Difference between revisions of "GECK:Community Portal"

Revision as of 15:37, 14 December 2008

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Wiki Organization

Settings

There are currently 2 settings pages: the page and the category. The category is much smaller, and seems to be incomplete. Should we delete it (in accordance with Categories below)? One note if we do - there are a few pages there that aren't mentioned on the Settings page (i.e., iSandboxBreakfastMin).

Minor things - do we want the format from the Oblivion wiki (i.e., iSandboxBreakfastMin) or not (i.e., FMinesDelayMin? Should we standardize with the first letter uncapped or uapped?
--Haama 07:08, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd like the format of the CS Wiki, but with different colors. How about a template? That would enforce standards and gives us some time to experiment and discuss the colors and organization. I'll make one right now.

--Qazaaq 11:36, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Template is done: Template:Setting. The header of the table changes to the page name.

--Qazaaq 12:46, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Shouldn't we put the description of a setting before its default value? The description seems to be the more important bit of information after all =)

--SnakeChomp 17:24, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that using a category page as the main resource to find the game settings is a good idea, as it groups them by name and not by their meaning. Considering settings only start with one of 3 letters, that won't provide useful organization. Is it worth even bothering having a "Settings" category? Tagging settings pages with that category will add them to the settings page but that alone won't help people find the information about the setting. I'll add the settings from the category page onto the settings page for now.

--SnakeChomp 17:09, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Agreed that the Category is a bad idea, as below. I definitely think the first letter should not be capitalized - in fact, since this is a newer version of MediaWiki, we can even do something about the pages' titles to reflect that. The template is a great idea, much agreed there.

DragoonWraith · talk · 17:50, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I also agree that description should come before default value.

DragoonWraith · talk · 17:50, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking that would be troublesome with very long settings pages. But it's easily changed in the template. Just reverse the table rows if you think that's not a problem.

Oh, and cool trick with the pagetitles.

--Qazaaq 19:16, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Already ahead of you on that one: I created {{SettingGroup}} for that very purpose. It's still kind of long, but not terribly and the consistency is worth it, IMO.

DragoonWraith · talk · 19:37, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Tutorials category

Currently all Bethesda's tutorials are in the Solutions category and the Wiki tutorials in the Tutorials category. Tutorials are not solutions, and clogging up the Solutions category with tutorials is not a good idea.
--Qazaaq 11:12, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

New Solutions Article

I just wrote up an article for a really nifty trick I discovered (and probably others have also). I added it to the Solutions category, but it made me think: Do we want some kind of central page for new content articles to go under? Right now it's hard to find my new article unless you're actually looking for it, and in the case of the article it's really something useful to know ahead of time.
--Quetzilla 01:48, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

We could (probably?) make a "What's New" section on the Main Page, as on the CS wiki. Also, I think it would go best under a "Modding Practices" category - let me see if there's one like that already and if not I'll create it.

This is close enough to the topic that I'll mention it here - To prevent sprawl, I think we should use either the Solutions or Tips and Tricks category, but not both. This problem was rather horrendous on the CS wiki - the answer to a question could have been in one of several places: the Question category, the Answers category, the Solutions category, the Useful Code category, etc.

--Haama 03:30, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Likewise, the Tutorials category should be renamed - the tutorials are strictly related to wiki editing. If they were related to modding, then I'd say merge it with Solutions or Tips and Tricks.

--Haama 03:52, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know, they seem like relatively different categories. 1 is to solve problematic situations you would normally encounter, 2 is for neat things you can do that you wouldn't otherwise have thought of. Either way, they both need to feature more prominently on the main page if anyone is going to find them.

--Quetzilla 03:41, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Heh - those two were never separate for me. Almost everything I've done required a trick or OBSE. Interested to see others' thoughts. Somewhat random - it might end up that Tips and Tricks becomes a subsection of Solutions.

Anyway, seems like I can't edit the Main Page. That may change (need to check my User Status), but for now remember that Solutions is on the Main Page (... at the very bottom). I've created a Modding Practices page and added your article to it.

