Talk:Taipei

There seems to be no difference in the content of the Taiwan and Taipei pages. I would suggest to merge them, instead of having to do all edits in two places. Or to separate Taiwan general information and Taipei specific things.

CasualTaiwan (talk)

Hey there - The reason why the Taipei and Taiwan pages seem very similar is because we only have information up for one Taiwanese city so far (Taipei). Once we have information for more Taiwanese cities, the Taiwan page will become more robust. Also, it should be noted that city pages may have some information (like specific pharmacy, clinic or ob/gyn recommendations) that aren't found on country pages. We don't want to discourage people from adding city-specific information by removing city pages entirely. For this reason, we can't merge these pages. I've rolled back the merge. I understand why you may have thought it was a good idea, but please do contact Gynopedia (gynopediawiki@gmail.com) before merging pages in the future. Thanks so much for your thoughts/ideas too! - Lani Lani314 (talk)

Understood, and it does make sense seeing as this wiki was started city-based. However, since both pages are exactly the same currently, it means double work for anyone contributing edits that apply to both pages. Maybe redirecting (not merging) Taiwan to Taipei makes more sense currently? Anyway, of course I respect your decision how the basic structure should be, and will thus simply copy/paste the edits I do to one to the other as well. Next step I'll check how things are organized for other countries vs. cities and start separating Taiwan and Taipei, as well as add some other major cities (Kaohsiung, ...) with local info based on existing resources like forumosa. Cheers from Taiwan, and thanks for the great idea and work creating and maintaining this wiki! A real contribution to society. CasualTaiwan (talk)

Yes, all great points! Thanks for your work on the wiki & support; it's really appreciated! Okay, so thoughts: I've wrestled with the fact that we have nearly duplicate information on both pages -- and, in some cases, like Taiwan/Taipei, the exact same information. The way this happens is that, usually, the city page is created first (and, when the wiki was started, it was only city pages). Then, after the city page is complete, the information is used to create the corresponding country page. The hope is that, over time, the country pages can discuss regional variations (in things like laws, social stigmas, costs, etc). Currently, not all city/country pages are identical -- but they're almost identical. The main difference is that the country pages sometimes don't include specific recommendations for things like hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, ob/gyns (which I think is the right approach). Instead, in the case of the Canada page, for example, they may say something like, "For information on STI testing facilities in Canada, please visit the city pages, like the Toronto page, as recommendations will vary by city." The reason why the Taiwan page doesn't have this distinction is because this extra step (i.e. removing city-specific recommendations) wasn't taken when the Taiwan page was created. However, this is (I think) a flawed approach anyway. As you can see, it's very difficult to ensure that edits from one page are displayed on edits from another page. Meanwhile, even if the same edits are placed on both city and country pages, we still have the issue of redundancy of content. Overall, I would like to find a better solution. Now regarding potential ideas/solutions: I really like that you bring up redirection vs. merger. Perhaps we can redirect country pages to city pages IF there's only one city page for that country (and, therefore, no major difference in content between the two pages). And perhaps Gynopedia can use a slightly different template (content-wise) for the country pages, so users are encouraged to think about country pages differently. I'm curious to know your thoughts! Of course please feel free to take your time to explore the site and see what you think, but I'm looking forward to knowing what you think! Thanks :) Lani314 (talk)

Thanks for taking your time to discuss this :) While I do run my own wiki, I'm not very much of an expert (yet?). Still, maybe there is a technical solution to this topic: Having general info on the country page, and kind of embedding/linking this info into the city pages. This way only the country page needs to be edited if general info needs an edit. The city pages then only "add" the city specific details to the info from the country pages. I created copies of Taiwan and Taipei in "my" userspace here and will try to find a suggestion how maybe this could look.

I'm looking into a thing called "transclusion", or more specific "labeled section transclusion": https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Labeled_Section_Transclusion It needs to have an MediaWiki extension installed though, and I'm not sure if you're willing to add this.

The downside of such an approach as I suggested, of course, would be that the wiki itself inevitably gets a bit more complicated. Maybe this could be putting off more casual contributors - even more than having to edit in MediaWiki code like it is currently necessary. Did you maybe think of adding an easier ("WYSIWYG") editor?.

PS: The MediaWiki version you run looks quite old (2015), worst case there could be some security flaws that could allow hackers/vandals to interfere with your page, or even the rest of your server in case you run different things together in one shared account. CasualTaiwan (talk)

So I played around a bit with an template that can do this transclusion without having to install an extension. The result is here:

• User:CasualTaiwan/Taiwan
• User:CasualTaiwan/Taipei

It kiiiiinda works, but is neither pretty nor intuitive. I'm not sure the extension "labeled section transclusion" would make it perfect, but at least quite a bit easier I would hope.

Anyway, I guess before suggesting something like this, it might be worth looking at completely different options. What I can think of:

• As you mentioned, for Countries that have only one city created so far, simply redirect from one to the other
• If the reason for having separate pages is to reduce information that doesn't fit the user's city: Having only a country article, where city specific info is linked on separate sub-pages (or is hidden and only revealed after clicking on a city name)
• Completely different structure (for example one page per country per topic?), which would lose the easy to read "all info on one page" aspect of the current wiki though
• Removing the country pages would not help, because multiple city pages would still need to have general info updates synced

CasualTaiwan (talk) 19:16, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for this thorough & helpful run-through - and I'm sorry that it's taken me so long to get back to you! I've been thinking about this issue & beginning to reach out the developer for potential technical solutions, hence the delay. Okay, about transclusion: From a technical standpoint, this simplifies the issue, and I love that it eliminates the duplication of text. However, like you wrote, transclusion complicates the process from a user perspective, and it eliminates the ability for users to edit *any* page. This has made me think through what we need from the pages, regardless of cost. Ultimately, I think we need to create the ability for users to edit content that is page-specific OR broadly applicable to all relevant city and country pages (which would require a common editor to automatically update all relevant pages). There may be some extensions that *may* be able to help with this requirement, but from my understanding, this will require quite a bit of technical work. My budget doesn't allow for this kind of work, so I'll probably need to begin thinking about potential fundraisers or other ways to generate these funds. Do you think it's a worthy issue for a crowdfunding/fundraising campaign of some sort? I would like to include this technical improvement along with other technical updates (like updating the MediaWiki version too - thanks for pointing that out!) in the big technical push. Let me know your thoughts, if you get the chance! Lani314 (talk)