Conventions

Conventions

Conventions help create organization within this wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org). These conventions include:

• Article (page) naming
• Template and Status Box use
• Category tagging and hierarchy

The wiki is growing as the OLPC program becomes more popular and touches more lives. Conistency becomes helpful in aiding users find and compare similar information. This article collects proposals and records conventions in order to bring more consistency to the wiki in service of making it a more accessible and useful resource.

Conventions & Proposals

What's in a name? Why Conventions

This wiki hopes to be the main repository of information for the OLPC project. The wiki contains a large number of articles for overlapping audiences: the general public, developers, laptop users, educators, policy makers, and others. Information is gathered from the various communication channels and added into articles.

Some of the information resembles a database in its natural organization with details of related items set out in separate articles with similar layouts. The information often varies too much to use an identical layout or traditional database.

The Wiki Way emphasizes making information available. The first sources of information are often rough, even cut-and-paste from email conversations that contain a technical data point or a stub of basic information. Everyone can edit. Some readers wordsmith the prose to make it more readable. Others add a new link or some new information. A more passionate reader may clean-up, reorganize, and research an expanded article. There is no approval process: people just edit.

As the Wiki grows, conventions aid readers and contributors by making it easier for them find articles that share similar characteristics without imposing much burden on the article writers. For example, putting a [[Category:Keyboard]] tag into all articles related to keyboards helps everyone.

Adding a Proposal for Changes To Many Articles

Edits require more effort when a change will need to be made to more than a handful of articles. A reader may need skim many nearly identical articles, discover the real organization behind the articles, and then separately edit each article. A change in convention may need to be made on many existing articles and therefore potentially impacts many readers. More care and thought is required for such large-scale modifications than the wiki-standard WP:BRD for a single article edit.

The goal of these larger changes is to make wiki better for another round of growth. While the new changes need not be permanent solutions, they should be good enough for the next year. No one wants to constantly reorganize the wiki. Building a consensus and inviting comment in advance cuts down on effort in making changes.

To make a proposal, write it below. Add a note and link to the talk page of some of the proposed articles to alert those readers of the proposed change. Others may comment on your proposal, make improvements, discuss ideas, and try to build some consensus. Consider your proposal accepted once you have consensus or if about a week goes by with no new comments. Then move the proposal, removing discussions, into the accepted conventions. Then you make the necessary changes to all the articles. You should propose a change only if you are passionate enough about the change to do the work.

It is not generally necessary to discuss conventions that already show signs of being widely accepted on this wiki, many conventions developed by Wikipedia contributors have been adopted or adapted for use on this wiki and Wikipedia makes a useful reference for how similar situations are handled by a large group of collaborators.

Proposed Changes

Put your proposed change here. A good proposal includes a title, date you wrote it, link to your user page, a well written convention for how future arguments are made along with examples, and a list of some of the pages affected.

Example Proposal

Here's an example proposal (these are not actual signatures, but it does paraphrase/dramatize a similar discussion):

Articles of Specific Keyboard Layouts by User:Cjl on April 8, 2008.

Keyboard Layouts To Be Named "OLPC language_name (language_code) Keyboard". For example, "OLPC Spanish (es) Keyboard". The language name and code come from the ISO 639 codes, with the two character code preferred over the three character code. These pages should also have categories [[Category:Keyboard]][[Category:Keyboard Layout]] and the category tags of countries that use this keyboard. While there may be multiple keyboards per country, multiple keyboards per language are less likely. Those could be titled "OLPC Spanish (es) Mexico Type Keyboard".

Currently, the keyboard layouts just have a category tag of Keyboard and are named after specific countries. For example, all Spanish countries, e.g., Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, etc., use the keyboard layout OLPC Argentina Keyboard because that was the first country for which the keyboard was designed. Keyboards generally go by language. The OLPC designator applies because the keyboards generally come through OLPC and it helps keep the Keyboard Category uncluttered. The ISO usage in language names and codes keeps out ambiguity.

This should changes about twenty pages including OLPC Argentina Keyboard, OLPC Armenian Keyboard, OLPC Nigeria Keyboard and others.

Comments?

• The country tags might be overkill, given how many countries speak Spanish but have no deployments --Walter 17:21, 9 April 2008 (EDT)
  • OK. Country pages with deployments will link to the page anyway. -- Cjl 17:34, 9 April 2008 (EDT)
• BTW, do we need a new Keyboard Template category? -- CharlesMerriam 20:45, 9 April 2008 (EDT)
  • eh, Can't hurt ---- Cjl 15:34, 10 April 2008 (EDT)
    • You're right; it can't. -- CharlesMerriam 20:45, 9 April 2008 (EDT)

After being quiet for about a week, Cjl then makes all the changes to the articles and moves the edited proposal to the Accepted Conventions section. The comments are deleted but still available in the history page.

Active Proposals:

Keyboard Layouts page naming/tagging proposal

Cjl 00:39, 11 April 2008 (EDT)

• Keyboard pages will generally be named in the form "OLPC language/script keyboard". For example, "OLPC Spanish Keyboard".
  • Language name is preferred over script (alphabet) name, especially for languages using variations of the Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic alphabets.
  • There may be multiple keyboards per country and multiple countries using the same keyboard. However, multiple keyboards per language are less likely. If needed, extensions to the naming convention to reduce confusion and add more explicit information on deployment could be used, for example "OLPC Urdu (pk) Keyboard" for an Urdu keyboard variation specific to a Pakistan deployment.
• Keyboard layout pages should generally have a [[Category:Keyboard]] tag.
• Keyboard pages should generally include relevant and existing "OLPC country" category tags to improve navigation from the "OLPC country" pages. It is not useful to create "OLPC country" tags if no OLPC effort for that country is active on the wiki.

