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Current Events is a centralized spot on the wiki where the community can discuss topics that concern the whole of the wiki. Think of it as a talk page for the entire database. If you want to open up discussion about a particular article, please do so on the Talk: page for that article. Don't forget to indent and sign your posts to make discussion easier to navigate.

Contents 1 Merchandise category alphabet tricks 2 New YouTube Videos 3 Redirects 4 In Development 5 Image links 6 Turning ads off for logged-in users 7 "Fight" Category ? 8 Archive

Merchandise category alphabet tricks

Hey folks: I've been adding a bunch of merchandise pages lately, and I've realized that our approach to alphabetical order is a little confusing in those categories. Before I get into it, I acknowledge that I was probably the one who came up with this system in the first place. It just took me a couple years to realize that I'd made a mistake. You know how it is.

Anyway, here's an example: Sesame Street Housewares. For the Sesame merchandise categories, a lot of articles start with "Sesame Street" -- so we've been trying to sort them under the first letter of the object. "Sesame Street cookie jars" is under C, "Sesame Street trays" is under T.

The problem is, that's not really that easy to read... especially when "Sesame Street collectibles (Enesco)" is under E, and "Sesame Street plastic mugs (Applause)" is under M. Browsing through the category, it's just hard for your eye to settle on the letter you're supposed to be looking at.

I'd like to propose sorting those under S, and letting the chips fall where they may. So you'd end up with a list like this:

S

• Sesame Street cake pans
• Sesame Street cookie jars (Applause)
• Sesame Street cookie jars (Treasure Craft)
• Sesame Street dishes (Newcor)
• Sesame Street keys
• Sesame Street mugs (Gund)

And so on. In that category, there'd also be a couple things listed under E: the Elmo Animated Lamp, and the Ernie and Bert lamp.

I think that would be an easier system to browse through, and it would save everyone the trouble of trying to figure out what to do with the category tags.

If we decide to go with this option, we don't necessarily have to change everything over right away -- I know that may be a big job. I'm happy to do the work, as long as I don't have to do it all at once.

What do you guys think? -- Danny (talk) 06:25, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

That sounds good. I'd kind of been wondering what the system was, since I noticed that some things were under the brand name, and some were under the item's name. This is good, so we can keep similar things made by multiple companies (like hand puppets) together.

And I love the stuff you've been adding! Keep it up! -- Ken (talk) 06:38, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

New YouTube Videos

New Muppet videos have followed Sam Eagle's Stars & Stripes FOREVER!!!! Postings from Beaker, Swedish Chef and Gonzo went up yesterday 7/16/08 -- Neffle 07:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Redirects

Hi guys -- I've been working for a long time on figuring out ways to make our Google search rankings go up... It's been a long-standing frustration, dating back to before I was working for Wikia. We get good rankings for some pages, but we should be #1 for Kermit the Frog and The Muppet Show, and we're not. I think the problem is the way that MediaWiki handles redirects -- it shows wiki/Kermit_the_Frog and wiki/Kermit as separate pages, so Google gets confused about what to bring up as results.

So after literally months of banging my head on this, I think we came up with a solution! We tested it yesterday on a couple of wikis to make sure the functionality works, and today I turned it on for us.

The change is: When you search for Kermit, instead of doing a "soft" redirect (showing wiki/Kermit), we're delivering a "hard" redirect -- going directly to wiki/Kermit_the_Frog. But we can't take the redirect link away from people, so that's being delivered separately as a javascript cookie. Anyway, blah blah blah -- go type Kermit into the search box and you'll see how it works. It functions the same way, and most people won't even notice the difference.

So that just got turned on, and I'm tracking six pages that aren't ranking as high as they should -- the main page, Kermit the Frog, the Swedish Chef, The Muppet Show, Statler and Waldorf and The Muppet Christmas Carol. Google re-indexes our pages about once a week, so we should see the redirect URLs dropping out of the search results over the next few weeks. At that point, I'm hoping we see a big rise in our results. Cross your fingers.

So let me know if you see the redirect stuff working in a surprising or unfortunate way. I think it's working well, but if you see any bugs, then I can get 'em fixed. Keep them fingers crossed. -- Danny (talk) 01:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I've found a little glitch in the redirect thing... the javascript is supposed to clear as soon as you go to the next page, but it's not clearing properly -- it's just timing out after a minute or so. So the speedy editors among us may have noticed that sometimes the (Redirected from xx) message sticks around for a couple pages before vanishing.

