Wiki organization

[greycat]

Regardless of whether we get a new wiki at some unspecified future time, we need to figure out how the wiki should be organized. Right now, it's a mess, and people are having trouble finding things. People who might add things are having trouble figuring out how/where to add them. And, of course, this means there are plenty of holes that need filling in.

Can we at least agree that putting tome4 at the start of each page name is redundant and useless? Please? As far as I can tell, the reason there's a tome4 prefix on half the pages in the wiki is because there are links to ToME 1, ToME 2, ToME 3, and T-Engine from the top page of the wiki. I think we can safely assume that nobody is ever going to fill in ToME 1 or ToME 3 stuff on this wiki. ToME 2, I could possibly see happening (I believe it still has players), but only because Neil's old ToME 2 wiki broke and was never replaced. T-Engine stuff is arguably an extension of ToME 4 stuff, and in any case, there is very little of it at this time.

Namespaces

As far as I can tell, this wiki engine does not have any of the features one would normally expect in a wiki, apart from the most basic HTML markup and linking. There are no redirects, no categories, no RecentChanges page (just the last 5 pages that were changed, on the right side bar), no access control lists, and no namespaces. So it looks like some people have been trying to make their own pseudo namespaces.

It seems this is the way the community wants to go, so we might as well attempt to formalize it, and then put in the labor to bring everything into alignment. So this is my attempt to define an organizational structure for the wiki pages.

Rule 1: Each wiki page will have a one-word namespace label, followed by one or more words of the actual title.

Rule 2: The namespace labels will be chosen based on the current evolved practices.

So, instead of a page named "Archer" or a page named "tome4 classes archer" (both of which currently exist), the proposed namespace rules prescribe that there should be a single page named "classes archer", with classes being the namespace label, and archer being the actual page title.

Namespace labels taken from existing pages: t4modules, classes, talents, races.

Proposed new namespace labels, not yet known to be in use (though it's possible): quests, zones, devel.

The namespace label itself may be used as a pseudo category page, enumerating the pages known to be part of that namespace, with a brief description.

I'm sure we'll come up with more labels over time.

Non-namespace pages

The rules above only apply to information that is naturally categorizable (races, classes, quests, zones, etc.). There are plenty of pages that do not fall into categories, such as tome4 combat damage. These pages will simply have the tome4 prefix stripped, if it exists. Otherwise, the titles are free-form, except that the first word should not be a namespace label (to avoid confusion).

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So, that's my proposal. Please discuss. I won't do anything at this time -- I'd like to see some sort of consensus first.

[marvalis]

Namespace labels taken from existing pages: t4modules, classes, talents, races.
Proposed new namespace labels, not yet known to be in use (though it's possible): quests, zones, devel.

Just from briefly looking at it I would think to add:
effects
damage types
resistances
NPC's
and development

Remove tome 1-2-3 pages and merge them in a 'history' (of tome 4) -page
Merge the t-engine stuff into development

[marvalis]

I took the liberty of reforming some of the wiki. I hope I'm not making to much of a mess.
Who is maintaining the 'high spoilers' page?

[Canderel]

How I generally build my gaming wikis...

1 Game title
2 Game introduction/Summary
3 Screenshots
4 Article Categories
5 "Special Article Categories"
6 External Links

This is the main page.

So under Article Categories you'll have, Classes, Races, Talents, Game Mechanics, Dungeons, Item Types, Resists, Damage Types, and more

Under Special Article Categories you'll have
Modules, Hacking, Engine Mechanics, ...

[Grey]

I don't think we need a separate introduction or screenshots section, since these are on other parts of the ToME4 site. Plus I quite like the separation of spoiler and non-spoiler material at the moment. However there's no need for spoilers to have a separate page - include them in the main list. "The wold of ToME" articles should just be under spoilers. Potentially the current design of the main page should be changed to two columns.

[marvalis]

Ok, but I do not want to merge the 'high spoiler' page myself into the 'wiki' page,
since I do not like messing around with someone else his work.

The person that was making/maintaining high spoilers also put 'tome4' in front of every page, and I am not going to run in and change all of that without that persons explicit permission.

[marvalis]

I don't get it, on
http://te4.org/wiki/wiki
The formatting of tables, external links, comments are not working

and on
http://te4.org/wiki/tome4
titles and links are not working?

Damn this wiki is buggy as hell.

/edit
Ok, so I found out you can use:
=title=
on http://te4.org/wiki/wiki

but you have to use
====== title ======
on http://te4.org/wiki/tome4

Links with "-" in it work on 'wiki' but do not work on 'tome4'

[marvalis]

ok this is beyond ridiculous, there are in fact two different types of wiki's who in some weird fashion are both linking to each other.

http://te4.org/wiki/wiki (type 1)
is linking to
http://te4.org/wiki/tome4 (type 2)
http://te4.org/wiki/tome4-high-spoilers (type 1)

Type 2 wiki can have - in its page name
Type 1 cannot have - in its page names

Both wiki's use different formatting.

For some reason links from type 1 wiki are going to type 2 wiki (but you cannot link from type 2 to type 1 afaik).

Fix this please.

[marvalis]

22:09 greycat marvalis: yeah... I think it defaults to mediawiki syntax now, but originally it was a dokuwiki, so the oldest pages are using the dokuwiki syntax.
22:09 greycat Bear in mind that BOTH syntax implementations are hacks that only get part of the actual thing they are emulating.

[Canderel]

I think (seem to recall) that it was me. You are welcome to do what you want with the wiki. It is the community's and we'll all make it better together.

[greycat]

The person that was making/maintaining high spoilers also put 'tome4' in front of every page, and I am not going to run in and change all of that without that persons explicit permission.

That's why I want to reach a consensus on this issue before going in and redoing a whole lot of page names and links.

Also, you only showed part of the IRC conversation. Seeing more of it may be helpful:

16:06 marvalis> There are as far as I can tell two different wiki's installed and both have different formatting
16:07 greycat> It's one wiki engine with two OPTIONS, and you select which formatting option you want.
16:07 greycat> Using a hidden javascript thing.
16:07 greycat> And they both suck.
16:07 marvalis> you can choose for each page the engine that you want?
16:09 greycat> marvalis: yeah... I think it defaults to mediawiki syntax now, but originally it was a dokuwiki, so the oldest pages are using the dokuwiki syntax.
16:09 greycat> Bear in mind that BOTH syntax implementations are hacks that only get part of the actual thing they are emulating.
16:10 marvalis> omg then it is even worse than I thought xD
16:10 greycat> If you want tables, the dokuwiki syntax is closer to complete than the mediawiki syntax. Other than that, I utterly despise the dokuwiki syntax.
16:10 marvalis> looks like its gonna be workaround then

[marvalis]

Input format
Filtered HTML
DokuWiki
Mediawiki

Turns out that 'HTML' table also do not work.

[marvalis]

I'm done for now, I think I pretty much merged all the content that I could find so there is a link to it on the first page.
There really was not enough content on the wiki in the first place to justify to many nested pages.
If anyone adds new pages, try to link to them from the main page.

[lukep]

I made the classes, talents and races pages. Anyone can feel free to modify them to fit a new organizational structure.

[marvalis]

I changed the layout of the first page to two columns.
I hope there are not to many people viewing that page in a low resolution, because there are to many menu's left and right from the wiki now.