User talk:Frbiscani

From the ALSA wiki

Ingomueller.net 02:44, 15 February 2007 (EST): Hey Frbiscani! Thanks a lot for your Tascam US-224 article, great job!! Your help is really appriciated. I just made some minor changes like adding links to other articles, as well as inline code tags, I hope you are okay with them. If you have any ideas how to improve that wiki in general, please drop a note here.

Ingomueller.net 04:43, 15 February 2007 (EST): Hey Frbiscani! The way you contacted me was perfect! I just got an email that this page has been modified (which never happened before). I guess every user gets informed when his talk page has been changed. I posted already an answer on my talk page, but I guess you'll rather notice it here. I'm checking the recent changes all the time anyway, so we can continue the discussion here. BTW, when editing, you can use ~~~~, which will be replaced by your username and the date when submitting the changes...

I agree with your point about usb-usx2y and Tascam US-224 having similar topics, but somehow, there is a reason for both to be kept. Of course, all devices using the usb-usx2y module have a lot in common and the information about that should be on the according page, but there is also some information that is specific to every device, like the foto and the features. Maybe the configuration part of Tascam US-224 can be moved to usb-usx2y, but I don't know anything about that topic, so just do whatever you think is the best.

markc 15:45, 20 February 2007 (EST): Regarding this example I would suggest having a Drivers sub-section index page that has a link to the usb-usx2y driver page which then has 3 sections, Notes about this particular driver, Hardware for a list of links to devices that depend on this driver then Software for any specialized utility or application software that mainly uses the usb-usx2y driver.

Frbiscani 23:59, 21 February 2007 (EST): I agree that probably unifying everything in the usx2y driver page is the best thing to do. However my experience lies only with the Tascam US-224... to my knowledge the US-428 is almost identical, but I don't know almost anything about the US-122. If I would like to attempt a unification of the three tascam cards under the same page, is there some page where I can test this approach? Should I create a page to be deleted after the testing? I don't want to mess up existing pages...

markc 00:50, 22 February 2007 (EST): Perhaps if we had a Testing category and you used a Testing:usb-usx2y page then we could have a staging area for new pages in general. I'm still unsure how categories work but this suggestion would still make it easier to remove these kind of pages once they were no longer needed.

Ingomueller.net 01:20, 22 February 2007 (EST): Hi! The Testing: namespace is a good idea (thanks for doing this anyway)! These pages are not meant be reached by ordinary users (example with the search function etc), so a separete namespace works great. However, it is not enough to create an article with a colon to create a new namespace. The creation of a new namespace can not be done (yet) by an ordinary user/sysop, but has to be done by the administrator (following this guide). In contrary to the Testing: namespace, I still don't think that is a good idea to "misuse" namespaces as categories. I quote the Mediawiki site: Generally, namespaces should not be used to categorize content of the same type -- that is what categories are for. Of course, we don't need to care about what they say, but I think if anybody know what's the best solution, it's them...

markc 01:44, 22 February 2007 (EST): Thanks for the links as I am still struggling to understand how categories work, let alone how namespaces work. It seems namespace may only be available in later versions of MediaWiki anyway. I think we could at least use just a Testing: category in the short term so Frbiscani could go ahead and try out a new usb-usx2y page. At some point in the future I could go through the database using phpmyadmin (with comfortable searching) and remove them altogether.