WIP wiki cleanup and update

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vultraz
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by vultraz »

iceiceice wrote:Edit: I just noticed this: Category:Candidates_for_deletion
Is it a good idea to unlink things and move them there?
Yeah, it would be good to use that to flag pages.
iceiceice wrote:Should we make a category for all SOC pages, or Old SOC pages?
I have been wondering myself what should be done about old GSoC/GCI pages. They clutter things up, but I'm not sure we can just get rid of them. Perhaps for now a Past_SoC category or something would do.
iceiceice wrote:Edit: I created a category for "WML for complete beginners" and also a category "WML Tips" that seemed appropriate for a few uncategorized articles.
There was already Category:UsefulWMLFragments, but a lot of those are outdated, I think, so maybe I'll just use your category.

The following pages I deleted/unlinked on-sight, since they contained nothing useful:
  • Mnewtons_Screenshots
  • Editor2_MacroWML
  • Lua_AI_Code_Examples
  • Lua_AI_Code_Library (I replaced links to this page with references to MAI test scenarios, as was indicated by the note left on the page)
  • Religion
  • Test
  • NewAddonServer
  • HttT_Rewrite (The idea about branching HttT might be used in the future, so it might be useful to remember that)
  • FormulaAI_FSM
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tbaker
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by tbaker »

I was going through the wiki today and on the Categories page and noticed many duplicate headings with different Capitalizations. I'm not much up on how to fix it or let someone know about it, or even if it is a problem to be concerned about. It just seems redundant and unnecessary. If someone lets me know how to edit them I would clean all of them up with the same rules of capitalization uniformally
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iceiceice
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by iceiceice »

NewMapEditor

This one looks bugged -- I find that I can't modify it's text or mark for deletion without getting red text media wiki errors, or even revert the state without getting "The edit could not be undone due to conflicting intermediate edits." :hmm:
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vultraz
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by vultraz »

I deleted it.
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by iceiceice »

This category: Category:Troubleshooting_and_Bugs
is sort of in a weird place. It's parent is "Development", but the info about reporting bugs should probably be under "Playing Wesnoth", as well as the FAQ. Maybe it should be a root level category and the server admin stuff should go somewhere else, or the category merged with something... :hmm:

Also I think we should rename the category "World of Wesnoth", I think there is an add-on called that now and that was what I assumed was in there :doh:
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8680
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by 8680 »

I’m troubled and rather sad to see how many pages have been deleted.

If they were deleted because a server administrator said that we need to save storage space, then okay, but I’ve not heard that storage space is a concern. If they were deleted because they were spam or otherwise illegal, then, of course, okay. But if they were deleted because they were old, and were decided to be useless, then that is troubling to me.

Why is deleting obsolete pages better than marking them with the [wiki=Template:Obsolete]{{Obsolete}}[/wiki] template that you had me write, as you’ve done for some fortunate pages? How does permanently destroying the information they contain, even if you think it useless, even if you think no-one cares, benefit anyone? [1] How can you know that no-one cares about them, and how can you know that no-one will ever care about them again? How can you know that no-one would ever have wanted to access that information, out of historical interest, or for whatever reason? And, what trouble is it [1] to not delete them?

People spent their time and effort to write our wiki pages, they chose to do so when they could have done so many other things, and I see no reason [1] to discard their work just because it’s old or no-one cares about it — to not just unlink it and mark it {{Obsolete}}, but to destroy it forever — when we could as easily preserve it [1].

Were I to go around deleting topics from these forums not because they were spam or illegal or otherwise in severe violation of policy but because I considered them obsolete and useless (and someone noticed), I expect I would soon face disciplinary action for abusing my moderator powers. (Okay, yes, I’d also come under censure for going around “updating” old topics, whereas updating old wiki pages is a commendable endeavor — but then, wiki pages are meant to be updated by anyone with the capacity and willingness to do so.)

