Infosphere:Conference Table/Old format

Creating this page for general discussion, outside of any specific page. Categorizing it as "Meta" even though its existence within the "FuturamaWiki" namespace should make that painfully obvious. This page is for discussing general policies or changes, mainly intended for admins/sysops, but I'll leave it open for everyone.

Templates
Even easier than copy/pasting, you just type in into the blank article and save. It creates the template you see for Amy now - and makes it editable, so you can insert items. Also includes comments to guide formatting and such. If the Wiki were 80% or even 50% complete I would agree that it is not worth the time, but doing it up-front can save us a lot of time going through pages trying to impose consistency later. Of course it's a moot point if we don't get more regular contributors than the two of us and some jackasses. :shrug:

By the way: Including the template in the article templates? Genius. Great idea.

Oh, stop, you're making me blush... :)

Using the Summary
Please be sure to use the "Summary" field when editing to indicate what you're changing. This allows everyone to know, just by checking the Recent Changes page. And if mistakes were made (or certain things were left blank) this allows users who may know about the subject to get to it quicker.

Standing Out
I assume everyone realises this, but there are other Futurama wikis out there. First off, there is a very excellent entry in the Wikipedia, as well as a Futurama Wiki hosted on Wikicities. The Wikipedia entry, while great, does not delve into nearly as much detail as we are here. The Wikicities Futurama page has only slightly more articles than we do, and they are generally much shorter and less detail-rich than ours. So in spite of there being other Futurama Wikis, we definately need to keep working on this one. However, because of this "competition," I suggest that we need a name for the wiki, other than "Futurama Wiki." Something that specifically and uniquely identifies our Wiki. Reactions, suggestions?

If only I had known! At this point it'd be a pain (but not impossible) to change the name. I did a google and didn't come up with any other Wikis. Now I'm sad. I thought this was the first. However, you bring up a point I was going to mention, but I didn't know where until now: WikiPedia by definition is free to copy. Therefore, if you think one of their Futurama articles is good, you can copy it straight here with minor (or no) edits, if you want to. As for what we could call ours otherwise? Um... Nothing clever springs to mind. Just stupid stuff like "FuturamaPedia" or "WikiRama"

Got an idea that I like: "The Infosphere"?

That's a good one, but if we pick something that doesn't have "Futurama" in the title, we should subtitle it like "The Infosphere: A Futurama Wiki" - Just to keep it clear what it's all about (plus, the infosphere is a bit esoteric).

Actually, in terms of search engines, all we need to stand out is top-notch content. Looking at the WikiCities one, we already have more (or at least equal) content. So when people search for "Nibbler" -- We'll outrank them anyway.

A good point. "The Infosphere: A Futurama Wiki" or "The Futurama Infosphere" would work for names. And as for distinguishing ourselves on content, to that end it's important not only to have a lot of information, but well-formatted pages with lots of pictures. It should be our goal to have at least one picture on every page. They don't have to be unique pictures, nessicarily - a picture of the Neutral President might be used on both his page and the Neutral People page, for example - but having pictures of everything we have articles about would greatly increase both the appeal of the wiki and it's usefulness as a resource. I'm gonna have to get a DVD player that lets me take good screenshots sometime, as the number of screenshot requests is going up fast...

Alien Language Sigs
Just FYI, I have the AL1 (and AL2) font, so I can make you guys new sigs of the correct size (without having to shrink them) and whatever colours you want. Or even the AL1 as a light background with the Roman/Latin letters up front. Let me know.

I have it to, that's how I originally made it; the reason I scaled it down was because it was quicker than re-capturing one from the font. Proof: Used it to make this

Redirects
I've created a redirect for Bender - The main purpose for redirects would be so casual fans who might only know a character's familiar name can go right to the desired page. Enter "Bender" in the searchbox to see what I mean. I won't create more until we reach an agreement. Alternatively, search for "Fry" to see the search results, and see if redirects would be wise.

Of course, the downside is that it makes it harder to find pages which mention Bender, because now you can't search for "Bender" ... so if we use redirects, it'd be quite a tradeoff.

Hmm? I just searched for bender and clicked "Search"... it worked fine, pulled up a whole list? First entry was the article "Bender Bending Rodriguez" separated because it had Bender in the title and not just in the body. Same thing with Fry. So I don't see the value as far as searching goes, unless a character goes by a nickname that is completely different from their real name. Personally I like typing out the whole names in links as well, because it appears when you hover, but redirects to allow people who don't like typing Farnsworth instead of Farnsworth the redirects-as-shortcuts would be fine with me. Also makes it likely that a casual contributor would make working links in their pages that wouldn't create useless extra pages. So I have no objection to setting them up for the principle characters, and possibly for the "merged character" articles (like Leo and Inez Wong, with redirects from Leo Wong and Inez Wong)

Oho! The whole time I didn't realize there was a Go and a Search button! So, I guess redirects can be set up by whoever needs 'em. If they're needed. But I won't bother...