EliteWiki:Village pump

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Although most of the discussions around the EliteWiki take place on the Oolite Bulletin Board these days, below is a fine place to put issues into concise discussion and concrete proposals.

New topics should be placed on top.

If you drop in the discussions here, please sign your message (like this: ~~~~).

Discussions

Deletions

Just to preserve the history of this for future reference:

OXP oversight, ships oversight

I propose a structured system for naming all OXP/OXZ pages in a uniform manner, now that there are tools in the hand for implementing it.

As is, articles about an OXP may be titled by simply by its name, or name.OXP or name[space]OXP, and I think it would be nice to give this both the clarity of letting the reader instantly know what the article is about, being able to arrive directly from the search window, and remove confusion when an article is not about an OXP. For category uses, this would also be an improvement.

I suggest that for an article that covers both a ship and the OXP it is delivered by, why not have both articles. Although some text will be repeated, this also allows for a division of in-world text and technical text. And for category uses, this would also be an improvement.

So, this is a task I wouldn't mind taking on, but I would of course like to hear opinions from others. OLDMURGH talk 19:23, 26 January 2022 (UTC)


Initial thoughts. I found the wiki page entitled "Library" confusing - it is an oxp and I would have preferred Library.oxp or Library OXP Especially with the various other uses of Library in the game (eg on the first "GUI" before one chooses one's Jameson: View Ship Library).

Other than that, I have no strong views. Your suggestion makes sense but I lack the experience to judge if it has hidden pitfalls. You have experience which I don't. And now that we have deletion rights, if your suggestion turns out mistaken, it will be easy to rectify.

As regards an article that covers both a ship and the OXP it is delivered by, why not have both articles. Although some text will be repeated, this also allows for a division of in-world text and technical text.... the one related issue which will need consideration is the focus on the vanilla game on the one hand versus the focus on individual OXPs on the other. I wonder if it would be useful to have pages with suggestions for gaming in Strangers World, for example - rather than just descriptions of the individual oxp's. I have tried to work on this with, for example, the Economics & Oolite Trading pages. But I wonder if advice on using Market Observer with Market Inquirer might also have some value.

Cholmondeley 19:45, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
On to the first point, yes to me Name[space]OXP ought to be the consistent form for ease in arriving directly from a search (and the one most often chosen?). All other variations can then be created to redirect there, though conceivably some names are close enough need disambiguation.
Your example of Economics & Oolite Trading is interesting, Economics is certainly a complex issue that is useful to parse with all the differing ways OXPs can manipulate, to what extent they are exclusive or can work together. This is the sort of thing I would hope to find when I look up. And also pages that cover how a body of OXPs designed to work together are described in detail how they fit together.
Oolite Trading leads me to an argument that I have that it's fine for an OXP title to start every word capitalised, but when an article of this sort has impact title, it sends mixed messages. Not having it titled Oolite trading misses out of instantly communicating that this is a wider explanatory coverage of the subject, –as well as ease of typing the URL directly with predictable success. "Trading in Oolite" is to me even more understandable as this type of article article. But this may be just me. In Outworld Wikipedia there are MOSrules for all these things, but here we should maybe be more free.
And yes, Library is one of those bugbears. The name ought to inform us that it is an external tool, and not one of the many other possible interpretations. It's pesky that its roots have spread so deep, but I think it's a worthwhile tidy. OLDMURGH talk 00:07, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Mr. Cholmondeley wrote: "As regards an article that covers both a ship and the OXP it is delivered by, why not have both articles. Although some text will be repeated, this also allows for a division of in-world text and technical text...."

Having thought it a bit more through, I must modify: trying to accomplish this in a strict librarian way seems excessive and a potentially little style intrusive. In so many cases of one/few-ship OXPs, individual pages would be impractical, but the above result of proper category representation can be achieved with redirects that have the cat tags. OLDMURGH talk 12:32, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Updating OXZ pages on the wiki

Conversation between Hiran & Cholmondely


There ought to be a lot more stuff on the wiki, as you say. I've been concentrating my efforts on lore, hoping to provide background for people writing OXPs or stories... that sort of thing. But, as you say, there should be a page for each item (if I'm understanding you correctly). Cholmondely

Sounds like consensus. That is a first step. :-) Hiran

Personally, I find the wiki is not so good for non-programmers who wish to learn how to start tweaking/writing OXPs. Otherwise it seems pretty good - apart from the missing OXZs from the Expansions Manager.

