Bhamwiki talk:Messageboard

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"Signs" category?

would this be a possible category for articles? perhaps relating to the proposed bhamwiki:architecture portal or something? i just think of all the interesting signage around town, City Federal, Redmont Hotel, that huge electric messageboard downtown, WBRC, Dixie Neon, the big C on the Cabana Building, Carraway's rotating star, the Alabama Theatre, the old Vulcan green/red torch, the old neon signs that used to adorn every church like 16th St. Baptist., etc...

good idea or no? -- User:Sagefats.

• Here's what I would do... For truly significant signs (such as the Barber's clock or the "Welcome to the Magic City" sign that was outside the terminal station) which might merit a separate article, we can make a Category:Signs. Otherwise, maybe a category, such as Category:Buildings with signage would make it too hard to distinguish noteworthy signs, like the ones you list, from your run-of-the-mill Walgreen's. With that being the case, I propose a List of notable signs as a separate article to which the other articles can be linked: e. g. "The current building is known best for the monumental 176 by 26 foot electronic [[List of notable signs|marquee]] mounted on top which displays advertising messages using an array of 1,440 incandescent bulb" (for Two North Twentieth). Also, if we collect a group of photographs of the signs, those can be collected in their own category, and/or a gallery article would be nice. Sound okay? --Dystopos 05:57, 27 November 2006 (PST)

• I like the list idea right now instead of the category. I would hate to see a bunch of national chain restaurants, drug stores and the likes show up in a category that was meant for the truly local and unusual signs. At least with the list we can put the Two North Twentieth, City Federal, WBRC, Barber's clock and the like without necessarily creating a separate article just for the sign if it is attached to a significant building. --Wheresdib 07:22, 27 November 2006 (PST)
• sounds good:) --sagefats

• I've found enough information to write an article about the sign at Terminal Station, but what should it be called? --Lkseitz 15:22, 30 November 2006 (PST)

• Good question. My first thought is "Terminal Station welcome sign", --Dystopos 16:17, 30 November 2006 (PST)

• How about "Magic City sign"? --Lkseitz 08:37, 14 December 2006 (PST)

• Works for me. Who's writing the article? --Dystopos 09:15, 14 December 2006 (PST)

• If Lee has the info to write it, he should :P --Wheresdib 09:58, 14 December 2006 (PST)

• Done. --Lkseitz 08:38, 15 December 2006 (PST)

• Looks great, thanks! When I get a chance I'll check HABS for a photo. Hard to verify that any non-governmental post-1923 published source is out of copyright. --Dystopos 10:05, 15 December 2006 (PST)

Going back to the original question posed by Sagefats, do we want to create a category or list of these signs? --Wheresdib 10:58, 15 December 2006 (PST)

• Yes, both I think. --Dystopos 07:02, 16 December 2006 (PST)

Chronological order

I've noticed an inconsistency in articles dealing with annual events. Most, I believe, list events in reverse chronological order. (That is, newest first.) Examples are Vestavia Hills Dogwood Festival and Magic City Art Connection. Others are in chronological order, such as Crawfish Boil and Rickwood Classic. I was thinking a consistent policy might be good for this issue.

Personally, I prefer to read things in chronological order (oldest first). It would also require less changes over time in regards to bolding the first instance of a term in the article. It also makes it easier to scan for the first year a sub-event was held, assuming it's in bold text. I can see the point of saying that over time some people will only want to read the most recent information each time they visit, but it seems to me that would primarily apply to us hard-core editors, not the average web surfer. Other opinions? --Lkseitz 08:37, 14 December 2006 (PST)

• As you have discovered, I am of two minds on the subject. As long as the organization of the article is apparent, I still don't have a strong preference. Ultimately, I think the best thing is for an overall article to discuss major developments over time. So subject headings like "First years", "Peak years", with individual occurrences incorporated into the text, would probably be the sign of a mature article. In that case, the order would probably follow a historical chronology and individual years might merit their own articles to document more trivial aspects. (Like the City Stages articles). --Dystopos 09:09, 14 December 2006 (PST)

Parentheses for disambiguation

Well, this is embarrassing. I've changed an article name from "Parkway Drive Trussville" to "Parkway Drive (Trussville)". I thought it was more encyclopedia-ish and helps distinguish that "Trussville" is not part of the street's name but its location. Looking at the talk page, I see I proposed the non-parenthesized version in the first place. IIRC, I was merely following Dystopos' lead from a couple other places. What do others think about this change? Is it a good thing? Unneccessary?

