Helping Out With the TO Wiki

[Sirnaq]

You're right when you say that renaming the stuff is not the priority.

However when I look at this page:
Category:Use - MyMMOGames.net Wiki
-->173 pages to correct. Nice number.

this one now:
Category:Etc - MyMMOGames.net Wiki.
--> more than 1500 freakin pages!!!

I won't make the offfense to list all the pets, the gacha/myshop items and all and all and all.

Look, I'm pretty devoted in the wiki edition: however it just took me more than 1 month, everyday's work, JUST to rename the quests and maps. What does it represent, 1% of the wiki, maybe? My idea is that we should stop from being in denial of reality: renaming such a huge content will NEVER happen. And it makes things even more complicated, for no purpose.

If we keep things easy to update, more "little helpers" will be likely to help, I hope. That's just my 2 cents.

[adipiciu]

Originally Posted by Sirnaq

If we keep things easy to update, more "little helpers" will be likely to help, I hope. That's just my 2 cents.

I notice that they aren't many editing the wiki, because it looks complicated, they don't find things like quests or maps.

Its the second category movement, the first was on MT, and i'm tired of this. I even proposed a solution but noting happend.

If they really want to move them they can easily make a bot to rename, move, etc but probably they won't.

I'm retiring

[Dread]

I said it in the beginning just keep all the trickster stuff with there name and rename every other game with whatever letter thingy so it won't clash but ohwell we started so no turning back now lol.

[Sirnaq]

Zomg it looks like the wiki is about to die a pityful death if we don't think seriously of what to do next. Now I realize that moving/renaming everything was not a great idea.

I got a suggestion, may sound crazy (so sit down on your chair), it goes like this:

1/ First, we don't rename/re-link anything anymore. The Myshop/Gacha (and many other) pages and categories have remained unchanged so far, thanksfully.

2/ Even if new templates such as TO_Etc, TO_Use have been created, 99% of the content do not use it yet, since nobody has changed the links on the related pages. I noticed than the items/gears that appeared with the "Lycan's Event part.1" and after are the only ones using the TO_stuff, so those few pages can be reverted to the "old" form very easily.

3/ The Left-menu is a real concern, too: It looks like a large number of users miss the old menu. And I have to admit, I belong to this majority. It took me more than two months to notice that you have to click on "Trickster Online [show]" to display it, it's far from being user-friendly. That's why so many people find it hard to access the quests, equips and maps. We DO need a decent left menu ;o

4/ Now let's go to the ultimate level of crazyness. I range on Adipiciu and Dread's side, when you say that we shouldn't have made all those changes. And it's true that making one different wiki for each different game is more clever, too. Thus, my suggestion is to make a massive, (manual) rollback, to give the wiki its previous form. As I was the one working on the pets, the quests and the maps, to me it's not a problem to manualy revert back all those links I've updated.

The main goal is, as stated in my earlier post, to make the wiki easy to "understand" and to update, just like it was in the good old time.

Now I give you two reasons that motivate this approach:
The good old links looked like this:
[[Abiox]]

New links look like that:
[[{{NAMESPACE}}:Abiox|Abiox]]

Much more complicated to figure how a link work, when you're a little helper.

Especially when you look at the code source of an existing page, the new links make pages so long, it became un-easy (impossible) to read.

Reason number two, the wiki's search engine is soon to be broken: try to search "abiox", you won't find it. Now try this "trickster online:abiox", the page will show up. That means we got to keep two versions of the same page, the old one and the new one, for the search engine to work properly...

My final word (sorry for the tl;dr): the old wiki was win, the new one ditter people from touching it. Better to turn it back to the original form before it's too late, than see it dying.

And sorry for my lame english, I hope you can read my words despites the synthax/typos :O

[adipiciu]

I agree with all the above, but we can't rollback. It will be total suicide.
We need to make some guideliness with how to use the wiki and how to edit it for the users. There were some guideliness on the old wiki and some template skeletons. They need revised and updated. Secondly we need someone with rights to make and run a bot, that will update all the links, categories, etc to the correct namespace.

[Sirnaq]

Originally Posted by adipiciu

I agree with all the above, but we can't rollback. It will be total suicide.
We need to make some guideliness with how to use the wiki and how to edit it for the users. There were some guideliness on the old wiki and some template skeletons. They need revised and updated. Secondly we need someone with rights to make and run a bot, that will update all the links, categories, etc to the correct namespace.

About rollback's total suicide, i'm not talking about the "undo" option, no, I just suggest that we move all pages to the old form (without trickster online: prefix), then we revert all the links with this same prefix. Believe me, it takes time to add a prefix on every page (it took 2 months, exactly), but it's only a matter of A FEW DAYS to delete those prefix. Doing this, we can also salvage the latest modifications of the past few weeks as well.

To put it differently, we've lost our time messing up with the prefixes. Now that we've realized, it's time to be wise, we've learnd from our mistake.

