Wiki > Suggestions

How can we make the wiki better? If you've got advice, comments, or complaints, add them in here.

For the curious, the source code to the wiki (as well as other tools we've written) can be browsed at http://atitd.centauri.org/viewcvs/trunk/

Beta Wiki Color Change

Would it be possible to have Beta information pages in the Wiki have a different background color temporarily? With a distinctive color, people will know whether the information they're looking at pertains to ATITD and ATITD2 information. Either that or some other visual cue that the information belongs to one telling or the other. Ahephron

Mycroft Search Plugin

I've written a search plugin for Mozilla/MozillaFirebird that allows you to search the wiki. The source files are here: 1 2 and an example of the javascript to install it is here: 3 Kem or MJR, borrow/steal/assimilate at will. :) (Maybe put a link at the bottom of the search results page or something? Whatever.) -Brant

Navigation

Adding a link or two to the top of the page (between Home and Recent Changes maybe) to the "major" pages would east navigation a bit. I suggest Tests at least, and maybe a link to Index.

However, I think the whole Index vs. Strategy Guides vs. Technologies organizational system really needs to be sorted out soon... With the number of pages rapidly increasing, it's getting harder and harder to get to where you need. I mostly resort to the search feature now, but the text box is located in an inconvenient place (at the bottom of the page), and the search itself isn't always perfect either. --Brant

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The search is not very good, but that's unfortunately not an easy problem to solve. The bottom of the page is not a good place for it, however; I'll see if I can put it up top. Adding more links to the top is easy as well; I'll doing that.

It's definitely time for a reworking of the organizational system. Some parts of the current system are good:

• The Index is often my first stop; everything of any importance should be linked to from here, in alphabetical order. This isn't any good if you don't know exactly what you're looking for, however; it's too long to browse.
• The Tests and Laws pages are perfect for certain classes of information. (The law library hasn't updated in a while, but that's because I'm waiting for a promised automated law library feed.) These pages can stay exactly as they are.
• Guides is a problem. Exactly what should go on this page? How is it distinguished from the index?
• Home isn't bad, although it might use a bit of work.

What do we need?

I'd love to have a Manual? page. This page would act as a table of contents for a game manual, as you might expect to find packaged with a boxed game. The manual would include pages introducing people to the game, explaining how to use the interface, and progressing on through advanced topics such as glassmaking and gemcutting.

--Kem

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An update:

• Search is now on the top as well as on the bottom, although the location of the search box is somewhat borked. (Anyone want to tell me what's wrong with it? Yeah, I know--I broke it, I get to fix it.)
• There are Home, Guides, Tests, and Index links on the top navbar. (And "Strategy Guides" has been renamed to "Guides".) I'm tempted to split the navbar into two lines to offset Recent Changes and Preferences? from the rest, and to add the Atlas to the top.
• There's a new Atlas page, and Guides has been reorganized. Is Guides any better now?
• The site is still white.

Future directions I'd like to take:

• I want to get authentication integrated with the game, in the same way that .info is. If eGenesis is willing to give us an auth feed, people will have to start logging in to record their name when editing a page. (Edits from non-logged in users will still be allowed, of course.) This will let people have a degree of confidence that the change logs are accurate.
• If we get integrated auth, User pages will only be editable by that user.
• Might turn on image upload for all authenticated users. (Again, predicated on us getting an auth feed.)
• Automated law library. It's coming, just as soon as Josh finds some spare time.
• A tech tree? I like the idea of a publically-updatable tech tree with a freely-available XML dump, but I don't know if this is the place for it--or if the idea is sufficiently appealing to convince people to do the initial data entry, which would be a monumental task. ** This has been started under TechTree. Its still in its infantcy and needs a lot of work yet, especially to standardise verbage and data entry.
  
• Variant on tech tree: research updates? Some regions track their local universities on web sites, but those are updated by a few people, like the ATitD.info maps are. Would it be inappropriate to set up pages for each University in Egypt and keep them updated? - - Zubon (I used to keep records on the forum for DoS research status, but it'd be much better to do it on the wiki for telling 2 - Var-LeTha.)

Suggestions, as always, are more than welcome.

--Kem

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It is now possible to generate index listings of all pages, regardless of whether they have a $INDEX directive or not. "$INCLUDE CONTENTS" will list all top-level pages. "$INCLUDE CONTENTS Users" will list all subpages under the "Users" page.

A page may opt out of this listing by including the "$NOINDEX" directive.

Is this a better mechanism for generating the Index page than having pages opt in to the index with a $INDEX? (See [Full Index]? for an example.)

--Kem

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Could the default setting for the "Recent Changes" link on top of each page be changed to 3 days? I believe that 3 days should be enough for those who regularly use this feature. You could still select 30 days from there if you wanted to see it all. Thanks - LittleCleo

Location Maps

On a dense map with many entries near a single location, it can get pretty hard to select items. What's the best way to fix this?

Suggestion: [Megrez] This sounds like the perfect use of an image map. In any area where the density of targets becomes obfuscating, overlay a solid block, selecting on that block loads a subimage of that area. Creation of the subimages may be a problem, but I believe it can be scripted with pbmplus if you want dynamic maps.

