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Honors below the division level

Been thinking, we now have most of the FL honors in the wiki but not the navigation. How about we add a Category on the main honor page below Other called "Regional Honors" that leads to a category page. There are 21 FL honor patches in their store http://www.flpathfinderstore.com/Florida_c_581.html and 19-20 of them are gray-not part of an established category. I imagine there are a few other examples, along with honors in pilot. Now that I typed this out it is really clear in my mind, so I am going to try it. We can always reverse/revise it. JadeDragon 23:09, 19 September 2014 (EDT)

Don't know how others would feel about it, but I agree. Good suggestion. --w126jep 00:52, 20 September 2014 (EDT)

Honor Header Template vs Translation

I have created a new template intended to replace the honor_header template. This one has named parameters rather than simply relying on the order of the parameters. It also removes the use of the SUBPAGENAME variable which will break when we start translating. I have not yet worked up the bravery required to attempt an upgrade to 1.23.3 without shell access. That is something that has to be done very carefully or the wiki will go down hard for a few days (or weeks).

But while I think about this more, we should switch the honors over to using honor_desc instead of honor_header. I have already done Aboriginal Lore, but there are hundreds more to do. I am still considering moving all of the honors directly under "Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book" for a two-level hierarchy instead of the three level (which includes the honor category) hierarchy we are using now. This will make linking from one honor to another easier as we will not need to know its category, and cross-linking honors is going to get a lot more complicated when we start adding translations. --Jomegat 21:36, 8 September 2014 (EDT)

I should try to learn how to get a bot to make those edits. It's very mechanical, so it really lends itself to that. --Jomegat 21:56, 8 September 2014 (EDT)

Success in the bot world! I've got it running right now, and it should find and replace every occurrence of the honor_header with honor_desc (in the Main namespace anyhow - not in talk pages, etc). The task of checking all the edits still remains, especially in the insignia=xxx field, as there may be some characters in the filenames I was not expecting. We'll see how it does. --Jomegat 22:46, 10 September 2014 (EDT)

The bot had problems, but I was able to fix them with the bot. There are no pages that use the honor_header template anymore. They all use honor_desc now. Now I need to study whether or not we need to move all the honors into a two-level hierarchy vs the 3-level we have now. That study will be done on the parallel version of the wiki running on my laptop. Further bulletins as events warrant! --Jomegat 18:39, 11 September 2014 (EDT)

Very nice work :) JadeDragon 01:04, 19 September 2014 (EDT)

Introduction

Hope I am doing this right! Wanted to introduce myself to you all. My name is Alyssa and I have utilized this resource a lot in the last year. I am passionate about Pathfinders and helping our kids and today decided to sign up so I could actually help and participate and give back as a thank you. Looking forward to contributing as I can :) Loved Oshkosh and all the honors we earned there and can't wait for the start of a new year ScrappinAly 20:49, 30 August 2014 (EDT)scrappinaly

Welcome to the PF wiki Alyssa. People like you are what make this wiki work. --Jomegat 21:47, 30 August 2014 (EDT)

And BTW, yes, you are doing it right. I prefer for people to not worry too much about wiki syntax. That will come with time, and I am more than happy to correct formatting errors. Just add the information - that's what we really need. --Jomegat 21:52, 30 August 2014 (EDT)

New South American Division Honors

Hello, everyone. I'm not sure how many here really follow other divisions, but the South American Division approved several new honors and have manuals out in Portuguese and in Spanish. Are there any plans to incorporate them here? I do lots of translation work and would be available to contribute the requirements into English.

