Talk:Old Home

Suggestions to improve Marspedia

Please post any suggestions you have to improve Marspedia using this section.

2017 Updates

We're in the process of upgrading the wiki and redesigning the main page. You may see things change a bit over the next few weeks & months.

Marspedia Content License

Currently the wiki is using Public Domain content in the main namespace, with sub-namespaces for GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons (non-specific). These were set up in 2007 when the wiki was created.

There is some interest in changing the main namespace to Creative Commons' Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which would make Marspedia compatible with Wikipedia and allow us to share articles.

Recently, I added the Mars 2020 article, and added some of my thoughts on this to the Talk:Mars_2020 page.

-- Jburk (talk) 18:57, 30 August 2017 (BST)

All public domain/CC0 content is compatible with Wikipedia. Changing the terms to something more restrictive not only is arguably claiming ownership of content submitted to be public domain, it would also create incompatibility with its sister wikis such as Lunarpedia.

The GFDL namespace was created for the purpose of importing Wikipedia articles (this was before the one-time never-to-be-repeated situation that allowed Wikipedia to change its licence); it can be supplemented or replaced with a CC namespace to import Wikipedia content without breaking anything or betraying past contributors. -- Strangelv (talk) 00:09, 3 September 2017 (BST)

Appreciate your comments. Let's discuss offline. -- Jburk (talk) 00:27, 3 September 2017 (BST)

Spam Prevention

We were able to stop the torrent of spam users & content that is created daily by botnets, and did a large amount of cleanup of spam users and pages they created. There were over 12k users in the system as of the end of September when we were finally able to stop the torrent using a combination of configurations & plugins. If you signed up for a new account in the last couple of weeks, it's possible we assumed you were a spammer and removed you. If this happened to you, please let me know immediately by adding to my talk page or sending me an email.

--Jburk (talk) 19:02, 3 October 2017 (BST)

Mediawiki software enhancements

I was able to configure a new Visual Editor for this wiki using an experimental plugin that runs on a Node.JS application using Heroku. This should make the wiki easier to maintain, especially for non-technical users that don't want to learn the Mediawiki codes.

Also I have added some of the newer options & extensions available in Mediawiki such as RemexHtml Parser, CiteThisPage, and ensuring things like ParserFunctions and ImageMap are working.

--Jburk (talk) 19:02, 3 October 2017 (BST)

Wiki Design

Marspedia is currently using an older version of the standard Mediawiki skin "Monobook". We have an interest in upgrading to the more recent "Vector" skin as this would make the site more accessible to modern mobile devices. We also would like to think holistically about the design of the wiki and the main page & what calls to action are needed.

-- Jburk (talk) 18:57, 30 August 2017 (BST)

Older Discussions (Pre-2017)

I have made an attempt to upgrade the front page to improve design, ease of use and accessability to the wiki. I have tried to focus on accessibility for new users as we need to increase online interest in our efforts.

Some recent updates:

• Inclusion of a "Featured articles" on the front page (see user:Ioneill for development details).
• Creating Marspedia:About page to move bulk text from main page.
• Creating "Marspedia News" section on front page - for development purposes (i.e. new site developments/announcements), not to advertise new content.

Unresolved areas:

• Copyright notice, should it be moved to a less-prominent position?

For now, over to you! -- Ioneill 04:19, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

---

I like the new appearance. It is better than ever! -- Rfc 07:43, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

It looks wonderful; I can't wait to steal it for Lunarpedia. 8) The copyright rules notice is too large and unwieldy, and as you may have noticed, in over a year I've not figured out a more compact solution that imparts the required information. Maybe a terse summary with a link to a more detailed version? How much can we pare down the summary if so? --Strangelv 08:30, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Hi James, I have seen several occurrences of "8)" in your talk. What does it mean? -- Rfc 09:10, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

It's an emoticon, akin to :-). I wear glasses, thus the eight instead of the colon... --Strangelv 11:28, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Cool, glad to get people's opinion on it. Kinda melded the Wikipedia format with our own - hopefully we'll be a unique set of wikis in time. I've been looking at the copyright notice, and I think we can work with what we have for now. We must keep in mind, we are in the development phase of this project, so there are going to be a lot of rough edges. As we will (hopefully) have a continuous, and increasing influx of articles, newcomers will need to read the GFDL terms and conditions first. Also, having the copyright notice there is in keeping with Lunarpedia etc., so it's a good visual aid to see we are all in the same "club"!

