WCPedia: IRC Meeting #2 After Action Report

Dundradal

Frog Blast the Vent Core!
This week we took a step back a bit during the conference.

We realize that Wiki editing can be daunting at first glance and have set ourselves to creating a "how to" tutorial for articles. This way less savvy users can figure out how to code and create articles without having to jump from article to article to figure out the necessary code.

We'll work on creating templates, infoboxes and other aspects of articles so that you can easily plug in information and start creating articles. The example pages will still work as guidelines for layouts and code that you may need, but our priority is making the project more accessible. We need everyone's help to get this moving and completed.

I'll let others who attended fill you in on some of the other details.

Next week we plan to meet earlier so that some of our friends from around the world can attend. We will hold the weekly conference at 2pm EST next Sunday.

We again invite everyone to attend, even if you know nothing about wiki editing (and most of us are still learning) we need you to finish this project.

This is WCPedia, Long Live the Confederation :D
 
I cleaned out the acronyms category, moving things out and into their full entries, making the acronyms into redirects. I found a few things along the way that I fixed, but it wasn't a major effort.

Like you said, every little bit helps.
 
Until we get the proper how-to page up, I'd like to suggest those who want to jump in read the following from Wikipedia:

For basic syntax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet

A far more in-depth tutorial that largely applies here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial

We promised you weekly status reports, so I'll give my personal status, Dund being our other major force this week. My main work was integrating Arena data from S*S into relevant fighter articles- mainly the tech specifications, but a little background info as well. By NO MEANS are the articles complete- I probably should've pulled even more S*S info than I did in at least a few cases.

Still remaining on those articles are more notes on the fighter's history, what battles it fought in, etc. Of particular note is the Paktahn, which has more S*S info than it does from WC3.

As Dund said, our primary objective of the week is to finish layout details like templates and infoboxes, as well as the how to tutorials. If you know anything about wiki, we could REALLY use your help on this to make sure it gets done quickly. If you don't know a thing about wiki and were scared off by the complexity of it all, check back throughout the week for those pages, or even just start with the wiki pages I linked to- they'll teach you most of what you need to know, and in a very user-friendly manner, at that!

Long live the Confederation!
 
OK, I think for the most part it should be simple to modify our existing infoboxes into something else. All I need is a list of what boxes we need, and what data THOSE need, and we're golden. Meanwhile I'll see about adapting wiki's flags....

There was talk for meeting 1 about citations. Wiki does it as follows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipe...rces_of_articles#Citations_of_generic_sources

It's not too scary if you look at it for a minute, but it might require more template work on our part to implement. As such, I'd love for the Cabal to tell me if it's worth looking into or not...
 
Well the fighter infobox we can double for capships.
We have characters and star systems.

We need one for weapons and perhaps specific places like the Naval Academy, I've been using the fighter infobox for installations (Ella, star bases, etc)

I'm glad to see the tags have been implemented.

We should make sure to create blank templates of our example pages with instructions about how to fill in the information. I'm a bit busy this week, but I'll try to work on one or two of them when I can.

As for the format I'm going to label them as "Capship Entry Template" etc. I'll also start a template category so that they are easily accessible.
 
Still need data fields for those infoboxes- things like date instated, armor rating, complement... anything that you want in those data fields, I need to know about before I can really do a lot with them.... haven't got much work done due to the fact that I have a project due tomorrow, and a few other things- I'll do my best to finish by the end of the week, though.
 
The infoboxes used in wikipedia to describe our modern capships look interesting to me.
So we can go that way:
- class overview: builder, in commission, number of ships completed
- class characteristics: (copy what has been done so far) Length,Mass, Propulsion,Max Velocity,Cruise Velocity,Acceleration,Max Y/P/R , Armament (Guns + Missiles),Front Shield ,Rear Shield ,Front Armor ,Rear Armor ,Right/Left Armor ,Figher/Bomber Complement , Crew, Jump Capable

is that it ?
 
We were still undecided as to whether include (length, mass, speed, etc) in the infobox or in a separate table as is seen in most entries.

Tables are better for comparisons between multiple variants, however I also like the cleaner look of the infoboxes containing all the information.

I started the Capship template, however I've noticed that text doesn't wrap correctly when using the "<pre></pre>" tags. Is there an easy way to fix this problem? I used the raw code for the Bengal as an example for people to follow along with explanations.

Please review the page and let me know if it's clear enough and if users find it useful.
 
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Actually, it looks ok to me too to stick with the class overview in the infobox, and use a separate table for the characteristics. You are right: we should avoid having too much info in the infobox.
 
So is the text wrapping for you in the raw Bengal code? Or is it extending far to the left?

It might just be Safari displaying it that way.
 
It's extending far to the right. I believe sticking a | at the beginning of a line will start a new one when you're in the code like that. Give it a shot...
 
That doesn't appear to work. Any other ideas how we might fix it?

I've completed four templates so far (half of the examples). They can be viewed here.
 
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Don't write so much. The codebox is designed for showing actual code for things like templates, not things like an entire page's source. Instead of having that box, link directly to the edit page for that article, or do a write-protected duplicate so that they have something stable to look at. Same effect, but not scrolled out... or alternately hit enter at the end of the lines.
 
I've just removed the article text from the preview code. It just doesn't show how the internal links work, but that should be easy enough for users to uncover by looking at the hard code through the edit tab.
 
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