Incidentally, this came from my expanding the U.S. Highway 78 article a bit. I decided if the individual road names of U.S. Highway 31 were going to get their own articles, Parkway Drive (Leeds) should too. Previously the Parkway Drive disambiguation page just pointed to Highway 78 for the portion in Leeds. --Lkseitz 10:01, 9 January 2007 (PST)

• My lead will typically take you down a circular path. I don't have any direction on this issue at the moment. Let's keep thinking about individual cases. --Dystopos 11:59, 9 January 2007 (PST)

Succession boxes and interims

Okay, help me out with this. I've recently discovered Edna Snow acted as interim superintendent of Homewood City Schools before Michael Gross (1978–1985), after Robert F. Bumpus (1985–1991), and probably between the two. (But see Talk:Edna Snow for more on that.). Because I don't know who was superintendent immediately before or after these two men, I've added her name, marked as "interim," in the succession boxes on these two men's pages for now. I also have succession boxes for these two stints on Ms. Snow's page. That's a short term solution.

In the long term, what do we do about people who filled a position while a search for a permanent replacement was conducted? Does it depend on the length of the interim? For example, Andy Craig will likely have been interim superintendent for over a year by the time a permanent Hoover Superintendent is found. Or do such people merely get a succession box during the active period they hold the position and we remove it and take them out of the link chain once a permanent replacement is found?

The scenarios for Snow are this. Let's presume she was interim superintendent between Gross and Bumpus.

1. She gets succession boxes as interim superintendent each time.
   1. Gross' and Bumpus' succession boxes both show her as interim both before and after them, meaning the user has to keep track of which row of succession boxes to use on her page to continue through the chain.
   2. Gross' and Bumpus' succession boxes only list the non-interim holders (each other), meaning Snow's are not part of the chain but are still handy for quick reference at the bottom of her article.
2. Snow doesn't get succession boxes as interim superintendent, but of course that information is noted in her entry. She doesn't appear in the boxes on Gross' or Bumpus' entries.

I know there will be special cases, but I wanted others thoughts on this. --Lkseitz 15:09, 1 February 2007 (PST)

• You might want to see how Wikipedia has handled it. I suspect that even people who serve for a day would show up in the succession box. In the cases where someone has served in between so many, though, I might be tempted to leave the succession box off that particular page and let it be explained in the text. --Dystopos 15:11, 1 February 2007 (PST)

• I can't find a Wikipedia policy on it and my attempts to find some examples have not panned out. Any suggestions for examples? I tried CEOs of Time Warner, Toys R Us, and Wal-Mart. The U.S. Presidents have nice succession box examples, but I can't think of any "interim" candidates. --Lkseitz 10:33, 2 February 2007 (PST)

• Looking around, I see that Mike Price is fully accounted for in the Alabama Head Football Coach succession boxes. So are Scarborough, Ontario Mayor Ken Morrish and Omaha interim Mayor Richard Cunningham (even though he's a red link). I think it's best to generally include interims in the succession box, but where, as in Snow's case, that would just stack up a bunch of boxes, we could make the editorial decision to streamline somehow. --Dystopos 11:53, 2 February 2007 (PST)

Iron Bowl stubs

• I will continue the Iron Bowl stubs next week. I don't want a mere stub to be the 1800th article and I probably should do actual work for once ;-). Of course, if anyone feels compelled to write one or some, here's a great resource: [1]. The information is very similar to the webpage I was using yesterday but was published in the Mobile Press-Register. --Wheresdib 13:29, 2 February 2007 (PST)

• Make sure that 1,800th is a good one :) --Dystopos 14:14, 2 February 2007 (PST)

• Please be sure to look at the articles I've written (or stolen) on these football games, teams, and coaches. I am not a football fan so I could be completely messing things up. --Wheresdib 14:15, 20 February 2007 (PST)

The Beatles?