(As may be evident, I found myself becoming overly emotional while writing some of that; in light of which, perhaps I oughtn’t post — if anyone here finds my conduct objectionable, please do say so.)

[1]: (unless we need to save storage space)
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iceiceice
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by iceiceice »

8680:

I marked many pages, probably between 50-100 as candidates for deletions. My main reason was, the wiki is very hard to search for useful information because it has a lot of clutter. Unlinked is not good enough. If it shows up when we search the wiki, or use google.com with site:wiki.wesnoth.org, and it is useless for current purposes, then it should probably be deleted. The majority of things I marked to delete were Uncategorized (had 160+ items before, < 50 when I was done, although many were categorized and not marked for deletion), after that the next most common was probably AI.

If something looked abandoned for years, and like there was no person (besides the original author) who would benefit from reading it in some circumstance, then I marked it for deletion. There are actually many pages I marked for deletion that have not been deleted, but I think these are still fairly representative of what I marked. If you poke around in Category:Candidates_for_deletion you'll find:

- Pages with maybe 1 or 2 sentences, then the author decided to create a new page with a different title and abandon the first (or blank it and abandon it.)
- Abandoned stubs
- Abandoned brainstorming sessions / project descriptions
- Abandoned reference tables with totally inaccurate info and inadequate description.

When I write abandoned, it usually means "not edited since 2008 - 2010".

Feel free to look at the current candidates for deletion and unmark any page you think is worth saving, or criticize my / someone else's decision to mark it thusly. I think that might be more helpful than complaining about the *number* of deleted things because tbh there was really an incredible amount of junk and probably there still is. I think the stuff appearing in Candidates for Deletion right now is representative of all the stuff I remember marking.

I don't feel at all conflicted to state that pages like these have no value to the wiki users and should be deleted:
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/CampaignEpicOfVaniyera <-- This is a record that 5 years ago, someone checked out a campaign from Wescamp to translate it to Russian. Progress remains at 0% and it has changed once since created.
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SavegameCode <-- Yobi Bear created this 5 years ago. It might have been relevant to a refactor or someones GSoC or something years and years ago, but at this point it is almost entirely inaccurate, although you would have no idea unless you had already looked at this part of the source code. So it is pretty much actively confusing / misleading. What value would this have for historical purposes? It seems it would make much more sense to just checkout the repo from 5 years ago if you wanted to see how things worked.
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Etiquette <-- This was a lore writing project which tries to create rules / conventions for how wesnoth characters should speak politely to eachother in campaigns. It appears it was abandoned half-finished in 2010. What are we saving it for? In case the OP comes back? In case someone is inspired to finish it or do something with it? These both seem pretty far-fetched.

I guess it is a question if we want to somehow archive the wiki offline for historical reference purposes. The wiki pages are really the only WML reference anyways. But it seems a bit silly and anyways none of the WML reference was deleted afaik.

Bottom line: IMO the wiki should not be a scrapbook, it has a more important purpose.
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vultraz
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by vultraz »

The wiki is not the forums. The latter is a place where people expect to find old threads. On the wiki, things are expected to be kept up-to-date and relevant.

Rest assured that no pages have been deleted that contain any information worth saving, and anything worth saving has been consolidated. Why, for example, should we have kept documentation around of an AI system that doesn't even exist in Wesnoth anymore? That's not something that can be "updated". The goal here is to remove these old, outdated pages and and organize the wiki in a more concise and easy to navigate fashion. Also, no personal UMC content pages have been deleted - they reside under Obsolete or Candidates for Deletion for now.

There are no disk space issues, but if you look at the deletion log, the sheer number of things that *can* be deleted is troubling. Hundreds of pages that serve no useful purpose just sitting there, a great majority of them with outdated information not worth updating. Keeping them around doesn't make sense.
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8680
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by 8680 »

iceiceice wrote:My main reason was, the wiki is very hard to search for useful information because it has a lot of clutter. Unlinked is not good enough.
Okay, so there’s a reason that unlinking and {{Obsolete}}ing isn’t good enough. I’d forgotten about the search functionality; thanks. But this can be overcome: We have an Old: namespace, sitting completely empty. Move obsolete pages there, and they won’t come up in the search results unless one specifically asks for them.

