[Eishtmo]

Does it ever need it.  BTW, Black Wolf, you're now my favorite person.

If I had the time, a lot of this might not of been necessary.  But there are so many pages, so much to go through, and so little time/energy to do it that the whole thing sort of fell into disuse.

Hopefully, this will change.  That said, some priorities need to be made.  The first, and most important, is getting that non-canon crap out of the canon stuff.  Especially the TVWP stuff that someone thought was important enough to mix into the V written stuff.  I appreciate that someone thought the stuff I made up was worth putting in, but it sort of turned me off from working on it because I was building the canon database and suddenly all that work goes down the tubes.  And I don't simply mean sorting it with labels, though that helps, but physically ripping it out in some cases.

Second, rebuilding (or getting access) to the old stuff, mostly the ship stuff which was a pain the butt when I worked on it originally.  I think I got all the fighters done, but no further.    Redoing it will be annoying, but easier if we can at least strip mine the data from the old one.

And finally, for now anyway, figuring out what we do and do not want in this thing, and where we want it.  User made campaigns, ships, timelines, etc should probably be seperate from the canon stuff, but that's the easy stuff.  I'm thinking of things like, do we really need to list the rotdamp for each fighter?  Or any of the dozens of detail points in the tables that may or may not actually do anything.  Finding out what they do might be nice too.

Well, that's how I see it.  Now I just need a couple hours/weeks to start doing it.  Damn modems.  And life.  And the universe.  And everything.

Thoughts?

[Wanderer]

You might want to check the 'General Modding/'Tables/Ships.tbl' from FS wiki.

And yes. We propably shoud not write all table stats to wiki as they are of no use to anyone besides a modder. And modder knows how to read the stuff from table files.

[Black Wolf]

My ideal wiki would be as follows:

1 - No non canon data unless it's clearly marked as such, and unless it's got some particular reason to be up there (eg. general community acceptance (still needs to be tagged though), specific campaign usage etc. Just so long as its not something someone thought up while editing and decided it should go in).

2 - Every article should be accessible within 4 or 5 clicks from the mainpage (eg. Universe, Ships, GTD Orion, GTD Bastion, or SCP, FRED changes, texture replacement, nameplates) as well as through search.

3 - All articles that need it should be categorized, if neccesary into more than one category.

4 - Articles should be standardized wherever possible. Eg. the Orion, Hecate and Ravanna articles should have the same standard stylesheet. Extra data fr particular ships could be tacked on, of course, but the basic stuff should be the same.

5 - All major edits should be summarized to show what changes you're making. It's easy to forget sometimes (I often do) but it's useful when you're scanning recent changes.

6 - Spoiler tags on every article that needs them. They're not that intrusive after all.

That's pretty much it - my ideal wiki.

As for content, I agree that not all the stats for every ship need to go on the individual ship class pages. I think wanderers on the money with the modder/p.layer split - only stuff relevant to the player needs to be there, ie. Speed, Manoeuvrability, Hitpoints, Shields - stuff like that. The problem comes in when you look at stuff like the afterburner - how many of the stats do we need? Total Burn time and top speed? Fuel capacity? Recharge rate? Or the power output levels? Hmm... new topic praps.

[WMCoolmon]

For ships, I think the pages should be entirly prose-based, no table data whatsoever unless it's extremely relevant. "This ship can take on a Loki" not "This ship can take on a Loki since its hull is X units higher than it." Ships pages should have tactics and tricks with that ship, as well as its general armanment style and important notes (Put the best gun in the Myrmi's second bank, so it shoots four at a time).

[Eishtmo]

Not to say we shouldn't have that kind of information, but I think we really should go more towards a flat out database first, then fill in the little things.  Saying "this ship can take on a Loki" doesn't really define it very well since if you're a good pilot, anything can be beat anything else.  Let's give stats that can be used by campaign builders, modders, and the general population that is reliable, then fill in with our opinions of what the ship can really do.

[WMCoolmon]

There's no reason to just copy all or most of the table stats into the wiki though...you can just look 'em up in the table. If you're a player, "Rotation Damp" isn't going to mean much to you...someone said that earlier, and it's true.

[StratComm]

I said it in the other thread.  Which brings me to my next question: why do we have two threads on this?

[Eishtmo]

I think it just ended up that way.  Really, I just wanted to try to put a direction for us to follow, this sub disscussion would be far better off in the other thread.