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[New page] Formal mentoring

Post by qwaletee
The current mentoring page https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Mentoring covers both formal and informal mentoring, which are not really comparable programs. Informal mentoring takes place without any guiding force, and happens often by accident or because of a social relationship that has formed among eidtors.

Formal mentoring is very structured.

they obviously have an overlap in tools and topics, but I think they should be separated, with a brief mention on each of the other type of mentoring.

To kick this off, I created a Formal mentoring page https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Formal_mentoring

Will have to move some the material around between the pages. I expect to create an Informal mentoring page. ultimately, the unqualified "Mentoring" page that exists now will either be a {{dab}} or we'll pick formal to be primary (since we're promoting its use!) and hatnotes to cross link.

Thoughts?
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Post by PesachZ
qwaletee wrote:I believe what you are asking for in wiki parlance is a navigator, though they don't necessarily follow the outline structure. As you add many countries, that outline would get very bulky, so we would probably want to have some way of reducing it in context -- say, only top level always displays, and the full subtree matching the second level you are currently in.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... _templates
PesachZ wrote:I've also been debating using a hybrid of the stem you suggested, while leaving the current subpage links in place as redirects to help with search.

So I would have pages for
...snip...
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Thanks for link and heads up. I researched it, and created {{Mentoring navbox}} which I've now used to replace the wiki outline on all ntoring pages.

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Post by PesachZ
kentsmith9 wrote:
PesachZ wrote:Thanks for link and heads up. I researched it, and created {{Mentoring navbox}} which I've now used to replace the wiki outline on all mentoring pages.
Very nice work.

I was reviewing the template page and thought I would make one change recommendation. We try not to include section headings in templates because you don't know if a template is at a particular level of a page into which it is transcluded. You would be better off having the template simply be at the bottom of the page on its own. That way if there are other templates that are desired on the page, you can list them one after the other and they somewhat stack upon each other.

Note the new state template pages do have section heading separating the two template boxes I built, but the template does not include the section headings.
Even given the very specific application of this template, and the instruction for it to always be included as the last thing in the page. Is it still a problem?

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Post by PesachZ
kentsmith9 wrote:
PesachZ wrote:Thanks for link and heads up. I researched it, and created {{Mentoring navbox}} which I've now used to replace the wiki outline on all mentoring pages.
Very nice work.

I was reviewing the template page and thought I would make one change recommendation. We try not to include section headings in templates because you don't know if a template is at a particular level of a page into which it is transcluded. You would be better off having the template simply be at the bottom of the page on its own. That way if there are other templates that are desired on the page, you can list them one after the other and they somewhat stack upon each other.

Note the new state template pages do have section heading separating the two template boxes I built, but the template does not include the section headings.
I removed the section heading, and converted it to appear like a heading, but the edit link now goes to template page showing the documentation instructions.

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Post by PesachZ
qwaletee wrote:There are a couple of tricky things where a template ends up referring to itself instead of the page it is transcluded on. One of those is the edit link for section headers.
I figured that by accident with this (original) setup, and didn't mind it much. But I like it even better now that it 'looks like' a header but behaves differently. The 'edit' link now goes to the regular view of h template page with the documentation visible.

Thanks for your suggestions
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Post by qwaletee
kent, can you weigh in on the page naming vs redirects? We currently have the two subpages primary named as Mentoring/subpage (Mentoring/Formal and Mentoring/Informal). There are plain-language redirects to these for "Formal mentoring" and "Informal mentoring"

However, this comes out looking very awkward and wonkish in the page titling. I would prefer to see the primary name be the simple, "English language" name.

There are other places where there is a clear benefit to using subpage naming. The very structured state pages need it for technical reasons. The country-specific pages need to make their scope as clear as possible, so they would have to be either Pagename (USA) or USA/Pagename. But here I only see awkwardness. the wiki software isn't really using them as subpages in any way, and there's no organizational benefit that I see.

If we need it this way for some technical or policy reason, I haven't figured that out.
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Post by qwaletee
I understand the rationale presented, but it is incomplete. I've done quite a bit of Wiki editing on multiple platforms, and while this seems to make sense, it actually doesn't.

In Wikis, the outline of a related set of pages has nothing to do with the naming of the pages. Subpage-style naming looks awkward, reads awkward, and the outline of related pages is not dependent on it -- you can have the same outline structure but name the pages any way you want.

For these reasons, Wikipedia actually no longer allows the use of subpages using this format it was once common there). You can accomplish the structure/outline but use "readable" names. Alternatives include using plain readable titles, adding the higher level identifier as a parenthetical to the end, and using index-style qualifiers -- Mentoring, formal; Mentoring, informal -- or even a mix -- Mentoring, formal (USA); Mentoring, formal (RC).

What's missing from the rationale:
* whether any consideration was given for the problems it creates (appearance and language)
* whether other approaches have been tried
* how use of other approaches has been found lacking
* how the pseudo-physical structure provides a concrete, measurable benefit

For example, this rationale, if written about the state pages would say:

The state pages use a series of templates that are based on an understanding of the page name structure. The naming of the subpages is hidden fro the end-user experience and mostly form the editing experience, so there is no clear benefit from using another naming structure. Any other naming structure would be somewhat more awkward to implement, and would certainly require massive rewriting of code. Perhaps other methods were not tried, but there was no other obvious solution to the problem anyway, as templating has some support for basepage name, which makes coding significantly easier.

That provides a clear rationale for the state naming structure, and addresses the possibility of alternatives and actual costs and benefits. The rationale provided here has none of that.
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Post by qwaletee
In grade school, I was taught to minime "I think" and "In my opinion." If it isn't your opinion or your thought, give attribution. Otherwise, everything one writes should be assumed to be that person's opinion, expert or not. This is an open forum, so I'm sure that anyone who likes the aesthetics of Mentoring/Informal will speak up.

My preference/objective is to keep it as close to normal spoken/written English as possible.
Formal mentoring in the USA
Informal mentoring in the USA
Formal mentoring in xyz
Informal mentoring in xyz

If that seems to words or "hides" the country too much, the parenthetical version is also OK:
Formal mentoring (USA)
Informal mentoring (USA)
Formal mentoring (xyz)
Informal mentoring (xyz)
...this format echoes the wikipedia disambiguation format. I don't know that everyone "knows" this format, but it is at least fairly intuitive.

For searches, we can do aliases (redirects) like we do with many other pages... and which we already do (Formal mentoring redirects to Mentoring/Informal, I'm just proposing to swap that relationship).

So Mentoring/Formal (or Mentoring, formal or both) would redirect to the main page. Searches would still find all the mentoring entries together in the predictive search dropdown, aka autofill.
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Last edited by qwaletee on Thu Aug 21, 2014 10:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by qwaletee
I believe what you are asking for in wiki parlance is a navigator, though they don't necessarily follow the outline structure. As you add many countries, that outline would get very bulky, so we would probably want to have some way of reducing it in context -- say, only top level always displays, and the full subtree matching the second level you are currently in.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... _templates
PesachZ wrote:I've also been debating using a hybrid of the stem you suggested, while leaving the current subpage links in place as redirects to help with search.

So I would have pages for
...snip...
Sent using Tapatalk for Android 4.4.2
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Post by qwaletee
There are a couple of tricky things where a template ends up referring to itself instead of the page it is transcluded on. One of those is the edit link for section headers.
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