Versioning CrawlWiki

[Jk]

I posted this in the CrawlWiki's general wiki discussion page awhile ago, but I think no one is watching that, so I figure I'll repeat it here.

I overhead some folks commenting that the wiki "isn't useful anymore", which I disagree with, but I see the complaint that some information is out of date, incomplete, and it's not always apparent what version of the game people are talking about.

I am a big fan of how they do article versioning on the Dwarf Fortress wiki (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Templ ... cleVersion). Since there are such significant ongoing changes, and it is not always clear which pages have been updated to the latest information, would it be possible to implement something similar for the CrawlWiki?

[TGW]

It's not even necessarily out of date. It's just not accurate a lot of the time. For example, the first random page I go to says imps are "impossible to catch with a throwing net" (and that they have -9 MR). The second refers to pandemonium lords as "tier-1 demons" and recommends buffing and killing them. The DDNe guide recommends worshiping Cheibriados. Freeze is compared unfavorably to flame tongue. It recommends using Azrael to "fence in" other enemies. elliptic's SpEn guide was quickly vandalized with a recommendation to abandon Makhleb after midgame (because his power dips), among other things.

When someone queries learndb in IRC and gets bad information, it's updated right then. If someone can't find something, it's added. If someone adds something wrong, it's deleted. This is impossible to achieve with a wiki.

[lucy_ferre]

The main problem with CrawlWiki is that it has very few active editors and most of them don't fact check before posting. Crawl's rapid updates also makes keeping the wiki up-to-date very difficult. Learndb isn't flawless though. It has sparse info (and several entries were outdated last time I checked), poor formatting, and a lot of dumb joke entries. I don't use either wikis anymore. The knowledge bot has monster info from the source, so that's the only one I'd use.

The DDNe guide recommends worshiping Cheibriados.

I suggested DDNe of Chei, because I never lost with that combo (2/2; online and offline). And it seems easy to me.

Freeze is compared unfavorably to flame tongue.

A new user posted spell reviews that were incorrect. That bad advice was removed several months ago. Just like German Joey's infamous Ziggurat "Archer strategy" (along with a few other dodgy Zig strategies) were removed. Learndb editors seem to intentionally ignore this (they linked to the deleted versions of articles). It's been awhile since I checked out either wikis, so I don't know if anything has changed.

It recommends using Azrael to "fence in" other enemies. elliptic's SpEn guide was quickly vandalized with a recommendation to abandon Makhleb after midgame (because his power dips), among other things.

It's a wiki. Anybody can edit the articles and improve them. It's just easier for people to point at the wiki and complain.

[Jk]

Certainly one of the problems of a wiki is that authority is decentralized and information can be added by people who don't know what they are talking about, but I really think the format is helpful; when I was very new, I didn't know what I didn't know, so it was hard to form specific queries. The interlinking of pages, letting you wander through the game information in a website, is really useful, and made the game accessible to me when it otherwise wasn't.

Is there some kind of senior editor or moderator of CrawlWiki? My suggestion would be:

1 - to draw a hard line between fact-based articles, which would require code-reference as proof (the way people sometimes post in the forum, and the way other encyclopedic sources usually work), versus strategic suggestion articles, which should have a person's name attached to them rather than just "XYZ guide".

2 - version the articles as suggested above, because while some information is wrong, some just changes quickly. I don't think this needs to be done in trunk, or at least not with every little update. Perhaps just major releases?

3 - have certain reliable people take "ownership" over moderation of certain groups of pages by "watching" them and rolling back inappropriate edits. this already happens very frequently.

4 - more rigorous editing guidelines in general, and some elaboration of the "meta editing" articles to help people learn to contribute effectively

I've made edits here and there where I've been able to add something to the wiki for fix issues, but I don't feel like I have the right to go and reorganize the whole thing. I'd be happy to help whoever runs the thing to do some of the grunt work though.

(Also, I was unaware that there were more factually accurate sources! )

[galehar]

I think the wiki mostly references the stable version. Maybe it should be made official, so people will stop complaining that it's not uptodate regarding trunk. Trying to keep it in pace with trunk would be insane anyway.

[MrMisterMonkey]

but does anyone complain that it's not up to date regarding trunk? I thought the bulk of it was complaining was split between it referencing ancient versions, being full of bad advice, and being plain wrong.

ignore that if people actually think crawlwiki is a source for trunk information

[dpeg]

I would be very happy if there were more people trying to keep it in shape. But I also think, or at least hope, that it's only a matter of time. The wiki shouldn't even strive to capture trunk. Dealing with the latest stable version is much better. It would be very cool to see an annotated changelog across all DCSS versions there.