As I was reading the wikipedia entry on the Beatles, I found this little tidbit: "...In an interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave, [John] Lennon had offered his opinion that Christianity was dying and that the Beatles were "more popular than Christ now." Afterwards, a radio station in Birmingham, Alabama, ran a story on burning Beatles records, in what was considered to be a joke. However, many people affiliated with rural churches in the American South started taking the suggestion seriously. Towns across the United States and South Africa started to burn Beatles records in protest." Does anyone know what radio station made that announcement? --Wheresdib 11:16, 26 February 2007 (PST)

I'm not sure, but it appears it might have been Tommy Charles of WAQY (scroll down to Birmingham Radio: 1966). --Lkseitz 11:38, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• WAQY-AM, there's a small paragraph on it in the article on Tommy Charles --Dystopos 11:40, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• Wow, you learn something new every day. I remember vaguely the "bigger than Jesus" quote but didn't realize that it was Birmingham that led the "ban the Beatles" drive. How silly. --Wheresdib 12:00, 26 February 2007 (PST)

Articles on tangential topics

• This conversation makes me wonder about someday creating articles for BhamWiki about mostly-unrelated subjects which basically boil down to lists of all connections between the city and that topic. (Not too unlike our articles about years). So in this case, we'd have an article at The Beatles and then it would have a brief introduction and then go into the WAQY stuff and Timothy Leary's "Come Together" campaign, etc. .. Any thoughts? --Dystopos 12:19, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• I really like that idea. Somehow tying it all together would make sense. I personally didn't care for the Timothy Leary article since it didn't really focus on Birmingham, but if we could tie it all (and a Beatles article) together, in a way that it makes sense to the unintiated reader, that would be awesome. And it would be a great way of showing off BhamWiki, because that info isn't readily available, all in one place, right now. And that's what this site is all about, at least IMHO. --Wheresdib 12:31, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• Re: Timothy Leary: Those are hard articles to work on. I think it's important to have them so we can "show off" a bit and highlight our connections to bigger figures and events, but it's always an issue of proportion. I like to keep the basic summary and the important facts intact (Leary's publications, Terrell Owens' receiving numbers, etc) but try also to winnow down the amount of detail about completely unrelated parts of their lives. I think the Michael Jordan article is a better example, but that's only because I had a source with plenty of detail. So the process of improving those articles can cut both ways. As we add local info we keep stripping out the stuff that Wikipedia covers better. Also, you'll notice I have some things like Civil War and Works Progress Administration redlinked in numerous articles in anticipation of some kind of article about the impact of those events in the Birmingham District. --Dystopos 12:47, 26 February 2007 (PST)

Examples

• Skewed too much away from Birmingham: Carl Lewis, Timothy Leary
• Well-balanced: Michael Jordan, Walker Percy

direct linking to Wikipedia?

• OK, this whole conversation leads me to a different question. On another wiki I frequent, they have it set up to where you can direct link wikipedia articles by typing wikipedia:Article Name inside double brackets. On the page it looks like you are going to a page inside that wiki but instead it leads you to WP. Is this something you would be interested in doing? I know you like to keep BW separate from WP, but in cases like Civil War, until we can pare that down into a Birmingham-area article, you could at least reduce the redlinks. --Wheresdib 13:00, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• I'm not as horrified by red links as you are, Wheresdib. They light the way to the future!. All kidding aside, I think it's better to create a page here, even just a stub, with a link to the Wikipedia article so that we have a chance to put it into some kind of context as well as invite improvements here. A direct link might make us feel like no article was needed. (And I don't want to start linking to every [[trivia:minor concept]] that [[being (philosophy)|exists]] on [[Wikipedia:About|Wikipedia]] just because we can. (So in instances where an inline link is appropriate, we can just use the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Link#External_links external link format] --Dystopos 13:20, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• I have to agree with Dystopos on redlinks. While they can be annoying (Hey, I wanted to know more about that!), they are also useful in seeing what needs to be done. I'm working on a site with a glossary where I define certain terms. At the end of most, I include a link to a Wikipedia article. I'd say we probably need to do something similar in the "External links" section. Easily linking within Bhamwiki to Wikipedia leads to abuse and confusion by users when they leave Bhamwiki without noticing it. --Lkseitz 13:33, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• One caveat regarding linking to Wikipedia in the external links section. For articles about truly-Birmingham topics, I hope we'll exercise our GFDL rights and update our own version as appropriate and use the link in the references section. The idea is that we'll have the superior article anyway. For articles about things where Wikipedia will always be more complete (Jordan, for example) the external link is justified. --Dystopos 13:52, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• I just suggested it because sometimes the need to know about something further is needed in an article. For example, we don't want to create an article about Montgomery here, that is outside our scope, but what if someone is reading the article about the governor or other lawmakers? A link to the Wikipedia article on Montgomery would be helpful without us having to create it here. It felt strange unlinking references to the city of Auburn when Bhamwikifying the Auburn University page. I agree that every single menial word shouldn't be linked here, but I was thinking more about articles that aren't within our scope but would help with related articles. Take Timothy Leary for example. Linking some of the cities and universities mentioned would be helpful to me without actually having to read the BW article on him, then flip over to the WP article to find more. That's just my $0.02. --Wheresdib 14:30, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• I encourage you to add inline links to Wikipedia where you think they would be helpful, but I think we should stick with the normal external link format to avoid confusion. --Dystopos 14:40, 26 February 2007 (PST)

