Several Sparse Spaces
Posted: Sun Jan 09, 2022 9:32 am
Well, it's been another week, and as usual, we haven't gotten as much done as we wanted on the Wongery—it's been kind of a busy time—, but, well, we did get some things done. We got another new article posted—varate. Well... new in the sense that it hasn't been posted before, but it's another article that was written some time ago (by Alarcus and has kind of been in our backlog. Also, I'm pretty sure it sets a record for the most redirects for any article so far... a record that I don't necessarily expect to be broken anytime soon. I'm not really sure all those redirects were strictly necessary, but I guess they're not hurting anything, so why not. And we've (well, in this case I've) expanded another old article—having expanded our first article, Dadauar, I figured I'd do the same for our second one. It's not quite as big an expansion—just under fivefold rather than eight"but it's still pretty significant.
There is one minor issue with the rewrite, though. In the expansion, I used a template that wasn't used in the original version of the article—Automatic taxobox. This is a template that, well, shows the taxonomic classification of living creatures, and it's one that I plan to use on every new article about a type of creature from here on out (and add to old articles as they're edited and expanded).
There's just one minor problem: that template doesn't currently exist on the Wongery, so right now there's just... a red line of text at the top of the article saying "Template: Automatic taxobox". For right now, of course, that doesn't really matter, since, well, nobody's visiting the site yet anyway and so nobody's going to see it. But of course it's yet another thing I'm going to have to take care of before the hard launch. It's not that I don't know—more or less—what's going to go there. Most of the templates on the Wongery so far were copied from Wikipedia (possibly with some simplifications and modifications), and this, well, it's not an exception; I'd planned to more or less copy the Automatic taxobox template from there. (With of course proper credit given to satisfy the licensing terms.) It's kind of a complicated template, though, and one that depends on other templates that also don't exist on the Wongery and so that I'd also have to copy over, and... well, it's a nontrivial task, and one I'll get to but haven't gotten to yet.
It's not just templates that need to be filled in outside the Wongery's mainspace, though. There are a lot of categories that need to be created, too. Right now, the Wanted Categories special page—which lists all the categories that pages are put into but that don't exist yet—shows 513 categories. That's a small fraction of the number of wanted pages—currently 7,597—but, well, it's still a significant amount of work that has to be done. In fact, really, while I'm okay with there being redlinks to pages, all the categories that are used should exist before the hard launch. The count isn't entirely accurate, because glancing over the list I see that there are some duplicates, some categories that should be the same but that I used different names for on different pages—like "summoned creatures of Curcalen" and "summoned life forms of Curcalen", and "planets of the SKE" and "planets of the Second Konabian Empire"—but even after taking out such repeats there are still about five hundred categories that need to be made, and... that's a lot. I mean, creating a category isn't nearly as much work as creating an article, of course, but it's not nothing.
Then there are still some pages in the project space that need to be made or edited, too. Not as many as the categories, but they'll be a lot more work. Heck, the project space pages that I linked to in this very post don't exist yet: Wongery:Categories, Wongery:Mainspace, Wongery:Project space, Wongery:Redlinks,Wongery:Template... Then other project space pages I've linked to elsewhere that don't exist yet include Wongery:Article, Wongery:Canon, Wongery:Central Wongery, Wongery:Contact, Wongery:Contributions, Wongery:Conventions, Wongery:Disambiguation, Wongery:Namespace, Wongery:Public Wongery, Wongery:Talk pages, Wongery:User pages...
Oh, right. At some point we'd been meaning to make user pages for ourselves, too.
So, anyway, we've got a lot of work ahead of us, I guess. The mainspace articles are the top priority... but there are a lot of other things that have to be done too.
So, uh, we're working on it.
There is one minor issue with the rewrite, though. In the expansion, I used a template that wasn't used in the original version of the article—Automatic taxobox. This is a template that, well, shows the taxonomic classification of living creatures, and it's one that I plan to use on every new article about a type of creature from here on out (and add to old articles as they're edited and expanded).
There's just one minor problem: that template doesn't currently exist on the Wongery, so right now there's just... a red line of text at the top of the article saying "Template: Automatic taxobox". For right now, of course, that doesn't really matter, since, well, nobody's visiting the site yet anyway and so nobody's going to see it. But of course it's yet another thing I'm going to have to take care of before the hard launch. It's not that I don't know—more or less—what's going to go there. Most of the templates on the Wongery so far were copied from Wikipedia (possibly with some simplifications and modifications), and this, well, it's not an exception; I'd planned to more or less copy the Automatic taxobox template from there. (With of course proper credit given to satisfy the licensing terms.) It's kind of a complicated template, though, and one that depends on other templates that also don't exist on the Wongery and so that I'd also have to copy over, and... well, it's a nontrivial task, and one I'll get to but haven't gotten to yet.
It's not just templates that need to be filled in outside the Wongery's mainspace, though. There are a lot of categories that need to be created, too. Right now, the Wanted Categories special page—which lists all the categories that pages are put into but that don't exist yet—shows 513 categories. That's a small fraction of the number of wanted pages—currently 7,597—but, well, it's still a significant amount of work that has to be done. In fact, really, while I'm okay with there being redlinks to pages, all the categories that are used should exist before the hard launch. The count isn't entirely accurate, because glancing over the list I see that there are some duplicates, some categories that should be the same but that I used different names for on different pages—like "summoned creatures of Curcalen" and "summoned life forms of Curcalen", and "planets of the SKE" and "planets of the Second Konabian Empire"—but even after taking out such repeats there are still about five hundred categories that need to be made, and... that's a lot. I mean, creating a category isn't nearly as much work as creating an article, of course, but it's not nothing.
Then there are still some pages in the project space that need to be made or edited, too. Not as many as the categories, but they'll be a lot more work. Heck, the project space pages that I linked to in this very post don't exist yet: Wongery:Categories, Wongery:Mainspace, Wongery:Project space, Wongery:Redlinks,Wongery:Template... Then other project space pages I've linked to elsewhere that don't exist yet include Wongery:Article, Wongery:Canon, Wongery:Central Wongery, Wongery:Contact, Wongery:Contributions, Wongery:Conventions, Wongery:Disambiguation, Wongery:Namespace, Wongery:Public Wongery, Wongery:Talk pages, Wongery:User pages...
Oh, right. At some point we'd been meaning to make user pages for ourselves, too.
So, anyway, we've got a lot of work ahead of us, I guess. The mainspace articles are the top priority... but there are a lot of other things that have to be done too.
So, uh, we're working on it.