If needed, I can post a link to their new honor manuals, which include all of their requirements. W126jep 15:49, 29 July 2014 (EDT)

The GC just approved eight honors (some from the SAD, some from other divisions). If you would like to add the SAD honors, that would be a good thing. If you need help formatting them, I can do that, though it's not that hard. Thanks! --Jomegat 22:50, 29 July 2014 (EDT)

Perhaps a greater need would be translating the Answer Book into Spanish? If you're interested, I'd like to explore that. We'd want to see how Wikipedia sets up multiple languages and follow their lead. I'd also want to get the NAD to buy into this (if they've already set something in motion, we would not want to duplicate the effort). --Jomegat 23:00, 29 July 2014 (EDT)

That was actually one of the goals I had in mind for the Answer Book. The NAD provides an Honors Manual in Spanish, which I have a copy of. I wouldn't have to translate myself the requirements (except for the newer honors for the past 3 or so years). I could work on translating the answers or finding equivalents in Spanish. I would probably need some help, though, with formatting. Check with the NAD and let me know if we can get started on this. w126jep 08:35, 30 July 2014 (EDT)

If the NAD has official requirements in Spanish, I think we can proceed with setting things up here for the answers. I'll dig into how to do a multi-language wiki when I get time, but with Oshkosh coming fast, I don't know that I'll have much of that in the next couple of weeks. I have already put the question to one of the NAD guys, but he was a champion of the wiki in the first place. --Jomegat 15:15, 30 July 2014 (EDT)

Multilingual Wiki, and Expanding the Scope

Here's a new header since we've morphed this into a new topic... --Jomegat 21:32, 1 September 2014 (EDT)

I've been trying to figure out how to create translated pages. From what I gather, a completely new wiki needs to be created in the different language and then linked. I'm wondering if you were able to find out anything and also if you were able to speak with the NAD.w126jep 19:41, 1 September 2014 (EDT)

I have been researching the multilingual wiki, and have pretty much settled on the Translate extension. Setting up a second wiki is another approach, and is the one taken by Wikipedia, but it is fraught with difficulty. There are a few hurdles that need to be overcome before we can install the Translate extension however. We need to update the version of mediawiki we are using (we're on 1.18 right now, and we need to be on 1.23). To that end, I archived the site last night to prepare for the upgrade. The other issue is that we will need shell access to the server, which is something our provider is going to resist (as well they should). This means I will have to get them involved, and for that, I have to talk to the NAD, as it probably comes with funding requirements. Incidentally, setting up a second Wiki would require the provider's involvement every time we want to add a new language. The Translate extension should only require their involvement once.

From what I have gathered, the NAD is very much in favor of a multilingual wiki in principle. Further, I understand that the GC is interested in the wiki now as well, but they want to see it less localized to the NAD before they adopt it - and for that, the first order of business is going multilingual. The second order of business will be to beef up the species accounts for those honors that feature various species.

I plan to add some hooks to the species account template so that we can tag each page that uses it with a set of regions where that species is endemic. We will then be able to create dynamic pages based on that information, and specific to a given area. After all that is in place, it's just a matter of adding species (which is a huge task, but should not be technically difficult).

I know I said that it would be the second order of business, but we have all the pieces we need to make that happen now without any involvement from our provider. So there might be some work on that sooner rather than later. For the multilingual effort, I may have to have a sit-down, face-to-face working session with the provider. I will try to get the ball moving without that, as it will be very difficult to make that happen before March. But if I can make it happen sooner, I will.

The GC is very interested in this wiki project, and it came up at Oshkosh when the 12 division heads of youth ministries met. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that would happen when I started this back in 2005. :-) They have people who are ready to translate the wiki into Russian, and are just waiting for the infrastructure to be created. So that is a very exciting development, and of course, it makes it a priority. That said, things often move with less speed than I would prefer, so we must be patient, but keep pressing forward.

I will install the wiki software on my machine at home and give the translate extension a spin. If I can get it to work here, that will go a long way towards easing the NAD's server into the upgrade. I'll keep you posted! --Jomegat 21:22, 1 September 2014 (EDT)

Wow ... so there's a bit to be done. No matter, all will be done in its time. I think that if the NAD really wants to make this site able to serve their population, Spanish and French translations are a must. The NAD has always seemed biased to only serving the English-speaking members, even though I know they do not do so with any malice or intention. They provide all investiture curriculum and much material in those two languages as well, so it would only be natural for the wiki to be provided in them also.

