The Wiki Fire talk:Formatting, Style, and Organization

The purpose of this page is to achieve consensus on various formatting, style, and organization issues that arise as we continue to develop and grow The Wiki Fire.

Pages on terms and school years

I didn't know where to put this, but sense I'm seeking a consensus on this, I thought this was as good a place as any. I'm looking at the most wanted pages list, and the top requests are all "Spring 2007, Winter 2006,", etc. Are these pages neccessary? At this point, it would be easy to go to the 6 or so pages that link to each one of these pages and take out the links, but the longer it goes, the more pages will link to it. I just don't see the purpose of these pages, so I wanted to solicite other people's thoughts. GreatHeights 10:30, 29 June 2007 (CDT)

it might be nice to have an events section for each term. so, you ask "what term was the ambassador from china here?" and you'd find that. and then they'd have the other events from all the different organizations there then. if that doesn't happen, i can't think of any other reason for the page right now. --Afitz 11:26, 29 June 2007 (CDT)

Those are all my fault. What I want to see happen with them is something along the lines of the pages for individual years and days that Wikipedia has, with a list of all the goings-on. User:Yesthatems was talking to me about doing something along those lines over the next few weeks, but if she ends up not doing it then I or somebody else can do it. But I think that, in general, we're aware that a lot goes on in a single term, and if somebody wants to get a sense of the term with trawling Wikifire's entirety then the term and year pages would be a helpful resource. I would envision breaking up the information into sections, like Housing, Classes, Faculty, Club Events, Senate Events, Other Events (e.g. tornadoes, floods, more well-known Campus Safety actions), and then some Miscellaneous or Gossip heading for people to put all their in-jokes under. Camozzi 13:58, 29 June 2007 (CDT)

Courses of study and academic department pages

Now that I've done what I can with the course pages, I intend to move next to wikifying and standardizing the pages for academic departments and courses of study. To that end, I need some opinions as to organizing these. There are 18 academic departments, most of which have a significant number of majors and minors. There are also 12 interdisciplinary courses of study. My question is whether you all think it would be better to organize the pages based on departments or majors. The options are:

• Organize all the information under the academic departments and interdisciplinary committees. This creates 30 pages, such that there are the 18 department pages, each with the various course of study and their requirements linked under a number of headings, with all the major-specific names redirected to a department page, and then a separate page for each interdisciplinary course of study. This would concentrate all the information onto a few long pages and involve a lot of redirects from major names to subheadings in department pages.
• Create a page for each department and also a page for each major area, with affiliated minors listed in subheadings (minors and departmental coursework without a corresponding major would have their own pages as well). This would create about 66 pages in total (18 departments and then the rest majors and unaffiliated minors and coursework). This may involve fewer redirects and spreading some information perhaps more conveniently and intuitively for those less familiar with the wiki format or frightened by long pages. On the other hand, it would also mean that, given the fluidity of professor assignments, for instance, that getting information about faculty on a major would involve going to the department page anyway.

Thoughts? Camozzi 16:36, 29 June 2007 (CDT)

Name

I think the name of the site should always be written The Wiki Fire. The official abbreviation should be TWF. This could go in the style guide. Do those work for everyone? Tfooq 01:57, 1 July 2007 (CDT)