The Wire:About

At the moment it is mostly written by Jimbo Wales. I (Jimbo) am sort of hoping other people come to help me, but then again, I sort of hope they don't. I am just starting season 2 at the moment (this changes quickly, and I plan to be caught up in 2-3 months) while season 4 is airing on HBO already. I am mostly just using it for personal notes, but after I catch up, I will no longer be terrified of spoilers and I can look up information on the net to make it better.

If you want to help, then please do, and don't worry about spoilers too much. :) I'll live.----Jimbo Wales 02:44, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I've been contributing a bit. There is fairly extensive coverage of the show on wikipedia so I've been transferring content.

Is there anything special that has to be done in regard to transferring wikipedia recaps to this wiki, or is it mostly straightforward copy-and-paste?

Also, the recaps have links to people involved in the show's production, such as David Simon. When pasting the wikipedia page for him, I see it contains many references to other wikipedia pages. I'm inclined to copy some of those over, if they're directly connected to the show (e.g. the one for David Mills, who's written for the show), but for others, to just link to the wikipedia pages without copying them here (e.g. the main page for Homicide).

I'm reasonably familiar with the guidelines for editing individual pages, but only vaguely familiar with standards and practices for, you know, whole sets of articles, so, should I go ahead with what I just outlined (copy and paste the pages that are directly related to The Wire and just link to ones which are indirectly related), or handle it differently somehow? --Satansfist 21:00, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

I think cut and pastes are fine for now. I was wondering what to do about Homicide and The Corner etc. I think that external links for indirectly related content is a good way of handling it.

For episodes a cut and paste is fine. I've been removing the categories and The Wire template from the bottom of the article and there are loads of links that need fixing for each one but that can wait. I think cut and pastes should be our first priority then uploading the images. I'm not sure about where to put the wikipedia tag - I started on the main article but don't like it being the first thing seen so I've been putting it on the talk pages today. Any thoughts?

I agree that the crew member articles should be copied over where possible and perhaps later rewritten to be more centered on the show where needed. I'm looking forward to adding all the things George Pelecanos re-uses from his fiction here as that would be original research on wikipedia.

For characters I have copied over the character list from wikipedia and have been populating it piece by piece creating a page for each character regardless of how minor they are in keeping with other show wikis.

--Opark 77 22:57, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

The wikipedia tag definitely uglies up the top of the page, but I was pasting them there too in keeping with your example :P Just from a visual standpoint I'd be a lot happier seeing it on the talk page, or perhaps the bottom of the article, but yeah, it's not pretty having it at the top.

I'd noticed you left out The Wire template, so I'll also drop those from the pages I copy over; still, I'd thought it was kind of handy as a sort of quick reference navigation box for the bottom of the pages, so perhaps something similar could be implemented later. And the Pelecanos stuff sounds like it would be a great addition. Maybe even text summaries of the lecture/interview bonus material from the season 3 DVD set, where the cast and crew discuss the show. --Satansfist 23:17, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea about the navigation template. I can't remember if I tried to copy that template from wikipedia but I think it might be problematic because it uses a table. I've copied S3 but not done the images. I think thats me for the night as its getting late here in the UK. The DVD extras articles are a good idea too; should we mention that the women in the audience all went doe eyed for Idris Elba?!--Opark 77 23:49, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Is there a particular reason tables aren't a good idea here (or is it just that they're tricky to get right)? And absolutely, the response to Idris was notable :P --Satansfist 00:06, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

They just don't seem to be working that well so far.--Opark 77 18:19, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Great googly moogly, they don't seem to be working at all! Does wikia even support tables?! It seems to ignore the code for them! That "Live wiki help" link over on the left hand menu near the top of the page, goes to a chat room for wiki editors, but I'm waiting until thewire.wikia is more fleshed out before I dare venture in there and pose questions, otherwise I'd feel embarrassed. --Satansfist 19:58, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Page naming inconsistency

Some wikipedia pages, and some links within these pages, are inconsistent about adding "(The Wire episode)" at the end of a page name. In some links to the page, it will have that phrase suffixed; in other links, it will not (apparently there was a discussion in the past where people agreed to remove all of those suffixes from the page names themselves, but there are still many links going to the old page names with the suffix intact).

Wikipedia has handled it by making certain pages redirect, e.g. "Hard Cases (The Wire episode)" will simply redirect to "Hard Cases", which is the article page; but other pages will variously link to either one or the other of the page names, without consistency.

I'm finding that in the various Wire episode infoboxes, where it links to a "previous" and "next" episode, there's some inconsistency about the naming. It creates a potential for duplicate pages to be created: one table of contents may link to "Hard Cases", and someone will go create a page for that episode, but then the infobox for an episode will have a previous link to "Hard Cases (The Wire episode)" and it will look like there's no page by that name yet, so somebody may click on that and create a page for it.

It would probably be best to attempt removing "(The Wire episode)" from all page names and links in the articles, since there's little need for disambiguation on wikia (you need disambiguation for a page named "Undertow" on wikipedia, but not here). There is one exception--an episode in season one is actually called "The Wire", which does need to be kept separate from the main article about the show--but other than that, I think the page names here (and the links that go to them) can and should remove that suffix wherever it's found. --Satansfist 00:06, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

In fact, now that I look, I just realized I HAVE been creating duplicate pages through the exact process described above--none of Jimbo's originals have "(The Wire episode)" in the name, but when I was copying over the text from wikipedia, "(The Wire Episode") was in nearly all of the infoboxes. Damn and blast. --Satansfist 00:09, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

You can redirect duplicates by placing:

REDIRECT Article name

on the duplicate page. Sorry its caused you problems - that was my error in not following the wikipedia naming conventions when I first created the episode articles.--Opark 77 16:23, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Ahh, it's no big deal (luckily I caught it after only a few episodes). I'll be trying to remove that "(The Wire episode)" bit where I find it in the wiki code that I copy over, though, unless there's reason to hang on to it. And of course in links to characters, where it has "List of characters from xxxx#yyyy|yyyy", I'm trying to replace with simply "yyyy" so that each character can have their own page on wikia. --Satansfist 19:55, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

I plan on doing the same but will go back through my cut and pastes afterwards as part of the clean up operation.--Opark 77 09:08, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

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The Wire:About

From The Wire

Contents

[edit] To do

[edit] Create articles

[edit] Add images

[edit] Clean up copied material from wikipedia

[edit] Crew

[edit] Intro

[edit] Page naming inconsistency