User talk:FrJohn

I keep a database of Orthodox web pages, and publish them on my Orthodox Links Page.

Can you give an e-mail addres to add the Orthodox Wiki to the database?

Deacon Stephen

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Email sent to you!

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I hope you don't mind, Father, but I passed the link to OrthodoxWiki along to some of my seminarian friends and a few others. God willing, there will be a few more contributors soon.

Rdr. Andrew 15:48, 20 Dec 2004 (CST)

That's great news. Thanks again for your contributions! I'm happy also to have someone onboard who has experience with WikiPedia. I hope you don't mind that I've bumped you up to sysop status. FrJohn

Sysopishness

Thanks! Now I have to figure out what to do with that.  :)

Rdr. Andrew 21:59, 21 Dec 2004 (CST)

Style Guide

Father, I've started a tentative OrthodoxWiki:Style Guide to govern the writings of articles, especially naming conventions. Perhaps it could somehow eventually be linked to the top of the page when editing is being done.

Rdr. Andrew 10:42, 22 Dec 2004 (CST)

RE:

That's great. I noticed you linked to the NPOV page on Wikipedia from your User page there. I think we should also have an explicit statement about this here -- basically I mean that on issues where substantial disagreements exist within or among the Orthodox churches we should adopt a description tone here -- giving reasons for different positions, citing notable figures on different sides, etc. Do you have some idea about how this should be written up?

Also, what do you think would be the most effective content for the front page?

Thanks again for your work! I'm thrilled that things are moving and shaking here :-).

FrJohn 14:42, 22 Dec 2004 (CST)

It's an interesting and somewhat difficult question. On the one hand, we'd probably want to keep things as "neutral" as possible, especially regarding disputes within and involving the Church. However, on the other hand, I think it may be wise to include something of what one might refer to as a "Mainstream Chalcedonian bias" in the project.

That is, especially WRT naming things, I'd prefer if we named an article Church of Alexandria to refer to that patriarchate in communion with your and my bishops, and Church of Alexandria (Coptic) to refer to the Non-Chalcedonian one, rather than Church of Alexandria (Melkite) and Church of Alexandria, respectively. Further, instead of Church of Greece (State Church) (as it might be called by the "True Orthodox"), we'd just use Church of Greece. A lot of these adjectival distinctives are already in use by the groups in question, anyhow (e.g., the Coptic Patriarchate refers to itself as "Coptic Orthodox.")

Additionally, when describing things, while not saying, "So-and-so's church is one of heretics and schismatics," we probably also would not say, "The majority Church of Greece has fallen away from the true faith, which subsists only in the Old Calendarist movement."

Thus, at least as far as naming and some other things are concerned, there would be a certain bias in favor of the mainstream of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. But why?

I think the possibility for confusion is massive if we don't explicitly set the bias in some way. Additionally, without it, I think we run the risk of drawing ourselves deeply into the controversies themselves. That is, there is going to be some bias, no matter what we do. As such, since the site is run by an OCA priest (yourself), and also because in terms of the rest of the world, the mainstream Chalcedonian position is what is most well-known (thus lending support to the bias in what might be called "definitional usage" terms), I think it's probably wisest to put this sort of bias in place.

That being said, making the bias explicit in the Style Guide would be a must, trying to explain it in as neutral terms as possible, mentioning the reasons and that it is in no way meant as a judgment on dissenting groups or persons. That way, perhaps we could attract as contributors some of the more thoughtful participants in these debates while leaving behind their more shrill brethren.

But all this is subject to your approval and revision.

Regarding the front page, I think we should move the list of things in development elsewhere, perhaps just giving links to major categories of topics. Perhaps a photo or two, especially maybe an automatically rotating one (I have no idea how one would do that). I've noticed that websites with continually changing things on the front page tend to have more frequent visitors, and of course more frequent visitors mean more contributors.

One thing I'd like to develop would be at least a bare-bones fixed-feast liturgical calendar, with entries titled things like November 1 having links to the saints and feasts of the day. Then there also might be a calendar page with links to all the dates.