I know i'm asking a lot, so here is my suggestion: let it to me. I'll change all the links i've made so far (pets skills maps quests and more), i'll remove every "trickster online:" that I can find. As I said before, it's way easier to remove such links than to add them. It may take, I think, no more than maximum 2 weeks. And 2 weeks are nothing compared to a more than 2-year-old wiki, right? Such a supposed-to-be-massive work doesn't impress me much, compared to what I've done so far.

Using bot is a nice option, but for "little helpers", I sincerely doubt they will understand such a sophisticated approach. Plus, we'll sure have to modify every single page, just to have the bot understand that it will be working 'only' on the TO pages. Means more work, on hundred thousands pages, once again.

As always, the easier, the better. It was "pretty easy" (*cough*) to update content on the old MT wiki, this new one just give me headache.

We now have to take the right decision about the future of our wiki. It's NOT an option, it's a State of Emergency. So we must discuss it before going further, and take the right decisions. For the sake of our beloved wiki <3

[Medoria]

Look, we wrote a script to handle what mediawiki was capable of handling. We realize there are many more links to move over, if you don't want to do it/find it too daunting, then don't and other people will pick up the slack. Do not speak for the entire community.
This is the way it is formatted and the way it needs to be. We realize it's a lot of work, but you don't quit something cause it's a lot of work, you work harder.
I'm sick of the negative attitude in this thread. There is a lot of amazing things going on with the wiki at large and the trickster wiki, if you can't see that, can't appreciate that, then well.. I just don't know.

As for this script adipicu that you think is so simple and easy to write, by all means, go ahead and write it and we'll use it if it works. You do NOT need to be a sysop to write helper scripts. I wrote code and extensions for MT long before I was given even modship.


Lastly: This is not MT, we do not support just one game and one wiki, we support a whole slew of games and as such the wiki will necessarily be more complicated. However the effect is more rewarding because no matter if you switch games, you can still come to the same source that you are familiar with and the same community of which we hope you've grown strong bonds within.

Also as for guides, anyone is more than welcome to make a "how to edit the wiki" guide
On the top of every page I linked to my guide for putting content in namespaces.

[SkillzKillz]

I think it would be best just to write a guide to help new users edit the wiki.

I've never edited any wiki before and I find it too aggravating to bear.

[Sirnaq]

Originally Posted by Medoria

Look, we wrote a script to handle what mediawiki was capable of handling. We realize there are many more links to move over, if you don't want to do it/find it too daunting, then don't and other people will pick up the slack. Do not speak for the entire community.
This is the way it is formatted and the way it needs to be. We realize it's a lot of work, but you don't quit something cause it's a lot of work, you work harder.
I'm sick of the negative attitude in this thread. There is a lot of amazing things going on with the wiki at large and the trickster wiki, if you can't see that, can't appreciate that, then well.. I just don't know.

Sorry but I somewhat disagree with you on this point: Regarding the quantity of games that we decided to cover, the solution was NOT to make a huge and uncomfortable Metawiki, but instead, a PORTAL leading to one specific wiki for each separated game. It would have spared us a lot of useless pain. Truth be told, I'm prefectly fine with the multi-games forum as is; still, a forum is not a wiki.

Oh and please, don't tell me to work harder. There are what, a handfull of four or five people really working hard on the TO wiki. I belong to the new generation of wiki editors, and let me tell you that, now I regret the old MT wiki is forsaken: it was easier to maintain, and everything was running fine there. Now concerning our wiki, there is just too much UN-NEEDED work just to recover something that was working perfectly fine before. Yes I went totally emo, now you know the exact reason.

Originally Posted by Medoria

As for this script adipicu that you think is so simple and easy to write, by all means, go ahead and write it and we'll use it if it works. You do NOT need to be a sysop to write helper scripts. I wrote code and extensions for MT long before I was given even modship.

I'm now waiting for such a script to come, and make me understand how wrong I was. Such a script would be my ray-of-hope, truly (see, I'm not negative all the time). Until then I take a break, I'm affraid of "ruining" the wiki even more.

Last, do understand that I'm not looking for some stupid e-drama, my only concern is that a wiki have to remain easy to browse by end-users, and easy to update by the editors. If one of those two points fails, the wiki fails...

[Medoria]

As I have stated several times in this thread, but let me state it once more:
WE CAN NOT HAVE MULTIPLE SEPARATE WIKIS. WE DO NOT HAVE THE RESOURCES FOR IT.

I don't know how to make this any clearer. Running a wiki requires a lot of resources and we simply do not have enough given the current revenue of the site and our current server to support multiple installations of mediawiki. It's is not a matter of what you or I or anyone else wants, it's a matter of practicality. We have one wiki, we can't have anymore. we are doing the best we can with the one installation.
I'm sick, sick , SICK of repeating this.
We have one mediawiki installation, END.


FURTHERMORE - We are not MT. The only reason we maintained the bulk of the content of MT is because I spent a decent chunk of my time WHILE I WAS AT WORK, to write a script to export the entire wiki so it wouldn't be lost.


Lastly- adding Namespace to a link is NOT HARD. Clearly both of you figured out how to do it, is it so hard to believe that other people on the internet and using the wiki can understand how to do it as well?? maybe I'm naive, but I frankly have more faith in our wiki editors.

