works right we can change the design. --ABC 14:32, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

Well, here's a mockup of what I'm proposing. It's pretty similar to what those other wikis use; I just think it looks less ugly. The "add a translation" link could go to an instruction page that says: "if you want to add a translation, find the two-letter code of your language, and make a page with that code in front of it". Or maybe instead of "add a translation", it could say "missing languages" as it does on the example you linked.

Anyway... so how is that template supposed to automatically recognize which pages are translated? Does it look for whether there's a page with the same title with a two-letter language code in front of it? But some pages will have different titles in different languages - I'm not sure how you could get around adding the languages in manually. Esn 05:58, 23 April 2011 (MEST)

Here's my second mockup. And once you click on "show missing languages", it will look like this. To be listed, a "missing language" must have a translation of the main page of this wiki. That seems like a good compromise to avoid listing hundreds of languages... Esn 06:38, 23 April 2011 (MEST)

They look awesome, but to be honest, I would expect this choice on the top of the page :/ With this nitty flags it doesn't consume to much space. The other great thing of the hidden languages is that you can add a translation to a page easily, that is missed in your mockups, right? --ABC 08:31, 24 April 2011 (MEST)

"that is missed in your mockups, right?" - nope, check out the second proposal. It's structured the same as the one you linked to, but with flags instead of language names and on the right side of the page instead of right at the top. I think it is better to have it on the right side so as not to distract most readers by being right at the top. Most readers will not be looking for other languages but to start reading the article. Also, if you look on various websites that are multilingual, the little flags to change languages are usually in the right-hand corner of the page, so this will be familiar. With the flags, as you said, it will take up very little horizontal space, so there is no reason to have it take up more space than is needed. Taking up ALL of the top horizontal space only makes sense if you're going to write out each language name in text, because that would take up too much vertical space if you kept it to the upper right. Esn 15:25, 26 April 2011 (MEST)

BTW I checked out, that you can change the skin already now to Vector, that is the new Mediawiki user interface everywhere. Douch, guess I should read the manual first ;) --ABC 19:00, 23 April 2011 (MEST)

ABC, I was wondering if you could give me a tip about Template:LanguageLink. Do you know how I would make it so that the two-letter language code would generate not the name of the language, but a certain flag? Esn 04:27, 27 April 2011 (MEST)

Over at OSM weuse this template [2] but this uses interwiki commons graphics that are SVG again :/ You might adapt it to your flags here, of course. --ABC 10:46, 27 April 2011 (MEST)

Goals of this wiki

Hi there, just a simple questions before I start any harder refactoring or contributing to this wiki. What are the main goals for this platform? What usecases do you spot on? How established is it within the pandora community?

Maybe we should make an IRC session focused on further plans on the wiki? --ABC 19:54, 23 April 2011 (MEST)

Well, I would prefer to keep such discussions in a place with a permanent record of what is posted. Also because many of the contributors contribute every so often, and I'd rather leave the discussion open to more eyes than have an intense IRC discussion of just a few people. If you'd like a wider discussion, you could start a topic in the GP32X Pandora general section... or we could keep it here and accept that it may not move as quickly as you'd like.

Now then, as for the goals: This wiki started out two three years ago largely because the Pandora team didn't have the time or the resources to put together a comprehensive user manual for the Pandora, so they decided to outsource the task to the community. Well, that actually happened a bit later, but it was a major project, anyway. These days, the wiki generally acts as a place where Pandora owners write down important things for reference. The sorts of things that would have gotten lost with the passage of time on the forums. The main activity happens on the forums, and the wiki is like the "long-term memory" of the community. Hence, the tutorials, the various tips and tricks that you see in different articles, hardware documentation, bug reports, and software lists. This is all here so that important things don't get forgotten just because they were done a long time ago. A lot of devs use it for the same reason, as a place to have an organized reference of the things they're working on. So in large part, the wiki is like a collection of what once would have been spread out on different sites - most articles were created mainly by one person.