James, feel free to copy any of the design aspects and stick them into Lunarpedia, will be nice to see a cool blue and grey version 8) I think the divs and tables are up to par. Seems to be formatted correctly in Firefox and IE, so there shouldn't be too many issues with other operating systems. I've noticed a slight loss in border on the right side of the copyright notice when using FF, will get that fixed.

-- Ioneill 20:45, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia based articles

I personally support the public domain license, but isin't it alot easier to just fork all the required articles from Wikipedia, then edit them from there? Many articles should be almost complete copies from Wikipedia. Having a "GFDL" namespace seems confusing. Nawi 11:36, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't think there are many articles that should be almost complete copies from Wikipedia. Every Marspedia article is written in the context of building a settlement on Mars, with special orientation to the Martian circumstances. When I started to work for Marspedia I had a similar idea - and an enlightening discussion with Ioneill. -- Rfc 20:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

How about "keystone" articles like the Mars Direct article, which Marspedia really should have ASAP? It certainly wouldn't need editing to make it more Mars-y! --Pete9804 19:15, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I will echo Miros' advice below. If a Wikipedia article is what the reader would want send them to Wikipedia with a link in an external links section. Otherwise make an article your own work. That makes licensing requirements easier. We do not need the hashed up partly computer translated and retranslated work that spammers use to camouflage spam. - Farred 20:32, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

We certainly should have articles about those keystone topics, even if they are small and rough for the beginning. And they should have a link to Wikipedia. What we can write into our article is maybe a different aspect, a focus on the importance and the chances of the topic. Please feel free to start the articles. -- Rfc 07:38, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I suggest no copy-paste from Wikipedia. Simply type in your thoughts as new work and put a Wikipedia link as an external link. Miros1 20:25, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Captcha

Can the captcha be disabled for registered users or something, because it's pretty annoying. Nawi 15:12, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi Nawi, I agree with you. Since I am an ordinary user I can not change this, but I can give you some explanation about the working principle of the captcha. The "gibberish captcha" is designed to pop up if the first word of an article is going to be changed (Please see also Marspedia:Captcha). Also, a captcha pops up for edits that add URLs and for Userlogin. We implemented the "gibberish captcha" when we experienced frequent attacks by a bot inserting gibberish into Marspedia articles. This captcha works fine, but is certainly a bit annoying when creating new articles. Most edits, however, should not trigger this captcha, since most edits leave the article's first word as is. If you experience a different behaviour, please let me know. -- Rfc 07:43, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Please disable the captcha. It is EXTREMELY annoying. T.Neo 13:25, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Possibly Strangelv can disable it for registered users, but I have no idea how to do it. Perhaps it is not possible for the captchas to distinguish registered users from IPs. After all we have to find a good balance of usability and security. If we had no captchas at all, we would get flooded with a torrent of automated spam (as we experienced before the activation of the captchas). -- Rfc 18:59, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

The previous Captcha has been removed. Please report any problems with the newer set of extensions. So far they are preventing ALL spam.

--Jburk (talk) 19:16, 3 October 2017 (BST)

Featured Article

Is the current FA going to stay on the Main Page forever? I swear is hasn't changed in the last 5 days. T.Neo 12:44, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

The process of nomination and featuring is not maintained on a daily basis, because nobody is willing to spend the effort so far. For a history please see Featured articles. -- Rfc 12:56, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