Not sure what issues you see. I do programming in real life so Wikis, Forums and also implementing code logic is ok for me. Although I am not (yet) planning to dive into oolite. So far it looks pretty ok for me.

And I am impressed about what people actually created - I guess all in leisure time. Or did anyone get paid for this?

My next project - since I've done the bulk of the work on the wiki recently - is to start including the missing OXZs.

That is exactly what I was thinking about. And I thought of not writing/maintaining the complete list manually or by one person. We should talk about this a bit more. :-)

Let's collaborate.

A question from my side: Where does the extension manager in the game get the official plugin list from? Is there something like a repository in the background?

Hiran


•Nobody gets paid for anything - the history of Braben clobbering Christian Pinder over Elite TNK is the big reason why. •Collaboration sounds great! Montana05 has been putting up new pages for his some of his most recent releases on the Ships.oxp front. •I presume that the list is created by the Expansions Manager from what is on the Oolite.org website. But the dark arts of grammarie are a mystery to me - Maik would know, as would others.

•There are 4 sources for information on any OXZ -

1) the material obtained through the Expansions Manager (including that obtained by pressing the i button) - one presumes that it too lives somewhere inside Oolite.org
2) the material tucked inside in the ReadMe inside the OXZ - if the author wrote one!
3) the material in discussions in BB threads
4) the material on the wiki page

Sometimes there is virtually nothing anywhere! See the new BioSphere page for something created from nothing! Cholmondeley Cholmondeley 22:51, 4 April 2021 (BST)

It seems to me the information in the expansion manager is quite the same as in the OXP/OXZ's manifests. For an overview this is definitely sufficient. The question is whether we have more information, and that today can come from the Wiki or the expansion itself. As an expansion developer I'd like to keep the footprint work low so probably packaging the documentation with the expansion is more confortable and versionable.

On top of that I'd like to scan the expansions for ships or equipment and make sure each of them has a representation in the encyclopaedia.

Hiran

Oolite Category

What is it for? And what should it be for?

One presumes that it was vital in the early days when there was a need to demarcate between Oolite and Classic Elite/FE2/FFE. Nowadays that seems irrelevant - except for when types in Tionisla and gets the Frontier page! And the Oolite category does not seem to help with that.

So what should it be for nowadays? Cholmondeley 09:13, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Capitals

I noticed that capital letters are used on Elite Wiki in article titles and headers indiscriminately, like the Americans do, not just for proper nouns. I even made a note about this in the MoS. By the way, in the most contradictory way, on Wikipedia this is not allowed and proper capitalisation rules must be followed in all titles and headers. Do we want to keep things as they are, or do we want to implement the rules from Wikipedia here as well and try to change to correct usage of capital letters? Debresser 14:43, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

As far as I am concerned, no need to change Maik 15:57, 15 May 2016 (BST)
To my mind, it would be better to make this change. Uniform use of lower case for all words following the first in section headers makes for a more predictable format that would for instance allow wikilinking to work with less work, much more smoothly. There are some great reasons this is foundation stone MoS. OLDMURGH talk

Community portal

The navigation pane on the left has a link to EliteWiki:Community portal, which was an empty page till I recently directed it here, to the Village pump. We also have a page EliteWiki:Community Portal (note the capitalisation), which actually looks more like a portal. So perhaps it would be a good idea to have the link in the navigation pane redirect there. On the other side, the Village pump is a very important page, IMHO, where all kinds of proposals can be discussed, and it is a good idea to have it in the navigation pane.