[JeffQyzt]

As a matter of practicality, wiki editors tend to edit whatever they're interested in. So, if players are using the latest stable build, they'll put in content regarding that. If they're all playing the latest trunk build, they'll document that instead.

Trying to "force" wiki content requires a lot of editing/policing, which there is probably not (currently) enough volume to achieve unless you get one or more super-devoted editors that "takes charge" (which leads to its own set of side-effect problems.)

[Jk]

Okay, here's what I did. I decided to take a particularly bad page ("speed"), dive into the code, and make it right (for 0.7).

Here's the final page: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=Movement

Note that I put it in a Stone Soup 0.7 namespace, and that there is a separate one for Stone Soup 0.8. People can edit whichever one they want to, and then when 0.8 becomes the official release, we can just redirect Movement to the new version and change the disclaimer to say that the information is for the current version, and start a 0.9 one or whatever.

Hopefully we can slowly get some nice templates for doing this and versioning the articles, but I figured I should try it on one small new page instead of trying to convince people to overhaul the wiki in one go.

I also think it should be possible to do things like lock core game mechanic articles we know are factually accurate and not changing further. There's no strategy input on a page like "movement".

[lucy_ferre]

Is there some kind of senior editor or moderator of CrawlWiki?

I'm an admin.

1- To draw a hard line between fact-based articles, which would require code-reference as proof (the way people sometimes post in the forum, and the way other encyclopedic sources usually work), versus strategic suggestion articles, which should have a person's name attached to them rather than just "XYZ guide".

2 - version the articles as suggested above, because while some information is wrong, some just changes quickly. I don't think this needs to be done in trunk, or at least not with every little update. Perhaps just major releases?

I agree.

3 - have certain reliable people take "ownership" over moderation of certain groups of pages by "watching" them and rolling back inappropriate edits. this already happens very frequently.

There are very few active editors and almost none of them are very reliable. I rarely visit the wiki, so that includes me as well.

4 - more rigorous editing guidelines in general, and some elaboration of the "meta editing" articles to help people learn to contribute effectively

I created a style guide and made several templates to help new editors. Any suggestions on what should be added to the help section?

I've made edits here and there where I've been able to add something to the wiki for fix issues, but I don't feel like I have the right to go and reorganize the whole thing. I'd be happy to help whoever runs the thing to do some of the grunt work though.

Anyone can make major changes to the wiki if they want, as long as nobody objects. Your project is a good idea. If you need any help feel free to ask me.

[Jk]

I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how melee combat works, as the code is much less concise than with movement. If anyone familiar with parsing through fight.cc wants to help, this page is where I'm essentially trying to explain how it works when you are standing next to an enemy and click / move towards him: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?t ... 0.7:Attack

If you know enough to copy and paste the relevant code into sections (or add sections where appropriate), I'd be happy to translate it into common English and build the narrative for the article in a way new players can understand. I'm slowly collecting the info, but it's a challenge.

Another article I'm going to try to work on is either "action" or "turns" (still thinking about the appropriate way to go about it, and whether they are separate articles or not). Can anyone point me to relevant sources and/or an explanation? The point of that article will be to explain how something like movement speed and attack speed, or other actions, will play out over the course of a turn (to help people understand why they might take 1 step, but an enemy will take 3, or attack them twice, etc.)

[galehar]

I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how melee combat works, as the code is much less concise than with movement. If anyone familiar with parsing through fight.cc wants to help, this page is where I'm essentially trying to explain how it works when you are standing next to an enemy and click / move towards him: http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?t ... 0.7:Attack

If you know enough to copy and paste the relevant code into sections (or add sections where appropriate), I'd be happy to translate it into common English and build the narrative for the article in a way new players can understand. I'm slowly collecting the info, but it's a challenge.

Cryptic and Eronarn have just started an attempt to rewrite fight.cc. They have created a wiki page about it. Maybe they can help, but you'll have to come to ##crawl-dev to reach them.

Another article I'm going to try to work on is either "action" or "turns" (still thinking about the appropriate way to go about it, and whether they are separate articles or not). Can anyone point me to relevant sources and/or an explanation? The point of that article will be to explain how something like movement speed and attack speed, or other actions, will play out over the course of a turn (to help people understand why they might take 1 step, but an enemy will take 3, or attack them twice, etc.)

Enable the show_game_turns option can help you. It used to be called show_real_turns, but I've renamed it yesterday. I think the player turn / game turn nomenclature is good to explain how the system work. If you search the source for you.time_taken, you should find what you're looking for. For monsters, it's a bit different, look for energy_usage.