GECK:Community Portal/Policy

Copyright

What're the rules on putting stuff here from the GECK/Fallout3? Clearly, screenshots are OK, as are lists of names.

But what about scripts? It'd be *awesome* to have the ability to see, for each function/condition/etc, a list of all scripts and other objects that use it, and then look at the scripts online, with each keyword in them linked to the relevant article.

If that's allowed, it's not something that could reasonably be done manually, so I'd be interested in trying to write a script to do it, though I'd need to understand wiki templates first, I think, and there'd need to be templates for functions, variables, conditions, forms, references, nifs, etc, and a standard page-naming scheme, and even then I'd have to run it on my test wiki to make sure it worked, first :) Hrm. Need a way to dump things like scripts and quests to text, though: has that been done anywhere?

I'm thinking of creating a simple data structure listing every ref/form ID and resource filename in the program, its type, and all its links to every other one, then using that to generate the pages.

If it's not allowed, I'll just go through as I have been, and just manually add a list of the scripts that use each function onto each page, though people will have to look them up in the GECK, as they do with the TES CS wiki.

Considering that those scripts do nothing without the game, I doubt they'd mind. Maybe a special template for the sake of indicating what they are and giving copyright notices. Anyway, the real thing is that frankly, a list of what scripts use a function is just not that useful. We had lists like that for several Oblivion functions, and they were just cumbersome, bloated, and never, ever used. You can get that information pretty easily by using Find Text... in the Edit menu, if you need it.

I don't feel very strongly about the issue, but I am against it. More importantly, it would be an absolutely ridiculous amount of work; that would certainly not be worthwhile.

DragoonWraith · talk · 07:58, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm with DragoonWraith on this, scripts are easily found with Find Text. Listing them all here seems superfluous.

I can see the added value of having the function pages one click away. So having a hand-picked selection scripts may be a good idea.

--Qazaaq 09:31, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

I massively underestimated "Find text". I'd assumed it only searched text fields and, from posts like this: http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Talk:GetUsedItemActivate I'd assumed that it couldn't find, say, conditions. I was so wrong! You can even search for FormIDs and RefIDs! Wow, I think I'm in love with a menu option.

A better method than selective scripts might be a universal mod for all text editors that provides context sensitive help for GECK keywords: the context-linking in any app is easy enough, but a prerequisite for it is getting a dump of all keywords (formnames, refnames, functions, conditions, etc), which is something for which I have no clue. Programming projects are wildly offtopic for policy page, so suggestions to my talk page please! DewiMorgan 14:38, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

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:

1. 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.
2. 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)

User Page Policy

Might it be a good idea to have some kind of rules about what is and is not appropriate in a User page? I mean, I do tend to think of them as a User's personal space, to do with as they like, but it should be at least somewhat related to the Wiki or Fallout 3 modding. For example, Greyditch992's Talk page is recruiting for a real-life organization (sort of). While FO3 related, it has nothing to do with modding the game, and I'm not sure this is the place for this.
DragoonWraith · talk · 00:16, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

External Links

I've just found the Links page, which seems to be used for linking to external tutorials and the like, and it's got me wondering about the availability of external resources (excluding those hosted on the Oblivion CS Wiki). Although the Links page is linked to from the main page, I feel like it's not particularly obvious so these extra resources can be quite difficult to find. Lumping them all together like that also removes them from any relevant context, making it harder for the user to find what they're looking for.

Anyway, I was wondering what policy (if any) the Wiki has for including relevant external links in regular articles. I would be surprised if there was any problem with doing this (after all, the Wiki is all about making information accessible, right?) but given how few I've seen I thought I'd ask for a bit of clarification. Would it be appropriate to include such links in See Also sections?

What I'd quite like to do is include external links to tutorials that I've written on cipscis.com, so that they can be accessed by people looking for information on the Wiki without requiring me to essentially give up authorship by hosting them here. This'll also allow me to link to updated (by which I mean re-written) tutorials of mine that have their previous iterations hosted here on the Wiki, without having to remove the information currently available on the Wiki.

Personally, I think that each article should link to as many relevant (useful) resources as are available, so I'm going to go ahead and add these links to what I feel are the relative articles in their respective See Also sections. However, I'm still interested in finding out how others feel about linking to external resources, as the Oblivion CS Wiki seems to be pretty much the only external resource linked to around here.

-- Cipscis 13:07, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, for one thing, convention (though not explicitly policy) is to have new discussion topics appear at the bottom of the page. I've moved it down here. I don't really know why this is, but that's how Wikis usually work and I think a lot of people expect things like this.

Anyway, the policy is "we really should be doing that better... do you have time to do it? Yeah, me neither." So if you're volunteering, go for it. Typically it would be in an External Links section after the See Also section. The only thing I would comment on is that it would likely be confusing/frustrating for a user to finish a tutorial and then see "Updated version of this tutorial on cipscis.com" - that would be kind of annoying. At the same time, I'm not sure it's appropriate to have pages on the Wiki that consist entirely of just a link to your site. That's an issue I'm not really sure how to handle.

DragoonWraith · talk · 20:43, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree that in general pages shouldn't be created just to link to pages on my site. I've listed it on the Links page so that should be sufficient. However, I have created a page to link to my Script Validator because I think it's something that Wiki users could find helpful but, it can't actually be mirrored on the Wiki. I have no plans to do the same thing for other pages.

If I make an update to a tutorial hosted both here and on my website that doesn't consist of a total re-write then I'll mirror the update here as well, but given that others can edit the tutorials hosted here it's entirely possible that the content will evolve differently in each location, so I think it would be appropriate to make both versions available. Perhaps a note about other versions could be included at the top of the page, with the actual links at the bottom in an External Links section?

Most of the external tutorials that I know about are my own, which of course I'd be glad to link to from appropriate articles on the Wiki. I'd be happy to include other external links as I find them as well, but most of the external links I include will probably end up linking to my site.

P.S. Thanks for the tip about new discussion going at the bottom of the page. I'll keep that in mind from now on.
-- Cipscis 23:15, 11 October 2009 (UTC)