I see no sufficient reason to keep pages that were blanked and had all their content moved elsewhere. (Although, I tried to type “I guess I’m fine with deleting pages that were blanked and […]”, but I couldn’t bring myself to, so I guess I’m not fine with it — but I’ll try to not let this new “emotion” stuff get in the way of reason.) I don’t know about stubs like CampaignEpicOfVaniyera and DelfadorsMemoirsStory (though I’d prefer to keep it all), but I’m certainly against deleting non-stubs, like all the other pages in Category:Candidates_for_deletion, which total a good 42 printed pages (with the mean being 3.8̅1̅ per wiki page) of content according to my browser’s Print dialog (not including Category:Obsolete, which is another 70 pages printed (mean ~5.4)).

But, I don’t intend to take this to the point of removing things from CfD — I don’t feel that it’s my place to do so, and it might be near-tantamount to edit-warring.
iceiceice wrote:http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SavegameCode <-- Yobi Bear created this 5 years ago. It might have been relevant to a refactor or someones GSoC or something years and years ago, but at this point it is almost entirely inaccurate, although you would have no idea unless you had already looked at this part of the source code. So it is pretty much actively confusing / misleading. What value would this have for historical purposes? It seems it would make much more sense to just checkout the repo from 5 years ago if you wanted to see how things worked.
Now that it’s deleted, I can’t know what was deleted, or whether I’d have agreed that it was “Junk” — a prime problem with things being deleted. From the sound of it, I’d have (had I the power) moved it into Old: and marked it {{Obsolete}}.
iceiceice wrote:http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Etiquette <-- This was a lore writing project which tries to create rules / conventions for how wesnoth characters should speak politely to eachother in campaigns. It appears it was abandoned half-finished in 2010. What are we saving it for? In case the OP comes back? In case someone is inspired to finish it or do something with it? These both seem pretty far-fetched.
It seems to me to be mostly finished, and usable as-is. I wouldn’t even mark it {{Obsolete}}, let alone delete it.
vultraz wrote:Rest assured that no pages have been deleted that contain any information worth saving, […]
No, I can’t “rest assured”, given that we evidently differ on what’s “worth saving”.
vultraz wrote:Keeping them around doesn't make sense.
And to me, discarding them doesn’t “make sense”, when we could as well preserve them.
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by iceiceice »

8680: If there's anything marked for deletion that you think is worth saving, just unmark it for deletion. I'm certainly not going to insist about anything or start an edit war on the wiki.

Most of this stuff has been sitting in Candidates for Deletion for the greater part of a month. If nothing else it is just a test to see if anyone notices or cares that we are considering to delete it. We certainly haven't been secretly tossing wiki pages in the middle of the night, we've been pretty vocal about the wiki cleanup operation.

I suppose you could potentially find other pages that were deleted here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wiki.wesnoth.org/*

I have definitely aggressively marked things for deletion if I didn't think that any user or currently active developer would benefit from looking at the page. I guess that Vultraz has declined to delete the things that look closer to finished even if they look abandoned, like Etiquette and Mystic-Group. But yeah, if no one would speak up to say "don't delete" then I would think we should delete.

I seriously question the value of archiving pages like, documentation for how to make Python AIs when Python AI was removed from wesnoth in 1.6. This was something that had many different pages and tutorials about it and I believe we were right to delete all of them. They were obviously abandoned and the person responsible for removing Python should have done something about this at the time.

Do you really want to archive random pages like this? http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Canvas_Next
I marked for deletion because its a two years old orphan with no udpates, and it doesn't have a clear purpose. The article describes itself as "This is a stream of consciousness of what doesn’t work with Wesnoth today, where technology and gaming has been going, and where Wesnoth should be in the future." In fact it's not a stream of consciousness at all, it is a highly structured position piece about how we should remake Wesnoth into a web-based game (edit: web technology-based game?), although it doesn't come out and say that. Basically a pipe dream / forgotten project, part position piece, part API description.