It's good to know that the GC is interested, it makes sense if we would like to do a multilingual format. I have seen the Russian wiki page and they have very good material. It's exciting that the division heads are talking about the wiki and wanting to make it available to all the world.

I guess I will continue to be patient and wait to see what the uppers decide. I just really want to start providing resources and translations; there are many clubs I work with who are eager to be able to find support in Spanish. --w126jep 11:24, 2 September 2014 (EDT)

I have installed the latest wikimedia software on my laptop (1.23.3), but have not yet been successful at importing the archived wikidata into it. The problem is that the archive file is 580Megs, and 20M is considered pretty big. I adjusted the apache2 server to allow up to 1G file sizes, and allow up to 5 minutes for a file to load, but my browser timed out on me before it could finish. I can probably use some other method since I do have shell access to my laptop. I just need to be careful about needing shell access on the NAD server. But I should quit working on it tonight, or I will not be able to turn my brain off and go to sleep later. Must. Decompress. --Jomegat 22:53, 2 September 2014 (EDT)

The import into the test wiki seems to be working, but it is very slow. It has been running for over an hour and is just now finishing the A's. At this rate, it's going to take a full day to populate the database from the XML dump. There are faster (but more difficult to use) tools, and I am regretting my choice at the moment. But patience!

Meanwhile, I found some decent tutorials on the Translate Extension. Anyone who is interested in doing translation work should take a look at these. --Jomegat 19:51, 3 September 2014 (EDT)

I ran over the tutorials and it looks pretty straight forward and easy with the extension. It mentioned that the wiki could have translation administrators (I guess that means one has to be authorized) or accessible for everyone to translate. Which one is being leaned towards?

That's something we will have to play with, but it would be crazy to not have you as a translation admin. Also, I lean towards opening things up to registered users, and deal with problems as they arise rather than preventing participation because I'm afraid someone might do something bad. Open is good. It's what got us this far. --Jomegat 22:31, 3 September 2014 (EDT)

The import failed. I let it run for about 26 hours, and it grabbed quite a lot of data, but then it just quit adding stuff. I killed it and tried a different, much faster tool, and now I pretty much have the wiki running on my laptop with most of the data from here in it. Next step it to install the Translate extension and see what happens. --Jomegat 22:14, 4 September 2014 (EDT)

The second method for restoring the wiki from the dump worked! I now have a fully-functional version of our wiki running on my laptop. Furthermore, I have installed the Translate extension (actually, the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle), and that seems to be working too! I will play around with it a little bit, but from what I can tell, it really looks pretty good.

The other news is that I have been exploring the possibility of upgrading the NAD wiki via ftp (without shell access), and it looks like that is something that can be done. The worst thing that can happen is that I completely trash it in the process, but since I have a full backup (minus this week's edits), even that is a recoverable scenario. But the wiki would be down for a little while. I will think carefully about this before proceeding. --Jomegat 19:04, 5 September 2014 (EDT)

There are some problems with the extension that will have to be worked out. The one I know about right now is that the SUBPAGENAME magic-word is kind of broken on the translations. SUBPAGENAME on a page called "Page/foo/bar" returns "bar", and this is used extensively in the honor_header template. However, if you were to translate that page into French, the software creates a new one called Page/foo/bar/fr, and SUBPAGENAME returns "fr". This makes the honor title "fr" instead of "bar". That would not be too hard to fix, but there are other problems this causes as well. For instance, the code in the honor header that detects if there is an advanced honor also relies on SUBPAGENAME... and that will be hard to fix.

I did find an extension that looked promising (SubPageFunctions), but it broke the wiki with a syntax error. It was last updated five years ago, so I suppose it's incompatible with 1.23.3.

One possible fix would be to come up with a new honor_header template (and name it something else). It would required us to provide the name of the honor as a parameter and not use SUBPAGENAME at all. Then we'd have to go through 400+ honors and use the new template. I could possibly just change the existing template and make it use SUBPAGENAME if the honor name was not provided, but that is fraught with peril and bumps up the ugly factor. I am still exploring options.

