Dungeon Master
Posts: 553
Joined: Wednesday, 22nd December 2010, 10:12
The crawl.chaosforge.org wiki needs higher standards
A lot of people have a low opinion of the wiki. Many question the reliability of its content. Others (including myself) feel it has more fundamental problems. In my opinion, the wiki lacks standards. I think it should implement a few policies to help this. I've numbered these by order of importance, with the first two being much more important than the other two.
1. Only put factual information on the wiki. Just say what stuff is, what it does, etc. If you feel especially committed, use citations (from the source code). Too many wiki pages have "tips" that are questionable. Occasionally this leads to ridiculous situations, like players thinking they need necromutation to enter the Crypt. Basically, I'm saying there should be actual rules as to what can be in an article. Right now decent articles are mixed in with a lot of nonsense and even fanfiction. I tend not to bother editing the wiki because there is too much of this "strategy" stuff on it. I don't want to create/edit an article only to have it mucked up later by someone adding a guide I disagree with. I also generally don't feel like removing what I think is bad advice, because it's all opinion, and why would mine be any better? I say remove opinion altogether.
2. Put strategy guides and advice in a different namespace (some of these pages could be linked to proper articles at the top, like discussion pages are... but they shouldn't be part of the main article). Same goes with character logs, fanfiction, whatever else people want to post. This way good articles can't be ruined by bad advice, but advice can still be given.
3. Place a box at the top of every article saying what major version it is accurate up to (e.g. 0.8, 0.9, etc). This sort of feature would be immensely helpful, since it would let users know how dated an article is. I've seen this used on the dwarf fortress wiki. This can't be done for every page all at once. For the most part, keeping the wiki up to date will be a losing battle. I don't think a complete, up to date wiki can ever be made unless development of Crawl dies (nethack has a serious advantage here). We'll always have outdated articles, so we might as well explicitly flag them as outdated.
4. For most articles, only document stable versions. Trunk changes too often and too much to document it on a good wiki (we have changelogs for this). Documenting an experimental feature which then gets reverted later (not uncommon in trunk) is one of the worst things that can happen to the wiki. If information on trunk is really that important, put it in a separate namespace. Yes, this means I think there shouldn't be a page on "Octopode" until 0.10 is officially released. There could be a Trunk:Octopode page, though, which gets reviewed and moved to the main wiki when 0.10 comes out.
Note that I don't really expect that these suggestions are going to be implemented, but I'd like to be proven wrong. This is stuff that really has to be enforced. I don't think it can come from regular wiki users, since I'm talking about fundamental rules about how the wiki structured. An admin needs to write it down, put it on a page, and point new editors to it. I'd get more involved if I was confident about guidelines like these being upheld. I think DCSS has a large enough community to maintain a small but high quality wiki, and it's a shame it doesn't. The best source of information we have is Henzell's learndb, and that is mostly filled with crap.