[NoeJeko]

As soon as someone donates $20,000 to the site, I'll get 3 front end webservers, a hardware load balancer, and a dedicated backend database server. At that time I'll install all the wiki instances people want.

At any point in time, anyone is welcome to write another guide on editing the wiki. Keep in mind, however there are a few things that will not change. First, the name prefixes are absolutely necessary to prevent conflicts. If LaTale has an item called "wooden sword" and Trickster has an item called "wooden sword", there is no way to distinguish between the two images. With categories, I'm quite sure that more than one game will have a category for Quests, Events, Weapons, etc. Again, we'll run into conflicts.

You're right, MT's wiki was accurate and unbroken as of June 18th, 2008. At this point it was locked for editing and quickly became outdated. Sure, the information it contained was more complete, but as time went on it's deficiency grew. To this day, only one person updates the MT wiki and does so by exporting the pages from here.

The purpose of MMOG, as stated multiple times, was to create an MMO community capable of outliving the death of any single game. We have no desire to become a massive information portal like MMOsite as these sites have massive amounts of information, but little or no community.

We're working to make navigation more intuitive across the entire site. There's an announcement about this that has been in the News section for weeks, and the new look and feel entered production last night. It's only a matter of time before we're prepared to roll it out.

A person in this thread got upset because they thought Medoria was asking them to "work harder". I could turn that right back around and get upset that I'm being asked to work harder and spend more money - in the reach of tens of thousands. That's what it would take to operate an IT infrastructure capable of handling what is being requested here. MMOG's been losing money since the day it opened and I am not about to sink $20,000 of my own money into this site when we have an infrastructure that works. I believe I've proven that I'm willing to spend what it takes to make this place work, but demanding more of me is quite insulting. As far as the administrative overhead for this - I spent almost every single minute that I'm not at work or with my girlfriend working on this site. I estimate that I spend a good 40-50 hours a week on this place. I'm not about to sacrifice time from my relationship for it. Outside this, I have no more time in my day to give to MMOG. Yet, this isn't good enough - the only way people will be happy it seems is if I just stop sleeping, give up my job, ditch my relationship, and live on this site. That'll work for about a month until my power goes out and I no longer have internet to work on it. Actually, it may not even get to that point because I may have starved to death by that point. Drastic? That's practically what's being asked of me here.

My 2 cents.

[Sandrie]

:x Omg, I've been really slacking off on helping with the wiki...I've been busy with school and all that...but reading what everyone, especially Noe, does for this place, I'm gonna try to get a little more fixed up on the wiki. If someone is so decided to this place, willing to do all that he has done, I bet I could work on the wiki a bit after I finish up my homework.

So I want to say thank you to Noe, Medoria, and all the others who have worked so hard here :x

[Sirnaq]

Message received. First of all, thanks for the clarifications, I may be quite active as far as editing the wiki is concerned, but I have little to no knowledge on how a wiki's "skeleton" is build up, and how it works server-side. At least I can see a little clearly now.

Now, just asking (and not flaming): on the space allocated on the server, isn't it possible to make multiple folders, each one containing a different "raw" wiki-skeleton? I mean, looking at:
http://www.mymmogames.net/forum and
http://www.mymmogames.net/wiki/

why not making:
http://www.mymmogames.net/wiki/Trickster_Online
http://www.mymmogames.net/wiki/LaFail
... etc?

Wouldn't it save us from renaming/ namespecifing everything? This is just a question. Better to perform some subtile Damage Control, before going further in the wrong direction.

Edit: As asked by Skillz and many others, here are a few wiki guidelines that were lost in space and time. However they are more than outdated, and need some revamp before anybody begin to use it I think. Here they are:

Wiki Guidelines - MyMMOGames.net Wiki
Template Skeletons - MyMMOGames.net Wiki

[Medoria]

Sorry, mediawiki sadly does not support such things.

[OrangeJuice]

>.<; I have no experience with wiki editing at all, so sorry if my question is really basic. Reading all these thread posts are kind of confusing (maybe since I haven't seen what a page looks like in editing mode but I think I should sign up for a wiki account only after I've got some idea of how this all works).

Ok, Sirnaq noted that the TO Category Use wasn't updated yet, so I went to the page to take a look. My following questions all relate back to that page:

a) When I go to the TO Category Use, the name is still Category:Use > so this should be changed to Category:TO Use, right? So, I know that wasn't changed BUT on the page I see a whole list of links of Use items all with the "Trickster Online:" in front of the item names > are those done being moved?

b) And for the links under "Subcategories" on that same page, for example, should "Box" be changed to "Trickster Online:Box" or "TO:Box"? >.<; Categories use TO but it's a sub one, and doesn't even have Category in the title, so I'm not sure.

c) Is there a certain order you have to change name spaces in? Like...do you change the namespace of the items on the page before changing the category's namespace?

._.; I can provide a screenshot if my explaination of my question is unclear.
And thank-you for any help and thanks to all that've contributed to the wiki so far ( =] it's been very helpful).