I told Nick about it; he's the tech wizard who's been working on this. He's working on it, and we'll be able to fix this soon. I just wanted to give folks a heads-up if you noticed it -- it'll be fixed. I'll keep you posted if anything else shows up. -- Danny (talk) 06:15, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

In Development

Is there any reason we can't add more categories to In Development articles? --Trogga 08:34, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

See Category talk:In Development and Category:In Development. —Scott (talk) 08:42, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I just looked there, and it's not really explained on that talk page -- it just references an old conversation, which is probably in the Current Events archive somewhere. Does anyone know if we actually had a single discussion that explains our attitude about In Development, or has it just evolved? -- Danny (talk) 19:20, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

It's actually the reverse of an evolution. Originally, the idea was not to include anything in any other category until it came out, which was something Danny and other admins enforced in comments (see here), but I can't find where the original statement was, which may well have just been on user talk pages rather than current events (that was back in 2006, when a lot of policies were just "We like it this way, and we'll remind people in edit summaries" as opposed to actual pages and rules for reference, and since there were fewer editors, "Hey, I think we should do it this way." "Okay, fine by me" conversations outnumbered current event discussions). Gradually, other users either forgot, ignored it, or just plain didn't know and admins forgot or had a harder time keeping up with it, until six months back or so when we decided the entire In Development area needed to be more closely watched, sourced, and verified. -- 20:56, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Ian made an interesting point on his talk page. We've currently got Unfinished Projects categories as sub-categories in various places. Unfinished Movies is a subcat of Movies, Unfinished TV Shows is a subcat of TV Shows, Unfinished Merchandise is in Merchandise, etc.

We've got it that way so that people can find that information. Right now, we're not really linking to the In Development category at all. We set that stuff apart so that we wouldn't confuse people about what existed and what didn't (yet)... but we may have gone so far that we're actively hiding information that people would want to read.

It would be easy to split In Development up into the major subcats -- Movies In Development, Merchandise In Development, etc -- and then have those be subcats in Movies / TV Shows / Merchandise. That way, people browsing through Movies will be able to find the In Dev stuff. What do folks think? -- Danny (talk) 21:15, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

It's a thought. I was initially thinking of exact parallels which would be problematic, but more general subcats (since a lot of stuff falls under merchandise) makes more sense than "Books in Development" and so on, since specific types will vary. With things like TV Shows especially, though, there's long periods where such a category would be absolutely empty, since in general "In Development" is a temporary category, until the project is released or clearly abandoned. Movies make a bit more sense (especially since things like Fraggle Rock have been in there for years, and may continue to be until it comes out or is definitely dead). Now that I think of it, instead of subcats, how about a list? List whichever movie/TV/toy products are currently in development and place in the appropriate category (also minimizing subcat/article issues), or a single list, ala Optioned Properties, and put in whichever categories are relevent at the time (movies, merchandise, TV, etc., and temporarily remove the category if there aren't any TV shows currently listed, and so on), and to avoid issues when something like a stage show or something unusual which doesn't fit in a major category crops up. I'll think about this some more, and see what everyone else thinks, but right now, since "In Development" is a more nebulous and changing category (albeit slowly at times), that makes more sense to me than subcats, while at the same time solving the navigation issues. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 21:24, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't see the point of splitting up In Development. It's a temporary placeholder: if it gets made, we put it in a real category. If it doesn't, we place it in the appropriate Unfinished category. —Scott (talk) 22:50, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Stuff can stay in the In Development category for a long time... Street Gang has been there since March 2006. Unbelievably, the Fraggle Rock (movie) page was created on December 5, 2005 -- our first day! So given a long enough lead time and an early press leak, a legitimate project might be in that category for years.

I just think it would be helpful to expose that stuff a little bit more. Right now, it's completely isolated from the rest of the category tree. -- Danny (talk) 22:58, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I just thought of another option for this which might satisfy all three of us -- just put the In Development category as a subcat of Movies, TV Shows, Books, etc. So someone browsing through the Movies category will see Creature Shop Movies, Muppet Movies, Sesame Street Movies, Unfinished Movies and In Development. I think it's inconsistent to have Unfinished Movies in there, and not In Development Movies (or some equivalent).