When you stumble upon the piece, you might easily think it could be about an active, real part of the wesnoth gui, like the other GUI element pages with similar names, but with human description as well. So there are definitely real people who have to sift through it currently.

Who actually benefits from reading this? First of all you have to read most of it to understand what it actually is, which demonstrates that it isn't very well written. Second of all, it isn't clear that it isn't reference for something that actually exists. Actually I'm still not sure if that's the case, and it doesn't provide any links. Maybe its basically just a private draft? If they care about it then they have a private backup. Since it's a position piece basically, it actually seems like a good candidate to be posted in the ideas forum. Since the author didn't do that apparently, it says something about how they view the current state of the piece.

There's a few options for what to do with it:
1.) Categorize it similar to "wesnoth philosophy" pieces which speculate about the "Future of Wesnoth"
2.) Put it in "Future" even though it is most likely an ancient pipedream. (We should potentially delete some of the things in Future as well tbh.)
3.) Invent a category for it.
4.) PM the author
5.) Mark it for deletion and see if anyone complains

You rapidly see how hard it can be to decide what to do with the random crap that ends up on the wiki. It is much, much easier to just mark things for deletion and see if anyone complains. If someone isn't willing to do that then we won't be able to successfully cleanup the wiki afaict. I guess we could potentially archive things off-line instead of deleting? I think I would favor that over the Old: name space. At least then way we could recover from a mistake. But I simply don't think we've made any mistakes. No one has yet complained that they needed any info in particular that was removed.
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by AI »

I've just removed a page from the candidates for deletion. I had it on my watchlist, but apparently that feature is broken right now.

Is the obsolete category a subcategory of candidates for deletion? Because there are some pages that that are useful for historical purposes.
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by iceiceice »

Maybe there should be a category "Useful for Historical Purposes", and you can put such things there. I still feel like its better if those things don't show up in wiki search or web search though.
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by zookeeper »

8680 wrote:
iceiceice wrote:http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Etiquette <-- This was a lore writing project which tries to create rules / conventions for how wesnoth characters should speak politely to eachother in campaigns. It appears it was abandoned half-finished in 2010. What are we saving it for? In case the OP comes back? In case someone is inspired to finish it or do something with it? These both seem pretty far-fetched.
It seems to me to be mostly finished, and usable as-is. I wouldn’t even mark it {{Obsolete}}, let alone delete it.
Seconded. I don't mind most deletions that I've seen I suppose, but I find it bizarre that deleting that page would even be seriously considered.
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by vultraz »

FYI, I was planning to keep that page around. I immediately deleted the obvious pages marked for deletion; the remaining ones I left for consideration. The Etiquette page (though I think it should be ranamed), should likely be kept.
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Re: WIP wiki cleanup and update

Post by iceiceice »

zookeeper wrote:I don't mind most deletions that I've seen I suppose, but I find it bizarre that deleting that page would even be seriously considered.
Idk, apparently it shouldn't actually be deleted. Let me explain why I flagged it as a possible delete.

The page is, according to author, a WIP from 4 years ago that was never touched since then. It's not clear if this describes conventions of dialogue for any actual campaigns in mainline wesnoth, or in UMC. Most likely not, since its been "under wraps" on the wiki since then. So, 4 years abandoned WIP, no obvious connection to any actual content in the BfW project? Sounds like a reasonable candidate for deletion.

If you don't agree with this thought process then maybe we should have a discussion about what the purpose of the wiki is, I might not be on the same page as you or others.

Edit: I searched again and was able to find a forum post referring to that page: http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php ... te#p460765
It wasn't in the first few pages of search results though. Since the author did actually link from forums though it was probably a mistake to mark it for deletion. It would have been easier to figure out what to do with it if the note at the top of the page had been updated.
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