Users/CharlesMcLaughlin - Sacramento Wiki

I'm one of the founders of this website. I started this project because I used to live in Sacramento and I wanted to learn more about the region. Currently I live in San Francisco.

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Hey Charles, I'm a writer for the TheCaliforniaAggie, and I'd love to do an article on you and Brian. E-mail me at gijohnson at ucdavis.edu if you think either of you might be interested. - GeoffJohnson

Here is a link to the article. —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-06-22 15:41:10 You should update the common.css file to the one from default (on the Wiki Settings/CSS page there). I noticed yours is older when trying to make this page's images look good. —PhilipNeustrom

Done, thanks! —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-06-26 17:20:28 question: why does my signature ( name that appears where it's indicated that i made a change) link to wikispot and not sacwiki? —John.Downs

Check you user settings ("settings" link by your name). You probably set it to link to "wikispot" at some point? Choose "each wiki" and press save and see if that fixes it for you. Let me know if this doesn't work. —PhilipNeustrom

2007-06-26 17:23:32 also thought it would be helpful to be able to edit individual events that have been posted to the events page, but i think that might require diving into the code. —John.Downs

Dear Sacwiki,

We used to have such a good relationship. But now, you delete pages when you take content off of Davis Wiki. A lot of it is quite relevant to Davis, and belongs here. Sure, you can copy, but unless it's something like a restaurant, please don't delete our page. It just reduces the value of our wiki, and the whole interwiki sphere of influence.

Thanks,
WilliamLewis

I haven't seen any pages deleted. But then again, I don't monitor DavisWiki all that closely. If it's related to Sacramento, it belongs on SacWiki. We have interwiki links and redirects to relate content, which should address your concerns. Most of the Sacramento related content on DavisWiki was published before SacWiki and WikiSpot existed. Now that we're up and running, it makes sense to move content over to the appropriate wiki and put a redirect in place. Be sure to note that I'm not the only one moving content, others started it. Now that I've seen it happen, I have to say that it makes sense. —CharlesMcLaughlin

Interwiki redirects don't really address the issue. The issue is that while Sac State is in Sacramento, it has a different meaning to those in Davis than it does in Sacramento. In Davis, it would be more about the rivalry with UC Davis than the campus life itself. And in Davis, things like "the Adrian Petersen, Vice President of ASUCD, actually attended Sac State while in office" have more effect. Sacwiki may want to cover everything about the campus and be more of a general page. —BrentLaabs

I don't think stating rules about the process of moving content from the Davis Wiki to the much newer Sacramento Wiki is useful. It is true, on one hand, that certain pages should exist in both places. The example of the Sac State page is a fine one. But the majority of pages are about much less regionally tentacular places or topics, and should live in the Wiki for that community. Rather than rules, we need to rely on common sense on a case by case basis. —BrianGingold

UC Davis Medical Center is a great case. It is physically in Sacramento, but run by UC Davis. Most of the information on the page is for Davis students who have classes or internships there. So should I move it to SacWiki and put a redirect on DavisWiki? (if so, point me to a primer and I'll jump into this fray!) Also, can my User/ page live in both wikis, or do I have to pick one? -MattJurach

This may be the wrong page to do it on, but I wanted to let you guys know I'm responsible for most of the deletes on DavisWiki. I haven't deleted anything twice, and I 'm open to discussion on the issue. I intend, however, to move anything that isn't relevant to Davis (say, Old Sacramento) over here, excluding those pages that warrant a Davis perspective (for instance, I'll leave Sacramento alone). Otherwise, there's no reason Davisites can't contribute to Sacwiki, too. GeoffJohnson

Just leave your "user page" option in your user settings to "each wiki" and then make a user page on each wiki. You'll then have, well, a page on each wiki :) You can also choose to pick a single "home" wiki. —PhilipNeustrom

I'd like to see the user page link default to the wiki the user came from when they created their account. I figure most users will frequent one wiki the most, although they may venture out. However, most users won't take the time to create user pages on all the wikis, so their user page link should go to their home wiki by default. We've seen lots of DavisWiki users edit SacWiki, but you have to manually look them on on DavisWiki to see if they have a user page. —CharlesMcLaughlin

I'm too lazy to move that to the feature req's page, so you should :P Though, I will say that this could potentially be confusing — "How do I create a page here?". People most likely to edit a bunch of wikis are probably also the most likely to go notice the setting. —PhilipNeustrom

2007-07-14 12:29:01 Hey Charles, I've added a ton of stuff to the "Front Page," it's somewhat messy and a lot shoud go into subpages. I love what you guys have done. Sac needs this. —steadyfrank

Hi Frank, thanks for all your work on the wiki! —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-07-17 22:04:13 The revert stats are a joke. I really don't care about them too much. Most of my reverts come from restoring deleted information or a few revert wars that I was in as a joke. In general, I don't like removing content. You should recall our disagreement about you deleting transwiki'd stuff. Also see the Shelly Bates and Kirk Cowgill pages where I put in a large number of reverts to preserve content. In general, I don't like removing content. I only remove content that is completely useless and out of place. —WilliamLewis