If we add categories to the In Development category, then we could keep all the In Dev stuff together in one folder, but still expose the content a little more in the category tree. -- Danny (talk) 23:04, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

That sounds perfect to me (and coincidentally, the solution that would require the least work). -- Andrew Leal (talk) 23:10, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Awesome. Isn't it nice when things work out that way? If I can get an amen from Scott, then we're good to go. -- Danny (talk) 00:07, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Image links

Wendy just discovered a cool trick that's kind of amazing we haven't figured out by now. Placing #REDIRECT in an image description to go to the article that the image is about. I wouldn't want to do this everywhere, but I think it finally solves the problem I've had with disambig pages. Disambiguation shouldn't have any links other than where you're "soft"-redirecting to -- that's why we don't link Sam and Friends or Sesame Street on Henrietta; we want people to get to what they're looking for rather than get sidetracked by other links. Having the images link to the description pages has always been a deterrent for me because people like to click on pictures. So for people who don't know wikis, they get a confusing image description page instead of what they were looking for. So the click result for images on disambig pages will be the article you're looking for, and if you really want the image description page, you'll still get the redirect from x at the top of the page. Cool, huh? —Scott (talk) 00:08, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Hey, I think the new image redirect thing is cool and all. But it might be a good idea not to use it for everything. What happens if the picture is changed, with a different address? I've been meaning to redo Artie Springer, for example, using a screengrab of the character on the show and moving the publicity photo to the Joey Mazzarino page. Not a big deal, and easily undone/fixed when a new image is added, but something to think about since apparently this is going to be used on a mass scale. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 01:17, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I totally agree about not doing it everywhere. One other thing I found I had to compromise on was Are We There Yet?. We have a picture of Sing-Along Travel Songs to represent the song, but if that picture redirected to the song, it would be misleading for its inclusion on the album page. So I uploaded Image:Disambig-arewethere.jpg just for use on the disambig page. I've only done the As so far with disambigs, so we'll see if this works. —Scott (talk) 01:25, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I think this is awesome. I've been wishing for this forever; it's amazing we never figured it out. -- Danny (talk) 05:41, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

The other problem is that it becomes utterly recursive. Say I go to The Exciting Adventures of Super Grover, and want to check the image info. Clicking the image redirects me to the same page, but includes a link to the jpg at the top. I have to click that to get the file information. In some areas, this may just be an annoyance. But it should definitely be avoided with, for example, images used in the Sesame Street episode guides, since it would make it more difficult to see which pages already link to that image (and right now, more than one character or sketch page links to images of that kind). It's especially bad with something like Sesame Street coloring books or any similar gallery page. Clicking the thumbnail doesn't enlarge the image, just redirects, and that's frustrating to everyone, casual visitor and editor alike. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 05:54, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I totally agree about Sesame Street coloring books and similar gallery pages. The point there is to have a collection of images to look at, the purpose of which is defeated if clicking on them just refreshes the page. —Scott (talk) 08:33, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Scott and Andrew, I think it's super neat, but when I went to the page for Joe Mathieu, and I clicked on his self portrait, it just refreshed the page, and that annoyed me. Because there is no real article on him, just a gallery of his images. -- Nate (talk) 17:29, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Okay, fair enough. I don't want it to be recursive either. I was just going through the Joe Mathieu page and linking the book images to the book pages -- I think that's a good use of this trick. I included the Joe Mathieu portrait without really thinking about where it was going. I added a redirect for the Who's Who on Sesame Street pic because that was on Mathieu's page.

Outside of a gallery, I don't think the picture promises anything -- so recursive images on some article pages are okay with me. When you hover over the picture, the tooltip still says the name of the image page -- so people won't be thinking that they can click on the picture on Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree and it'll take them somewhere special. -- Danny (talk) 18:05, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and undo the recursive gallery images for the coloring book and Mathieu's portrait. For the others, it's not a matter of promising anything, and won't affect average visitors, but it does create an extra step for editors who want to replace or upgrade a given image, requires that if said image is replaced with a different filename that one recreate the redirect, and adds another double redirect issue if a page is renamed. None of this is an argument against it, and I can put up with it if it's useful to visitors, but I think these need to be taken into account. With a page like Joe Mathieu, where the links are below the gallery anyway, I wonder how helpful it is in the long-term, whether it really helps the average visitor (and where it doesn't hurt to see the image enlarged without going to the page, especially for non-logged in users with the ad set-up). Just some things to consider. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 19:06, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I guess I was thinking that a gallery like that is the same as a disambig page... The idea is that people can see the gallery, and then follow the links to individual pages. In a gallery like that, I think a reader who wants to follow the link is just as likely to click on the picture than the link -- maybe even more likely, since the picture is bigger and offers a larger target.

It's true that the link is under the picture, but the same is true for disambig pages.

Plus, clicking the picture and going to that book page also gives people a larger version of the picture -- clicking on the Cookie Tree cover takes you to the Cookie Tree page, where you get a 300px-width picture. If you want to see something bigger than that, then you're right, it's two more clicks -- but a lot of the time, the picture is actually 300px anyway, or not much bigger. The Cookie Tree image is 368px wide, so it's not much of an improvement.