• Duly noted. --Wheresdib 14:50, 26 February 2007 (PST)

Improving search ranking

As an experiment, I entered some search terms in Google to see where BhamWiki shows up:

Term	Results page
birmingham	Not top 10
birmingham alabama	Not top 10
birmingham wiki	3
birmingham alabama wiki	4 (not main page)
wiki birmingham	5
wiki birmingham alabama	5 (not main page)

For all of these, Wikipedia's Birmingham page is in the top five results. Surely we can do better. A link from the Wikipedia page would help, but as a non-neutral party, I'm not going to add it. I might request it on the Talk page, though. We might also add the word "Alabama" a bit more (or at least higher) on the main page. This not only helps search results, but might help those unfamiliar with both the Birminghams of Alabama and England figure out which one we're talking about a bit faster. Then there's a couple things only Dystopos can do, like add a meta description tag and/or tweak the title on the main page (e.g. "BhamWiki - The Project to Document the Birmingham, Alabama District"). Of course, I don't know that anyone else cares about this, so I thought I'd toss this out and see what y'all think. --Lkseitz 09:53, 27 February 2007 (PST)

• These are worth consideration to the extent we want to drive people to the site who merely have an interest in Birmingham as such (and we do). However, for those with specific interests in the things we cover well, we're doing pretty good (homicides birmingham - top result; mary anderson inventor - 3rd hit, wallace rayfield - top hit; wbrc 6 - 6th hit, wspz - 4th hit, rickwood field - 10th; birmingham black barons - 16th; 16th street baptist church - 17th). Since the main purpose of the site is to be useful, I'm pleased that google is directing people to us when we're in a position to be useful. As Lee has observed, adding links from the main page helps google find things, so I'll probably rework the featured article section more often. (and mention Alabama) --Dystopos 10:06, 27 February 2007 (PST)

• I'll add it to the Wikipedia page, I don't really care. This isn't like we are advertising a business or anything. I just don't know exactly where to put it. --Wheresdib 10:22, 27 February 2007 (PST)

• The relevant Wikipedia policy is Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. Full compliance would necessitate discussion on the article's talk page. The best location would seem to be the "External links" section. --Dystopos 12:24, 27 February 2007 (PST)

• In related news, our PageRank recently climbed from 3 to 4. --Dystopos 12:27, 27 February 2007 (PST)

Traffic

• The site has been seeing an increase in traffic recently and is currently ranked 704,970 by Alexa -- ahead of birminghamweekly.com (1,961,589), bwcitypaper.com (1,118,536), bcvb.org (982,094) and informationbirmingham.com (708,991). AL.com is ranked 9,990. --Dystopos 08:24, 28 March 2007 (PDT)

• Update: Our Alexa ranking is now 526,009. --Dystopos 07:17, 25 April 2007 (PDT)

Dates

• I would like to help out setting date pages up, but would like to know if we are going to have any sort of standard with regards to what to include and exclude from date pages. For example, should we include homicides for each date page? ‎Patriarca12 11:09, 4 April 2007 (PDT)

