Spring-cleaning the Wiki!

[Master-Athmos]

Hey there!

I recently talked about the Wiki not really being useful for "newbies" - i.e. both for players just as content-creators and apart from things like a not really intuitive structure, outdated or incomplete content we even have "nice" errors like spelling problems for languages other than english:



Just as plain big bugs like what you get lately when choosing German as language:



So would anyone else be willing to do something about it so we can work out a plan of what needs to be fixed, totally redone, deleted or just merged so we have a nice source for both players and developers to dig into...

I'm able to write stuff in english as well as german and besides gaming I have quite an understanding of the entire modding part except for Lua (although learning that is on my list ).

So is there anyone else here feeling like helping to revamp the wiki? Even if you just can cover small parts or just can write small tutorials it would be helpful and if you know another language than english so you can translate that'd be fantastic too...

[SeanHeron]

I'm with you! I've been thinking of starting an overhaul spree myself, but having some company is definitely more fun!

I have a few thoughts on a plan of action, but I'm not yet certain on how best to go forwards (I'm was thinking mark everything as category "old" and then look to include more and more into the actually accessable wiki - there's so much stuff hidden so deep people will never usually find it if they've not been round here for ages...)

[Master-Athmos]

To my mind the best approach would be not to "fix" the existing content but get a parallel Wiki of its own which we build from the ground up by either writing new stuff or copy pasting good'ol stuff. Until we're finished the recent Wiki would stay in place...

[maackey]

hahaha, i remember a while back the english one was the same way. I remember changing it, and then finding lots of other similar color bugs all over the place. Imo it would be nice to have a little collaberation on cleaning up the spring wiki.

Someone else changed a few things, but the colors weren't really "pretty" (they worked tho) Some style guidelines may be appropriate as well. I also have a hard time finding things, so maybe an orginizational structure could be worked on here?

[Auswaschbar]

To my mind the best approach would be not to "fix" the existing content but get a parallel Wiki of its own which we build from the ground up by either writing new stuff or copy pasting good'ol stuff. Until we're finished the recent Wiki would stay in place...

This is how stuff never gets done. Just go and fix the articles. If you want a place to test / store temporary stuff, use your user page.

[Argh]

This is how stuff never gets done. Just go and fix the articles.

+1, and prune articles that duplicate one another as you go, there are lots and lots of duplicate Wiki articles on mapping, for example, that should get cleaned up.

[Forboding Angel]

I hate wiki syntax. Editing things in the wiki is 100x more work than it needs to be, which is why I never do it.

Needs more tinyMCE (I have no idea what wiki software this site is using, but is tinymce integration even possible with it?).

Edit: NM it's VERY possible. Any change I could get server ftp access?

[Master-Athmos]

This is how stuff never gets done. Just go and fix the articles. If you want a place to test / store temporary stuff, use your user page.

Well my reason for saying so was that I'd rethink the actual structure so you don't get this in your face as the main page and in general have things more organized. If you want to just build upon the existing stuff things like dead links will happen just as no real accessibility of certain stuff at certain times. If everyone is ok with that I wouldn't mind doing it that way but I still think it's more clean and wouldn't give that much hassle if you start at zero and then rebuild things (lots of stuff will be copy-pasting anyway) - you can sort out all the "identic" topics in the dev part later on too...

EDIT:
Well another maybe more "powerful" wiki system might be welcome too plus maybe having the option to include pictures again which got blocked afaik...

[zwzsg]

and prune articles that duplicate one another as you go, there are lots and lots of duplicate Wiki articles on mapping, for example, that should get cleaned up.

Err, except in those case, one article has the one missing tidbit of info that you were missing and causing you headache for hours, and the other not, while they're otherwise 99% identical. Wiki is not just meant to be pretty, its main use is to hold the info. Not saying you shouldn't clean, of course you should, but be extremely cautious about it.

[SeanHeron]

Hence why I suggested marking everything as "old"/"deprecrated" but not otherwise removing it for now - the space its going to use is no problem, and if it's not linked to anymore, it's not going to clutter up things either. But it still is there if someone needs it!

Also Zwzsg, while I do agree that the Wiki is an important information storage facility, if that information is nigh on inacessable, it's not going to do very many people good either - hence "pruning" (while not deleting), definitely makes sense to me.

