Wiki needs work

[Lucifer]

So I've been going through the wiki looking at how it can be cleaned up, organized, etc, and noticed a number of interesting trends.

First, the tournament area has grown *a lot*. I found that drupal offers a number of useful modules for this, would anybody be interested if I spun off the tournament area of the wiki into its own website? Would anybody volunteer to hack some drupal modules to give it more stuff that would help in tournament planning/running/etc?

Second, there's a lot of information duplicated on a lot of pages. I think a pretty serious restructuring needs to be done, but exactly what I'm not sure yet because I need to do a much more complete inventory of the wiki to determine that. If I work up a target outline for the wiki organization, how many volunteers can I get to do the actual work? Specifically the things that I know need to be done are in this annoying list here:

* There's a lot of list pages that only contain links to other pages. These should be mostly rewritten into articles that provide overviews for the topics covered, with links to the other pages included. There's a format that'll work for it I can put together.

* There's a lot of pages that contain a little bit of information on a topic, then there's another very similar page that contains a little bit of different information on the same topic. These need to be merged in every case that exists and links updated to reflect that.

* There's a few pages that need to be split up into smaller pieces to be transcluded in other places.

* There are some pretty old pages. We should make a list of old pages somewhere and whenever you stumble across such a page, link it on that list. Or a category. Basically we have no means to deal with pages that probably should be deleted or factored into other pages and then deleted. We haven't accumulated a whole bunch of trash yet, but we're starting, and now is a good time to think about what we'll do with it.

[wrtlprnft]

• There are some pretty old pages. We should make a list of old pages somewhere and whenever you stumble across such a page, link it on that list. Or a category. Basically we have no means to deal with pages that probably should be deleted or factored into other pages and then deleted. We haven't accumulated a whole bunch of trash yet, but we're starting, and now is a good time to think about what we'll do with it.

A lot of these pages could probably need some work to bring them up to date with current development and can maybe use some links too.

[Jonathan]

I guess I didn't help by adding team information to code hacks. At least the information is there now.

[Your_mom]

i'ld like to see proper use of the catagories. Right now all the catagories are jumbled up.

[Lucifer]

I guess I didn't help by adding team information to code hacks. At least the information is there now.

Actually, that's the kind of thing that page is for. When it has grown enough, it should be factored into different pages and the structure it needs is probably self-evident.

A lot of this work is non-trivial, which is why I'm asking for volunteers instead of just trying to do it. If y'all recall when the wiki first went up, we had no idea what was going to go on it and what structure it would have. I said something to the effect of "after we have something, we'll need to work on getting it structured", so I guess that's all I'm really doing now.

I'll see if I can put something together in the next few days. The long part is getting it inventoried.

[Jonathan]

I mean that the most extensive description of which name and color are used for a team is now on that page. It'd be better to have a rewritten and more complete version on a page about teams, with only the replacement stuff on code hacks.

[Lucifer]

I'm short the actual inventory, although I'm looking over the wiki while I work on it. I've started the wiki structuring page, here:

http://wiki.armagetronad.net/index.php/ ... ng_Project

I intend that page to provide the master outline of all wiki content. It should ultimately link to every page in the wiki showing how everything relates. So for "editors" and "moderators" (that's those of us volunteering to care about this and do something about it), when you see a new page, you should check it against this outline to see where it fits and take appropriate action. The very minimum appropriate action is to put the page on this outline. The maximum appropriate action could be breaking the page down into parts and moving teh content to other pages, or it could be updating all pages that link to it in such a way to push it into the actual structure this outline shows.

So even though the inventory isn't present on this outline yet, it should ultimately get there. There's enough outline for you guys to start sticking real articles in there and see how you can arrange the Playing the Game section, you know, if you wanted to start working on it.

[Lucifer]

Ok, I've got most of Playing the Game inventoried and listed on that page. Your_mom started up the talk page, so volunteers should go look it over and probably start working.

I'd suggest that to get there from here, you should start by going to the outline and specifying what the categories are on the outline. Each node on the outline that has children should be a category. Then go to the articles linked and put them in the categories. When all of the linked articles have categories, then go in and start making the Category: special pages, move text into them, write new text, etc. Finally, look at the orphaned pages special page to see what got left out and work those into the outline.

[Lucifer]

Ok, you guys can take a turn now. I've got most of the categories laid down for Playing the Game, and most of the pages put in there. There's some content to be written on the category pages themselves, and probably some more organizing. I said it was a lot of work, didn't I?

Leaving alone the other sections for now, we can take them in turn. Get this one done well first, then move on, eh?

[DDMJ]

Is it me or did everything on the Wiki get centered. It seems all the text and tables are now centered in the middle of the page. Hmmmmm.

[wrtlprnft]

Lucifer did some strange things with margins, so everything is indented on the right and left by like 10%. It gets worse with nested items like lists.
If you don't like it and you're logged in you can go into your preferences and select the monobook skin.

[Lucifer]

Well, you probably need to select the monobook skin now. I just upgraded the wiki and the armagetronad skin is broken in mediawiki 1.7.1, and since I think there's work going on somewhere for a new skin, I'm not updating it. So logged in users may need to visit their Preferences page and select a different skin.