I think we can resolve this by moving "EliteWiki:Community Portal" to "EliteWiki:Community portal" (which only an admin can do), and have it link "Community portal" in the navigation pane point there, and then add a link to the Village pump to the navigation pane. We could also replace the link to "Current events", which IMHO is not needed, by a link to the "Village pump". We could also keep things as is, i.e. have the link to "Community portal" point to the Village pump, and no link to the EliteWiki:Community portal in the navigation pane. Your opinions please. Debresser 00:11, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Main page

See Proposed change to the main page, which I warmly recommend to implement. Note, btw, that I did not creat that article, and as a matter of fact, I think it should be deleted, since proposals like this should be made on the talkpage or on a userpage, and not in main article namespace. Debresser 00:03, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

I like it Maik 15:59, 15 May 2016 (BST)

Then perhaps you can implement it. The Main Page is about the only protected page on the EliteWiki, and I can't make the change. Debresser 20:21, 15 May 2016 (BST)

Please help merge article

Please help merge Elite 4 known facts into Elite: Dangerous now that the latter is known to be the official name of the new game. Preferably somebody who knows the game and knows what is fact and isn't. Debresser 06:28, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

WikiMedia

There are no dropdown suggestions for searches. See Manual:Enabling autocomplete in search box on how to enable this.

There are no references on Wikipedia. I mean, the <ref> tags don't work. Apparently the Cite Extension has not been installed. I am not sure we need/want to use real references, and that is a question in its own right.

I tried sorting articles in categories per subpage, see Template:Quote The Traders Almanach, however, it doesn't work on EliteWiki, even though on Wikipedia it works. Do we have subpages enabled on all namespaces? Debresser 00:50, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Userfy

I think the following pages should be userfied, i.e. moved to user subpages. I have posted on their discussion pages, but I wanted to centralise discussion.

Debresser 20:07, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Galaxy Guide

Autogenerated Galaxy Guide should be moved to EliteWiki namespace, since it is a project page, as stated clearly in the very first sentence of that article. Debresser 21:54, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

User profiles

What about articles like Break, which was in Category:Real People; User:RyanHoots/Commander Ryan Hoots, User:Tricky/Commander Tricky, which are in Category:User; and all the articles in Category:Profile. Are these all user profiles? If so, let's put them all in Category:Profiles. Debresser 07:38, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Update: it seems only one of the articles in Category:Profile was a user profile, the other 8 were fictional characters. Debresser 07:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Reminder

Can some admin please delete all the pages that need to be deleted? See the template above. Debresser 05:42, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Update: I had a look at who are admins, and I noticed that none of the 5 admins has edited EliteWiki for the last year, and one of them made a total of 11 edits over 5 years ago. I see I'm going to have to be patient. :) Debresser 12:22, 21 January 2016 (UTC)
Yep. And I doubt that anybody reads this. Your best bet is to contact Maik through the Oolite-BB. Svengali 16:41, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
By the way, I think it would be a good idea to de-sysop at least that one editor who never really edited. Probably was a mistake he was made admin. Debresser 09:24, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
I contacted Maik. He said he'll look at all of my proposals as soon as he has the opportunity. Debresser 14:50, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia

I propose to move all the articles in the Wikipedia namespace to EliteWiki namespace and to delete the Wikipedia namespace. This is not Wikipedia, after all, but the EliteWiki, and that is why our default namespace should be EliteWiki. Debresser 05:41, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good. Svengali 16:37, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
Done. Debresser 17:30, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Rough Guide

We have two parallel categories: Category:Rough Guide on the Ooniverse (using "on") and Category:Rough Guide to the Ooniverse (using "to"). The main article is at Rough Guide to the Ooniverse, which is the actual title with "to". Can we merge the "on" category into the "to" category? Debresser 23:18, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

By the way, this was also the intention of the first poster on Category talk:Rough Guide on the Ooniverse, which was not understood by the second editor there. Debresser 06:04, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
Done. Debresser 14:51, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Account creation

The main page says: Important note - Due to the increasing number of spam accounts, new account creation has been disabled. If you want an account, please send a PM via the Oolite Bulletin Board to 'maik'.

I would replace that by: Important note - Due to the increasing number of spam accounts, new account creation has been disabled. If you want an account, please follow the instructions at Wikipedia:How to created an account. Or: ...please follow the instructions here.