O.K. T.Neo 09:09, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

If possible, could someone write a step by step guide to featuring an article? I mean the coding procedure. I have FTP access if such access is necessary to change the article. I also need to do so on Lunarpedia, but haven't had time to dig through the code to figure out a way to wing it without screwing things up. I doubt that future users will want to go through all of that. -- Jarogers2001 07:01, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, I figured it out. You guys put your heads together and decide which article you think should be featured and then clear it with Ian. I have this talk paged watched, so I'll know if you post your final decision here. I'll do the grunt work if Ian finds himself otherwise occupied. -- Jarogers2001 08:43, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I would like to nominate Water as the next featured article, although it might be useful to quickly go over it and the most recent results from the lander to make sure it's up to date... -- Strangelv 10:51, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Good idea. The Interplanetary Internet may be replaced by an other article. How about something contemporary? Proposal: Mars One or Curiosity? We could also change the Featured article to Currently in the news or Hot spot or Most interesting or In focus, which does not necessarily refer to the high quality of the article. It might help to attract readers (and authors) who are interested in contemporary stuff. -- Rfc 19:27, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Since the featured article had not been changed in several years, I changed it to Mars 2020. --Jburk (talk) 19:18, 3 October 2017 (BST)

Promotion

I've just submitted Lunarpedia and Marspedia to the DMOZ ODP.

http://www.dmoz.org/

I recommend that you also submit them in order to increase traffic and speed up the process of our links being approved. ODP also populates these to other search engines. - Jarogers2001 10:26, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Marspedia has been approved; I resubmitted Lunarpedia. Miros1 16:36, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Program strengthening

Dear Colleagues,

Your activity is close to us on spirit, we are glad to your successes.

We invite you to discuss the new practical idea of association in the unique program of which the mankind didn't know analogues. The given program has the working name «Otherwise continent» (in Russian - «Иной континент»). Idea being: to begin in different places of the Earth creation of real planetary settlements, pertinent for conditions of the Moon, Mars, etc. and to offer in this independent settlements habitation and work for high-grade intelligent families.

It will allow to provide advancing development of new land culture and an infrastructure of interplanetary programs which shortly all the same become habitual for earth dwellers. I.e. we begin preventive preparation to grow roots on the planets through inclusion of such independent planetary settlements in a land economic turn, developing thus empty earths, applying renewed energy sources, progressive agrotechnologies, «new pedagogics» and many other innovations which still remain a rarity on the Earth.

Number of inhabitants can exceed and 3 thousand persons in each settlement

There doesn't exist any basic obstacles from the point of view of engineering-technological reserves for this way, both materials Marspedia, and our long-term researches testify it. But the basic alarm is caused by absence in plans and preparations of disembarkation to the planets qualitatively important for settling of planets of strategy – strategy of socio-culture dynamics. This aspect is in especially powerfully developing by our scientists and designers. Mission of the given so-called planetonautics ^(C) strategy also consists in advancing development already on the Earth and at direct participation of all earth dwellers of culture of planetary dwelling …

I.e. for planetonautics priorities vary into how socio-culture drive technology’s development: socio-culture factors become a source of technological development, rather the reverse, as before, in astronautics, for example.

The program is supported by some companies and the research centers of Russia, now we search for partners in a consortium abroad. Their interest is clear: after all in the conditions of crisis such strategy will allow to open new applications for pertinent workings out from any of areas – the industries, astronautics, IT, social technologies, the pedagogic, robotics, transport, the different high technologies, many branches of fundamental and applied science etc., i.e. will suffice affairs on all. There will be new workplaces, families will not break up, new knowledge and technologies, social communications etc. All these workings out be required and inhabitants of independent settlements will be engaged, and superfluous products (energy, a foodstuff, new knowledge, techniques, etc.) will be on sale on a foreign market.

The business plan is developed for the basic land version of independent settlement of type «Solar farm», for three settlements drawings prepare, there is discussion at conferences and on the Internet, students etc. work over themes

We consider that the most suitable time has now come to pour in this strategy the large finance and to provide to it steady progress.

Details it suggested to discuss after your acknowledgment of basic interest.

Yours faithfully,

Nazym F. Sayfullin,

The co-ordinator of the program "Independent planetary settlements"

Moscow, Russia --PPark 15:31, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Dear PPark, I am glad there are people like you all over the world, sharing the same enthusiasm to plan human settlements in places beyond the limits of Earth. Certainly we are interested in networking with your program "Independent planetary settlements". I'm going right ahead to create first links on the new article page IPS. Welcome aboard! -- Rfc 20:13, 17 February 2010 (UTC)