Rdr. Andrew 09:26, 23 Dec 2004 (CST)

In Reply

Greetings again! I think those are good ideas. I agree about the "mainstream Chalcedonian bias" made (gently) explicit. It would be great if you could just revise what you said, add some general stuff about NPOV and stick it in an appropriately titled style page.

About images, I think that's a good idea too -- easy to implement, providing we find some appropriate ones.

The liturgical calendar shouldn't be impossible. At www.OrthodoxWeb.org and other places, there already exists php code to integrate a site in with the calendar on www.oca.org. The challenge would be rightly fitting it into the MediaWiki template (I don't think you can put PHP code right into an edited page, right?). I don't have much PHP experience, but I don't think it would be too hard for someone who does. Also, Huw Raphael (www.doxos.org) sent me the code he uses for this purpose.

Thanks!! FrJohn 12:24, 23 Dec 2004 (CST)

One more

Father, I've further expanded the OrthodoxWiki:Style Manual if you'd care to take a look. --Rdr. Andrew

Images

Fr. John, I tried to upload an image and use it in an article. All worked just fine until I tried to use the "thumb" tag in the link. At that point, the image failed to show, and there was difficult to make out error information near the top of the page. --Rdr. Andrew

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Hi Rdr. Andrew,

Thanks again for your contributions -- Great work! About the image, I have a few ideas about what could be screwy on the server-side. Let me check into them and get back to you. Also, what was the image called? I can see if it's been uploaded successfully. Wishing you a blessed New Year, FrJohn

P.S. Hey, actually, I see you've uploaded lots of images that have worked fine. Is it just one you're having a problem with?

Uploading images is no problem. My difficulty is with using the "thumb" option when incorporating the image into an article. For instance, the following does not work:

[[Image:Theodora.jpg|right|thumb|The Empress St. Theodora, Wife of [[Justinian the Great]]; Mosaic, 6th c., Cathedral of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy]]

...whereas this works fine:

[[Image:Theodora.jpg|right|frame|The Empress St. Theodora, Wife of [[Justinian the Great]]; Mosaic, 6th c., Cathedral of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy]]

I've noticed the same behavior with other images, too.

--Rdr. Andrew

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Hi again,

Sorry for the delay. I found out the problem -- When I moved the site to a new server I neglected to install ImageMagick, so the thumbnail function just plain wouldn't function. Anyway, it should be fine now, but let me know if I need to tweak it anymore. Once again I'll say it -- thanks for your work!

FrJohn 23:16, 2 Jan 2005 (CST)

It seems to work just fine now -- thanks! --Rdr. Andrew

News page?

Father, what would you think about having an OrthodoxWiki:News page (protected so that only sysops may add to it)? We could use it to make announcements about major updates and changes, with the newest news at the top, perhaps including a permanent link to Special:Newpages. --Rdr. Andrew

Sounds like a great idea! What do you think we should do with the Community Portal Current Events pages in the sidebar? We also need to do something about the "help" page in the sidebar. User:FrJohn 15:42, 5 Jan 2005 (CST)

I've been dreading that you'd ask me about that.  :) Current events and OrthodoxWiki:News would theoretically serve the same purpose. It might be a bit confusing in terms of organizational namespace, however, for Current events to be thus named -- perhaps OrthodoxWiki:Current events or OrthodoxWiki:News would better indicate that it's about OrthodoxWiki and not about current events in the Church...? Whatever you'd prefer to do would be fine with me. (Can you change what's in that navigational sidebar?)

What you've got on OrthodoxWiki:Community Portal makes sense, that is, it would probably serve well as something of a big meta-to-do list (To Do for OrthodoxWiki specific stuff).

As far as Help:Content is concerned, I'd be willing to put something bare-bones together and perhaps prod it from time to time with a bit more. Is there perhaps something from Wikipedia we could adopt? I've never been deeply entertained by writing user manuals, as you may imagine.  :) (Having done it professionally here and there.)

