Fedora Weekly News meeting summary 2009-01-30

[Oisin Feeley]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Dale Bewley <dlbewley at lib.ucdavis.edu>
wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 16:04 -0500, Max Spevack wrote:
>> On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, Pascal Calarco wrote:
>> > * Pascal will update the FWN StyleGuide to indicate that person
>> > references should ideally reference the appropriate User: wiki page,
>> > if it exists.  If it does not, we will use CamelCase references as a
>> > fallback.
>
> Ian Weller tells me FAS users can be queried on IRC by messaging zodbot:
>
> (02:56:24 PM) ianweller: .fas karsten wade
> (02:56:25 PM) zodbot: ianweller: quaid 'Karsten Wade' ..<snip>..
> (02:56:29 PM) ianweller: .wikilink quaid
> (02:56:31 PM) zodbot: ianweller: [[User:quaid|Karsten Wade]]
>
> This does seem to be handy, if not outisde typical workflow. It doesn't
> seem complete though:
>
> (03:08:31 PM) dbewley1: .fas dale bewley
> (03:08:33 PM) zodbot: dbewley1: 'dale bewley' Not Found!
>
> I checked and I have the 'privacy' box ticked in FAS, so I guess that's
> why I'm missing.
>
> I see that to appease the wiki czar, we've so far decided to link to
> [[User:FAS_LOGIN|Full Name]] and fall back to camel case after a manual
> query fails.
>
> To be honest, I'm not very inclined to search for FAS usernames given a
> full name just to link them from the article. I think it would be a
> little too onerous. If camel case names are deemed evil, should we
> discuss how valuable it is to have name links at all? Generally I'm all
> for the more links the better, but I'd prefer to keep things as easy as
> possible on us writers.

I'm in agreement here I think.  Unless there's an easy way to find
people's names or guess them then it becomes time-consuming to find them
in the wiki.  I was using the wiki advanced search with the User box
ticked and gave up after doing a couple because it took so long.  By
comparison it's pretty easy to guess people's CamelCase name in general.

The only way I can think of around this is to obtain a dump of the FAS
usernames correlated to the surname/familyname of the user.  We could
probably then use this to build dictionaries for whatever texteditors we
use (see next point).

> Maybe we can discuss beat writer personal workflows. Describe our own
> habits, and pick up some tips from others. Probably best to start a new
> thread for that.

The workflows do indeed make a big difference to what we expect or can
achieve from the above changes.   I'll look for the other thread or go
start it now. Mine's a bit wonky but it had distinct advantages until
the above changes!

Best wishes,
-- 
  Oisin Feeley
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley