Both forums need an introduction

[Laird]

Should be working now, Max. See how you go (your username will be displayed on the wiki without the underscore, but that's just the way MediaWiki does things).

There are ways for us to monitor the page. One is simply to set a "watch" on it (e.g. by checking the "Watch this page" checkbox when editing the page or by manually editing it into your watchlist), which will inform the watching user of changes via email. Another is to monitor recent changes to the wiki via its RSS feed. Another is to simply check its Recent Changes page manually.


Go for it!

OK - I'll try to get back in a day or two. I'll write in HTML format, but if that isn't what wiki needs, it will be trivial to change, I hope.

David

[Laird]

OK - I'll try to get back in a day or two. I'll write in HTML format, but if that isn't what wiki needs, it will be trivial to change, I hope.

David

Yep, here's the markup that the MediaWiki software supports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext

[Laird]

Wait, that includes a bunch of stuff unique to Wikipedia, including various templates and syntax supported by extensions that aren't installed on our wiki. Better is this guide, which hopefully doesn't include anything unavailable on the PQ wiki installation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting

A while back, for another wiki, I developed a custom skin that supports this kind of thing, but it's kind of unwieldy and out of date (not mobile friendly), and I'm not sure it's such a good fit for our purposes. I'll share it just in case it sparks ideas: http://clc-wiki.net/.

Basically, it adds a treeview component to the left sidebar, and repurposes MediaWiki "redirects" to serve as "aliases", so that the same article can appear under multiple places in the treeview based on its aliases (although I'm not sure there are any examples of that in practice on that wiki at the moment - there are examples of aliases that don't appear more than once in the treeview though, e.g. http://clc-wiki.net/wiki/The_C_Standard).

The unwieldiness comes in because creating redirects is even more tedious than manually adding an item to a bunch of lists on our current Skeptiko Index wiki page.

Anyhow, as I said, it might spark some ideas.

Thanks for this. But I think I was perhaps getting a bit carried away with the tagging idea. A list of links classified by area and format (e.g. retrocognition and podcast) would be very useful, and I think your Skeptiko Index already contains a lot of material that could be included in it.

I have to say I see problems with a main page that pushes a particular line on psi, particularly if everyone here is entitled to edit it. I would prefer the site not to have a stated belief about psi - in the same way that the SPR doesn't have a corporate belief - but to be welcoming to everyone who is prepared to discuss the evidence, whatever conclusions they draw from it.

[Laird]

I have to say I see problems with a main page that pushes a particular line on psi, particularly if everyone here is entitled to edit it. I would prefer the site not to have a stated belief about psi - in the same way that the SPR doesn't have a corporate belief - but to be welcoming to everyone who is prepared to discuss the evidence, whatever conclusions they draw from it.

Hopefully David takes that on board in his draft. If not, we can discuss how to edit it either here or on the "Talk" page for the wiki article he creates.

I have to say I see problems with a main page that pushes a particular line on psi, particularly if everyone here is entitled to edit it. I would prefer the site not to have a stated belief about psi - in the same way that the SPR doesn't have a corporate belief - but to be welcoming to everyone who is prepared to discuss the evidence, whatever conclusions they draw from it.

I suggest that anyone who wishes should write an introduction without bothering at this stage about markup etc. The first phase is surely to have a quantity of decent text - maybe with placeholders for links. After that everyone can chew the text about and come up with the first version to go public.

I am very well aware that a number of people here don't like me all that much (to be blunt!) so I certainly don't want to be seen to take a leading role in this project.

I remain very cautious about the idea that anyone who is a member here will have the ability to edit the live wiki page. I would have thought that it would be better if those who want to contribute (myself included) would work offline, and submit the result to Laird or anyone else he nominates. Changing this site's front page is vastly different from adding a comment or starting a new thread.

David