Anyway, I think it was good for us to play around with this a bit, and figure out some of these use cases so that we can talk about them. I won't add any more image links until we can all talk about it and figure out the pros and cons of using them. -- Danny (talk) 19:31, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

This is an area that affects non-logged in users rather than us. Before the ad change, you're right, it wouldn't make a difference. Now, it does. Going to the article page, one has to look beneath the ad for the picture, and if one's on a page like Joe Mathieu and, say, wanting to compare the images and his art style, it causes extra effort to see the stand-alone image (since now on the image pages, the ads are on teh side and don't distract). So I think the biggest issue is simply, "Why are we creating the redirect and who will use it?" (one which will naturally vary). The disambiguation is one thing (and I think Scott's ultimate goal there may have been to jettison the links entirely, which would work there but be a bad idea anywhere else), and is there to help "people who don't know Wikis" But if it's just to save some visitors from clinking the obvious link below in an art or merchandise gallery, which in general is more of a collection of nice images than a navigational tool on the whole, creates two to four steps for everyone else, I'm not sure it's worth it. There's still room for figuring out pros and cons, I agree. The book gallery thing is worth examining, but off the bat, I'd like to say that I think it would be a terrible idea to try to do any redirecting for any images from, say, Miscellaneous Cameos. So I think that's another question, and not one which is entirely answerable: do average visitors treat all gallery pages as simple disambiguation or navigation pages? What do people go to a page like Joe Mathieu or Michael K. Frith Sketches and the like for, to look at the pictures both en masse and in close-up, or just to get somewhere else, or (in all likelihood) as a bit of both? (In which case, I'm not sure favoring redirecting over the other is all that helpful). -- Andrew Leal (talk) 20:45, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Okay... Obviously, I saw this as a much simpler thing than you do. It's not something that I feel like I need to fight for, or advocate for -- just something that I thought was cute and harmless and worth doing. If it's a problem, I'll just revert the redirects I made. I don't feel that strongly about it. If somebody else does, then they can take up the discussion. -- Danny (talk) 22:13, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I'm not trying to fight against it. But I think it isn't as simple as just putting it everywhere since it effectively changes the way the image file page works and is reached (a function which may not matter to visitors, but important to anyone adding, replacing, or renaming image files), and if we are going to use this on a massive scale, a simple "why am I redirecting this, how/who will it help, and what will it affect" is worth considering. That's all, really. -- Andrew Leal (talk) 22:23, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Turning ads off for logged-in users

I just posted a message on the Central forum... Logged-in users will have ads turned off for article pages starting tomorrow, so the only place where logged-in users will see ads is on the main page.

There are two options for people who want to see how the pages look for logged-out users. There'll be an option in preferences, under the Skin tab -- a checkbox that says "Show all advertisements". There'll also be a URL toggle if you just want to see ads for one page -- you can add ?showads=1 at the end of a page URL to see what it looks like on that page. The URL toggle will only apply to one pageview, so you don't have to turn it off.

So now people will have a choice about how they see the site, and I hope that it'll encourage more people to log in. I've been working hard to make this happen, so I'm excited. -- Danny (talk) 20:40, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

"Fight" Category ?

Hello ! I would have a suggestion for Muppet Wiki, not too silly I hope. ;-) What about a new category headed "Fight" for some sketches and episodes (like the Rita Moreno Episode of the Muppet Show, or the battle between Kermit and the Koozebanian Phoob, for instance) ? Or maybe a Culture article "Muppet Battles", as Scarecroe suggested when I told him about it ? Bat-Power 19:48, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I think an article is a great idea! I'm not sure about the category, but I think the article would be really fun. -- Danny (talk) 20:00, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Fine ! I can create the article and write part of it, but I need help. Bat-Power 20:38, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Sure, that's what a wiki is all about. Just start the article, and I'm sure people will help fix it up. -- Danny (talk) 23:04, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Hello, every one ! I've just started the article "Muppet Battles". I would very pleased if you could comment, improve or complete it, or add some photos. (As I say each time, I'm a French-Speaking Belgian, and I do my best in English.) ;-) -- Bat-Power 9 July 2008

Archive

• Current Events Archives

12/05	01/06	02/06a	02/06b	02/06c	03/06a
03/06b	04/06	05/06	06/06	07/06	08/06
09-10/06	11/06	12/06	01/07	02/07	03/07
04/07	05-06/07	07-09/07	10-11/07	12/07	01-02/08
03-04/08	05-06/08	06/08	06/08a