P.S. Images seem to work ok - see here eg : http://springrts.com/wiki/NOTA

[Master-Athmos]

P.S. Images seem to work ok - see here eg : http://springrts.com/wiki/NOTA

Yeah that's what I was talking about - the ability to upload, comment and place pics like that was disabled at a certain point afaik...

So what was done that way remained but you can't do something like that anymore. Correct me if I'm wrong...

[SeanHeron]

Ah, I'd not tried that - that would suck of course...

On overall structure, there's two things I'd say:

• -One is the category structure, which makes it easier to keep track of things - the one I had suggested waaay back (and which people more or less stuck to I think) is the following: http://springrts.com/wiki/Talk:Main_Pag ... ory_system . Any changes people would suggest to that?
  
  -More relevant of course is how we fit stuff in from our main links, ie "About", "Games", "Development", "Help" and "Download". What do we want to present on each of these, and how do our categories mesh with them - ie what are the category entry points?

A more general question (I don't think has been ever discussed much) is how much room to give information on content - I mean of course we want to present the Games that use Spring as an engine, but is the Spring site also the right place for guides for those games (see the plethora of strategy pages there are)?
I'd lean towards not really, but maybe that question is too in depth, and might be controversial. (To be clear, I'm not advocating such pages be removed - the question to me is if they are given prominence / made easy to find).

Sean

[Master-Athmos]

Well imo the main categories should pretty much be what the website navigation says at the very top being About, Games, Development, Help and Download as you don't have any direct link the the wiki's main page anymore on the website itself...

Concerning the game related content - well imo that's totally up to the respective developer who should be allowed to write down as much as he/she wants...

[HeavyLancer]

Image support on the wiki needs help badly. We should either reactivate image uploading or find a way to integrate the media section of the site so we can use that.

Also, +1 for the old/deprecated tag idea.

[Forboding Angel]

Needs moar TinyMCE.

[Master-Athmos]

So this tinyMCE is a WYSIWYG editor you can feed with a wiki syntax?

[zwzsg]

Needs moar TinyMCE.

If TinyMCE is what you use on your springinfo, please no! It's horrible to use. It tries to be WYSIWYG, except it doesn't output what it's supposed to. And you can't even fix that by going into advanced/manual mode, since it fails at rendering half the tag and miss the other half too.

[AF]

Springinfo is wordpress
Spring wiki is mediaiwki

You also fail to notice a fundamental rule

The stylesheet styles the content. Editors produce content. So stuff like changing the fotn etc and colour of the whole document is very very bad practice.

So editors are to eb used to produce well formed content with headings and stuff. Seeing boldness and ehadings as actual headings ifnront fo you is the help aid that wysiwyg editors give you these days, but they rarely are pixel perfect and rarely have the same style, and they're not supposed to either.

• Markup/html is for content
• CSS is for stling content

And this filters all the way upto wiki markup.

Why do this?

• Bandwidth
• Consistency
• Browser caching
• Loadtimes
• Clean markup
• Less maintenance work
• Faster browser rendering

E.g. the white text bug where people have turned the text white in the wiki mark up for aesthetic purposes instead of editing the style sheet, and when the style sheet changed ti no longer looked good requiring tonnes of wiki edits that continue to this day

[Master-Athmos]

So - as some people volunteered for helping let's start to iron things out:

So I guess we need to find a basis in terms of style to work upon so what AF mentioned doesn't happen again (I guess this means using no style=... tags?). Next we should talk about the new navigation structure the Wiki should have which imo also should include the multiple languages right from the start (i.e. the same structure for all languages and maybe even an option to always change the language of the part you're viewing and not just being able to do this at the main page (some people might not find at once anyway as there's no direct link to it form the website))...

[Forboding Angel]

Needs moar TinyMCE.

If TinyMCE is what you use on your springinfo, please no! It's horrible to use. It tries to be WYSIWYG, except it doesn't output what it's supposed to. And you can't even fix that by going into advanced/manual mode, since it fails at rendering half the tag and miss the other half too.

Arugh, that's what CSS is for! It's already styled!

It strips things that aren't valid xhtml (which is a good practice, if you want to do code, I suggest brushing up on xhtml). I know that you're talking about embedding here. If you had done it as valid xhtml in the first place you wouldn't have had any trouble.

I say it again, needs MOAR TinyMCE.