Spring-cleaning the Wiki!

[aegis]

totally disappears on ie7 standard rendering and resizes the content area with webkit, splattering the content all over the screen...

I'm guessing some of this is due to web standards/validation fail of sorts <_<

edit: yes, xhtml doesn't mix well with 43 validation errors, and no, we're not gonna have a broken floaty index.

2nd edit:
aha, the culprit is a TABLE IN A SPAN
bad jK, bad.

[jK]

"bad jK"?

I didn't wrote mediawiki with extreme limited html/css possibilities

PS: after a short check, it seems many websites use the window logo for win versions of their apps (sauerbraten, opera,...). Perhaps somebody should just send a mail @ m$.

[aegis]

"bad jK"?

I didn't wrote mediawiki with extreme limited html/css possibilities

but you *did* break the page.

if you submit a revised/improved stylesheet or theme, we can apply it...
also, it'd probably be cleaner to include a <style> section than add spans around everything if you're going to hack it up...

[jK]

2nd edit:
aha, the culprit is a TABLE IN A SPAN
bad jK, bad.

can't find such one o_O

if you submit a revised/improved stylesheet or theme, we can apply it...
also, it'd probably be cleaner to include a <style> tag than add spans around everything...

.. mediawiki with extreme limited html/css possibilities

[aegis]

2nd edit:
aha, the culprit is a TABLE IN A SPAN
bad jK, bad.

can't find such one o_O

if you didn't notice my revert..

[aegis]

if you submit a revised/improved stylesheet or theme, we can apply it...
also, it'd probably be cleaner to include a <style> tag than add spans around everything...

.. mediawiki with extreme limited html/css possibilities

if you submit a revised/improved stylesheet or theme, we can apply it...

cleanly, even!

[aegis]

imho the download page should actually get a proper design.

[SeanHeron]

I agree in full (to proper design) - I'd definitely suggest an thorough overhaul of all our top-level wiki-pages (About, Games, etc.). Was even considering starting a thread for the single pages for design input - but thought that might draw more flak then help...

On the win-logo: yes I did realise that it's copyrighted. I didn't realise they explisitly say not to use it on webpages (but I guess they would, because they want there lawyers to be able to get people to remove it if they so feel). I got the logo from here, by the way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows (so my take would be not to worry in this case, "fair use" and such...but it's not crucial I guess).

Edit: for some on-wiki coordination, I've created this: http://springrts.com/wiki/SpringCleaning . Not pretty, but I hope it conveys how I think we might go forwards, and helps for coordination.

Edit2: Auswaschbar, you mean horizontal space I would guess? And yes, I for one would agree that Mediawiki standard gives more room to work with - our constrained width, while nice for consistency with the page overall, has serious drawbacks.

[Master-Athmos]

I just edited the Sitemap as I saw fit...

[SeanHeron]

Looking good! I'll do some edit back later .

[Neddie]

Perhaps the Lone Editor will ride again... perhaps...

[Licho]

Tbh i dont think editor makes people edit more.

Extra hassle due to wiki syntax is nearly zero .. especially since most edits should be just updates of existing stuff..

Dont bother, lazy people will post but not do the actual stuff forever :)

[Neddie]

Editors exist because people generally can't edit, not in order to somehow coerce them into editing themselves. We have guilt for that.

[Master-Athmos]

Looking good! I'll do some edit back later .

Yeah - I still missed some categories like one for AI development and the strategy guide also should get one somewhere - as it's written with TA in mind it probably should go to the TA-mod section...

But let's talk about what can be abandoned:
I guess the Spreading Spring section can go despite the "nostalgic" T-Shirt. We might drop a line about advertising in the "About" section...

I'd also delete the entire King Titles part. A bunch of rules for getting a title nobody seemed to care about and that was abandoned like 3 years ago...

The Monthly Topic Rotation is quite similar. The idea never seemed to get enough fans and also was abandoned like 3 years ago. We could resurrect this but I guess it's not really needed...

Not really something we should get rid of but the FAQ definitely needs an intense slimming cure because it's full of stuff told elsewhere too...

Then there's the problem with the other languages. As far as I see it only the german and french subpages have any serious number of translated topics. The Portuguese part pretty much is nonexistant as it entirely leads to the english topics so I guess we can abandon that as a whole. The Italian part has at least some "translated" topics which consist of just brief paragraphs though rather than a translation of the english version or an unique version of it. So we probably should drop that part too...

I'd say we take the current french and german part out of the structure and build up the english one at first. Then we "clone" that and look what already got translated. I'm not sure though if that "cloning" is easily possible - maybe there's a better way for integrating the translations in the new structure...

Do some of the "volunteers" here speak French btw? I had it at school for some years but still I guess I'm not the ideal person for looking through and correcting what is present right now...

We also might want to invest some "research" in how to get rid of the errors with the special characters. I had something like that once for subtitles and so I guess when the website was rebuilt a while ago it got converted via ANSI system rather than Unicode (or the other way round). There probably is an easy way putting it in a text editor which corrects the flawed letters then so you don't have to do all this by hand. Maybe someone here already knows how to fix that issue...

[HeavyLancer]

I suggest completely deprecating the old mods category as a whole. Most of the mods and games within that section are unmaintained or unplayable in the current spring version.
Well, I'm off to fix the games page, but before I go, would anyone disagree with putting in a 'games' infobox thing that lists a game's website, spring version compatibility, license info, etc. ?

[SeanHeron]

I've been filling in some links, but it's starting to get messy.

Should we split into what we want the sitemap to be, and a seperate page where we collect what we actually have?

