HaskellWiki talk:Guidelines

Headlines

Brett, this is not to offend you. It just expresses my conviction. -- Wolfgang Jeltsch

Not to worry Wolfgang - I never take offence :) - My thoughts on the usage of level 2 only were primarily due to the size balance, but also I note this is a guideline for the original mediawiki site. Does anyone know why that is? BrettGiles 22:11, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

No idea, but it seems loose to me. -- Wolfgang Jeltsch 22:40, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I did some research on metawiki and this is the reason they start at level 2. "So that when a user without CSS, or a text-mode browser, or a screen reader visits, they'll be presented with a page that at least has a logical document flow." From what I can tell, by default, the page title is rendered as a h1 element. So are single = headings. Double == are h2 and so on. So from that point of view it does make sense to start at two equals. I think the real issue is that the software is slightly broken in not generating an h2 for a single equals sign. So, what do you think? BrettGiles 22:36, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

I prefer starting with ==, like Wikipedia. —Ashley Y 00:52, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

MediaWiki is broken in not creating an h2 element for a headline with single equal signs. So we should work around this brokeness by making our top-level headlines == headlines. -- Wolfgang Jeltsch 21:22, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

I've added a respective section to HaskellWiki:Guidelines. -- Wolfgang Jeltsch 21:40, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Page nameing

I see that we are doing renaming of pages pretty much whenever someone doesn't follow the unofficial guideline. Is it time to move that to an official guideline? Do we need a large consensus to do so or just persuade the sysops? BrettGiles 19:24, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Official guidelines?

What makes a guidline an "official" guidline? What's the process? —Ashley Y 00:53, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I suspect that a large number of the users / contributors to this site have an academic background. My experience with academia is that some kind of consensus based decision is the most successful at getting the decision adopted. In a community like this wiki, I’m not sure how to get that. We could send out notices on the various mailing lists, we could post notes on the front page and probably other ways as well. Like any consensus decision making it would take a long time. On the other hand, those that support the site could just be autocratic, set the rule and if there is too much flak, change it.

As to what actually makes an "official" guidline, I think it is up to the sysops whether we even have such a thing. The word tends to mean that sysops are required to monitor and fix the site when these are not followed. So, we might not even want to go to official, stay at unofficial and just let the community grow the guidlines (and do the monitoring) as they see fit. Sometimes, a certain level of anarchy works fine.BrettGiles 16:06, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I think that the traditional consensus decision making process is too slow. In addition, not everyone is interested in every guideline question, so it is not sensible to bother everyone with each of these questions. Therefore, it seems to me that it is better to follow your “autocracy approach”. And I also doubt that it is sensible to let some sysops decide about what guidelines are official. At least, this would be a bit contrary to the wiki approach, in my opinion. So I propose that users are allowed to set up guidelines they think of as sensible—possibly after some short discussion—and to declare them as official. If others don't like the guidelines, the guidelines can still be discussed (again) and changed. -- Wolfgang Jeltsch 21:22, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

OK. Everything on the project page should have a consensus. Everything else should be discussed here. I have adjusted the project page accordingly. —Ashley Y 06:34, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

What is the “project page”? -- Wolfgang Jeltsch 21:22, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I understand. It's HaskellWiki:Guidelines. -- Wolfgang Jeltsch 21:40, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Headlines

Each page has a title which is automatically shown near the top of the page (currently centered and in red). So it doesn't make sense to put a single level 1 headline at the top of the page. (At the moment, you will see this on a few pages of this wiki. I suppose this is a legacy which comes from copying content from the old website to this wiki.)

For top-level structuring, level 1 headlines (the ones denoted by single equals signs in the source) should be used. It is semantically incorrect to use level 2 headlines for this purpose. I note that level 1 headlines are currently rather large and in a font that might not be preferable. However, the solution to this is not to refrain from using level 1 headlines but to change the stylesheet appropriately. —says User:Wolfgang Jeltsch

Note that is is currently being discussed. Level 1 (single equals) create an <h1> heading, which is the same level as the page title. We may (or may not:) switch to the standard of starting at level 2 (double equals) —says User:BrettGiles

I prefer starting with level 2 as per Wikipedia. I consider the page title to be implicitly level 1 (whether it gets rendered as h1 or not). —Ashley Y 06:34, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Wiki Bug

Try giving a Haskell example with the greater than or less than sign in it. It clashes with the HTML rendering!