References:

ISO 3166 Codes for the representation of names of countries

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_15924_codes

ISO 639-2 Codes for the representation of names of languages

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-2_codes

Detailed proposal of name changes to existing keyboard page names.

Current	Proposed
OLPC Argentina Keyboard	OLPC Spanish Keyboard
OLPC Armenian Keyboard	no change
OLPC Brasil Keyboard	OLPC Portuguese Keyboard
OLPC Cyrillic Keyboard	OLPC Russian Keyboard
OLPC Dari Keyboard	no change
OLPC Devanagari Keyboard	OLPC Hindi Keyboard???
OLPC Ethiopia Keyboard	OLPC Amharic Keyboard
OLPC French Canadian Keyboard	OLPC French (ca) Keyboard
OLPC Italian Keyboard	no change
OLPC Kazakh Keyboard	no change
OLPC Khmer Keyboard	no change
OLPC Libya Keyboard	OLPC Arabic Keyboard
OLPC Mongolian Keyboard	no change
OLPC Nepal Keyboard	OLPC Nepali Keyboard
OLPC Nigeria Keyboard	needs clarification, supports Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba
OLPC Pakistan Keyboard	OLPC Urdu (pk) Keyboard
OLPC Pashto Keyboard	no change
OLPC Pulaar Keyboard	no change
OLPC Rwanda Keyboard	OLPC French Keyboard
OLPC Thailand Keyboard	OLPC Thai Keyboard
OLPC Turkey Keyboard	OLPC Turkish Keyboard
OLPC Turkey Q-Type Keyboard	delete ???
OLPC Urdu Keyboard	OLPC Urdu (in ??) Keyboard
OLPC US International Keyboard	OLPC English (us) Keyboard
OLPC Uzbek Keyboard	no change

Comments?

• For Devanagari, it's the annoying exception. It is closely related to the Nepali keyboard, etc. I would suggest you name it Hindi, as you plan, and also add both to a "Devangari Keyboard" category. Nothing wrong with an extra category.
• For the Turkish keyboards, I expect you need to keep both. Both are used in Turkey and we should wait until the XO deploys there and their Ministry of Education makes a decision. Ah, extra exceptions in case one runs out. :)
• This is great, but I am a bit confused: it seems that in most cases, you are using the language name for the keyboard, which is fine, but, for example, Kreyol, why not use the name OLPC French (ca) Keyboard. It happens to be the preferred keyboard in Haiti, but it is the French Canadian keyboard. Is the rationale that we are deploying in Haiti and not in Canada? Also, why do you drop the OLPC in front of some of the Urdu keyboards? (Also, are there really two different Urdu keyboards? I suspect that the Urdu (in) keyboard is not real (yet). Nigeria does present a problem. Why not jsut have three different names pointing to the same layout? Same for Pashto/Dari, since the new keyboard for Afghanistan will be used for both languages. --Walter 10:29, 11 April 2008 (EDT)
  • Leaving OLPC prefix off of Urdu keyboards was simple oversight, fixed now. The chance to catch errors is one of the good things about this page. Current Pakistan and Urdu keyboard pages do indeed have identical text on their pages and I was going to propose eliminating one, but I saw what might be two differing layouts for Urdu keyboards on the Keyboard_layouts page and so I thought I would make a more conservative proposal and ask for clarification. If there is no current or intended distinction between PK and IN Urdu keyboards, then I would propose to delete OLPC Pakistan Keyboard page. Cjl 10:49, 11 April 2008 (EDT)
  • I agree with your point on Kreyol, and have changed the proposal to French (ca) Keyboard. I thought it best to put a very specific proposal up to solicit very specifc improvements such as those you've provided.

Use Country Boxes Template on All Countries proposal

Peru

---

Country Information
ISO Country Code	PE
Wikipedia Article	Wikipedia Link
Government Support	Sponsored Trials
Deployment	Demonstration (under 50 machines)
Languages
Keyboard Layout	Spanish Layout
Written	Spanish (es)
Spoken	Spanish (es)
Secondary Written	None
Secondary Spoken	English (en)

CharlesMerriam 05:44, 10 April 2008 (EDT)

Every country page will add a country box, similar to the one shown, by including the Template:Country box. This would provide a quick overview for each country, as well as make a categories detailing Government Support and Deployments. This could replace or update the outdated OLPC Status by Country. It solves the current problem of figuring out which keyboard goes with each country, finding the right ISO codes, and provides a reference for the languages spoken.

While this box is currently English only, a future expansion could show it in native languages with English subtitles. Also, future expansions might link to keyboards and languages better once those pages follow better standards.

This should change about 80 pages, including OLPC USA, OLPC Brazil, and OLPC Korea. I would add the country box to each page with Government Support and Deployment information as unknown. People more knowledgeable about current levels of support and deployment would need to fill those in over time. I will post a note to the talk pages of some affected pages.

Accepted Conventions

Please pick a section into which you put your convention: the wiki has become rather large. When in doubt, either guess or just put under the closest major heading.

Usage Around The World

Country Information

Country Pages

See description on page Category:Countries