Oh, and your drop suggestions sound sensible to me (Edit: referring to Athmos) - not sure if I'd actually delete them though, I'd just go for marking them clearly as "deprecated", and unlinking them + taking them out of the category system (leaving them with the sole category of "deprecated").

Edit: didn't see poster before me - Infoboxes sounds like a good plan! And I have to agree with you on dropping pretty much the entire "mods" category.

[Master-Athmos]

I've been filling in some links, but it's starting to get messy.

Looks good so far although I wouldn't do the s3o guide as another category - that would be listed in the "standard" s3o part. I guess the entire part of the unit development can stay rather similar to what we - i.e. no real subcategories you click on and get a new page but rather everything put on a single page with a table of contents at the top...

Should we split into what we want the sitemap to be, and a seperate page where we collect what we actually have?

Well I guess we should keep the sitemap as the one we want to have in the future. You might want to open another page where we just write down what should go to what category although imo that's usually self-evident or if someone finds something that also should go to a specific category he still can drop it at the right place and look what part of it is already told...

Oh, and your drop suggestions sound sensible to me (Edit: referring to Athmos) - not sure if I'd actually delete them though, I'd just go for marking them clearly as "deprecated", and unlinking them + taking them out of the category system (leaving them with the sole category of "deprecated").

Well if you want to do that we must create a page with a list of all those "abandoned" pages because well - if you would edit everything and have no more link to one of those pages would ever find it again (in order to delete or just look at it)? Going through the orphaned pages list would be quite annoying (although that one might actually shrink )...

Edit: didn't see poster before me - Infoboxes sounds like a good plan! And I have to agree with you on dropping pretty much the entire "mods" category.

Infoboxes sound reasonable. When dropping the "mods" category we're just talking of [url=http://springrts.com/wiki/Mods]THIS PART right?

EDIT:
Did some more work on the Sitemap...

[SeanHeron]

Maybe I didn't make myself very clear - I think with all the links added its too long that people could easily recognize the structure or make decisive changes - and I think it should still be open for sweeping changes .

So I'm moving the Sitemap with "filled in" links to CurrentSiteMap and using an older (shorter) version for SiteMap (our envisioned one), which we can use to illustrate how we think the structure should be. Feel free to change it back if you think its a dumb idea!

I think we might use the (envisioned) SiteMap as a tool to track our progress -> that is only link in pages that we're happy with (while noting which pages we want to use for a given bullet).

And yes, those are the "mods" I was talking about, anyway.

P.S. is there no easy way to link to Wikipages in the bb ?

Edit: not thought about "deprecated" pages that are delinked ending up in orphans... Well, I'd be okay with deleting as well, though as Zwzsg pointed out, more care needs to be taken in that case. Plus I can't delete, as I'm not an admin, while I can "deprecate" .

[Master-Athmos]

Well you once said something about a page to collect links. I think we should do a page which pretty much will be a very long list (or we might give it actually a rough shape of what the sitemap looks like so it won't grow extremely long) where we just paste links that fit a specific topic. So like e.g. when it's about s3o models we just plainly put all links to stuff with that topic below the "s3o-model-headline". So for each category of our new sitemap we'll get a bunch of links. That way when restructuring the actual wiki we have way less danger of forgetting about a certain topic making it an orphan...

Concerning the two sitemaps:
Apart from the one without links missing some of the new categories I find that one harder to read as the red font is not that well readable on that blue-ish background...

So I guess we now should do that link list page, make some thoughts about providing all pages in different languages and do something about the wrong special characters. The latter might be a job for the admin as well maybe it's just a wrong charset and the core texts still are ok. I'm not very keen on that area though - maybe someone else could dive into at which point the characters got wrong and if there's a way to fix them by changing something in the Wiki's settings...

Also concerning the multi-language topic: What would be the best way to do this? Is there an automatic way to have each page get a link to the respective translated page also including an option to add in more languages later on?

EDIT:
Ah - I guess I found a solution: When copying the text in an editor and saving it ANSI encoded and reopening that file I get the correct characters again. So I guess when porting things over we just have to do copy paste the page's source and resave them in order to get a clean version...

EDIT2:
Still if there's an option to change the server charset or whatever made the character mess happen it'd be better to do so than convert every article by hand...

[SeanHeron]

I agree with you on the redlinks making the eyes burn - removed the linking, so it's just plain text now. The "CurrentSiteMap" is what I wanted to use for what you're calling "link collection" I think. Check it out!

Readded the categories that got dropped - sorry about that, I had meant to do so (but forgot). Hope everything is back in their now!

I did leave out the Strategy guides - but that was on purpose! See my explanation at the bottom of the envisioned Sitemap.

Edit: Can we please have the CSS or whatever changed so that the links are more visible - yes I bet I could look into it, and make a submission. But I would guess there's someone with both easy access to make it happen, who also happens to know how to edit it with little effort... Something like what is used for the links on the Downloads page would be great!
(I'm sorry, but I really don't feel like spening an hour+ to read up and play around with CSS, when I would assume someone else can do it in 5 minutes... please correct me if my assumption is wrong)

Edit2: Hmm - after enthusiasticly advocating and implementing the split, I've noticed it's actually put me into a dead end... I don't really know how to continue from here :/. Okay, so the split was probably a bad idea - let's just keep working on the latest version of http://springrts.com/wiki/CurrentSiteMap - and work towards developing that into what we want to have . Sorry not to have listened to your advice!

P.S. I'd use the other page for illustration purposes - ie if people want to suggest a different structure. I moved it to http://springrts.com/wiki/SiteMapThoughts, but then couldn't move Current back to SiteMap, what! Hmm, I could do with Admin capabilities after all...