--Haama 04:08, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I like the distinction between Solutions and Tips and Tricks. On the CS Wiki the solution category was filled with articles, which made it hard to find what you're looking for. Taking all tricks out of the solutions category should help.

--Qazaaq 11:05, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for going on a structure-creating rampage, I should've checked here first. I do think Tips and Tricks deserves to be a separate category to Solutions, for the same reasons as Quetzilla- Solutions seem like they should be mini-tutorials as opposed to Tips which should be compact and used to show possibilities.Talkie Toaster 14:20, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

In general, no need to check here first. If I/we/anyone thinks there's an issue it will be brought up - Tips got my attention because someone created an article with the same name that day, and because all of the articles in it were also placed in the Solutions category. That's enough call to keep them separated, so Tips stays.

Thinking about it some more, though - articles should be in one category or the other (distinction), and to make it easier to find we make Tips a sub-category of the Solutions category (the articles won't show up in Solutions).
--Haama 15:07, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Mod Tools

I've created a Mod Tools category to be able to easily point people towards commonly used programs like FOMM and F3Edit. As new tools come out, let's make sure to add pages for them here. Also, I'd like to link to it from somewhere sensible, main page maybe, but I wasn't sure where to stick the link. If anyone can think of a good place, feel free to stick it in.
--Quetzilla 01:23, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

BSA Problems

There are some problems that the users may experience with the software such as missing or unfindable models. While somee people know how to extract them, some do not, and bits of useful general information like this should be available for those new to modding. Iron Angel 01:11, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean the .bsa files? In general, your best bet is to ask about this on the forums and then update the appropriate page(s) with the answer.

The Community Portal itself is more meant for proposals of an issue to tackle, then a place to find answers.

--Haama 03:46, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I think his point was that it will be common for people to look for the 'missing' files and get confused, yet the wiki here doesn't say anything about how to get access to the files. Probably goes under 'Solutions' :P.

--Quetzilla 04:12, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

A tip in one or more of the starting tutorials is probably the best solution to this.

--Qazaaq 11:17, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Tidbits

The recent page Tips And Tricks (note page, not category) reminded me of the Tidbits category from the CS wiki. That category served as a "staging" area to move information from the threads to the wiki, or at least point to interesting threads and posts in the hopes someone had enough time to wiki-ify it. Should we bring that back?
--Haama 03:58, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, although, I'm afraid that adding a Tidbits category will make people lazy.

--Qazaaq 11:18, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Wiki Policy

Bylines

Oh boy.

So, on the CS Wiki, we had a rather serious problem with bylines on tutorials - it prevented them from being edited, updated, improved, and when we asked that bylines no longer be used, it sparked a large-ish controversy spanning several pages and a 200 post thread on the CS forums.

Now we have "bylines", of sorts, in the Talk pages of the Bethesda-written tutorials. Well, OK, clearly they're special for that reason, but are we to take it that those are not to be changed? I'm concerned that they set a bad precedent, and I'm worried about what people will think of them.

Regardless, you guys should add {{Break}} to the end of your userpages, so when you transclude them like that the floated image doesn't mess things up that come after. We could add the template to each of the pages that you've transcluded into, but it makes more sense for it to be done on your end since it will update all of those pages simultaneously.
DragoonWraith · talk · 22:27, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

According to a forum post they definitely are okay with tutorials being edited. Maybe bylines were for internal... accountability?

Anyway, this wiki is chock full of info... so much to learn :(

--Quetzilla 02:31, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Just two more comments:

Adding a byline doesn't directly prevent anyone from editing the page, however it does discourage people from editing the page. The byline implies ownership and, as such, that you need permission to change it.
If you want to sign your tutorial, there are places to upload it: the Bethesda Softworks forums or the Fallout3Nexus Article Database.

--Haama 02:52, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I'll confess ignorance here - I'm responsible for the appearance/formatting of the tutorials and BGS user pages. I wasn't privy to the Byline debates on the CS wiki, so I'm not really sure what the issue is. I don't see any reason the official tutorials shouldn't cooperate with community standards, though.