At that page I would add a bit about that they'll have to create and account at the Oolite Bulletin Board, if they don't have one. About how to find maik. That they'll have to post something somewhere before they'll be able to write maik a private message. Things like that, which I found a bit confusing when I went through the steps. Debresser 21:54, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Note: this post is outdated in view of my Proposed change to the main page, see #Main page. Debresser 14:46, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Go button

I think that Wikipedia:Go button is a bit redundant. For beginners it is too detailed and complicated, and more experienced users will not need it. I recommend to delete it.

Regarding the search function. I noticed that the "search" field does not show any suggestions. Can functionality like that be added? That would also make instructions regarding capitalization superfluous. Debresser 21:47, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Fiction

The Fiction category lacks a definition, and seems to include both works of fiction, authors, fictional characters and entities, and until recently terms. I think this category should be diffused into the appropriate story categories (like Elite stories, Frontier stories and Oolite stories), and the to be created Category:Authors, Category:Fictional people and Category:Fictional organisations (or simply Category:People and Category:Organisations) categories. Would that make sense? Debresser 21:40, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I started implementing this. By the way, Category:Factual is even more vague in definition and scope. I think we should strive to move all articles in it to other, more appropriate categories (partly to be created still). Debresser 18:48, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
I finished cleaning out the Fiction category. One of the things I did was create Category:The Traders Almanach. There are literally hundreds of articles that have a section about The Traders Almanach, and need this category added. See this edit for an example how to do best this. Please help. Debresser 22:41, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

Top or bottom

On Wikipedia it is customary to add new discussions to the bottom. Here I saw the opposite: the newer discussions are above the older ones. There is even a specific instruction to that extent, see above. Is that the way we want to keep it, or do we want to conform with the Wikipedia custom in this regards? Debresser 19:38, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I think scrolling through >2 years old topics is not really helpful and I would stick with 'new on top'. Svengali 18:48, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
I get your point. At the same time, all of Wikipedia does it, and on pages that are significantly longer than here. Please also check your talkpage, where I crated a section by pressing the "+" button, and you'll see that the WikiMedia default is to create new section at the bottom of a page. Debresser 17:35, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
°grins° Sure, it's not the default and it was just my personal setting when I created this page (and I was the only user for more than a year). Feel free to remove the instruction. But either way - it won't give pleasing results. Svengali 17:35, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Ooniverse

I thought it might be prudent to create a category for the Ooniverse-related stuff, and make Fiction a subcategory of this. For example, I have this idea of moving the Rough Guide to the Ooniverse stuff and even creating some more Oocanon for us. Thoughts? Zireael 13:40, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I see that the Guide is listed under Fiction, so maybe I'll start moving the Oocanon stuff there... Zireael 16:47, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Dynamic Ship List

Some pages are inserting multiple entries in Dynamic_Ship_List_(Oolite) which renders its sorting functionality useless. Either remove the SMW template from these pages or split in single pages which can be transcluded? Svengali 09:56, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

EliteWiki namespace

Some OXP related pages are using the EliteWiki namespace (e.g. EliteWiki:The SunBat Line). Move? Svengali 09:56, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

The same applies for the other WIKI related namespaces (e.g. Wikipedia), etc. I also think that the redirects for Oolite, FFE, etc. related pages in that namespace should be removed. Opinions? Svengali 18:00, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
Should definitely be moved. Done, see The SunBat Line. I found no other. Debresser 22:44, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

OXPs in Oolite category

What is the proposed approach for OXPs - placing them in the Category:Oolite or not? >90% of the OXPs do not push into it. Svengali 21:19, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

The same applies for Fiction. Fiction has a own main category and a subcategory in Oolite, so removing the category Oolite from these pages is probably the way here. Mixing different approaches for navigation trees is not really that helpful. Svengali 20:18, 5 May 2013 (BST)

Template mess

We currently have quite a few different templates to place pages in categories. Some are using the the OXP-in-category template, others are simply using the passed parameter. Time to stick with one approach, I'd think. Svengali 21:19, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

I've also seen that some templates (e.g. HUD-OXP) have been cleared. What should this be? Svengali 14:16, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Wanted pages

