Romance Wiki:Community Discussion

Welcome to a new discussion page. This page is used to discuss the general topics that don't fit on an article or user talk page. You can ask questions, discuss policies, contents, operations and technical issues of RomanceWiki. Discussions will be archived once this page gets too long.

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Note: The talk page (reached by clicking "discussion" tab at the top of the page) for this Community Discussion page will be used to discuss things concerning this page itself, e.g., the layout, content.

What Should We Call This?

Yay! We have a place to talk about all those things that don't fit anywhere else. But, what should we call this discussion page? On Wikipedia, the page is called the "Village Pump." That does not sound very "romance-y" and we don't want to just copy them. I have suggested elsewhere that we call it the "Tea Room," or "Coffee House." What are your suggestions?--Kay T 16:02, 19 September 2007 (PDT) P.S. While we get the page set up, is it okay to have discussions about this page here. Once we have it going, such discussions should go to the project talk page.

Discussion Parlor? --Robini 19:49, 19 September 2007 (PDT)

I like Parlor(y) type names, water cooler is good, Tea Room...like that. Or we could go with a Regency theme with Assembly Room(s).--Romancewiki 09:56, 22 September 2007 (PDT)

I vote for "Tea Room". --DawnBurn 14:29, 25 September 2007 (PDT)

Announcements?

We could also use this for announcements although that does not seem right. Anyway, there is a new Help:Talk Pages with a question on its Help talk:Talk Pages. --Kay T 16:25, 19 September 2007 (PDT)

Awards

I think we need an award for User:Leigh and User:Amy. It is a slow day when they are not around adding/fixing hundreds of books! Thanks! --Kay T 15:00, 29 September 2007 (PDT)

I second this nomination (though would also note that User:Kay T and User:DawnBurn have been equally awesome. I only glanced at the site while on vacation (apparently there's a rule against wiking while on vacation, though I did get a few interesting comments about my RW t-shirt -- wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian!), so it's just awesome to see all the new stuff and, especially, all the content clean-up. I know that Leigh is aware of the offer for a book bag (and Kay's was finally put in the mail!), so Dawn and Amy, if you're needing a bag, let me know.--Romancewiki 19:48, 29 October 2007 (PDT)

Um, I'm highly flattered. I do think Leigh & Amy should get awards for most prolific and most page additions. I believe I serve mostly as a gadfly and doing background organizational stuff which appeals to my anal retentative side without requiring new content from me. If you have extra bags, I would be honored to receive one, but I'd prefer to wait until both Leigh & Amy have been contacted because they are super duper awesome. --DawnBurn 16:05, 30 October 2007 (PDT)

Wow, thanks guys :) I have to say I don't add nearly as many pages as Leigh -- I tend to get on something like adding book descriptions to Superromance pages and go and go and go until I find something else to obsess over. What I really need is wiki rehab! :) --Amy 18:01, 30 October 2007 (PDT)

Chocolate for rehab! We need chocolate! We really do appreciate all of your hard work - fixing or adding. I just know that when I first made the comment, I looked at Recent changes and there were no entries from Amy or Leigh yet that day - a slow day indeed! Sort of scary. Felt like I needed to call you to make sure you were okay. ;) And having people understand RomanceWiki well enough to do the behind the scenes stuff is so great! Thanks --Kay T 16:07, 1 November 2007 (PDT)

Category: Books by Publisher

I have noticed that several publisher categories have been created and used on book pages for that publisher's books. This is not a bad idea, and I created a mega-category: Category:Books By Publisher. We could add a publisher category on the book template. What do you all think? --Kay T 20:20, 29 October 2007 (PDT)

Looks like we're both up late (okay, heading off to bed after this -- have to return to the Evil Empire tomorrow). I think, way back when, I might have started to categorize books by publisher, but not categories. I quickly realized that the by publisher designation might be useful, but was also unwieldy. Books by imprint -- which is closer, I think, to what you're doing here -- makes more sense. Nobody seeks "Books by Harlequin", but they do seek "Presents" (or Harlequin Presents). Just as with the author designation, it makes sense to categorize books in this way.

I am guilty of being inconsistent in this regard (having not found my original method of categorizing books by publisher to be particularly effective). I would agitate for imprint over publisher, but publisher if imprint is unknown/not easily discernible. I am strongly in favor of offering the maximum number of options for finding content. Other thoughts?--Romancewiki 23:46, 29 October 2007 (PDT)

Yes, I would probably do book imprints since we have started to use those for Harlequin, but for Red Rose it is probably okay to just do the publisher for now. The other publisher category that had been created was for Samhain, but that was one that had been nominated for deletion, and I think you did delete it this weekend. Maybe Dawn or others will have some thoughts on this. I am not wedded to one way or the other. --Kay T 13:24, 30 October 2007 (PDT)

The reason why the Samhain page was up for deletion was because it was a double, IIRC. I'm not against Category:Books By Publisher in that the point of RW is to help people find the books they are looking for. However, I do think Romancewiki's notes are potentially troublesome. In that what category do we use for things like Harlequin versus Blaze (Publisher versus Imprint). I think more people do look by imprint,and if each imprint category was a subset of the overarching publisher, that might be good. But we already have inconsistencies in how the imprints are named or referenced on the book pages. I'm realizing I'm not making a preference either way. Umm... yes to having the mega-category being added, and potentially yes to that being added to the template. But realizing that all previously created pages won't have and that we'll likely get duplicates of categories due to spelling/caps/inclusion of publisher and imprint or just imprint/etc. into those categories. --DawnBurn 16:03, 30 October 2007 (PDT)

Darn you Dawn for practicality! Here's my thinking, for what it's worth (about what you're paying...). When I first started, I was a naive babe in the woods. I think -- and someone will surely correct me as it was a rookie error -- I named a page "Romance". It meant either Harlequin or Silhouette Romance (I can't recall), but it was a stupid page name and I'm crossing my fingers that the more organized of us have fixed it.

