User talk:Stumax

Stuart,

The recent catastrophic events in New Orleans, as part of what once belonged in the Louisiana Purchase, brings to mind again the enormous amount of time and effort your grandfather spent on this Toussaint Louverture project before his untimely death. It also reminds me of many interesting hours I spent with him discussing this project, which was his passion. I too was confounded by the immensity and scope of what he'd undertaken...and spent hours trying to sort and organize those boxes of notes!

So glad you've created the web project, and I hope that as more of us access the site, that it'll come together as a rich source of information for this most courageous, dynamic, one-time leader of Haiti.

Good luck with your continued efforts. May they enrich your creativity and enliven many wonderful memories of time spent with Granddad!

Marty Johnson 9/16/05

Expanding the louvertureproject

Right now I can't think of anything. I just think this idea of a wiki for Haitian history/Haitian revolution is great and it could become one of the very best ressources on the net about Louverture and his times. This is ever so important in light of recent developments, then without understanding what happened in the run-up to 1804 it's hard to comprehend current Haitian history. I just thought with additional pages, it will be a lot easier to attract more viewers. I added a lot of redirect pages, so for example just searching for "L'ouverture" gets you to "Toussaint Louverture". I also tried to increase links between pages... Let me know if you like help with something in particular.

Doe

Stumax wrote:

"Don't know who you are, but I just wanted to thank you for showing up and helping to get the wiki moving along. It really helps to have more people involved in the project. Please let me know if you need any help, or if I can answer any questions. stuart [at] the louverture project [dot] org --Stumax 11:23, 29 Sep 2005 (PDT)"

Front page and uploading images

Stumax wrote:
...I was taking a look at the front page the other day. I really think it needs to be changed to reflect some of the new material we have online. I might have some time this weekend to take do an update, but feel free to dive in and muck about with it, if you like. --Stumax 07:53, 14 Dec 2005 (PST)

• Oh, I meant to answer for a while, (I completely forgot...). I like the front page as is, so I didn't touch it, but it wold make sense to include some of the newer material...
• The upgraded wiki software seems to prevent spamming very nicely! I also like some of the new features.
• Uploading images is currently disabled, any reasons? --Doe 29 Dec 2005

Uploading images re-enabled

• Thanks for letting me know about image uploading. The variable to enable uploading changed in the new version and I missed it. Should be working now. Please let me know if anything else seems broken or missing.
• You're right: spam is way down. Yay! (For now...) --Stumax 00:43, 29 December 2005 (PST)

re images

Images don't seem to load right now. For example looking at the new images lis, I got the following message: >warning: is_dir(): Stat failed for ...louvertureproject.org/wiki/images/thumb/1/1e/Crete_a_pierrot_lamartinier.gif (errno=13 - Permission denied) in /...thelouvertureproject.org/wiki/includes/Image.php on line 1545< User:doe 29.12.2005

try it now

Permissions issue. Fixed... I think. --Stumax 01:22, 30 December 2005 (PST)

Yes, works just fine... --doe 31 December 2005

re spam filter/span tags

I didn't use any span tags. It seems the filter works nicely! -Doe 06:18, 27 February 2006 (PST)

Alfred Nemours Collection of Haitian History

Dear Stuart: I am a researcher at the Institute of Caribbean Studies of the University of Puerto Rico (one of the oldest Caribbean research institutes in the World). Instead of describing our institute, I will just draw your attention to our URL at http://graduados.uprrp.edu/icaribe/

I only wanted to point out a unique collection we have here at our Rio Piedras campus, namely the Alfred Nemours Collection of Haitian History. You can read all about it in our journal Caribbean Studies, Volume 32, No. 2, July - December 2004 (sorry we don't have an online version).

Sincerely,

Dale T. Mathews, Ph.D. http://kalipuna.blogspot.com/

re spam and domain restructuring

I agree it is getting ridiculous with the spam. Luckily the spammers aren't very sophisticated (the pages never even get one hit before they are reverted or deleted) otherwise it wouldn't be as easy to detect and delete, but it is a great nuisance nonetheless. I feel the same way about requiring to register, since I like the idea of anybody being able to contribute very easily. On the other hand if there's no better way to prevent spam, it seems the only way for know. a setting that new pages can only be created as a registered user. I believe I've seen that on wikipedia, although I am not sure in which language that was. The French wikipedia entry for Napoléon Bonaparte is closed off too... Are there different levels of introducing registration?