• So far, homicides have fallen below my own inconsistent threshold. I would imagine that ultimately only notable sporting events would be reported, but right now they're helping fill out some thin dates. Among the things I've considered adding to the dates and years pages are relevant illustrations, a template for each month similar to the one for each decade, and a category for "year articles" to ease navigation. --Dystopos 12:47, 4 April 2007 (PDT)

• Oh, and also I'd love to see a template on the main page that read the date articles and generated a "today in Birmingham history" feature. --Dystopos 13:24, 4 April 2007 (PDT)

• For Wikipedia's date entries (e.g. March 15), they use this template, listing the entire year's dates. I can see arguments both for and against using it here. I'm guessing you want something more like this, but without the year and days of the week. And I'm afraid the template for a "today in Birmingham history" feature is quite beyond my abilities right now. --Lkseitz 10:11, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

• I think it's feasible, but we might need to reformat the dates pages, or create parallel pages like March 15/todayinhistory or something that could then be referenced into a portal frame. --Dystopos 11:29, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

• I’m thinking I will make a run at the years pages. Chronolgies are one of my big things.--MacroAlan 08:34, 15 October 2007 (PDT)

Maps

This is primarily addressed to Dystopos, but others might be interested. Google Maps has a new feature called My Maps, which lets one "create personalized, annotated, customized maps using Google Maps." This is exactly the kind of thing Dystopos wanted for pages like List of Birmingham homicides in 2006, as it will allow many placemarks on a single map. The downsides are 1) the map will be a separate link rather than appearing in the article, 2) it would make BhamWiki very dependent on the Google Maps service (Some might argue the "locate" templates I've already created do that anyway.), and 3) each map would be owned by an individual unless we set up a group "BhamWiki" account (which would still have a different set of issues). I haven't played with My Maps yet, but it looked so cool I had to bring it to y'all's attention. --Lkseitz 11:15, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

• I saw the announcement. I already have a Google Earth folder for 2006 homicides. I'll look into whether I can directly export that .kmz file into something that people can load in a browser on Google Maps (instead of needing the Google Earth application). --Dystopos 11:26, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

Status

You all have probably noticed that the site has been spotty again. I don't know a lot, but I know our overall number of connections and queries to the database is within acceptable levels; that our overall traffic bandwidth is within acceptable levels, and that the actual physical server on which bhamwiki.com is hosted is reported to be running fine. The friendly Dreamhost support team suggested today that it is possible that the MySQL database is "corrupted" and have I tried restoring from a "known good" backup.

• Well, here's the deal. I don't know what's good. Dreamhost takes snapshots of the database daily and stores them for a couple of weeks. I suspect if there is something wrong in the database, that its much older than a couple of weeks. I've made my own off-site backups in January and last Sunday (Easter). I don't want to lose data just to see if that solves the problem. Losing data is a bigger problem than a slow site, in my opinion.

• So... the only way I know for sure that I don't lose the most important data (the articles), is to save them all to my own computer as text files. Which I've been doing. I've got 255 so far and I'll keep doing it until I have all of them. I've focused on the most recent ones. I am backing up ALL new contributions in the same manner, starting now, and for the foreseeable future. Whatever becomes of this database, all articles will be preserved and will see the light of day. Please don't be discouraged from about contributing. (Also, I have backed up the images folder from the mediawiki install, so no actual image files are threatened)

• Note: My failsafe method is intended as an absolute last-resort for the most critical content, to be used ONLY in the case that the database itself becomes irrecoverable. The method does not preserve the article history and it doesn't follow through with categories. This would technically be a violation of the site license, but if it's the only thing I can do, you'll just have to forgive me.

• Second note: If you are so inclined, it wouldn't hurt to keep backups of your own contributions, especially things that will mean more to you than to the public, like your user pages. If needed, I have kept a private list of all user's login names and email addresses which I can use to re-create accounts if that ever becomes necessary.

• Third note: If anyone wants to sit down with me and propose a better means of hosting BhamWiki, let me know.

