Geohashing talk:Current events

The experience for a brand new user coming to the Main Page and wanting to geohash is confusing. A recent discussion in the geohashing IRC channel led to a number of changes to the Main Page and pages linked from there, including this one. Seeing as it is the second link in the left nav bar, people are going to click on it, and we should make it more relevant than a static page essentially restating what is on the Main Page.

Once upon a time, for the first few months of geohashing, people used to post their geohashing intentions in one big glorious mess on the page for that date. But then people got the hang of using expedition and graticule pages, and by October 2008 no one was doing that anymore. It's still a natural thing to expect. A new user asked me "where are all the expeditions I can go on listed?" He understood the answer, but wanted to know how he, as a new user, was supposed to know where his graticule page was and if anyone was going.

This revamp of Current Events is a new proposed use of the page. It's another way of showing off your expedition where everyone can see it, and an easy way to browse what is planned.

I hope that someone can automate this, to automatically seek and display the pages with the Expedition planning category for each date. This is a start.

Please check it out, use it if you can and rewrite anything that needs it. -Robyn 03:21, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Date links

JimL, the recent expeditions aren't meant to be a repeat of the main page photo pages, but a new thing (or an old and gone thing reinvented) for text links to the recent expeditions. I was leaving them empty for moving old ones to, but you just gave me a better idea. -Robyn 00:50, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

How many days should the old ones stay around for? I think a week. Should they be archived (maybe on the same 2009-06-10 page as the photos) or just deleted? I think they would work well on the photo archive pages, that would be after the photos have left the Main Page. I think I favour archiving them, but only just. The drawback is clutter for people who want to view the photos a month at a time. Does anyone other than me do that? Does anyone who does that care?

The current style of links to the categories is obviously not for archiving as it could be recreated at any time. -Robyn 01:03, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Automated Crawling for Current Events

Since I will likely be bored, and confined primarily to my apartment, this weekend, I will look into creating a bot to crawl the Expedition planning category, and auto-creating the list of planned expeditions for all dates available, as well as for the last couple days. I don't know if we can easily have an automatically populated list like we have on the front page, since it would probably be best to keep the amount of work for creating expedition planning pages down. The unfortunate thing is that with a bot, the data on the page may not be the freshest, but I have some ideas on how to deal with that. --aperfectring 18:13, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

How should it work?

Cool! In manually populating the page, I found it most productive to search for e.g. "2009-06-13". There were only two pages in the planning category, but there were things on graticule pages and graticule talk pages. A bot could probably link to the page and section it found that text, and paste the first line following it. Graticules like New Jersey that post the daily location even when no one goes could be either put on an exclusion list or prevailed on to include a string like "no plans yet" that tell the bot to skip this one. At any rate, when it is botted, there must be room to easily edit manually. How often would the bot look? -Robyn 18:29, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I think the key is to influence people to create their expedition page before leaving, and make sure that the expedition page is added to the category. If we can get that mentality in place, then the bot can check for changes in pages that link to the category and only update the page as needed. Do keep in mind that this is all just vague thoughts right now, and I will plan it out much more fully when I am not at work. =P --aperfectring 18:39, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

This is so wiki. I love how I can have ideas and then people make them better and make them work. -Robyn 18:43, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Oooh, I just had a flash of genius (it hurt). But I had better post it before I forget. We could have a "Have the bot create your expedition planning page for you" section where you give it your graticule's name or lat/lon, the date, and possibly a user (for who is going), and it will create the page using the approved template for you in a couple minutes. --aperfectring 20:28, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

That is in line with my My Vision of the Future, so I heartily approve this possible new development. -Robyn 23:02, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

BTW, if the page goes by planning pages, then it doesn't even have to crawl. It would be sufficient to link under each date to, e.g. Category:Meetup on 2009-06-14. But it would be better to have them listed right there on the page, especially if the bot would retrieve graticule names. -Robyn 00:57, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

My vision is to have, for each date, a list of expeditions in planning. Each of which would contain a link to the planning page, where the text is the graticule's name, the name(s) of the participant(s)t and a summary of the location. The last part will probably be the biggest challenge. People usually have a section where they list who is going (though not everyone signs up right away), but the summary of the locations that I have seen are usually a bit longer, and would need to be cut down. To get a graticule's name from its lat/lon requires looking at All_Graticules, but that shouldn't be very difficult. For All_Graticules, I think I will pull down a copy of the page daily, and run off of that, so I am not constantly trying to download that monster of a page. BTW, has anyone noticed that All_Graticules doesn't follow the naming conventions? --aperfectring 12:08, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Moving All Graticules to All graticules was discussed, but rejected over concerns for the automation that uses it. I was thinking about this last night, that the "I'm going on an expedition" bot should solicit date and graticule (required) with the option for specifying participants and a one-line description. Perhaps there should also be a provision for specifying that it is a retro or alternate. As a first pass for listing already created planning pages, I would just grab a line of text. So what if you have a lot of "Hey guys this is totally doable" or "I wish I could go but I have to pick up my dog at th". At least you have links. People might even learn to start with a good tagline. -Robyn 16:47, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree that the primary goal is to create the list. It should be trivial enough to include a user list. For the descriptions, if it is too long (some people are VERY verbose in describing the location, I have noticed), perhaps I should cut it off after 100 characters or so (something like 20 words), and if it is longer than that, add an ellipsis. The length isn't set yet, I will likely go with what looks best. I have used the same toolkit as User:ReletBot and gotten it to log in, and download the Main Page so far. I will continue working on it. For now I will hard code pages to look at/create a list for. User:AperfectBot has now been created. --aperfectring 17:23, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Using 2009-06-14_49_-122 as a test bed, and some code Relet graciously donated, I have come up with a bot which creates a line of text in the following format:

link - personA, personB, personC - Where it is and if it is long then I...

That looks awesome. Will the bot be confused if it gets an edit conflict, like I just did??

It doesn't do any editing yet. Most likely it will pull and put the page so quickly that no one will notice. If there is any error on write (which an edit conflict is), I will likely take a simple approach and just discard my changes, sure that I will catch it next time. On a side note, people should put their expedition planning pages in this format: Template:Expedition/Example --aperfectring 23:07, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

See Talk:2009-06-14 40 -104, as of its original creation time, as a perfect example of an expedition planning page that the ideal bot should be able to find. -Robyn 17:40, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

I will look into ways of parsing that, since I agree, that should be enough to create an entry. Currently the bot ignores talk pages, since the ones I saw in the category were the historical planning, and the expedition information was on the page itself. --aperfectring 15:08, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Testing

Next step: pull all pages from Category:Expedition_planning and parse them, producing a list, and thus verifying my algo, and its error handling. --aperfectring 22:43, 13 June 2009 (UTC)