Another thing I discovered is that since a translation creates a new page, that will mess up the honor counters. We'd have to add "secondary=true" to the honor_header template in all the translations, or attempt to detect "not English" and set it automatically. That one's not too scary. Bottom line: it still looks promising, but I'm glad I'm trying it out before deploying it. --Jomegat 22:40, 5 September 2014 (EDT)

Everything worthwhile in life requires patience. The best results come from trial and error. I'm trying to keep up with the technical jargon but I guess I have quite a bit of learning to do with wiki editing and its terms. From what I understand, the update is running great, but there are still some issues like the header template and there might be more on some other things since it hasn't been completely explored. If it hasn't been updated in a while, that's not a promising sign. Like I said, trial and error.w126jep 22:56, 5 September 2014 (EDT)

Your summary was pretty excellent. Forgive me for filling this with jargon, but I wanted to document it somewhat accurately in a place where other people could read it too (in the hope that another gear-head might see it and be able to help out). It also helps me quite a bit to write this stuff out, as sometimes describing a problem prescribes its solution. --Jomegat 23:27, 5 September 2014 (EDT)

You may already know about this but there is a Pathfinder Honor Wiki based in Ukrainian already :) http://wiki.pathfinders.org.ua/index.php? It links here and includes at least one local honor. JadeDragon 03:45, 20 September 2014 (EDT)

Outdoor Industries

After a push on these Honors we are down to three incomplete honors, with about 11 total questions to still answer. We should keep plugging away at the remaining tough questions so we can put the whole category to 100% soon! Jomegat, (and anyone else) you want to look over the honors in this category and double check them for reasonableness and completeness? JadeDragon 16:22, 15 April 2014 (EDT)

I have been checking, and I like what you've done so far. Thanks! --Jomegat 18:43, 15 April 2014 (EDT)

Outreach

These honors are getting close to finished too. I brought all 9 ADRA honors back into the navigation system and have nearly finished off the ACS honors now. Peacemaker and Advanced are outstanding. African American Adventist Heritage in NAD and Advanced are the main sticklers. Be real nice to get these to 100% too. JadeDragon 16:22, 15 April 2014 (EDT)

Accounting

I've added a few things to the Accounting honor under requirement 3. The info is taken from Wikipedia. I've linked in the Honor entry to the particular articles. If you could import the Edit history for those two items, I would appreciate it :) Bluescifiworm 12:45, 2 September 2013 (EDT)

I've exported the WP articles to my laptop and will import them later (when the innernets at my house are not so busy). --Jomegat 15:50, 2 September 2013 (EDT)

Miscategorized?

I believe that the childcare honor is incorrectly catagorized in this wiki. The background of the patch matches Outreach not Health and Science which is were it sits now. It also seems a better fit in outreach along side sign language and other service oriented honors. I do not know how to move it. JadeDragon 16:41, 18 May 2013 (EDT)

You were right. The GC has it categorized with Outreach. The NAD always put these under "Division" honors which I never liked. I had to guess which one it was way back when the wiki was set up, and I got it wrong. I have moved it. --Jomegat

http://www.investitureachievement.org/wiki/index.php/Adventist_Youth_Honors_Answer_Book/Outreach/Cultural_Heritage may be incorrectly categorized as well. It is a gray background reflecting its inclusion in Heritage. JadeDragon 06:15, 20 May 2013 (EDT)

The Heritage category does not yet officially exist, even though there are some honors that have been approved and are in that category. I don't think that situation will change until next February at the earliest. I don't think we should move any existing honors into it until the NAD makes a decision. I can well imagine several honors that belong here:

• All the "Lore" honors
• African American Heritage in the NAD & Advanced
• Anything else with "heritage" in the title.