• And last: I appreciate your patience with me. I don't know much about these technical issues and I'm a slow learner. What faith I have is in the fact that the site is still, if intermittently, performing as expected with no apparent gaps in the database; in the fact that MySQL and MediaWiki have broad user and developer bases and that our content is not in some endangered proprietary format. --Dystopos 18:59, 10 April 2007 (PDT)

• It's a daunting task, but you can use the Special:Export page to download pages with their entire histories. You can then use Special:Import, which only Sysops (you) have access to to restore them. I knew there was a good reason to track my contributions. --Lkseitz 20:35, 10 April 2007 (PDT)

• Tell you what, if you can figure out how to get a list of every page, I'll try the export function on a full list and see what comes out. --Dystopos 21:59, 10 April 2007 (PDT)

• Is that all? Special:Allpages. :-) I exported all the articles I've started (but not their talk pages) last night since I had a handy list. Doing the whole thing, however, is a bit much for my dial-up connection at home. --Lkseitz 06:50, 11 April 2007 (PDT)

update

• I haven't learned anything more from Dreamhost today. The condition of the site seems the same - plagued with "internal server errors" and general sluggishness. I was, however, thanks to Lee, able to backup all of the articles in the main namespace using the Special:Export function. So I now have a nice collection of 82 .XML files with a few dozen articles each which, if need be, can be imported into a fresh wiki install. Most of these were exported with their page histories. I found it more convenient to export dense pages like the main page and the homicide lists without their histories, and then sometimes found that checkbox checked several pages later. But oh, well. I'm planning to continue saving articles as text files because that's the only thing I actually trust. Hopefully it won't come down to that. More later on any plans for attempting a fix. I'll continue backing up contributions as they are made. --Dystopos 16:31, 11 April 2007 (PDT)

• Dreamhost is reporting that a database admin checked our database and that it appears to be fine (not corrupted). We haven't identified what was causing all the logjams earlier this week, but at least today things seemed to have improved. I'm still keeping copies of everything as a precaution. --Dystopos 20:20, 12 April 2007 (PDT)

• Next task is to try to corrall the googlebot so that it doesn't index anything but article space. Initial research indicates that I'll need to "beautify" the URLs in order to make that easier. So whenever I do that there may be a little bit of downtime, but it should knock some of the peaks off of the loads that cause our server to return an internal error. --Dystopos 11:50, 26 April 2007 (PDT)

• Looks like was more hotlinking going on than I knew about. Disabling the hotlinking of images has apparently returned over 200 "failed referrals" over the last 24 hours. Preventing this practice probably saves us some bandwidth, but I'm not sure if it will affect CPU usage, which has been our bugaboo. --Dystopos 14:38, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

• Are you referring to the ability of people to link to BhamWiki images from outside the site? Guilty. (Photos are supposed to appear in those bubbles when you select a location.) Sorry, it was just an experiment (and an attempt to guide more people to the site). Guess I'll upload copies of those photos to my web site for Google Map purposes. --Lkseitz 15:05, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

• Yes, that's what I'm referring to. And I'm not convinced it was problematic since our "bandwidth" usage is well below the threshold that should cause any problems or trigger any additional expenses from our host. Depending on how hard the server's CPU has to work to deliver an image file with a link that locates the file through our database, hotlinking could have been contributing to our "internal server error" problem. In any case, hotlinking has been disabled on the server by modifying .htaccess. (Don't I sound all knowledgeable now?). Yet to be tackled is the issue of googlebot's indexing of non-article pages, which I suspect is the main culprit in overusing our CPU. --Dystopos 15:26, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

Techmixer 3.0

I presented BhamWiki alongside the Magic City Flickr Group at TechBirmingham's "TechMixer 3.0" at the McWane Science Center this evening. Most people I talked to were very pleased to learn about the sites which make up the "Project to Document the Birmingham District". Just as many people, it seems, were interested in the 20" iMac G5 I brought to show them off on. I expect we'll have more people exploring the site, and hopefully some fresh contributors. Thanks in advance for everybody's help in welcoming people and encouraging them to participate. --Dystopos 18:54, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

Month templates

For the individual date articles, I've started creating month templates. (Template:April, Template:May, and Template:June so far.) I'd like some feedback before I put them on all the date pages. In general, do they look okay? For the first cut, I had the month name and arrows at the top link to "Category: X dates", but this proved to be clunky when doing between months. (You can see this with the April template still.) The new version (May & June) instead goes to the last day of the previous month and the first of the next. Does anyone disagree with this approach or have a better idea? Second, I'm questioning whether the month name should link to the category or not. It seems redundant. Opinions? --Lkseitz 08:49, 6 June 2007 (PDT)

