ZamboniBambino – User talk

Marking edits as minor

Hi. Could you please take care to not mark edits that change the content of a page in any meaningful way as minor?

It's possible for a minor change to involve thousands of added or removed bytes, and equally possible for a major change to result in no added or removed bytes; "minor" is not a measure of the size of a change, but rather it's weight.

Does the content now say something new, or not say something it did?

Then the change was not minor.

Are the statements practically as they were, but in a vastly different order - affecting the meaning?

Then the edit may not be minor.

Are the statements practically as they were, and in roughly the same order, but laid out in a completely different manner - not affecting the meaning?

Then the edit is very likely minor.

It's sometimes a tough call deciding if an edit is minor, but bare three things in mind, and it gets simpler:

1. User preferences allow that other editors who might be watching the page might not be informed about minor edits, and might be justifiably frustrated to find that an article has dramatically changed without their being kept in-the-loop, if major edits were marked as minor.
2. If you were watching the article, and had set your prefs to ignore minor edits, would you want to know if someone else had just done what you did?
3. If in any doubt about whether the edit is minor - it isn't.

   Better to be safe than sorry.

I hold my hands up and openly admit to quite probably not always getting it right myself, but, a couple of your recent changes to Function were very obviously not minor, whereas a couple of clearly minor edits aren't marked as such. It's just a little difficult to keep track.

Anyhoo, that's all. Hope I'm not bringing you down. No biggy! :-) -- Fred Gandt (talk|contribs) 14:31, 19 May 2014 (CEST)

Hey, it's not a problem. It's been a while since I've edited MediaWiki, so I am a little out of the swing of things. I'll make sure that I do differentiate the two more clearly; I was just trying to get the content in there and ended up doing it any which way but loose. Bear with me while I adjust :-) Thanks for the concern! ZamboniBambino (talk) 18:46, 19 May 2014 (CEST)

Indeed, cheers :-) -- Fred Gandt (talk|contribs) 03:34, 20 May 2014 (CEST)

Creation of redirect pages

I see you've created three orphaned redirects, two of which are alternative spellings of the same page name.

I'd (and this is only my opinion) suggest only creating pages where a need is clear and the new pages go on to service that need.

Again - this is these are only my opinions, and you should feel free to ignore me, tell me to stick them ... well actually I'd prefer you didn't do that ... but you get the idea? ;-)

All the while the current content needs attention (and it surely does!), it's perhaps better that we stick to fixing that, than making more that is (at least currently) serving no purpose. -- Fred Gandt (talk|contribs) 14:31, 19 May 2014 (CEST)

Indeed, I created some redirects for the different spellings, for no other reason than to make things more accessible to new starters trying to use this wiki to learn how to script for ARMA, etc. I think there are genuine concerns to create pages only where needed, but I think the need-only criteria is fair on an encyclopedia, but on this wiki which is mainly a container for development information there's a clash between purposes. I don't think MediaWiki makes a very good documentation system, and I think MediaWiki has a pretty horrendous search algorithm which necessitates the use of redirects (IMO) but I digress.

You don't need to qualify your opinion, I respect that you're trying to help and have Wikipedia-cred which lends towards that opinion well. ZamboniBambino (talk) 18:46, 19 May 2014 (CEST)

I completely agree; MediaWiki causes more problems than it solves in this (Biki) case, but at least for now, that's what we're stuck with.

I figured you'd created them for that reason, and to be entirely honest - I have no idea if that's helpful or not. My gut says "no", but my gut is a bunch of tubes filled with sh*t, so maybe it's opinion is a little less than useful. *Shrug*. It's something that perhaps might be worth testing. I'd personally be keen on looking at Google Site Search as a plugged in alternative. I'll ask Dwarden if it's a possibility.

Any cred I may or may not have doesn't and will never make me right. -- Fred Gandt (talk|contribs) 03:34, 20 May 2014 (CEST)

No, but it makes you probabilistically less likely to be wrong, and so long as you're not editing primarily Hello Kitty character pages, you're in good standing ;-) And as for the gut, it's great for waste, and questionable for judgements, but either way, it's a beautifully, biochemically complex. Keep it. ZamboniBambino (talk) 21:02, 20 May 2014 (CEST)

Dwarden's not keen on using Google Site Search, which is understandable (extra stuff added to the already loads of stuff).

Just a heads-up. -- Fred Gandt (talk|contribs) 19:49, 22 May 2014 (CEST)