I think the greyness of its background is an artifact of photography rather than an intentional color change. As far as I know, there are no honor patches yet with an intentionally grey background. --Jomegat 17:47, 3 June 2013 (EDT)

except for the Florida Conference honors, which are found here: http://www.floridaconference.com/iym/pathfinders/honors/(unsigned comment by User:98.242.149.225

Not disagreeing with you, but I know an elderly MG with gray background vocational patches. JadeDragon 05:34, 4 June 2013 (EDT)

Another complication is that the Cultural Heritage honor is an SPD honor, so the NAD doesn't really have a say in what color its background is, or what category it belongs to. Has the SPD adopted a Heritage category? --Jomegat 17:49, 3 June 2013 (EDT)

Not according to their sites as far as I can find.JadeDragon 05:34, 4 June 2013 (EDT)

According to the GC, it belongs in Arts & Crafts. http://gcyouthministries.org/Ministries/Pathfinders/Honors/tabid/85/agentType/View/PropertyID/574/customFieldIDs/1/Default.aspx?SearchValues=Cultural+Heritage --Jomegat 17:51, 3 June 2013 (EDT)

Or in Outreach http://www.pathfindersonline.org/honors/outreach-ministries/257-cultural-heritage but this page says "Category: Outreach (NAD) / Arts Crafts, & Hobbies (GC)" and the image is a Arts & Crafts background. Confused yet? I'm half a mind to earn it and order it from somewhere and be surprised by the color-my wife (and kids) are native from Borneo so if I do the research for her area the answers will make total sense, not so much so for British Columbia where we don't have traditional wear or bride prices. JadeDragon 05:34, 4 June 2013 (EDT)

I ordered the Cultural Heritage patch from Florida Conf. and have it in hand. Clearly an Arts and Crafts background. Should we move it? How? JadeDragon 16:27, 15 April 2014 (EDT)

I moved it. Along the top of the screen is a "down" triangle next to the "View history" tab. That contains a "move" feature. I made it leave a redirect behind in case anyone has bookmarked it in its old place. I also updated the Outreach & A&C pages to move the honor, and updated the master index on the main AYHAB page as well. Oops - I still need to change the category in the honor header, but I'll do that in a second... --Jomegat 18:51, 15 April 2014 (EDT)

Same problem for Maori Lore. I did all the above steps to move it from Outreach to Arts&Crafts (like the other Lore honors) plus updated the honor counts on the catagory and main pages to reflect the two moves. JadeDragon 22:12, 15 April 2014 (EDT)

Patch Photo Updates

The wiki shows Dressmaking and Advanced patches with Red/Vocational backgrounds but I believe they are (maybe again) Household Arts/Golden JadeDragon 05:43, 4 June 2013 (EDT)

Maybe BLueScifiWorm can help as I just awarded her one of these. Cailin, if you could remove the advanced star from it, take its picture, and upload it here, that would fix it. I'd do it, but I don't have a patch any more! --Jomegat 12:06, 4 June 2013 (EDT)

Can you take it from here? http://www.pathfindersonline.org/es/honors/household-arts/13-dressmaking or http://www.flpathfinderstore.com/Dressmaking--ADVANCED--PF-NAD_p_8321.html JadeDragon 18:31, 4 June 2013 (EDT)

I could, but I'd rather teach you how to do it. First step is to download the photo to your computer. Then look for the "Upload file" link in the left pane of most any page on the wiki and click it. Browse to the copy of the image on your PC, come up with a file name for the wiki, in this case "Dressmaking_Honor.png", assuming your downloaded copy is a .png file. If it's not, you could either convert it, or you could name it Dressmaking_Honor.jpg (or whatever) and change the honor to use that instead of the old one. There is a pulldown menu where you can select the license, and the correct choice there is the "PF insignia" one. That's pretty much it. It might complain about the file already existing, but you should be able to override that. Let me know if these instructions were sufficient! --Jomegat 23:28, 4 June 2013 (EDT)

Perfect instructions - all done. I added a Golden version of the basic honor and replaced the red version of the advanced honor. JadeDragon 02:31, 5 June 2013 (EDT)

Nice work! I'm a bit overwhelmed this week with some major projects, but maybe next week I will have some time to pitch in more here. --Jomegat 07:19, 5 June 2013 (EDT)

All the edit logs show you have contributed vastly to this project. Don't feel bad! JadeDragon 11:48, 5 June 2013 (EDT)

Woops! Didn't see this till now! Guess I need to pay more attention. Haha! Glad you got it sorted though! Bluescifiworm 00:27, 6 June 2013 (EDT)

SPD Honors

These SPD honors are not represented in the wiki yet:

• http://honours.adventistconnect.org/master Zoology Master Done
• http://honours.adventistconnect.org/folk-art-1 (new one)Done JadeDragon 06:00, 4 June 2013 (EDT)
• ttp://honours.adventistconnect.org/hiking-2 for which you would just add a star to your hiking patch when earned.

