Future of Wiki

zecro · Post by **zecro** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 12:22 am

I'll try to be to-the-point here. [Edit: to stay more to-the-point I have stricken all the irrelevant training stuff because I am silly (and partially wrong)] BV is busy, and with him stepping down as Training ZL, it wouldn't be too far out to logically extend that to "BV is busy for the Academy." I say this with no intent to marginalize BV's efforts on the Academy, but with web2.0 being all the rage, and having spent a lot of time on various wikis, but I would like to point out that most or all of the material on the Academy really should be on the Wiki. To my understanding, the current policy is to remove all gameplay-related material on the Wiki in favor of linking to the Academy.

This is inefficient for several reasons:
Wikis are really great for centralizing and cross-linking to information with a consistent styleBV is busy, so any changes (inaccuracies and such) on the Academy take longer to change than they would on a community-driven wikiThe wiki format itself has a variety of ways to present information in a low-bandwidth simple-to-use format (scroll down to the movelist on this page and note that all the colors and graphs are auto-generated. This is true for the hundreds of other such listings on the site)

Anyway, to kind of give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here is the sandbox in the wiki. I wrote that paragraph for an overview to be posted on game sites, then I got the idea of putting in a sortable list of scout ships by factions (should probably have things with default loadout and such, but it's a proof-of-concept), and then I realized that if I just threw in some double brackets on the paragraph I wrote, half the terms would have Wiki articles already. See the red links? Those are gameplay-related things that should be on the wiki for the reasons outlined above. The blue links are already there.

If a person wanted to learn about allegiance, and we linked him to this overview page he wouldn't have to search for information on any of the details, it would be directly linked (thanks to simple wiki formatting) from three paragraphs. The number of blue links represents the amount of knowledge that someone should know at least in overiview.

(Oh yeah, I got those values for the scout data from ICE and some multiplication, and I'm not sure how it works exactly, so no guarantees for accuracy of that particular info.)

Clay_Pigeon · Post by **Clay_Pigeon** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 1:31 am

1) BV is not the training ZL. He ran @Cadet

2) BV is not the only person running the Academy

3) The entire premise of your suggestion is that "BV is busy," which is fairly speculative, since you don't know the reasons for his stepping down. You're also equating running the Academy with running @Cadet, which is...just....wrong. @Cadet is a rather large time commitment; BV spent several hours a week maintaining the program. It is just as valid to say that BV has more time/energy to maintain the Academy, now that he's not running @Cadet.

4) Whether or not the Academy should be merged with the wiki is a different argument altogether, independent of BV's status. I suggest contacting the respective ZLs directly (training and documentation).

zecro · Post by **zecro** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 1:45 am

Ok, point taken about BV/Academy. Also, until Cadet II/ACS material is made publicly available, this does not concern training at all because it's documentation. Yes, it can be used for training. Exclusively? No. Even if Training is responsible for the Academy, that still doesn't preclude anyone from documenting aspects of the game such as the common uses of different ships, their stats, the stats of missiles. If that means that the same information is placed in two different places by different groups, it means there's no centralization, which is arguably good/bad but not critically important.

It still makes no sense to me that the Wiki massively (and externally) links to the Academy when that material could be easily placed in the Wiki with better results.

Clay_Pigeon · Post by **Clay_Pigeon** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 2:10 am

I'm not the Training ZL anymore, so I'll refrain from jumping into this. The Academy falls under the Training Zone, so what happens to that material is up to Adam. That's how the Zones were divided up. That's his call, not mine (or yours).

Post by **TheBored** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 3:18 am

I've agreed with your points since before I became the Documentation ZL. The main reason it was never done was because "We put a lot of work into the Academy, so lets keep it". I've disagreed with it from the start, but I wasn't interested in creating some feud over something like documentation.

Recently, things changed. BV opened up to the idea of moving things to the Wiki, so we started. We just completed a month and a half project to move EVERYTHING Cadet I related onto the Wiki. The change became official earlier this week. The Academy move was to be determined based on the Cadet I move. Since it went so well though, I'm quite confident that we will be moving the Academy information over as well. I'm not pushing it this second, however... I want to let the Cadet I info sit for a bit so editors can catch problems with our previous documents along with the new Cadet I stuff. After things settle again, I'll start pursuing the Academy stuff. This has all been in planning since the holidays

Once we start (and finish) the Academy information, I'll open up the Wiki to all gameplay related information, like it should be now. Regarding Cadet II & ACS however, I wouldn't count on seeing those become public anytime soon. I understand (and agree with) the reasoning for keeping them private. If Adam (Training ZL) chooses to make them public, I'm sure we will accommodate those documents as well.

TB

Post by **BlackViper** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 3:44 am

A simple PM to me Zecro would have told you we started this two months ago. For some reason people seem to think a public post works better than a simple PM to me.

TB and his crew did an excellant job on the Cadet I move. NOW, if you would have read the cadet grad post in general you would have seen a small blurb about the Academy moving. OR read the post in general about linking Cadet wings. Instead you wasted a whole group of peoples time by posting this.

Sorry, but sometimes people need to read before posting. Hell, read the news item on the Academy!

OR you could have PM'd the ZL for documentation, but that would have made too much sense too I suppose.

zecro · Post by **zecro** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 4:37 am

When there are five conflicting sources of information, a PM to one person will not help.

The Academy site proper notes that Cadet I is moving/has moved. No word on the status of moving other documents.
BVs post from Cadet mentions the transition to the Wiki in passing.
The sticky in this forum clearly indicate that this is not happening.
Other posts in this forum, recently as a few months ago, illustrate an aggressive filtering of content between the Academy and the Wiki.
Wiki policy itself states: "You cannot put gameplay material on the wiki. If you do, it will get deleted."

I wanted to help in the new effort, so I requested a clarification in the proper forum which has, despite efforts to derail discussion from the point, actually answered my question of "why don't you put gameplay stuff on the Wiki?" with "we weren't before because we didn't want to but we will in two weeks."

Thanks for the clarification, and I hope that making templates is not against Wiki/documentation policy.

Post by **TheBored** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 5:01 am

Aye, good points. You can always PM a ZL though, at the very least they can point you to the right person to ask

I will write up a "State of the Wiki" article sometime soon.

TB

EDIT:

zecro wrote:QUOTE (zecro @ Feb 19 2009, 11:37 PM) Thanks for the clarification, and I hope that making templates is not against Wiki/documentation policy.

Templates for what?

zecro · Post by **zecro** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 5:55 am

By templates I mean color-coding, pre-formatted tables for missiles, weapons, ships, notices... If all of it is going to be moved over, might as well make it look nice and informative. ICE isn't exactly user-friendly, but power gamers would want to know all that information and having it all available in an easy-to-digest chart with some color-coding would probably help a lot. Maybe once there's a place for people to easily figure out how much damage what weapons does to what hull/shield type (numerically) instead of "it's super effective!" and "it's not very effective..." they would actually use it to their advantage? Color-code hull type for each ship, color-code shield-type for each ship, and then refer to them when you make weapon damage charts. Creating a template allows you to write "hull=heavy" and it would wiki-matically put that in the right spot, with the right color. People's memory works better when there's more than experience and words to go off of, numbers and colors would help.