2007-07-21 13:05:46 Hey Charles - First thanks for the good work & creating the site. It is much needed. Second, I added a Record Store section under Goods and you deleted it because there is a Music Retailers section. I am an avid music freak and when I look for record stores I look for sites listing record or cd store not music retailer. while technically music retailer might be correct, i think most users will miss it, like i did. can i suggest that at the very least the two sections in music retailer be subsections under that main listing, the way there are subsections under the clothing section? thanks —SS —SS

Thanks for contributing! I didn't start the music retailers page and I'm not particular attached to it. I just don't want to maintain two sources of information. I like your idea about differentiating between types of music stores in the music retailers page - perhaps it will help people steer away of the corporate megastores. —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-07-27 03:17:32 You're using Title Index instead of All Pages? All Pages was supposed to be the wikispot standard; just curious as to whether you chose "title index" or didn't know about the other one. —BrentLaabs

Thanks for pointing that out. I just changed the tab to All Pages. —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-07-31 11:50:58 Charles - Do you know of any plan to "unify" wikispot user pages? I created my user page on the daviswiki, but after making edits to the sacwiki I noticed that I'll need to make an entirely new user page here as-well (or make some hacky re-direct to my daviswiki userpage). Shouldn't I have the same userpage regardless of where I'm editing (daviswiki or sacwiki), I'm still the same person! =) —VladLoscutoff

Vlad, Thanks for contributing. Here is a work-around: First go to the DavisWiki and click the 'watch this wiki' link at underneath your name. Then click the settings link in the same area. Finally, look for the "My name links to my user page on..." option and choose Davis. —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-08-02 23:59:01 Charles, thanks for all of your great work with SacWiki. —Graham.Freeman

2007-08-09 19:27:43 Hi Charles. How do I link my name here to my Davis wiki page (of the same name)? Do I just use the redirect prompt, or is there some better way to integrate my profile? —robinlaughlin

Robin, Please see my response to Vlad above. —CharlesMcLaughlin

Great! It worked. Thanks. —robinlaughlin

2007-08-12 01:55:01 I don't think it's a good idea to use wikipedia as the basis for articles. Using WP articles as a starter requires that the resulting article be licensed as GFDL (a rather crappy license, if you ask me) instead of CC-by. —WilliamLewis

I don't see anything wrong with GFDL. Wikipedia has done well with it. —BrianGingold

The very fact that it is incompatible with CC-by (and just about any other non-GNU approved license) is enough to make it inappropriate for this site. Debian doesn't consider it free because of the restrictions it imposes. For example, lets say that someone wanted to print out a GFDL article and distribute it. They would have to distribute a hard copy of the GFDL with the printout, which is in many cases longer than the article itself. There are restrictions on the formats you can distribute GFDL articles in. GFDL allows the licensee to decree that a certain part of the work can't be changed. Etc, etc, etc. GFDL is just too restrictive. -wl

I actually prefer the GFDF over CC for the same reasons I prefer the GPL to BSD style licenses. That said, most of the content on this site is licensed under CC and I'm OK with that because I can't complain about all the hard work behind Wikispot. Note I said most content — individual pieces of content (text, images, etc.) can be licensed differently. That is why the license block below states "except where otherwise noted...". —CharlesMcLaughlin

Well, I can understand that some people prefer copyleft licenses to copycenter licenses. However, that doesn't mean that the GFDL is a good copyleft license. The restrictions on printouts with GFDL are pretty bad. The invariant sections part is also pretty nasty, with each derived work requiring a NEW title AND the reproduction of the new work requires inclusion of all the titles of the works from which it was derived. Metainformation can often overwhelm the actual content, which is bad. A much better copyleft license for text is cc-by-sa. While it's still incompatible with cc-by, at least it doesn't have the silly restrictions of the GFDL. -wl

2007-08-17 20:13:55 I'm going to start slowly adding and working on SacWiki stuff to make up for reverting a few redirects :P —EdWins

Awesome, thanks! —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-08-28 12:50:45 i'll pass it along to the appropriate people, it's certainly a useful wiki —DanielNguyen

2007-09-11 11:45:37 Sure thing, if you see any philsophical mistakes or a style that is not good or whatever please let me know so that I can fix my editing. I love Sac, great place to visit. —SteveOstrowski

2007-09-11 21:40:16 It still should be rewritten. Copypasta isn't good wiki content. —WilliamLewis

— Well then you should you rewrite it. —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-09-14 21:38:38 Hey, Charles. Do you think creating links for downtown streets makes sense for the Sac Wiki at this time? See my comment/question to James Schwab. I don't think it makes sense for Sacramento, but will yield to what others agree to. Right now pages are mixed. —robinlaughlin

— I don't like maintaining multiple lists. If others want to keep up with the maintenance, that's great. —CharlesMcLaughlin

2007-09-20 09:09:02 Check out Presentations and let us know what you think. —JasonAller

2008-04-24 12:09:58 Local Spelling Words is automatically created when people use the wiki's "Check Spelling" function. However, no one really uses it, considering FF/Opera do a better job. —BrentLaabs

2008-05-22 13:52:48 I don't agree with your choice of leaving the homepage without a pic. I'm not saying we need that specific pic, but it needs something there. The page doesn't flow well at all and looks really boring. —BrandonBarrette