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Contents 1 Posted Discussion 2 When CreationWiki goes Offline 3 Database Error 4 Congratulations 5 policy for allowed content 6 Finding Help Pages 7 Decline of the Earth’s Magnetic Field 8 Paragraph, ref formatting

Posted Discussion

When CreationWiki goes Offline

For our computer, CreationWiki was not available on April 1. There may have been a cyber attack or simple maintenance. Is there another site we should go to that will have news about what is happening while CreationWiki is out? Since it is back up again today, that's good, but I couldn't find any explanation about what happened yesterday. Is there a special place to look to find out what happened? --John Baab 18:56, 2 April 2011 (PDT)

There is always nwcreation.net that is the parent site to this project. I am sure thats where you can find some news if something serious has happened. Other than that I am not to sure.--Tony 14:57, 3 April 2011 (PDT)

That is correct. If the site is down for maintenance, we will post updates on the index.html (homepage) of the NWCN website (http://nwcreation.net). If there is nothing to report - as is the current case - there will be none. Sometimes servers just crash, and are offfline for a little bit while tech support tries to debug..--Ashcraft - (talk) 09:23, 4 April 2011 (PDT)

Database Error

Tonight there was a database error on the Philistine page. I had never seen this before and wondered what caused it. Also it should be drawn to the attention of the administrators. --John Baab 19:28, 12 June 2011 (PDT)

Yeah I haven't been able to edit anything for a while. Any idea when the database will be fixed? Shinydarkrai94 23:36, 18 June 2011 (PDT)

On June 6th several database files apparently became corrupted that are related to the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) addon. The actual cause of the corruption is unknown but coincided closely with an installation of the server control panel indicating a possible link. Other database files were also affected. I have disabled the SMW, which has cleared up the error that is generated when saving files and calling up pages that contain SMW data. Restoring the corrupted files will likely be accomplished with an installation of the latest MediaWiki software. FYI - although an error was generated when saving files, the edits were preserved.

Sorry for the delay in clearing up the issue. --Ashcraft - (talk) 19:46, 22 June 2011 (PDT)

Thanks for filling us in! ~ "Webster" Otley (talk) 18:49, 23 June 2011 (PDT)

Yea, thanks for fixing the database :). Shinydarkrai94 19:16, 23 June 2011 (PDT)

Right on, glad we are back in action...--Tony 20:50, 24 June 2011 (PDT)

I've been haveing for weeks now simaler probelms with vairous pages, espically Gether, I posted about it on my Talk page.--MithirandirOlorin 22:17, 24 June 2011 (PDT)

Sorry for the outage - totally my fault. I attempted a software upgrade and it caused a bit of trouble that I had difficulty reversing. The site should now be restored completely although a few edits from Friday (June 1st) were lost.

I have restored the Semantic MediaWiki tables which are currently being rebuilt. Hopefully once this is finished, the SMW properties will again be available. --Ashcraft - (talk) 09:59, 6 July 2011 (PDT)

cool, glad to hear we back in operation :)... cause you know I am all OCD about this site ;o.--Tony 14:36, 6 July 2011 (PDT)

Bad news. There is now a 'Database error' on the Nebula theory page. I hit it when I clicked on the Nebula Theory link in the Nebula page.--John Baab 10:19, 24 July 2011 (PDT)

That is the same error we were experiencing before and somewhat of a confirmation that the Semantic MediaWiki extension is causing trouble. I ran a database repair routine and that didnt clear up the problem, ultimately I had to remove the SMW code on the page to restore it. It was apparently (again) this SMW-related error that crashed the server yesterday due to "excess resource usage". I'm afraid that unless we can get the SMW back to proper function, it will need to be removed from the site. --Ashcraft - (talk) 11:02, 24 July 2011 (PDT)

Congratulations

I just wanted to say congratulations and God bless to Ashcraft and everybody else on this wiki helping make it one of the most substantial Christian wikis on the Internet today. We finally reached 5,000+ articles recently, and certainly that is a tremendous milestone... Here is to 5,000 more well-informed articles so that we may be an intellectual cornerstone for Christian apologetics and online outreach!--Tsommer (Tony) 14:01, 31 July 2011 (PDT)

Per CreationWiki:About, any creationist perspective is welcome, not just Christian ones. But I won't quibble; it's primarily Christian.