Special:WantedPages contains a lot of requested articles. Some are lurking there for several years. Specially Classic, FFE and FE2 stuff hasn't been touched for ages. Should we go and simply turn the links in plain text? Svengali 21:19, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

I've filled out some wanted articles recently but I don't know enough about Classic/FE2/FFE to do anything. I guess we need to find someone who knows his Elite history? Zireael 13:40, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
I think that we should keep the Classic/FE2/FFE pages as they are (apart from additions/updates). This site is paid for by Winston who originally set it up as the Elite Wiki. The backside of this site (wiki.alioth.net) is alioth.net - which is devoted to FE2/FFE - just take a good, hard look at it. Winston wrote most/all of it, just as he wrote the original articles here. See Special:Contributions/Winston. Cholmondeley 18:59, 13 June 2021 (BST)

Ship pictures: taking decent ones

BTW: how do you guys actually produce these pictures?--Rxke 10:01, 22 February 2006 (UTC) - comment on Oolite Ships page

not difficult once you're going (ie a hassle to do it for just one ship, but faster when doing several)
-take the pic (best in demoships sequence or shipyard, or wings, not so nice in oolitespace since the lighting is often lacking and you get plumes and such).
-open and crop in photoshop, remove surrounding "paint" with a magic wand (ie make all non-ship transparent). I like to go over the edges with a blurring tool to avoid the harsh pixels. contrast, lightness and hue tweak (esp for pics taken in wings)
-resize and fit into a 100x100px frame, save the png..
--Murgh 10:59, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Redirects

I want to add redirects for Switeck's Quantum Drive OXP & Variable Jump Drive OXP, so that the redirects can bear the tags linking them to the Equipment category. Should that now be Quantum drive & Variable jump drive? Cholmondeley 09:06, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

The titles looks to me like good choices but where will the redirects lead. Will they not have their own pages? Oh, because you would rather the OXP suffix not appear in the category? OLDMURGH talk 17:01, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Not quite. Switeck said that he did not see the point of them having their own pages. So they are now detailed on his just created user:page, but to have oxp-category tags on that particular page seems misleading to me. Hence creating redirects which can become oxp pages in their own right in the fullness of time.

Cholmondeley 17:26, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
Ah, then I understand. So then why not create Quantum Drive OXP and Variable Jump Drive OXP, place the cat tags on them but make them redirects to his userpage.. But that's what you intended, but then you paused, why..? OLDMURGH talk 19:02, 2 January 2022 (UTC)
To my mind, it would be better to make this change. Uniform use of lower case for all words following the first in section headers makes for a more predictable format that would for instance allow wikilinking to work with less work, much more smoothly. There are some great reasons this is foundation stone MoS. OLDMURGH talk
Yes I agree entirely with the gentleman, the exception being capitalisation of titles (in English, many other languages not) and proper nouns. It seems a big ask to go about altering every OXP title where this convention most likely is overwhelmingly uniform. Especially as EliteWiki's own MoS managed to get stuck with the maxim that there should be indiscriminate use of capitals. But yes, I'm for it. OLDMURGH talk 21:54, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Patrolling Edits

Saw this here - for yesterday and earlier... What is this about, and should we be worrying about it?

Cholmondeley 22:07, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
I didn't see you down there.
The regular recent changes link doesn't show me anything out of the ordinary, but if you are referring to seeing the new feature of seeing a "patrol edit" tag or the red exclamation marks next to an edit by not one of us two, this is not something to worry about on an intimate wiki of our size.
–On big wikipedia where a thousand edits pr ten minutes scroll by, by legions of all types of users and anonymous editors behind IPnumbers, it helps the team of admins to see what has been looked at and what remains unchecked in the constant, exhausting battle against spamming, tomfoolery, shithousery and all other shapes of wikivandalism. A trusted minority of WPusers have "autopatrolled rights", so they alleviate a little from this workload.
Obviously all the good and estimable souls who contribute here could be autopatrollers, but I haven't spotted the relevant grant user tight feature and guess the settings/software hasn't been set to include it. Anyway, it's a "massive wiki" issue, so the thing is to ignore it. OLDMURGH talk 00:36, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
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