I've never even heard of either of those. Must be pretty new? Bluescifiworm 00:30, 6 June 2013 (EDT)

The South Pacific Division (SPD) has their own set of honors. Over the past five years or so they have been going through each one, reviewing it, and if necessary modifying it to fit their needs. http://honours.adventistconnect.org is SPD's http://www.pathfindersonline.org

They also have introduced several of their own (such as Folk Art 1 - which implies the existence or at least a plan to introduce Folk Art 2). Divisions routinely introduce new honors, and then the GC committee reviews them. If they are not too region specific, they approve them for world-wide use.

SPD was the first division to officially recognize the wiki. They incorporated lots of content from it into their official resources. They link to the wiki (at its old location - I should send them an email) but made static copies of the content for their official documentation. It was pretty cool back when it happened (and still is). --Jomegat 06:44, 6 June 2013 (EDT)

That is pretty cool! I sent an email to the people at the YPAC site, letting them know the wikibooks project they linked to was now here. Would be cool if SPD linked here too. Bluescifiworm 07:56, 6 June 2013 (EDT)

Field Guide

What do you guys think of creating a field guide here? It would be an enormous undertaking, but I think it would be pretty cool to have one. It could have information on birds, flowers, mammals, sharks - basically every kind of species one needs to identify to get an honor.

I would organize it so that every species was on a different page, and could be added to several categories depending on where they live. In other words, we could have an entry for Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), and it would belong to regional categories for all 50 US states, plus the Canadian provinces where it grows, etc. It would belong to a single category for its species or genus, and that category would belong to its own family category, which would belong to its order, etc.

For Edible Wild Plants, we could add edibility categories (edible tuber, edible greens, etc - as per the EWP honor requirements).

With all these categories set up, it would be a piece of cake to then create a dynamic field guide for a given area and subject. By using templates, each species could be presented in a uniform way (which we already do).

Thoughts? --Jomegat 08:28, 16 June 2013 (EDT)

I don't have the Wiki skills to set it up, but it sounds like a good plan. Would we be duplicating an existing online effort? Would this detract from completing answers for remaining unfinished honors? JadeDragon 00:29, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

It might be better to do this at Wikibooks instead of here. They already have some of the meat but not much in the way of bones. In other words, they have articles grouped by major categories (birds, reptiles, etc) but do not have the category system in place. I have a lot of printed field guides, and every single one of them is aimed at a particular region. To create a universal FG we would have to be able to narrow it down by region. I'll think about this some more before acting. Maybe, I'll think about it for a long time. --Jomegat 08:06, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

This sounds like a massive job and duplicative of the printed field guides in existence. I just came back from a trip - much of it without internet access. Tried to ID some flowers and trees and really wished I'd brought a field guide. Practically field guides are meant to be taken to the field so they don't work well online. JadeDragon 11:58, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

I have sometimes had better luck with online FG's, as they are searchable. In these days of smartphones, I expect online FG's to be very fieldable. --Jomegat 17:47, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

images with issues

I cant get the image for Bones R5 to display. What am I doing wrong? JadeDragon 20:19, 18 June 2013 (EDT)

You weren't doing anything wrong, it was me. A while back, when anyone would click the upload tool at Wikibooks, it would upload an image to the WB wiki. Later, they switched it so that images would be loaded to the Commons by default instead. I first answered this honor on Wikibooks before they made the switch, so the upload went to WB instead of the Commons. I'll move it here, and everything should work. --Jomegat 08:40, 19 June 2013 (EDT)