I do believe that people search more by imprint than publisher (though in the case of Harlequin, both are equally popular). If I were to do it all over, I would create a mega-category for each publisher and then a sub-category for each imprint. That would achieve the goal of making sure that information was accessible no matter how people search (and people search in ways you cannot begin to imagine -- if you're ever bored, watch a co-worker or friend or (best) mother search. It's quite stunning and also educational.

So I am advocating for a particular hierarchy, but also realizing that this is a huge time suck (and when it comes to the wiki, we all so many of those, right?). But...light, tunnel, all that. If someone has the energy and time to write a set of rules for categorization, I do have a resource who can help. If not, my feeling is we make this a future project while we put guidelines in place for go-forward content. Thoughts, agreements, disagreements, better ideas (you all have way better ideas than moi)...? --Romancewiki, signed for author by DawnBurn 16:58, 8 November 2007 (PST)

Shock, gasp! You forgot to sign your post, RomanceWiki. My thought was that this could be added to the template and as you said we could add the publisher category going forward, gradually adding to existing books as needed. What other complications are we not thinking of? One is that a category of "Avon" might contain both books, info about the publisher and authors. Does that matter? I also wonder if there is some "easy" way of doing this. At this point, as you see from the mega-category (Category:Books By Publisher), there are both imprint categories, publisher categories, and articles with lists of books by publisher. We could also add the numbered series here if we wanted to. hmmm...--Kay T 13:22, 2 November 2007 (PDT)

Replying to Kay's post, but the general thread. I have some LIMITED experience with writing code. I might be able to come up with a rule set, if we are talking about a bot. I think this thread speaks to a general "need" to clean up. There is still the Romance page, and the naming of the imprints (and their associated by the number pages) is um... random at best. But moving all of those pages (nominally annoying) and then fixing all the redirects (way more annoying) could be more easily done by a use of bot, which would then potentially allow at the same a restructuring of the mega-category to allow more searching. So, it might be of benefit to examine if from a complete overhaul instead of just 'going forward.' I'm willing to use what limited code skills I have toward this and I've considered more than once figuring out enough to write a bot that would auto add the Same Title, Multiple Author books to the Books Alpha pages (which, incidentally, I'm not fond of and are incomplete and hard to use, not that I actually have a better suggestion). Umm... short summary:

Let's talk (here or in group chat) about how it might be best to restructure from the ground up with the use of a bot for any high repetitive tasks in cleanup.--DawnBurn 16:58, 8 November 2007 (PST)

Dawn, I think that someone here might have figured out how to use AWB (from Wikipedia) to do some repetitive tasks, and I have wanted to learn but am afraid. :) One of the problems of thinking or talking about a mega-category and the category tree structure is that there is no good way of seeing that structure on the wiki. That even drives me crazy on the RomanceWiki:Category Index -- hard to show the structure. At one point (many moons ago) I had dumped all the categories into Excel and then made the structure more obvious. How would you suggest we do a restructure? Should we move this to the category index talk page?--Kay T 13:43, 9 November 2007 (PST)

Traffic Analysis

Before I go back and read what Kay and Dawn are discussing above (lot of words, little coffee), I'll introduce a new idea for those of you who love to waste time on research. When I have time, I like to focus on building up content related to search phrases used to bring (see recent pages for Anne Weale and Sara Seale as examples). I've pulled out the approximately Top 20 Search Phrases that our readers are using (note: this list is edited to toss out things like "romancewiki"). If you're looking for hours of fun, adding content to these pages is the way to go!--Romancewiki 10:12, 10 November 2007 (PST)

Discussion Options

To make the discussions about structure and content more efficient, I am wondering if we need to create a list, forum, blog (which, yes, is still high on my list -- just waiting for tech guy to add Kay's category page. I am turning into quite the nag on that).--Romancewiki 10:12, 10 November 2007 (PST)

Publishers and Books with Same Name

I've encountered another problem with creating disambiguation pages - books that have the same name as a publisher or imprint. Some examples:

• Splendor and Temptation - imprint pages to which another user has added information about a book (sigh)
• Genesis (publisher) and Genesis (CP) (book)

Should we create a disambig page listing both the books and imprint (and if so, do the imprint pages need to be moved to "Title - Imprint" -- as we renamed similar anthology pages "Title - Anthology")? The problem with that, of course, is that a ton of links to that imprint will have be changed. Does anyone have a better solution? --Amy 19:47, 30 November 2007 (PST)

Funny you should mention this as I encountered this situation this week. In my case, because there were so few links to deal with, I changed the publisher name to the full title. However, since someone (me, I'm ashamed to admit) started off calling Temptation, Temptation, there are far too many links to change (though, I can ask my husband's assistant to do that if we choose to got that route -- she has the, as they say, bandwidth).

I admit that I like the idea of adding imprints to the disambiguation pages. Sick I know. I am willing to manage the task of dealing with the Temptation and Splendor links (first) if we agree that this is the optimal solution. I'm going to ping Leigh, Kay, and Dawn to weigh in.--Romancewiki 21:05, 30 November 2007 (PST)