Language

I was wondering if you would allow us to make a french translation of the most useful pages on the wiki. I don't know if it would be possible to have some kind of seperate section for french pages.

I would understand if you didn't want to use some bandwith for pages that are of no use to you. If I knew more about setting up a wiki I would simply find another server to set one up, but it seemed easier to ask first if it would be possible to have everything in one place.

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Of course; go right ahead!

You might want to put all French pages together under a subpage, so they can be easily listed and recognized. (So Flax? might be the French version of Flax.)

--Kem

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A subpage will work, but one caveat: we currently have no way to do more than one level of subpages. That is, you can't do [[Foo/Bar/Baz]]. If we do the subpage route, I'd actually suggest using the iso language code "fr" instead of the english word "French" as the root page name. I wonder how hard it would be to add multi-level subpages. An alternate route would be for me to set up a separate wiki db, accessible from something like /fr/wiki, though that would make falling back to English pages less convenient for users. This is actually a very interesting topic, given the possibility that the Second Telling may have French, German, and English all on the same server. If there are any people with experience in managing multi-language websites, especially wikis or documentation, I'd love to hear suggestions. Things like translation of the interface text aren't all that difficult, using something like a gettext localization catalog; the real challenge would be the content. We'd need people to translate changes back and forth.

Oh, and bandwidth isn't a problem; the wiki is more or less entirely text, and isn't a major consumer of our available bandwidth.

-- mjr

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Something else, you could add this to the top/bottom of a page. http://translate.google.com/translate?u=URL_HERE&langpair=en%7Cfr&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&prev=%2Flanguage_tools and replace URL HERE with the current URL of page. You could then do a German translation, even Spanish, etc.

-Mau

Improved Map

Integrate with DarthBobo's java super map applet at http://www.purplefrog.com/~thoth/atitd/ . Make all atlas pages have both the static image, and the "pop up map" button with all the landmarks.

Bugs

When you use the admin tools to rename a page, all links to that page are updated automatically. However, the $INDEX/$ATLAS commands are not, resulting in an empty link [like this]? showing up in the index/atlas.

The $MAP directive doesn't work correctly when using the justification parameters in $TABLE. See Gazebo Locations for an example. Notice how all the parameters from the table don't appear in the map unless you remove the justification parameters from the $TABLE directive. I noticed some more detail to this, the problem is that the data from the tables last column does not appear in the summary when you mouse over the location on the map.

Changing format line endings is important. This has the effect of displaying equivalent looking lines on a diff, and causing the file to be updated even though no functional update has taken place. This can be corrected by running dos2unix/unix2dos on each of the page files and running all future pages through a substitution that maps to a common line ending (either Mac, Unix, or DOS). (I forget how I came to this conclusion of the problem, verify that it exists :P -- RedStorm)

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Now that Darkest Night is out, what about making an Atlas page for each Mushroom. Instead of those clunky squares, we could just have dots. But having a graphic thing much like Shroomdar may make the Test slightly easier. -Ravious

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This has been bothering me for a while, but it never really clicked until just now: The list of backlinks (click on the page title at the top) has been acting somewhat weird. Instead of listing pages that link to the current page, it lists pages that contain the current page's title in their body text. I'm guessing this is somehow related to the fact that most wikis use ThisLinkPattern and not [[This Link Pattern]] - is the code simply searching for all occurances of the page title? I think this should be addressed if possible; backlinks can be a fairly important part of navigation. -- Brant

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This is actually a bug (or lack of feature, or what have you) in UseModWiki. It annoys me as well; I really should fix it. Probably the best way is to use this wiki's custom index code to avoid the need to do a full text search across all the pages. -- Kem

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Any idea why '0' is showing up as the first index entry? (It doesn't lead anywhere valid)

Comments

Should there be a way to allow anonymous edits of certain Users subpages? I don't particularly mind if somebody decides to anonymously edit my user page to leave a comment or something. In fact, I think it's important that the wiki remains as open as possible, even when it comes to personal pages - that's the whole idea of a wiki in the first place. --Brant

Either a comment or permission system should be setup to address this. I have the idea that users/<name> is <name>'s personal wiki in namespace <name>, not that it should be restricted. Personally, I want it reverted back until permissions are implemented. Is there anyone relying on this feature, or has had problems with their user page being edited that this is addressing? --Redstorm

Is the sky really falling because you need to have a username to edit a user page? Does that really restrict usage of the wiki in general? The idea of a wiki in general was conceived of outside of a game context, but that's besides the point. Make a page of "Messages for Brant" and link it off your user page and let the anonymous edits fly. But it's not like you can't edit someone's user page. You just need a user name to do it. That's hardly restriction. -- silver

It's not that big of a deal, but I will pose to you the same question that you posed to me: Does it really matter if everyone can edit pages under /Users? I have to admit that I had read it as only the User that the page is under can edit it. From an organizational standpoint "Messages for Brant" makes my skin crawl. Furthermore, this affects me two ways: 1) I've got a page under /Users that I want everyone to edit (PyroSim), and 2) my username was created for me. But I'll drop the subject now. --Redstorm