Category talk:HomeARC ML 0-200
From XFamily - Children of God
Category title
Peter (and others), are there benefits you see to preserving the current title for this category? There are three issues I see with the current title (HomeARC ML 0-200)... 1. These Mo Letters have nothing to do with the HomeARC per se. (The level of sanitation also has nothing to do with the HomeARC, as the versions in the HomeARC are supposed to mimic the paper copies in Family homes after having undergone the various pubs purges.) 2. "ML" is not as descriptive as "Mo Letters", and 3. MediaWiki automatically offers "next 200"/"previous 200" links, which allows shared category intro text, as opposed to copying and pasting the intro text across all "HomeARC ML xxx-xxx" categories. What are your thoughts on this? --Monger 17:56, 30 July 2006 (PDT)
Detailed list with titles
I have moved the list below from the Category page to here, as I think it is inappropriate for its former location. Perhaps this can be moved to a new article titled "Mo Letter list" or some such. Thoughts? --Monger 17:30, 30 July 2006 (PDT)
- I don't agree. I believe it is nice to have the actual titles of the MLs for easy reference. I also believe it belongs on the Category page.--Thorwald 17:33, 30 July 2006 (PDT)
- Listing them on the category page is incredibly redundant. I know we have this same problem with some other categories, but I feel that we should strive to address the issue with the other cateogories and not propagate it in even more striking form here. I would personally prefer to have a prominent link to the listing with titles at the top of the category, and use the category itself not so much as the primary location for users to access Mo Letters, but rather more for the underlying organizational benefits of the category. --Monger 17:56, 30 July 2006 (PDT)
- This is also in response to the first entry at the top of the page. In regards to the category title, the intent was to precisely identify the source. I think it is important to archive the different versions of each publication. While I don't know he exact details of the purge and sanitization procedures, a preliminary comparison leads me to believe that the text of Mo Letters in the HomeARC often differs significantly from both the original and any paper saniztized copies in a Home's library. Some of the changes (such as replacing "Jew" or "Jewish" with AC, rewriting whole sentences and paragraphs, etc) go a lot farther than merely cutting out pages or blacking out words and could probably not be easily done without reprinting the publications in question. How closely the sanization of paper publications tracked the sanitization of publications in the HomeARC is definitely something that merits further research. I realize that ML is not as descriptive as "Mo Letter" but they are already in a category titled "HomeARC Mo Letters." I realize that Mediawiki shows 200 links at a time in a category but I think whenever possible categories with thousands of articles should be avoided. I agree that the titles are important and I like Thorwald's table. I think eventually we should both create both alphabetical and numerical (and possibly chronological) lists of Mo Letters and other Family publications. Having articles with a numerical title (or at least a redirect) would be very helpful in creating links when a reference to a Mo Letter number appears in a document we have archived. There are also some indexes (Pubdex, KWIC, Mo Letter Index, etc) we may want to scan, OCR and add links to - a standard title format for Mo Letter numbers would be very helpful for that. Whether each category should have a list of the publications in that category I don't know although I don't see any problem with it except it makes the page longer. I would expect that eventually we would have alphabetical and numerical lists with links to different versions (original text, original scan, Daily Bread version, HomeARC version, other purged version, maybe even a version showing the sanitization/purge changes, etc). Peter F. 20:33, 30 July 2006 (PDT)
- I mostly agree with the points above as you have explained them, but I have two questions. 1., Can you explain a bit about why you think that categories with thousands of articles should be avoided? (I see no reason to avoid it, pending hearing your reasoning) ...and 2., What is your prefernece regarding whether or not we should include the list with titles on the category home pages themselves, vs. on separate pages (e.g. "Numerical list of Mo Letters", "Alphabetical list of Mo Letters", etc.)? If we are going to have different categories to denote the sources of different versions of Mo Letters, etc., I imagine that the easiest way for users to actually browse them would be to have a table on a separate page, with a single row for each title, and discrete links for each source ("HomeArc", "Original", "DB", etc.) --Monger 12:19, 31 July 2006 (PDT)
- One more thought....with this much data involved with Family publications (versions, comparisons, ordering, etc.), does it really make sense to keep it all in the Wiki, or should we have a separate app to accomplish it all? We could of course make the app's template look the same as the wiki. I don't know PHP (though I could probably whip something together using ColdFusion in less than an hour if all the db tables were alreay set up) so I probably wouldn't get involved with development that much, but still, the route we're currently taking seems a bit crazy given the scope of what you've described. --Monger 12:38, 31 July 2006 (PDT)
- This is also in response to the first entry at the top of the page. In regards to the category title, the intent was to precisely identify the source. I think it is important to archive the different versions of each publication. While I don't know he exact details of the purge and sanitization procedures, a preliminary comparison leads me to believe that the text of Mo Letters in the HomeARC often differs significantly from both the original and any paper saniztized copies in a Home's library. Some of the changes (such as replacing "Jew" or "Jewish" with AC, rewriting whole sentences and paragraphs, etc) go a lot farther than merely cutting out pages or blacking out words and could probably not be easily done without reprinting the publications in question. How closely the sanization of paper publications tracked the sanitization of publications in the HomeARC is definitely something that merits further research. I realize that ML is not as descriptive as "Mo Letter" but they are already in a category titled "HomeARC Mo Letters." I realize that Mediawiki shows 200 links at a time in a category but I think whenever possible categories with thousands of articles should be avoided. I agree that the titles are important and I like Thorwald's table. I think eventually we should both create both alphabetical and numerical (and possibly chronological) lists of Mo Letters and other Family publications. Having articles with a numerical title (or at least a redirect) would be very helpful in creating links when a reference to a Mo Letter number appears in a document we have archived. There are also some indexes (Pubdex, KWIC, Mo Letter Index, etc) we may want to scan, OCR and add links to - a standard title format for Mo Letter numbers would be very helpful for that. Whether each category should have a list of the publications in that category I don't know although I don't see any problem with it except it makes the page longer. I would expect that eventually we would have alphabetical and numerical lists with links to different versions (original text, original scan, Daily Bread version, HomeARC version, other purged version, maybe even a version showing the sanitization/purge changes, etc). Peter F. 20:33, 30 July 2006 (PDT)
- Listing them on the category page is incredibly redundant. I know we have this same problem with some other categories, but I feel that we should strive to address the issue with the other cateogories and not propagate it in even more striking form here. I would personally prefer to have a prominent link to the listing with titles at the top of the category, and use the category itself not so much as the primary location for users to access Mo Letters, but rather more for the underlying organizational benefits of the category. --Monger 17:56, 30 July 2006 (PDT)