• They look great and work fantastically. I agree with having the arrows link to the next specific date (I can foresee that "February 28 >> February 29 >> March 1" might be confusing, but probably ok). I also agree that linking the month name to the category is redundant. Let's just leave that black. --Dystopos 09:55, 6 June 2007 (PDT)

Jefferson County Maps

Look what I found via Wikipedia today! --Lkseitz 14:14, 9 June 2007 (PDT)

• That's sweet stuff. I was able to download an editable .svg file and prettify it up in inkscape and photshop as an experiment. More work than I would undertake all at once, but it gives you an idea of what can be done. --Dystopos 21:54, 9 June 2007 (PDT)
  • Impressive! And far beyond my skills. --Lkseitz 10:49, 11 June 2007 (PDT)

Defunct landmarks and institutions

I was wondering if we should have an encompassing upper-level category for Category:Demolished buildings, Category:Former parks, Category:Defunct periodicals, and so on. In other words, a category for buildings, sites, institutions, and things that no longer exist. (We have one for people. It's called Category:People by year of death.) Something that would make it easy to navigate through "things that aren't there any more." I can't think of an all-encompassing name for it. It would probably break down into "Former landmarks" and "Defunct institutions", though. --Lkseitz 10:49, 11 June 2007 (PDT)

• I wonder if you wouldn't just pop them into Category:History until something more specific becomes evident. --Dystopos 12:08, 11 June 2007 (PDT)

slowness

• I know that the site has been slow the last couple of days. I've taken action to block twiceler, a robot/crawler that was hitting us almost as hard as googlebot. Hopefully that will take some pressure off the server CPU until we figure out a way to channel googlebot more productively. --Dystopos 13:54, 21 June 2007 (PDT)

High school bands

With my creation of an entry for Pat Morrow, I got to thinking about the various appearances of local high school marching bands in nationally televised parades. This seems like prime material for a list, but how to phrase it? "List of Birmingham District high school marching bands nationally televised appearances" just seems too wordy. Breaking the list up into separate lists either for individual high schools (e.g. Homewood High School) or events (e.g. Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade), while making the list name simpler seems like too much specialization. The former can be included in the high school's entry (or the band's, if it merits one). I like the idea of a three column list with the date, school, and event that can be sorted on any of those. So any suggestions for a better list name? --Lkseitz 15:36, 25 July 2007 (PDT)

• The main thing is finding the references that would allow us to generate such a list. We can move it around until the name feels right (vis-a-vis Interstate hole) --Dystopos 16:00, 25 July 2007 (PDT)
  • Well as Homewood's was the first Alabama high school band in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, we don't have to go back past the '70s. And I suspect the most recent stories on the Homewood, Hoover, and any other bands going to such parades might mention the previous appearances. I guess I'll get started, come up with a name, and we can go from there. --Lkseitz 11:48, 28 July 2007 (PDT)

Infobox City

• I've created another Infobox template, this time for cities and towns. You can see an example of it in use on the Homewood page. I thought I'd solicit feedback before sticking it on more pages. --Lkseitz 21:01, 25 July 2007 (PDT)
  • Let's try it out on Vestavia Hills with the seal centered top and the map filling space at the bottom. --Dystopos 06:38, 26 July 2007 (PDT)
    • Done. (What do you think?) And I learned something, so now the image attribute is optional on the school infobox template. So if any articles weren't using it because it lacked an image, that's no longer an issue. Speaking of the school infobox, should we add to it the background colors used in the city one? --Lkseitz 09:15, 26 July 2007 (PDT)
      • Looks pretty cool to me. Good work. Generally I prefer only the subtlest coloration. Let's stick with less is more for now. --Dystopos 11:24, 26 July 2007 (PDT)

