Talk:Tips for contributing to the SVR Wiki
As of template
Further to the suggestion of using dates to show when things were updated, I see that Wikipedia mentions an 'as of' template, which apparently means you can then report all such dates to see if they need updating. Not being a template expert, can it be implemented here, and is it worth doing or is it overkill? --Robin (talk) 22:26, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
I liked the sound of this, especially as there are so many restoration projects which could potentially need regular updating, however as far as I can tell, it's unique to Wikipedia. I can't find any mention of it as an extension for Mediawiki. It may be possible to adapt it, but if so, it's beyond me. --Graham Phillips 110 (talk) 19:31, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
- Beyond me also - it should be possible to import the relevant template(s) but I can't begin to work out how. A slightly less elegant work around would be to use Category tags, eg when referring to something being current as of June 2015 then add at the bottom of the page 'Category:As of 2015-06' and so on. That would achieve the same result, and (I think!) if you add the magic HIDDENCAT word to the category page then it wouldn't display on the source page when browsing. Worth trying that way, or does anyone else want to try importing the templates first? --Robin (talk) 17:44, 18 June 2015 (UTC)
- I've given importing it a go, and I'm going to test. As of 18 June 2015[update] --WillSalt (talk) 20:19, 18 June 2015 (UTC)
- Right...that didn't really work. The latest version of the template available on MediaWiki depends on an extension we don't have installed - there may be versioning issues that I haven't investigated fully. I'm not going to try to unwind all of the import because of the risk I accidentally remove something that wasn't new to my import. I know it's clutter, but hopefully it won't cause any issues - let me know if you think it has. --WillSalt (talk) 20:41, 18 June 2015 (UTC)
Just a couple of thoughts now that the As of template is working.
There's a few cases where I think its use is redundant, describing a diagram as being in a signal box as of a specific date for example, when it is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. I'm not so sure about describing a carriage as being part of a set though. If no one updates the As of dates of those 50 or so carriages every month, the entries soon look out of date. I'd suggest leaving out the As of, just refer to them as part of a set, then try to update them as and when required to remove that reference when the carriage itself is taken out of service. --Graham Phillips 110 (talk) 09:27, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Order of article elements
I started reordering the "See also", "References" and "Links" headings on a couple of pages, when I thought I ought to check to see if there was an established standard. It turns out there is, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Layout and the correct order is;
- See also (with lower case "a")
- References
- Links
So I'll start gradually working my way through and altering pages to keep a consistent style. --Graham Phillips 110 (talk) 06:56, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Collapsible tables (or anything else)
Some of the tables in articles are getting to be quite long, so I looked up how to do that fancy expand/collapse stuff that Wikipedia et al. have. The answer is to add "mw-collapsible" to the class of the table (or whatever other feature); adding "mw-collapsed" will have the item collapsed when the page is open. For example, this bit of code:
{| class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
!Date!!Tour name !! Route !! Notes !! Web !!SVR News
|-
|29 Mar 1995|| || Bristol-Paignton + return || Test trip prior to summer season (Pete Waterman) || ||114-59
|-
|}
produces:
| Date | Tour name | Route | Notes | Web | SVR News |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Mar 1995 | Bristol-Paignton + return | Test trip prior to summer season (Pete Waterman) | 114-59 |
Full manual here --Danny252 (talk) 11:52, 1 July 2016 (UTC)