Fairfaxpedia:Village pump

Welcome to the Village Pump. This page is used to discuss the technical issues, policies, and operations of Fairfaxpedia. It is a concept borrowed from.

Discussing the site
So far we (mostly I) have created various pages in the Fairfaxpedia namespace to discuss the site. I think it's better to follow Wikipedia and have discussion here, putting content in separate pages once things are fleshed out, while discussions on further refinement can occur in those pages. --Joshdoe 11:26, 28 February 2012 (EST)

Discussion threading style
Personally I prefer the form that Wikipedia uses, where each reply is indented and the signature occurs at the end. I find it is more readable than the current style you can see on our talk pages. I think people can pretty quickly learn to sign their entries with. --Joshdoe 11:26, 28 February 2012 (EST)

Board meetings
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors meets every month, which generates hundreds of pages of agenda, attachments, and summary. Should we aim (eventually) to (very) briefly summarize each board meeting on its own page, linkifying the content in the process, and with a sidebox to navigate between meetings. This would be a fair bit of work, and we wouldn't want to duplicate the content of the agendas/summaries, but I think it could be very useful, and also serve as a way to generate stub articles. --Joshdoe 11:26, 28 February 2012 (EST)


 * I pulled the Clerk's Board Summary for the January 24, 2012 meeting and the thing is 54 pages long! It would probably take me at least a day, (and likely two) to summarize the summary, and I'm unsure I'm willing to commit to that kind of an investment, especially since it looks like it'd have to be done every two weeks, not every month. I will say it does look like great source material, though, there's six and a half pages of nominations for all sorts of boards, commissions, and committees. --Chuckhoffmann 18:41, 28 February 2012 (EST)


 * I'm with Chuck. It'd be pretty tedious to get all that down. Perhaps someone or some organization in the community will take it upon themselves to document all that information. It might be worth to document the major resolutions (though we'll have to hash out what that means). Good idea, though. Let's keep it on the back burner. --Frank Muraca 23:13, 28 February 2012 (EST)

Maps
Especially for such a locally-focused wiki as Fairfaxpedia, we need to integrate location data and/or maps with our articles, especially articles about places. --Joshdoe 07:42, 23 February 2012 (EST)


 * I'm a big proponent of OpenStreetMap, so I'd love to have OSM have some part in the maps we show on the wiki. I've been working on improving the road network in the county, importing parks, adding buildings. In some cases, at least initially, we can use maps from Wikimedia Commons. Eventually it would be nice to create some custom maps. One question I have is how prominent should maps be? Some place articles have very large Google Maps, which I think might be too big. Wikipedia has been working on integrating OSM. At the German Wikipedia you can click Karte in the upper right to drop down a map (e.g. here), and the English site has a similar drop down map if you click the globe in the upper right (e.g. here). -- Joshdoe 08:12, 23 February 2012 (EST)


 * It makes no difference to me where we source maps from, but when I tried to use OSM as the map service for the Westfield High School article it still showed the Google map. The question I have is how will adding a feature like that affect performance? I don't know if anyone else is having this problem, but Fairfaxpedia is crawlingly slow for me already, and there's only 100-odd articles on it.--Chuckhoffmann 10:16, 23 February 2012 (EST)


 * I'm currently investigating how to embed a non-intrusive, but interactive map in infoboxes based on coordinates, and possibly overlaying a polygon to show the extents of the subject in the article (e.g. park/county border). -- Joshdoe 07:39, 25 February 2012 (EST)

Portals and namespaces
I believe we should create a Portal namespace, such as, and put all our portals in that namespace, keeping Fairfaxpedia strictly for meta content. -- Joshdoe 12:15, 28 February 2012 (EST)