WCPedia: Categories and other things

Dundradal

Dundradal

Frog Blast the Vent Core!
I think we should formalize a list of categories. I was going through and found conflicting categories for battles/military operations/military conflicts...with entries spread out between.

I'm eliminating the military operations category and tossing it into Battles. Battles will cover major engagements, operations and campaigns. Military Conflicts will stay because we do have multiple conflicts in the WC universe that should be organized as such.

I haven't looked too much at other categories but I'm sure there might be some or incidents of this. Here's the list. I think before we go adding tons more we think about it and post it here before hand so we can all be on the same page. I'm still figuring out this wiki stuff myself, like how the hell do you change a page's name? The easiest things...

Current Categories

A
Acronyms
Awards

B
Battles
Books

C
Characters

D
Drinks

F
Factions
Flight Designations

H
Holovids

I
Images

L
Languages
Locations

M
Maneuvers
Military Conflicts

O
Oaths
Organizations

P
Periodicals
Places

R
Races

S
Ships
Squadrons
Stellar Cartography
Strike Forces

T
Technology
Templates
Timeline

W
WCPedia Administration
 
That sounds pretty good, except I'd suggest that Strike Forces and Squadrons aught to be consolidated as subcategories under Combat Units or some similar category. I was doing some work on ships a while back but gave up when people were moving things around and getting rid of my edits.

If you don't mind a minor derail, do you think that ship types and individual ships should be listed under the same category or should they be subcategories?

We really need a consensus on the layout of things before a lot of work can be done or we'll wind up overriding and invalidating each others' work.
 
I didn't even notice those two! They should be just under Squadrons. I might have created Strike Forces by accident the other day, although I'm not sure I'll have to check.

Ship types and individual ships should be listed separately, although linked, you know what I mean? Link the ship type to all the individual ships and vice versa.

Perhaps we should see how many people are really motivated to take on this project and then hold some kind of WCPedia summit on IRC? That way we can all get on the same page. I know we have a few lurker editors who have done tons of great work already, so come out of the shadows already. Let's get cranking.
 
Yeah I'm finding hidden or not correctly linked categories a lot now. I discovered "Weapons" earlier today and am trying to figure out how to organize all the hidden or lost categories back to the main list.
 
I've gone ahead and cleaned up Ship Classes and set the standard for naming.... Whatever-Class Transport etc If you look you can see how it plays out. I've gone ahead and renamed all entries in this fashion, however we now have a ton of empty pages because I have no idea how to delete them. Is this an admin thing or something else?
 
Dundradal said:
I've gone ahead and cleaned up Ship Classes and set the standard for naming.... Whatever-Class Transport etc If you look you can see how it plays out. I've gone ahead and renamed all entries in this fashion, however we now have a ton of empty pages because I have no idea how to delete them. Is this an admin thing or something else?
Click to expand...

I'd replace whatever was in an empty page with a redirect to an appropriate page. I'll see what I can do.

edit: I added a few disambiguation pages, created some redirect pages and redirected those outdated pages to the appropriate articles.

In the future, instead of creating a new article, you can rename an article by selecting the move option at the top of the screen. That should reduce clutter and make it easier to make the pages match each others' formatting.
 
Oh, I have another issue I'd like to bring up. Currently, the dates and years are set up so that each individual date has its own page. It'd be a lot simpler to move all of those 2654.102/April 2654 type pages and move their contents onto a single page for each year. Important, cited dates would have a brief synopsis of the events of that date and a link to an article on what happened.

I really don't see the need for an article like 2654.111 where the only thing that happened on that date was Blair and Spirit escorting a Drayman to a jump point when it could be in a larger article that collects all of the timeline information for 2654. It'd make citing dates a lot easier and provide greater context for the event.
 
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Agreed. I've been linking years in articles but not specific dates unless they are important.
 
I wish we could get more WCPedia guys in here, I mean, it's awfully easy to come to a consensus between two people, but a lot more people need to be involved.
 
Vinman said:
Oh, I have another issue I'd like to bring up. Currently, the dates and years are set up so that each individual date has its own page. It'd be a lot simpler to move all of those 2654.102/April 2654 type pages and move their contents onto a single page for each year. Important, cited dates would have a brief synopsis of the events of that date and a link to an article on what happened.

