marking hoax articles, and tinWiki visual styles

William One Sac,

Hello, I have some further thoughts and so am here posting a longer reply to the conversation begun at my talk page. When I read your reply, I had a thought that came from something I saw on a page that was bumped, so to speak, by a vandal today. You see that page has a fairly rare banner on it called Contentarchive. Its design is something I have noticed before, both when I have seen that banner and also on some tables (that I haven't been able to find again recently when looking for them). On a side note, I didn't know about banners/Templates earlier and so now when I found out this one is indeed a banner, or Template if you will, I added it to the list.

The idea of the Contentarchive banner/Template seems to be to deliver a message about an article, a somewhat different thing from for example what the Stub and Fix banners do. Looking at it now to make sure, I see that the Contentarchive banner does indeed not, for example, add to any Category the pages it appears on. In case it might help in some process of clarifying article types and how that might determine some need for two different types of notification/banner, I wanted to give my interpretation of your two categorizations of hoax related articles:

1. Articles that purport to convey real information, but whose topic is suspected to be bogus (not necessarily meaning the article writer just made it up, but that a commonly known topic is suspected to really be based on a hoax)
   
2. Articles that talk about a topic from the point of view that the topic is in fact a hoax. My illustration again of such an article's introduction: "Confessions of an Area 51 Employee is a well-known UFO related hoax"...

About the visual style of the Contentarchive banner and those few tables I'm talking about, I am thinking that perhaps that is a part of the appearance which it has been chosen should be tinWiki's "look". If so, and that it isn't more random or such, then perhaps it could be good to take that visual style into account, together with the other visual styles that are used in various places in tinWiki, when creating new elements of the website. (I personally have for example thought that the red and white table style, which as I mentioned I have come across a few times in the past looking at tinWiki pages, could be a candidate to model a possible new Community page after, as far as tables, if it were to have tables on it.) Concerning visual look and such, that is of course a useful tool for making the site more recognizable as far as its visual "identity", and also to set it more clearly apart from other wikis.

Anyway, this is just some thoughts I'm "throwing out there".

Optimist



P.S.

I think I know what you referring to (Bill Ryan), I saw something similar on ATS' front page (?) a while back about some person who were writing emails to someone but then stopped, and some ATS people made a similar sounding e-mail address and then started sending e-mails to the same person who had received the original e-mails from the anonymous person, where the whole point of the ATS people who made the fake, similar sounding e-mail address, was to for some reason bring the person who had received the original e-mails -- and who had also served as spokesperson for the e-mails' content -- back out to relating to the public. Anyway, that's just what I thought you were referring to, but like you say it's not too important. Except, of course, for what it teaches us, so to say, that it might be easy to find info on it if there is made a tinWiki page category called Hoax. :-)

reply to post by Optimist

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Optimist, those are some interesting ideas you have there. The idea of changing the template is indeed an interesting one, to reflect the tables you mentioned. As for the content archive temlate, I have been very hesitant to use those on the pages that were created from the above top secret content archive source. The reason being is that, being a wiki, if those pages have information added to them, or are edited, they really are no linger ats archive articles. A good example of this is (I think) is the aurora page. As for the community portal page, I will contact Skeptic Overlord and ask him if he can redirect the redirect for us, so that we can make an improvement there.

It took me a while to realize what you meant, but now I think you are talking about template in the sense a general visual style of the entire tinWiki website. I definitely think the overall "look" or visual style in this sense is worth at least considering, that is, if it was indeed in that sense you thought I was using the word "template". Actually I hadn't thought that far and was referring only to how the pages for the Stub banner, the Fix banner, the Today code and other pages of that type are named "Template:" and with the rest of the name following.

But I none the less agree totally that all aspects of the website, like for example the overall visual style, deserve consideration that maybe haven't been analyzed or such already. Of course that doesn't mean all things need to necessarily be changed, like to change it just to change it. (Obviously, tinWiki has many things that work well as they are right now.)

There were several interesting things in your reply, for example what you explained about the content archive pages. I'm still not sure I understand all of it, but if the case is that some pages are supposed to be fixed or have static content to serve an archive function, then certainly I can see how that can seem to deviate from the general idea as far as information content articles in tinWiki. I do consider that it should be a natural part of an encyclopedia wiki to have the possibility of updating and editing articles. (Some pages are naturally restricted -- but those are most often like help and guideline pages and such, as opposed to encyclopedia article pages.)

Looking at the Contentarchive banner right now, it says, "This article is part of the AboveTopSecret.com content archive. It has been copied from the archive and integrated within the tinWiki Project." If that means it should be left alone to remain in its current state, then I feel the pages should be locked to protect against normal editing. If they are however not supposed to necessarily remain in their current state, then I wonder if perhaps the banner is somewhat superfluous and could be replaced with a simple link in a References links section or something like that, since the only thing "special" about the page is that its first version was pasted from some other part, so to speak, of ATS. This is however just my immediate thought right now as I'm typing this.

By the way, I happened to find one of the tables I have mentioned, I mean those that have the same color scheme as the Contentarchive banner, with the red color and white font. The table turns out to be found on a common page, Greys.

Anyway, I think it will be really great if it works out getting Skeptic Overlord to make the link allow a page set aside as Community portal . Definitely think such a page would become a really cool tool for both existing and also new users.

Optimist


edit:

P.S. I "discovered" that the table and the Contentarchive banner respectively don't have the exact same shade of red color. Anyway, I decided to use the red and white style for a little button like thing I have wanted to add to my signature. I made its red color graded between the two shades, the grading may not be easy to notice, though. Anyway, I'm sort of contributing a wee bit to identifying tinWiki with its currently maybe most distinctive visual style, then. Which I think is sort of nice in some way. :-)

[edit on 7-9-2007 by Optimist]

After I realized something obvious right now, I would sum up tinWiki's visual styles as follows:

• Grey elements (as on the front page)
  
• Red elements (as in the table here and in this banner)
  
• Icon styles are afaik currently only my adaptation seen here

Just wanted to try and make like an inventory regarding the topic of the visual aspect of the website. Thanks in advance for comments about anything I may have forgotten or am not aware of -- or on any other aspects of this topic.

Optimist


edit: fixed typo

[edit on 9-9-2007 by Optimist]