Per Christian Wikis; there are two Christian wikis bigger than CreationWiki: Conservapedia itself, which has ~33,000 articles, and BibleWiki (160,000 pages, but most seem to be public domain imports of Bible verses). WikiChristian has over 250,000 pages, but only 3,300 are considered "content pages". So, "one of the most substantial" is clearly correct. ~ "Webster" Otley (talk) 21:40, 22 August 2011 (PDT)

policy for allowed content

Is there a policy addressing what types of pages should belong on this wiki? This relates to a recent discussion here. ⇔ ChristTrekker 06:28, 20 October 2011 (PDT)

There's the About CreationWiki page. I hope that helps a bit. The policy structure here is not as extensive as on Wikipedia. ~ "Webster" Otley (talk) 19:07, 22 October 2011 (PDT)

Finding Help Pages

The CreationWiki is doing well, and we may need to add to our help files a little bit. I needed to add a Greek word on one page, and couldn't find what the correct procedure was. I looked at our help files, and looked at the help category, but found nothing about Greek or foreign languages. I feel sure I have seen instructions about adding Greek somewhere, but I can't seem to find it now. It may be someplace obvious that I simply missed when I scanned through, but if not, perhaps we should expand the help index side bar to include some of the other help pages that are hard to find. This could be a help for new users, and (ahem) us longer term users who have forgotten something.

--John Baab 17:26, 22 November 2011 (PST)

Very true, I agree man!--Tsommer (Tony) 22:31, 22 November 2011 (PST)

Are you looking, maybe, for these templates?

As to your larger point, I don't see any downside to having a central index of help pages -- maybe Help:Help pages. :-) ~ "Webster" Otley (talk) 20:48, 8 December 2011 (PST)

The help index can be found using the link in the left margin panel that says "Help files". --Ashcraft - (talk) 06:28, 9 December 2011 (PST)

I appreciate Mdotley pointing out the template pages, but I still don't know how to find them if I need them (though I could come here to the coffeeshop if I needed to). Would it be possible to add three new headings to the left margin panel that says "Help files"? Probably we would add to the "Advanced Formatting" section three sections which would be "Hebrew Words", "Greek Words", and "Bible References".

--John Baab 10:40, 12 December 2011 (PST)

The link to the template help page can be found in the "Advanced Formatting" section of the help index. I added a second link there to help with navigation.

Feel free to create a help:language and help:Bible reference pages to assist users with those formatting issues, and then link to them from the help index page.--Ashcraft - (talk) 13:41, 13 December 2011 (PST)

I used Special:AllPagesto create the list linked above. Once there, I just used the existing options to narrow the results. ~ "Webster" Otley (talk) 22:13, 25 January 2012 (PST)

Not directly on-topic, but I added help:Unicode recently. Seems that in any project, writing the documentation is an afterthought! ☺ ⇔ ChristTrekker 📝 07:24, 13 December 2011 (PST)

Decline of the Earth’s Magnetic Field

It has been amusing to view the intellectual bun fight between Creationist and Atheist groups on this subject. As a professional electrical engineer I am intrigued by the ‘dynamo’ theory of the earth’s magnetic field...—unsigned comment by David Bamber (talk • contribs)

Discussion transferred to appropriate article - Geomagnetic field decay. --Ashcraft - (talk) 10:13, 22 December 2011 (PST)

Paragraph, ref formatting

It kind of bothers me that the page formatting seems off. My suggestions are as follows:

(1) I think there should be a bit more space between paragraphs to reflect blank lines, to improve readability. Paragraphs look "stuck together". (2) I think line height or ref height needs to be changed, as the use of refs throws off the look of paragraphs. The height of page lines using refs is noticeably different from those elsewhere in a paragraph.

I suppose both might indicate the line height needs to be increased slightly.

--Jzyehoshua 18:12, 21 April 2012 (PDT)

I just added line height template right now. Whenever the template is used in a paragraph with a height of 1, it changes the paragraph to single spacing. Right now there's some error that causes line height of lines with footnotes to change, seemingly to double space. And this line height fixes that. I would be nice though to figure out what's causing this and fix it. I think it must be in the footnote template somewhere. --Jzyehoshua 11:13, 16 July 2012 (PDT)

I tried adding some new templates relating to footnotes and refs but it didn't fix it. It must be an error in an existing template. I'm going to try and see if I can find it. It must be a very basic template, whatever it is. Something dealing with footnotes or paragraphs themselves I'm sure. --Jzyehoshua 11:48, 16 July 2012 (PDT)