I really don't see the need for an article like 2654.111 where the only thing that happened on that date was Blair and Spirit escorting a Drayman to a jump point when it could be in a larger article that collects all of the timeline information for 2654. It'd make citing dates a lot easier and provide greater context for the event.
Click to expand...

Dundradal said:
Agreed. I've been linking years in articles but not specific dates unless they are important.
Click to expand...


Can't say I entirely agree. It makes sense for most things but not necessarily the goals originally set out for the WCPedia. Is this easier for you entering the info, or easier for someone looking up stuff about Wing Commander? Things like this and More categories aren't necessarily bad as long as they're connected properly. Multiple entries for the same thing don't entirely make sense but redirects and multiple category listings for alternate names for the same thing do, because not everyone looks for info in the same manner as everyone else.

Some of the placeholder entries (which shouldn't have their own pages yet) for dates come from things like the novels. The WC movie novel goes farther and breaks things down to the hour at times.

While it may not be ultimately that important on which day a Drayman was escorted , it's certainly usefull in crossreferencing various ship movements and personel issues. This is just the kind of thing that some fan mod or project might want to find out and I think the main goal should be making finding info easier.

While individual days might not have a lot, having every single item on one page for 2654 for example would make it unnessesarily legnthy to the point of making finding what you want tedious.
 
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AD said:
Can't say I entirely agree. It makes sense for most things but not necessarily the goals originally set out for the WCPedia. Is this easier for you entering the info, or easier for someone looking up stuff about Wing Commander? Things like this and More categories aren't necessarily bad as long as they're connected properly. Multiple entries for the same thing don't entirely make sense but redirects and multiple category listings for alternate names for the same thing do, because not everyone looks for info in the same manner as everyone else.

Some of the placeholder entries (which shouldn't have their own pages yet) for dates come from things like the novels. The WC movie novel goes farther and breaks things down to the hour at times.

While it may not be ultimately that important on which day a Drayman was escorted , it's certainly usefull in crossreferencing various ship movements and personel issues. This is just the kind of thing that some fan mod or project might want to find out and I think the main goal should be making finding info easier.

While individual days might not have a lot, having every single item on one page for 2654 for example would make it unnessesarily legnthy to the point of making finding what you want tedious.
Click to expand...

The thing is that, if all of the individual dates are on one page, you can still link directly to the date you want pointed out by adding # and then the sub-heading, like if I wanted to link to 2654.111, I would link to 2654#111 and it would go directly to that date on the 2654 page. I'm not suggesting that we eliminate dates, I just think that this would be a better way to organize things, as we have the main 2654 entry and then individual days and people are linking to either one, making formatting a mess when they could be linking to one page.
 
I just whipped up an example of what I'm suggesting.

https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Timeline_Format_Proposal

here's what happens when you link to this page and add #2654.111, it jumps down to that specific day, and you can look around the page and see the event in the context of the other entries.

If someone typed in 2654.111, it would go to the 2654.111 page which would redirect to 2654#2654.111. Nothing would be different except it'd be a lot easier to keep organized and would provide context for each event. Plus, it's a lot more professional, and we'd have fewer tiny pages with very little information.

I think this would be a lot more fun to read, and if you wanted to know everything that happened in 2654, you could go to 2654 and have all of that information in one place instead of spread out over 33 pages.
 
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You can also easily include single date pages in the year page, there are commands for that in mediawiki software ;)
That way people can also find or look up the information in more than one way, as AD was saying.
 
Whoever did those infoboxes, could I get some for capships as well? And any others you think we might need. I'm adding them to every article I can.
 
I like those.

I would say make one for both individual ships and ship classes. Is there a way we could make them so we could include the armor and shield stats image inside the box as well?

Do people think infoboxes or tables are the best way to express ship data?
 
I could use infoboxes for non kilrathi/terrans. ie Firekkans, Wu, Varni, etc. I don't need one for each but just one all non-TK races.

Perhaps make the box gray?
 
Is there a way to do standardized stat boxes for multiple ships? I'm trying to figure out how to recreate the ships2 Bloodfang entry and have it still look nice.

It would also come in handy to have the template in the template area.
 
I'd really like to hear from somebody about what sort of format we should use for the timeline. There is a lot of work I'd like to do but I can't do it until we have the timeline format worked out.
 
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