--Rdr. Andrew

Addendum: I mucked about a bit with the MediaWiki namespace and was able to adjust MediaWiki:Currentevents to go to OrthodoxWiki:News, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to produce something like this: OrthodoxWiki News. In any event, you can tell I really don't know much about how MediaWiki really works.  :/ I'm not much of an administrator per se, but I'm willing to give it a try if it's needed. I'm much more comfortable, though, with administering content itself. --Rdr. Andrew

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"Having done it professionally here and there." - That's why you're so good at it! Thanks for mucking with the namespaces. When I get a chance, I'll try to bone up on some of the administrative stuff so that I can back up your content creation engine server-side! About "Current Events" - I think it would be great to use this page for current events in the Orthodox world, conferences and so on. It would take a much larger base than we have now though to keep up decently. Maybe we should ask some bloggers to write about our site, or otherwise advertise it...

I think the best thing would be to have both "Current Events" and "OrthodoxWiki News" in the sidebar. (Right now, I think your change was successful - I only see OrthodoxWiki:News in the sidebar). How'd you do that?

FrJohn 08:43, 6 Jan 2005 (CST)

I changed the sidebar by editing MediaWiki:Currentevents. From what I was able to glean from the MediaWiki website, I think more substantial kinds of changes have to be done in the "developer" end of things (which I am thoroughly not qualified to do).

I do think you're right regarding having two different sets of news -- one for the Church and one for OrthodoxWiki itself. I'm not sure how you'd have both in the sidebar, though. For now, I'll change MediaWiki:Currentevents back to what it was.

Regarding the user manual writing -- I worked as a technical writer for a couple short stints but loathed every minute of it. Poets are just not meant for that sort of work.  :) But I'll see what I can steal from Wikipedia and perhaps adapt it for here.

--Rdr. Andrew

Sounds great! Thanks! Given your energy level, may I assume you're still on Winter break? :-). FrJohn

Yes, for the moment.  :) We start classes again on Monday. --Rdr. Andrew

Sidebar edit

I'm afraid it was a hack, too. I just edited the contents of MediaWiki:Currentevents (after having scrolled through Special:Allmessages). I have no idea how to add new lines to the sidebar. --Rdr. Andrew 20:17, 28 Jan 2005 (CST)

Categories

The conceptual hierarchical relationship between ethics and bioethics is obvious. However, the difficulty is that, based on a hierarchical order as you suggest, there are potentially multiple category trees that a given entry might have, and not all of them would necessarily be linear. So, since the listing of categories in the wiki is linear, figuring out the order based on a hierarchical sorting system for a given entry might be difficult. For instance, let's say an article is about someone who is a bishop, saint, church father, hymnographer, missionary, and an American saint. Which goes first? Not all bishops are saints, so bishop couldn't be a sub-category for saint. Not all missionaries are bishops or saints. Not all church fathers are bishops, and so on.

The hierarchy is already preserved in the category system itself (i.e., when you click on the category name and see sub-categories), so it's already being represented in the most useful sorting way. Since I think we'd all prefer some uniform kind of sorting for categories in the articles, alphabetical seems to me at least to be the easiest and most non-problematic to implement. If you'd prefer something else, though, we can rewrite the OrthodoxWiki:Style Manual to reflect otherwise (at this point, it reads in terms of alphabetization). We'd also need to go through nearly every existing article to rearrange the category listings. Let me know what you think. --Rdr. Andrew 10:26, 29 Jan 2005 (CST)

OK, OK :-). Maybe I should read the Style Guide more thoroughly! Fr. John

Thanks for the Welcome

Father John! You may not remember me, but I believe we met at St. Vladimir's Seminary at Pascha Vigil 2002. My wife, Erin, and I were visiting with Bishop Seraphim and the Talleys. It's interesting to see that we connect again here!

Good to meet again! I think I do remember, although its a bit fuzzy. What's your name though? You didn't sign the message and you weren't signed in when you left it? Welcome again! Fr. John

(Methinks he is a not-signed-in Joffridus. --Rdr. Andrew)

Yes, it's me, Joffridus. My name is Geoff Mackey. My wife and I had just met Bishop Seraphim that evening through mutual friends Dana & Sue Talley and the three of them invited us to attend Vigil there. What a wonderful experience it was! It wasn't my first experience of Orthodoxy, but it was an important event along the way. I am now studying for Chrismation at St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Kingston, NY.