My main task in bringing the disparate elements together into a structure I see like this: to make sure that all related articles are linked to each other, via wikilinks or categories. But I don't try to interfere in stylistic decisions much. A lot of it is "not my business", frankly, especially the dev articles. ;) If I, personally as a Pandora owner, care about the organization of a particular article, I'll make a case for changing it in the talk page, or do the changes right away if I'm pretty sure that they'll be uncontroversial. Esn 16:03, 26 April 2011 (MEST)

News bar?

Hi, what do you think about adding a newslist to the mainpage collecting all informations of the different forums and listing the official announcements? --ABC 08:34, 24 April 2011 (MEST)

Well, I don't really see the need for official announcements - we have the Pandora Stalker and PandoraPress for that. Who decides what is "official"? As for "community news", those are already collected on the three software lists. One can subscribe to the RSS feed of those articles and thereby keep abreast of the latest events - or simply check them once in a while and sort by date to see what you missed. As I said above, I think the wiki is more like the long-term-memory of the community; the reference library rather than the TV channel. It's hard work to keep it up-to-date as it is. Are you volunteering to keep the news up-to-date if we add a news bar? The development of the wiki rests largely on who's willing to do the developing. ;) Esn 16:31, 26 April 2011 (MEST)

Well updating is not the problem but to get the news. I'm not very excited about the currently very distributed communication infrastructure and so I think it might be a good chance to collect them at a single point so newbies doesn't have to checkout a lot of portals or semi official blogs...--ABC 19:32, 26 April 2011 (MEST)

So the question remains, who's going to keep it updated? If news is never updated, it is not news. So... what exactly are you proposing? Transcluding several RSS feeds from other sources? Perhaps using RSSmix to combine the most important places where news is posted? For example, the software projects edit history, PandoraPress, the Official blog, some Youtube channels? Esn 03:22, 27 April 2011 (MEST)

Yes but by a human filter/merger. The most Blogs publish the same informations that are mostly just the official news. So what about exchanging news between the boards that get filtered by priority? Well ok, I guess we pause the discussion here and see if the wiki might get more popular, then we can return on thinking on high frequency news ;) --ABC 10:42, 27 April 2011 (MEST)

Yep... the content is decided by who's willing to work on it. Not a lot of people are willing to work on something more than a small edit here and there (but even those can be very helpful). If anyone takes it into their heads to work on a big new project here, far be it from me to discourage them! I'll just make sure that what they're working on is connected to the rest of the wiki. But of course, it's often easier to start big projects than to maintain them. Esn 10:19, 29 April 2011 (MEST)

Full ack. I will take some time to think about this idea but currently there are more important task as merging the german wiki back to here, add new content and extend articles :) --ABC 10:37, 29 April 2011 (MEST)

Merging with german wiki

Hi, sorry for putting that much topics on your todo list, but I like to ask even here if you would give the german wiki users a warm welcome? AFAIK there is currently only one maintainer left, but their wiki is quite good organized and has some really interesting aspects (e.g. icons for buttons,...). To me it sounds wise to first cleanup our own articles and then merge both wikis and use this process to update all the articles --ABC 23:17, 25 April 2011 (MEST)

Hi there, I'm the last active editor of the German wiki. During the discussion (German) about how to best solve the problem of transferring the existing category system into a wiki with a different categorization one user brought up the idea of doing it like Wikipedia and have quasi-separate wikis that are linked through a language bar on the left of the screen. I previously discussed that solution with ABC and we came to the conclusion that we can't do it because it would probably be too much of an effort and we both didn't know how to do it anyway. Said user on the other hand (his name is T4b, let's call him that) offered to do exactly that. While that would make the job of transferring the German wiki to pandorawiki.org quite a bit easier it would mean a big change for the wiki as it exists, at least if you don't want to leave all the other languages in the English wiki (with prefixes). So what do you think? --Lockenlord 00:55, 30 April 2011 (MEST)

Well as said on the german page I would prefer one single wiki so we could keep images, templates,... together. But anyway if T4b can do this job I would accept it, of course. Everything that brings both wikis a bit clother is a tep in the right direction :) --ABC 14:18, 11 May 2011 (MEST)

Developer's Pandora

I once donated my Pandora to a waitlisted developer, and he created a page to document the stuff he does with it. I figure it might be worth linking from the main page since it is otherwise orphaned.--Matthias H (talk) 21:52, 10 April 2013 (CEST)