Wiki needs updating!

[Canute]

But i bet all the new player will honor your work at the wiki.
And solong you enjoy your work for/at the wiki everything is fine.

[Pangaea]

But i bet all the new player will honor your work at the wiki.
And solong you enjoy your work for/at the wiki everything is fine.

Thank you, and I hope so.

As for the work there, it is dawning on me that it's a TON more work than I at first anticipated. It sort of feels like starting over from scratch when it comes to all these infoboxes. Most of my time so far has been spent trying to figure out what fields we need, going through many, many XML files and trying to make sense of the structure, and converting it for wiki purposes. I'm therefore far from sure how far I can keep going here  Motivation kinda went out the window the other day, because it's a mammoth task.

But that said, after much huffing and puffing (and playing the game a whole day), I've managed to get down a draft of sorts for a weapons infobox. Tons of details that need improving, like what to do with "what material can this thing be made of" and "these are banned materials".

Since both the pictures and the wiki is dark now, I needed some type of filter to pop them out a bit. Maybe this looks like muffalo vomit, but it's a start? *shrug*



PS: Currently there isn't any info about materials needed for crafting it, because I suspect it might be better ot put that in a separate table so we have all "things" in there. But then I need to figure out how to store it and query it. Argh. So much stuff to clear up 

[vzoxz0]

You could group this data in logically structured "tabs" like most other wikis do when there's a lot of information.

[Pangaea]

Took a while, but finally uploaded the Weapon infobox today. It's gone through some revisions. After finally getting a half-decent overview of various properties for weapons, I decided to remove some of those I had, and add a couple of others. It's still a bit big (obviously sniper rifles don't have burst fire), but I'm fine with that.




Nice suggestion about tabs. Although I'm not sure how fitting it would be here? Typically I see that on other wikis for quite distinct material, like if there are some spoilers, different versions of the same weapon/item/enemy, or tabs for different classes of enemies and stuff like that. Here we're more talking about different properties of the same item, which IMO fits better in one infobox. Could try to be minimalist and only include the truly crucial info, but I think people generally like infoboxes because it's easy to get a quick overview, instead of reading about it in the text sections. Those are typically for more verbatim explanations of quests, analysis, tables and the like.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Really love the way your screenshots look! Is there someway to enable this on the wiki site, or are these just your personal files you are working with and this hasn't been uploaded or set to "live" yet?

I'm probably a dummy and missing the setting or prefs button, lol!

[Pangaea]

Thank you, that is great to hear 

Currently it's unfortunately not possible to enable this as there remains a lot of work before everything is done. The above screenshot is actually taken from my local wiki. It is however possible to see a good chunk of the new look if you copy my user-space CSS to your own userspace. It's not perfect as there are some colour inconsistencies here and there and I haven't worked on it much lately. Some of the tables and (old/current) infoboxes don't look good.

But if you want you can do that by copying the content of https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/User:Pangaea/vector.css to your own CSS. Probably easiest to create it by going to your Preferences -> Appearance -> Click on Custom CSS to the right of the skin names. Vector is default, so best to use that one. Then paste all that code from earlier and save the page.

It's not possible to toggle these changes on and off, so if you want to disable it again, you need to blank the user CSS from https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/User:YOURUSERNAMEHERE/vector.css


The process is moving forward, but it involves a *lot* more work than I had anticipated. Brief overview:

• Redesign the whole site to use a dark themed skin
• Make new templates for all the infoboxes, and eventually a crapton of Cargo templates. The pawn and weapon infoboxes is part of this process. It has taken much longer because I need to figure out the data structure and "translate" it to something that would work in a database. And since a lot of the data on the wiki is outdated or at least not complete, I need to first figure out the actual properties that the game uses, which has meant combing through hundreds of XML files, which often have parents, which makes it hard to get an easy overview. Think I've found a half-decent solution now, so I hope it will be easier moving forward.
• Once all that template stuff is done, we need to update (almost) all the pages on the wiki to use the new infoboxes, and update their data with correct values and identifiers. I think some of this can be partly automated with a software called AutoWikiBrowser, but I'd need to write a load of Regular Expression (regex) first. Will have to re-learn it as I haven't worked on it for two years.
• After *that*, we can finally transition the current pages from SMW to use Cargo data instead, which means writing templates that query the newly created database and fill out pages with content. That can be to for example list all weapons in one page, or in the Temperate Forest page, list all animals that live there, with data about them. Or maybe list all items that can be made with metal and sort them in this or that fashion.

So yeah... rather a lot of work 


Then there is "exhilarating" maintenance tasks like categorising all images, deleting de facto duplicates or outdated ones, and lots of stuff like that. I've done some of that recently because it felt like I got more stuff done that way than just banging my head against templates.

Oh yeah, and of course update the actual text content on pages where it is outdated. I've mostly left that alone tbh, but others are thankfully doing great stuff there, both other staff members and regular users.

As the saying goes: People come for the content. People stay for the content.

Better design and infoboxes and the like is nice and all, but it's only one (small) part of the content, and the actual descriptions, analysis, advice etc matters a great deal as well.

If anybody are reading this and see something that is wrong or can be improved on the wiki, you are of course free to head over there and start editing

[Pangaea]

As a little aside, this is how the Community Portal looks on my end now. It looked dreadful before on the dark design due to inline CSS coding making it unreadable. That is fixed now, so it's easier to adapt the look in the future. The default skin version (the white one) should look exactly like it did, but is easier to change in both that and other skins by using CSS files instead of inline tag styling (not a good practice, in general).

[Pangaea]

Little heads up: I've started working on some help pages -- while leaning on MediaWiki and Gamepedia help pages.

Why re-invent the wheel? This is why that license thing was such a big deal.

Hopefully this will be useful for both new and old editors.


Edit:
It's now possible to get a glimpse of what the new infoboxes may look like on the wiki itself, without all that CSS malarky. Not everything looks right on the default skin, but at least they show up as infoboxes now instead of a garbled mess.

Here are two examples from test pages I'm fiddling with
* https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/User:Pangaea/Animal_test
* https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/User:Pangaea/Biome_test

[Pangaea]

I'll probably have to throw in the towel here. Too much to do, too much stuff doesn't work, and I simply don't have the time. I should focus on more important things in life than voluntary work for this that would seemingly never end.

I've written tons here, so people know here to go if anybody want to pick up.

[BlackSmokeDMax]

I'll probably have to throw in the towel here. Too much to do, too much stuff doesn't work, and I simply don't have the time. I should focus on more important things in life than voluntary work for this that would seemingly never end.

I've written tons here, so people know here to go if anybody want to pick up.

Thanks for the work you did! Maybe go play the game some now!!

[Pangaea]

Thanks for the work you did! Maybe go play the game some now!!

Thank you. Glad to hear people appreciate it, even if I hadn't hoped things would end like this. It was simply way too much for one (hobbyist) to pull off. I had a ton of plans and wanted to improve matters. But one can't really do these things half-arsed, everything is connected. And with the issues faced, especially with Cargo, which I didn't expect, it became too frustrating. I couldn't bare to spend so much time to try to hunt down Cargo errors, and CSS override errors with every selector under the sky.

On the bright side, it has been fun to spend more time actually playing the game