Maybe somebody could summarize the concerns and proposed solution?

--Joel Burgess 10:58, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

The effect of bylines that we've noticed on the CS Wiki is that it discourages other people from editing the pages. This is sometimes because they think it's impolite to edit an other person's article, or because they doubt their own knowledge if they know who wrote the original article.

While that doesn't sound very serious now it will become a big issue when the number of contributors decreases. Having bylines on CS Wiki proved to be another hurdle in getting contributors while we needed everyone that could lend a hand.

At the moment the bylines are not much of a problem, but like DW said, they do set a bad example and we want to avoid the problem we still have on the CS Wiki with bylines on various tutorials.

I share DW's concerns about this, but I do think knowing a bit about the authors and the developers in general gives the tutorials an extra touch. I'd say we follow Jesse Tucker's example - list the tutorials on the userpage and remove the profile from the talk pages.

--Qazaaq 11:51, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Misc

Differences from the CS wiki

Just noticed that subpaging doesn't seem to work. Are there any other major differences?
--Haama 07:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Use {{Bc}} for that. Solves the annoyance of having the extra-long titles, too, if you don't want them.

DragoonWraith · talk · 17:56, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Function links to CS wiki

...
...
Really?
It's hard to say how this will work out. On the one hand, if someone finds a bug or trick with Fallout 3 and it works with Oblivion, then by all means they should be on the same page. On the other hand, would it be exactly the same (i.e., are there books and scrolls lying around Fallout)?
I bring this up to stir conversation, let people keep it in mind, and encourage feedback on how this works out. If it works out then that saves a lot of work, if not then maybe we could make a bot to copy the information over?
--Haama 04:30, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I think it's a matter of functional laziness -- both we and BGS have better things to do than c/p a hundred some functions to this wiki. Moreover, when something here would be changed it wouldn't be changed there, even if the info was useful to both. This way we can add F3 pertinent info to the page here and Ob info to the original page, while keeping common data centralized. Trust me, even if we did decide it was better to dupe it all, no one would actually get around to it :P.

edit: actually there ARE books in F3 that can be activated.

--Quetzilla 04:37, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Are people really going to test something twice, once for Fallout and then for Oblivion? I'd say copy them over, but leave the link on the page.

I'll reveal my further plans for the scripting section right away: I'm going to make a template for the function pages. That will include the syntax, example and categories. That would require going through all functions at once, but changes should be fairly easy after that.

--Qazaaq 10:32, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I was primarily responsible for getting the function pages initially created. The links back to the CS wiki were more a matter of convenience than an actual decision -- in general, I left just a link when the function was identical to the Oblivion version (but I can't guarantee that is 100% true). If the function had changed in any way (new parameters or different functionality), I documented it here. There are definitely some functions that are obsolete or just plain broken (i.e. crash the game) -- these I didn't document, although I now realize that you guys already have the full list, so I'll leave it to you whether or not to put in pages for functions that don't actually work just for the sake of completeness.

--Kkuhlmann 14:23, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

This is a case where using a Wiki bot would be ideal. I know how to work one, and Gstaff and TS7 seem to be warming up to the idea, but they still need to get back to me on some specifics.

Anyway, the lack of guarantee that the two functions are identical sort of kills any rationale for keeping the pages centralized. Cross links (here and on the CS wiki) are a good idea when they are at least supposed to be the same - at the very least, it will provide people with information about what bugs might be worth checking for, if they were in the Oblivion version of the function.

Qazaaq, that sounds great. That template should help with a lot of things.

DragoonWraith · talk · 15:25, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

@@ Line 30: / Line 30: @@
 :::::Oh, and cool trick with the pagetitles.
 :::::--[[User:Qazaaq|Qazaaq]] 19:16, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
+::::::Already ahead of you on that one: I created {{[[:Template:SettingGroup|SettingGroup]]}} for that very purpose. It's still kind of long, but not terribly and the consistency is worth it, IMO.
+::::::[[User:DragoonWraith|DragoonWraith]] &middot; [[User talk:DragoonWraith|talk]] &middot; 19:37, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
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