--

I think the domain restructuring is a great idea. While the blog is a great idea, if it isn't updated regularly, it really doesn't have to be very prominent. In terms of a shutdown maybe it makes sense to feature some kind of banner for a couple of days beforehand, so that people might know what's going on. Weekends are as good a time as any other to shut down the site temporarily.

You are welcome. But nothing one could put up in content, could beat the idea of using a wiki for Haitian history. Speaking of which, I thought about if it is really interesting to put up a lot of encyclopedic information and then realized that there is not much that covers the subject in depth and this makes The Louverture Project really unique. --Doe 19:46, 20 July 2006 (PDT)

re domain restructuring

Everything seems to work fine, except that pages with accents in their titles don't seem to work correctly. Example: when doing a google search for Sanite Bélair (with or without accent) and clicking on the first TLP link provided, the message coming up is: >Bad title The requested page title was invalid, empty, or an incorrectly linked inter-language or inter-wiki title. It may contain one more characters which cannot be used in titles.< Previously this had worked correctly.
The problem seems to be that the link as it appears within TLP <http://thelouvertureproject.org/index.php?title=Sanite_Bélair> (this is how google has the link: <http://www.thelouvertureproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Sanite_Bélair>) is somehow transformed into <http://thelouvertureproject.org/index.php?title=Sanite_B%C3%A9lair> (that's what TLP ends up with after stripping the /wiki/) and stops working correctly. So it seems that the new setup uses a different text encoding method for the links!

As to the edits that were lost: only minor changes... unimportant. I didn't think of your working on the site, my mistake, but really nothing of significance got lost.

Overall, or is it my early morning over-caffeinated state, the site seems more responsive. maybe it's the new MediaWiki version?

I like the design of the Journal a lot, how about some, even if very infrequent, new enties... -Doe 07:19, 4 September 2006 (PDT)

Broken image link

Hi Stuart, the logo (Toussaint image) on the upper left corner disappeared, it says <Set $wgLogo to the URL path to your own logo image> instead. Toussaint Louverture looks much much better...

Dominique

Fixed

D'oh! I updated Mediawiki and forgot to copy over the old image. I also cleaned up a database error. Thanks for the heads up!

--Stuart 20:24, 28 November 2006 (PST)

Toussaint's portrait

Hi Stumax, I'm new to this and couldn't figure out how to add in the right page, but about Toussaint's portrait, I thought you might be interested in this one: http://abolitions.free.fr/article.php3?id_article=129

Don't know if you read French, but basically it says this portrait was made in 1802 in Brest when Toussaint was taken to France. It was made by Bacquoi, who at some point taught Toussaint's own children. From other sources it seems this portrait is now in the French embassy in Haiti.

Had you ever seen it before? I got in touch with the author of this page but haven't heard from him yet.

Greg

===Using this project for teaching========

Dear Stumax

I am teaching an upper level undergraduate class at Newcastle University in the UK on The Haitian Revolution next semester, and just discovered your site. I would like to suggest to my students that they help to add material to it, possibly for credit. I just wanted to check with you if you had any problems with that, any guidelines on how to go about it, or any experience of others using the site for teaching.

I hope you see this! You can reply to me at diana.paton@ncl.ac.uk (or perhaps here--but I'm not sure if I'll know that you've seen it.)

(Have previewed and see that this is coming out as a subdivision of the previous item--I don't see how to fix this yet, sorry.)

Best wishes

Diana Paton http://www.ncl.ac.uk/historical/staff/profile/diana.paton

Added Recaptcha

I added the Recaptcha MediaWiki plugin tonight to try to help cut down on comment spam. Please let me know if there are any issues.

Re: Recaptcha

Seems to work impressively well! -Doe) 00:26, 19 March 2009 (UTC)