Faculty categories

We have an inconsistency in the various faculty categories. It currently is on a per high school basis . . . sort of. Some Birmingham high schools have their own faculty categories. The suburbs with their own school systems tend to only have one high school that's named after the city. So where do we put Birmingham superintendents? Because the suburbs only have one high school, their superintendents are in the "city's" faculty category. Do we need to create Category:Birmingham faculty and then put the schools as subcategories? We have to keep in mind all schools, not just high schools, as I know there are some Homewood Middle School principals in Category:Homewood faculty. --Lkseitz 11:45, 28 July 2007 (PDT)

• It probably does make sense to group grade school faculty by system. --Dystopos 14:42, 28 July 2007 (PDT)

Birmingham Barons

Another day, another template, for which I welcome feedback. Working on this template led me to do clean up of the Birmingham Barons article. It seems to be largely copied from Wikipedia. As such, it has some disambiguation on certain names. I'm wondering if any of this disambiguation is necessary on BhamWiki or if the links can be changed to just the names. The list follows:

• Jeff Abbott (baseball player)
• Bill Foster (baseball player)
• John Garland (baseball)
• Howard Johnson (baseball player)
• Roberto Hernandez (baseball player)
• John McNamara (baseball)
• Frank Thomas (AL baseball player)

• Good observation. I'd nix the disambiguation until we find it necessary. --Dystopos 08:20, 23 August 2007 (PDT)
  • Thanks for updating the template. I've updated the Barons entry. --Lkseitz 11:58, 23 August 2007 (PDT)

Fallout shelters

Fallout shelter sign

Should we have a category for buildings that were fallout shelters during the Cold War? Unfortunately, I only know of two: the Birmingham News building (1917) and the Alabama Theatre. I can offer an anecdote for the latter. There were still barrels of food and water stored around the Alabama until the late 1980s when the management asked the appropriate authorities to come remove them. --Lkseitz 05:57, 12 September 2007 (PDT)

• The only one I know about first hand is Napier Hall on the campus of the University of Montevallo. Still, I think a category would be appropriate. --Wheresdib 06:18, 12 September 2007 (PDT)

• If we can find a listing, sure. My recollection is that I've seen the sign on several schools, and on the Vestavia Mall. --Dystopos 06:57, 12 September 2007 (PDT)

Photo sources

Relocated to Bhamwiki:References#Images.

Main Page

Is it just me or is the Main Page a little drab? On every computer I get on, when I access the site, you have to scroll down to see the Featured Images. Is there a way to move them up, or section off the page so they are visible without scrolling? --Wheresdib

Civil Rights movement link

• I was linking "civil rights" in the Temple Emanu-El article and discovered something; we've linked "Civil rights movement," "Civil Rights movement," and "Civil Rights Movement" in almost equal numbers. (See the Special:Wantedpages page and turn it up to the top 500.) Maybe we should create a stub with the "correct" capitalization so our links in the future will be consistent? --Lkseitz 06:59, 14 October 2007 (PDT)

• Sounds good. Which one is correct? I think we got here because I keep thinking different things at different times. Wikipedia uses "civil rights movement" to discuss various movements, and "African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)", to discuss a particular one. "Civil Rights Act of 1964" would be capitalized as a title, but generally in texts, "civil rights movement" seems most common. I tend to go with "civil rights movement" in text, and "Civil rights movement" as the title. What do you think? --Dystopos 08:15, 14 October 2007 (PDT)

• I was hoping you'd make an executive decision, because I'm on the fence as to which is correct. I searched the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute web site for "civil rights movement" and discovered they're not consistent either. I listen to the Grammar Girl podcast, and her episode on "Capitalizing Proper Nouns" makes me think that, since we're discussing a specific time period, all three words should be capitalized. In other words, we're typically using "Civil Rights Movement" as shorthand for Wikipedia's "African-American Civil Rights Movement." --Lkseitz 07:00, 15 October 2007 (PDT)

• I am going to agree with Lee. "Civil Rights Movement" seems to be the best usage, not only to show it was significant but also an actual movement. You would capitalize "Civil War" when referring to the war that took place from 1861 to 1865 in America, even though there are lots of "civil wars" and "civil rights movements". --Wheresdib 07:30, 15 October 2007 (PDT)

• As opposed to the "War of Northern Aggression." I agree, captitalize each word. Someone pick one for all of us. --MacroAlan 08:28, 15 October 2007 (PDT)