FIRSTwiki:Village pump/Archive 4

From FIRSTwiki

FLL/Vex pages

There are a great magnitude of pages that need to be done in relation to FLL and Vex. Finding a naming system for them is so great that I am beginning to wonder if we should set up subdomains for each of them (eg, fll.firstwiki.org and vex.firstwiki.org). My head is beginning to burst at the size of the task. (three sets of team numbers, three sets of events, three sets of awards, etc.) so have 1, 1 (FLL), and 1 (Vex)? Or like 1, FLL:1, and Vex:1? (FLL team numbers exceed 6000)

I'm currently using the system that Vex and FLL pages have the same name as their FRC counterpart, but have " (FLL)" or " (Vex)" appended to them. --Astronouth7303 21:37, 23 Apr 2005 (EDT)

I'm an FLL coach (first time doing a wiki page though) so interested in how the FLL sections will shape up. I'd love to help shape the way the FLL sections will look.

So "first" and most important. Team numbers in FLL are not frozen so every year a team has a different number. Therefore, not sure it is wise to make the team number the primary identifier/navigator for FLL pages. If I'm a coach or FLLer looking for another team's page I would most likely look first by State (or country), then by team name.

There are some wrinkles here though.

• Many FLL teams have traditionally changed their team name from year to year to match the competition theme.
• On the other hand the more experienced teams are keeping their names from year to year to enhance name recognition.
• There are a significant and quickly growing number of international teams
• Most likely only a very small percentage of teams would create pages on FIRST Wiki (in my opinion)

So my question is how to edit the pages to make it easy to "browse" FLL teams by state/country, but recognize that a team name search will most likely be the way someone would look for a team first. If there is no objection I'd be happy to take a stab at starting my state of CT and create a page for my team to get things going. Once there is clarity on how the FLL sections might look I can definitely help advertise this to some of the more experienced teams (the ones that have websites already or attended the World Festival just passed)PeterFll 09:26, 13 May 2005 (EDT)

Hmm. That's not good. Basically, there is no static way of identifying an FLL team?

States are pretty easy to do automagically. Category:FLL team/Michigan, in my case.

At this point, it may be worth coming up with a new system for FLL, eg FLL:2005/1 (for team #1 in 2005)

I seriously hope that Vex is not as nuts. --Astronouth7303 16:06, 13 May 2005 (EDT)

I would say Astronouth's suggestion is good, except as I have said before, I don't think it makes sense to confuse people with these mock name spaces. "FLL 2005/1" is better. Additionally, I would say it would be preferred to have the content on the latest year, so each year, a team can move the page (say from "FLL 2005/1" to "FLL 2006/720") and that way the old page will always redirect . --Max [1257] 16:31, 13 May 2005 (EDT)

I'm back (apparently my log in works at least for now). I have to be blunt and say I don't think FLL coaches will use their team numbers at all in defining pages. There were a lot of kids I met who didn't even know their team number. There is just no particular reason for them to.

I've been giving this a lot of thought. I went over to Wikipedia and started clicking the Random Page link a lot. I didn't notice that anyone was using any kind of naming convention for their pages other than that the name of the page was exactly what the title of the page was. Given that wiki is a totally open system where anyone can create any page they want at any time (at least in theory) I think any kind of naming convention that is not totally intuitive and extremely well accepted will fail. So for example, with FRC teams I think the team number is constant and well known so I think that will fly. For FLL, I think you won't be able to enforce anything other than team name as that is all that is static. I would suggest that you encourage FLL teams to just use their team name, but encourage them to add their team page link to the appropriate Index pages (Index of teams by state, by name alpha, by category, etc.). Of course this raises the specter of page name conflicts (where two teams want the same name). But this same issue occurs commonly on Wikipedia as well so perhaps it is wise to take a cue from them. They have an official policy regarding disambiguation at Wikipedia:Disambiguation. So if two teams wanted the same page name there would be two options...

