Check it out here!

So the deal is this. For every act that you verify, you get one month free of ads. So if you verify a whole podcast, by marking down the times on the pages (signing the act) and making corrections as needed, you get 5 months free on both the Wiki and the Battlestar Forum. After you are done, send myself a message on my [[User talk:Shane|user talk page]] and I will change your account for no-ad viewing. I can only take your word on it as if we do an audit (I doubt we have time…) and find out you were just faking it, we will strip you of your ads-free viewing ASAP.

Basically this applies to anyone other than myself, Joe, Steelviper, and Spencerian. Questions? Good.

Now to choose different themes, you need to have a username on Battlestar Wiki. So if you don’t have a username on Battlestar Wiki, get one. It’s free. We don’t bite. Promise.

Once you have a username, log in with it. (The log in link is at the very top right hand corner of the page.)

Once logged in, click on “My Preferences“. Then click on the tab named “skin” in the control panel that loads. From there you have your choice of skins! Right now there are three. The lighter of the three is a skin called “bsgmonobook”, which is essentially a version of Wikipedia’s skin, with black text and with an off-white background.

Cool, eh?

Feel free to get started by going [[WGA Strike|here]]. You may wish to discuss changes or needed additions to this article by [[Talk:WGA Strike|going here]].

So say we all! Keep the faith!

I’ve started doing this with the character pages… yes, IMDb now has pages on characters. For instance, this is the page for [[D'anna Biers]]. As you can see in the biography section, I’ve added a link leading back to Battlestar Wiki.

In addition, IMDb supports external links to websites. A beautiful way to do this is to find each individual IMDb page for each Battlestar episode (regardless of series) and submit an update with a link leading back to Battlestar Wiki.

For instance, an external link to [[Occupation]] would be filed under “miscellaneous links”, with the link to that page on the wiki (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Occupation), and a description like “Battlestar Wiki – Occupation”.

Of course, it isn’t all selfish. In fact, in my Battlestar Wiki “pimping” drive, I’ve gone through and submitted various corrections as well in terms of adding actors, correcting character names (Sarah Parker to [[Sarah Porter]] for instance), and other good stuff. Which is good, because IMDb (for better or for worse) is used by a lot of people, and everyone ultimately benefits from polishing up IMDb.

Although, I do have to point out that IMDb and Battlestar Wiki don’t have the same licensing scheme, so a simple copy and paste job should never be done at all!

So instead of me (or just one or three people) doing these updates, feel free to join in!

The extension is here.

For technical support, Catrope will be able to help you, as he is lead developer for that extension!

So code we all!

An outstanding and somewhat irksome issue to me was the fact that I could never check to see whether or not a certain image was being used across multiple wikis, without manually fiddling with the URL in the address bar. So what I did was change “media” (as in “media.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Image:thing.jpg”) to “en” (as in “en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Image:thing.jpg”), “en” to “de” and so on.  Needless to say, a tedious task to do manually, particularly when you want to delete unused or inappropriately tagged images, even with someone who can type up to 110 words a minute.

The reason for this check is to discover what pages on a wiki are using this file. Once I (or one of the admins) discovers what pages use the image, it’s a fairly simple matter to go through and remove the image from articles that are using it prior to deletion, thus avoiding a “broken image”. Which results in an unprofessional and unclean distraction from the page’s content.

So the problem that faced me was simple: How do I easily switch between the image description pages on all the Wikis?

It’s something that I’ve been trying to tackle for a while now, and I’ve rummaged through the Wikimedia Commons (a larger repository very much the “mother” of the Battlestar Wiki Media repository) in an attempt to discover inspiration.

If you take a look at this image description page on an image of [[Edward James Olmos]] on the Wikimedia Commons, you’ll see some tabs on top of the page, which read “check usage”, “find categories”, and, the last one, a small tab called “en” (the two letter code for English).

I tried (briefly) adapting the “wikitools” software that the “check usage” and “find categories” tab makes use of, only to find that it would be more of a hassle to rework, debug, and run through hundreds of lines of code and configuration swtiches. Indeed, it made the laborious task of tweaking the URL in the address boxes look like a stroll in the park.

So that was out… but the “en” tab struck me.

And so I began finding out which files in MediaWiki generated the tabs. After a brief bit of research, I found the target: a file called “SkinTemplate.php”, located in the “includes” directory of any MediaWiki installation worth its salt.

With my fair knowledge of PHP at hand, I managed to whip up basic tabs for each language (”de”, “en”, “es”, etc — including “media” for the repository), and “hide” tabs of the same language.

Quite pleased with myself, I managed to figure out that I was on the right path.

One problem. Some languages, such as German and Turkish, have a different name for the “image:” namespace. (”Bild:” and “Resim:” respectably.) While MediaWiki is apparently smart enough to discern that someone calling for:

http://de.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Image:William_Adama_promo.jpg

would get:

http://de.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Bild:William_Adama_promo.jpg

it’s not smart enough to do the reverse, unless you change both “de” to “media” and “Bild” to “Image:”… by hand.

So I came up with a solution of running the URL through PHP’s preg_replace().

And thus I have worked out the following bit of code, which requires only minor modifications to the SkinTemplate.php file. I’ve attached the file with the code, so it’s easier to manipulate (and, obviously, if anyone wants to take a crack at making it more efficient, you’re welcome to do so)!

Download the file here!

When you use the attached file, you will want to go through and remove the instances of “battlestarwiki.org”, in addition to renaming the file so as to strip the “.txt” extension. I had to do this since WordPress doesn’t like file attachments with the .php extension.

Comments, suggestions, and constructive criticisms welcome! Also, if you do use this on your own wikis, I would kindly ask that you credit me and Battlestar Wiki somewhere when doing so!

Also, as a side note, I plan on doing more of these “how tos” in the future, so as to share our knowledge with other webmasters and web entrepreneurs. Personally, I’ve never cared to horde knowledge, so I find teaching back to others is gratifying and, ultimately, beneficial to us all. So, if you want to know how we do something, please ask and we’ll be glad to try and answer your questions!