Let's improve the tome wiki!

[Draknodred]

I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the ToME wiki is a bit lacking when it comes to game information (I still don't really know what dreamforge damage is). It doesn't seem very active at the moment and I'd like to help give a push to get the ball rolling.

I'd like to put the call out for anyone who has any interest to help me get started with updating the wiki. If nothing else suggestions for what is missing or needs to be updating first would be good.

Right now I have three things in mind I want to add to the wiki.
- Zones (in-progress)
- Bosses
- Page Template / Style Guide.
- Combat stuff that might be confusing to new places (damage types, talent specifics, etc.)

The last few hours were spent updating the zone pages so each non-city zone has a page and has a very basic layout. It's not great but it's a start. I wrote a small python script to do this but if anyone else has done anything with scraping data from the source I'd love to see what you have.

I've started a to-do page to keep track of things that need to be done. http://te4.org/wiki/todo

It seems a lot of the wiki functionality is slightly clunky. It can't do redirects, search is wonky, and trying to do specific formatting can be a bit of a nightmare it seems. I don't know what options are available there or how large the task is of getting the wiki functionality all the way over to mediawiki, but I'd be glad to help in any way I can.

[CaptainTrips]

From irc today:

16:20 captaintrips_ Question, what's the official word on the wiki software? Would a switch to something less finnicky be open to debate? It seems there are more and more people around who are both interested in using the wiki and, more importantly, are willing to contribute. But complaints about the wiki software are almost universal among those who have tried to use it.
16:22 DarkGod it's a possibility, however somebody would have to convert the existing articles
16:22 DarkGod some are in mediawiki format already, but not all
16:23 PureQuestion I've never had a problem with the existing software..
16:23 PureQuestion The only major issue I can see is lack of shortcuts across the top
16:23 captaintrips_ I think there would be a willingness to do that, especially since many of the articles are probably due for extensive rewrites.
16:24 captaintrips_ I've found formatting to be quite annoying, among other things.
16:25 captaintrips_ Draknodred mentioned on the forum: "It seems a lot of the wiki functionality is slightly clunky. It can't do redirects, search is wonky, and trying to do specific formatting can be a bit of a nightmare it seems."
16:25 captaintrips_ And he's not the first to have made this comment.
16:25 *** Leissi quit (Ping timeout: 240 seconds)
16:25 *** Leissi joined #tome
16:27 captaintrips_ It's definitely something that should be discussed more in-depthly by those who planning on doing the most editing, I just wanted to see if a change would be possible in the first place before going on to that.
16:29 DarkGod yeah, if people are up to it I could switch to a mediawiki

As I mentioned there, I don't think converting the non-mediawiki articles would be too big a task to undertake, especially if it would mean increased ease of use for creating new content. Some of the older articles are probably due for complete rewrites (if not outright deletion) anyway. I'll go through later tonight and try to figure out about how many articles would need to be converted.

Edit: There's also a dokuwiki to mediawiki syntax converter out there: https://github.com/tstaerk/mediasyntax/ ... iawiki.php

[CaptainTrips]

DG gave me a list of all the pages on the wiki which are not in Mediawiki syntax, and I've gone through and categorized them. About 3/4 of those pages don't need to be converted imo; they should either be deleted outright (redirect, outdated, test, T-engine 3 pages, etc.), or at best gathered together in a text file to be hosted somewhere else for history's sake (i.e. a bunch of ToME 2 pages).

Of the fifty or so that remain to be converted, most are simple enough to be done with the PHP application I posted above. If there's sufficient interest in switching wiki software (which there should be if there is sufficient interest in actually noticeably improving the wiki), I would be willing to do the lion's share of the converting.

Thoughts?

[Draknodred]

Sounds good to me. If you want to make a page on the wiki with the list you have with what pages need to be converted I'll start work on it as well.

[CaptainTrips]

Done: http://te4.org/wiki/wiki-pages-be-converted-mediawiki

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to help out with this for a week or two as I'll be at a conference.

[CaptainTrips]

What naming convention are you using for the new wiki? Specifically, what are we doing with spaces/hyphens in multi-word titles? Eg., 'combat-damage' or 'combat_damage'?

[wobbly]

Also good would be a thread for what people looked for in the wiki & were unable to find. For example, today I went to the wiki - brotherhood of alchemist quests & was unable to find how the random completed potion was determined. Does it randomize between eligable alchemists then a potion from that alchemist? or does it randomize between all eligable potions?

[Nimmy]

Also good would be a thread for what people looked for in the wiki & were unable to find. For example, today I went to the wiki - brotherhood of alchemist quests & was unable to find how the random completed potion was determined. Does it randomize between eligable alchemists then a potion from that alchemist? or does it randomize between all eligable potions?

The first one. It is written in the function "competition" in "data/quests/brotherhood-of-alchemists.lua"
The code for the game is (relatively) easy to parse, so I think it would be a good idea if the wiki could contain, when possible, a reference to the source code of the information. It would make it easier to find mistakes.