1. The second team could just create a new page with slightly different name.
2. If the team name is an acronym then the teams could expand the acronyms to avoid ambiguity.
3. One of the authors could move the original page to a new page with state qualifier in the name, then create a new page that lists the teams that have the same name. If you refer to the Wikipedia:Disambiguation article this would be called creating an "Equal" disambiguation page.

A clarifying example may help. I'll use my team name as an example. Our team name is S.M.A.R.T. I could just create a page SMART, add it to the appropriate indexes and categories(index of fll teams by state under CT, index of fll teams by year founded, Category FLLTeam or whatever). Now let's say there is another SMART Team from Wisconsin. When they try to go to create a page SMART they'll find my page. At this point there are a couple of options. If both of our team names are acronyms we could agree to use the full acronym. If that is not the case (or we both prefer not to expand the acronym) then we could follow the Wikipedia disambiguation guidelines. We would create an unambiguous page for each team (maybe SMART CT and SMART WI), then make the SMART page a disambiguation page that links to both of our team pages. The "first" team to have the name SMART would need to do the extra work to update the pages that link to their page, but this is relatively straightforward using the "What Links to This Page" link. PeterFll 08:45, 16 May 2005 (EDT)

Names will certainly work. I was trying to avoid some problems but its entirely a non issue if teams do not use their number. What about identifying FLL team pages as such? Append or prepend an "FLL" somehow? Perhaps for FLL it is not a very large issue, but it appears Vex teams are using their numbers as FRC teams do. --Max [1257] 13:49, 16 May 2005 (EDT)

Max, I'm not sure FLL as an append or prepend will help. It would probably just confuse. I think making sure FLL team pages are added to the appropriate categories would be the thing to do. Categories would of course be the place where it would be critical to identify FLL. I'm thinking Index of FLL Teams by State, Index of FLL Teams by Name, Index of FLL Teams by Year/Team Number (optional for those who want to be found by number as well). I'll set up some FLL stuff and use my current team as an example. It anyone objects of course it won't be hard to change :-) --PeterFll 19:48, 16 May 2005 (EDT)

The naming thing should work. He's my ideas on the details:

• Use the most "official" version of the name (redirects from other versions, appropriately, is ok).
• In case of conflict, the page [[Name]] becomes a disambiguation page, and each team appends their state and/or country (?) to the title, eg, [[Name (State 1)]] and [[Name (State 2)]].
• For an FLL indicator use this:
  • Part of the FLL category.
  • (Future) Within the FLL subwiki.
• [[Name (FLL)]] should redirect to [[Name]], unless below.
• If an FLL team name conflicts with an FRC or generic FIRST page, the current page takes the name, a notice is placed at the top of it, and the team page is moved to [[Name (FLL)]].

Comments? Questions? Concerns? --Astronouth7303 20:35, 17 May 2005 (EDT)

User Support

Probably not the best place for this, but I was looking for a place to post a generic question (actually a problem) using FirstWiki and couldn't find an appropriate place to put it. I see a User Questions section, but this is all FAQs. I don't see a page to just ask questions. Wouldn't that be a logical thing to have to cull FAQs from? Anyway, this is user:PeterFLL, but I'm having a couple of weird problems. First is I can't log in at all (it says I don't exist). Second when I try to access the User page I created at User:PeterFLL sometimes I see it and sometimes I don't. User Astronouth has even posted a comment on the discussion page of my user page. At one point I could see that comment on my discussion page, but the user page itself said "this page hasn't been created" yet. All very inconsistent. Again, apologies for posting this here, but I'm eager to get cracking, and wanted to make sure any edits I do are as a user rather than anonymous. I'm also thinking if there is a bug with the User features that would be something that should be ironed out before there are a lot of users. I'm using most up to date XP and IE, cookies are on, and FirstWiki is in my trusted sites group so don't think it is a browser issue.

I added something to FIRSTwiki:User questions telling users taht they can post questions there. We can later move any questions deemed FAQ-worthy to an appropriate FAQ page. I'm surprised there was never any procedure for asking questions before, thank you Peter. --Max [1257] 14:00, 16 May 2005 (EDT)