Forum:Proposals from the State of the Wiki Podcast

Forums: Index > Rin's Travel Agency > Archive > Proposals from the State of the Wiki Podcast

In the most recent podcast episode (which is currently in postproduction and is not uploaded yet), Techno, SCM, and I talk about things we'd like to see the wiki improve on in this upcoming year. This lead naturally to a bunch of little proposals that don't seem worth making separate forum threads for each of, at least at present:

• Return of the Featured Articles - Come up with criteria for an article to be Featured, which would essentially impose that it has comparable quality to Tifa Lockhart. Have a randomly chosen Featured Article on the front page, and announce when a new Featured Article is added to the database on our Twitter. The goal is to create a standard that editors developing other articles can shoot for, rather than to aim for equal representation from each game in the franchise.
• Closure of the fora - Currently Blackjack, Zi'tah, and Dollet Hotel are (a) glitchy to the point of being unusable and (b) obsolete because of Discussions and Discord (which is why I cba to fix them). So let's just close them. In the case of Blackjack or Dollet Hotel I wouldn't mind if we just decided to delete them completely. Get rid of the Rin's stickies because they're both outdated. Move Zi'tah to some other format (projectspace?) where people can share fanart, fanfics, etc. Encourage our resident fanartists etc. to use it, because Zi'tah could potentially be a positive force for the FF community if it wasn't dead.
  • UPDATE 18:39, 27 January 2022 (UTC): Per Zero-ELEC the Blackjack and Dollet Hotel have been archived. Leaving Zi'tah up, but I fixed all the bugs with it.
• FFXIV: Help Wanted - There are two areas where our FFXIV coverage is lacking. Our lore articles have lots of details but are frequently poorly organized, and having a few editors who sit down, figure out how to best organize it, and then rewrite all the pages to fit that organization scheme would bring up the quality of that sector by a lot. Second, I would like to selfishly request help from editors who are interested in FFXIV and know Python or Lua (or possibly Rust or C# but I wouldn't be able to help nearly as much with those) to help with the great process of migrating the wiki from xivdb to xivapi. (Or, you don't even need technical prowess, someone going through and dealing with Special:PrefixIndex/Project:XIVAPI/Quests/ and Category:Bot-generated articles, and merging bot-generated articles with their human-written counterparts, would already be a huge boon.)
• FFT(A) Mapper - As in Golgollada Gallows, our FFT battle maps are ... lacking. However, as demonstrated by the great work of Techno, Adonzo, et al. on the Icon module (among others) we should have the technology now to use Lua to generate nice table-based maps. This is a pipe dream for me to work on if we ever get our mountain of xivapi stuff sorted out.
• Where's our mapping tool, Fandom? Related to the above proposal, can we pressure Fandom to get their mapping tool finished sooner? It seems like it's been abandoned (or just delayed because of Covid?) While it might not be that useful for FFT(A) it would be very useful for the S/NES games and FFXIV.
  • UPDATE 16:19, 23 January 2022 (UTC): SlyCooperFan1 has confirmed that Fandom will announce an update about this soon.
  • UPDATE 18:39, 27 January 2022 (UTC): Brandon Rhea has a blog post about this, let's check back in around April 2022.

Thoughts on any or all of the above ideas? (Also, Techno/SCM, feel free to add or edit bullets to the above list, we had a really long discussion and I may have forgotten some of it... Other editors should also feel free to suggest little things they want improved below too!) Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 02:00, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Featured articles—if we do follow it, the thing we need to be careful about is balancing having good quality standards with not being too clique-ish about it. i.e. Make sure articles hold up to certain quality standards, but do not desingate specific people to it. I think w:c:jakanddaxter:Project:Featured articles is a good standard we can follow here. Over there, J&D wiki randomly displays one of its featured articles on the front page, and I know Wookieepedia does some Lua magic to automate that, which we could consider.

No strong opinions on the rest, most sounds good.-- Technobliterator ^T_C 03:20, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I envisioned something like Project:Requests for Promotion for it, plus a Lua randomizer would be very easy to build. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 16:19, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

I started fixing the names of some FFXIV quest pages but had to pause because I'm not sure what you want done with the removed quests. I blitzed through and moved Doman Connection into place, and afterwards noticed that this quest was merged into In Flagrante Delicto, whose original version is also in the list of quest pages that couldn't be made. So what do we want done here? -- Some Color Mage ~ (Talk) 06:00, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Currently I've just been deleting old versions of quests, with the understanding that we can use the bot to create a section of the wiki about them later if we ever decide that's what we want to do. Not sure if that's the best approach though Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 16:19, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

I would personally prefer if old and deprecated quests could be maintained as a separate listing. As for the rest of the proposals, I would personally ask that the various fora be archived rather than deleted outright if possible, if only to preserve older posts and conversations, for whatever their value. Otherwise everything sounds good. — Zero-ELEC (talk) 19:48, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

I did adapt the old Legacy template into Template:Deprecated which should work for defunct quest pages. Works without game and current fields, though game at least should be used. Could potentially be expanded to include when the content in question was removed. Adonzo (talk) 02:39, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Louisoix Leveilleur: Eorzea was destroyed by a force of unimaginable power raining down from the sky. It is the dawn of a new age!

The following article covers a subject from a previous version of whatever game that has since been removed. For the content that replaced this, see whatever page.

Ha, that's a good one.

I will leave Doman Connection where it is for now to avoid making a bigger mess, but I'll leave any other old quest that's in the unnamed quest pages where they are for now, if we implement this then we can get to sorting the names for those pages out. -- Some Color Mage ~ (Talk) 05:37, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

How does Rock the Castrum vs Rock the Castrum (deprecated) look? Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 13:06, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Sure, we can preserve old fora. Maybe we should do it by deleting the front pages of the forum, protecting the individual threads, merging the categories with their archival versions, and having a link to the archival categories on Forum:Index. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 13:14, 24 January 2022 (UTC)