SC4 Encyclopaedia

krbe · January 11, 2008, 05:59:30 PM

This thread was previously known as: "(Urban) Planning reference - collected tutorials?"

As important as having an outline for articles we need, are clear and precise guidelines on how the articles should be written, so as to avoid excessive information on a subject, or leaving out important notes (oh, everybody knows that!). Sort of the same as the templates, but covering more possibilites.

Pat Riot · January 11, 2008, 06:44:57 PM

what?

edit: nvm, i thought that^ was the first post in the thread.

krbe · January 12, 2008, 02:45:03 AM

Quote from: Pat Riot on January 11, 2008, 06:44:57 PM
what?

edit: nvm, i thought that^ was the first post in the thread.

Might mean someones onto something

daeley · January 14, 2008, 02:38:04 AM

If this is done in a wiki format, I would be happy to paste in some of my work (when I find the time ofc)

I would also strongly advise to keep the number of content links in such a wiki to other sites (especially discussion forums) as minimal as possible. Forums tend to go down and up and sometimes even down permanently, as such - in my opinion - it's generally better to sum up the most important points of a discussion instead of linking to it.

Shadow Assassin · January 14, 2008, 05:56:25 AM

Exactly, and in the case of a lot of things found in the early days of SC4, they are very close to being lost forever, now that Simtropolis [why ST? Back in those days, it was the site to go to for the discovery of new things in SC4] is archiving old threads. So, it's probably worth it if we can rescue that stuff before it gets lost in the mists of time.

Especially the stuff pertaining to transit-modding.

On the Wiki, we are going to transfer information over from various small repositories of information, such as RedLotus's Interchange Tutorial [which is hidden in some Yahoo! briefcase somewhere in the messy place that is the Internet]. An archives section will be created specifically for that purpose.

krbe · January 14, 2008, 06:25:11 PM

I'd just like to add that the Wiki should support [[Links that allow spaces (and brackets) as Wikipedia does]] and not [[LinksThatHaveToBeWrittenInOneLongWordWithoutFormatting]]

I've tried a few Wiki installs, and it seems like most of the rely on the latter method (but the former should be possible to get to work in MediaWiki, I didn't just find out of it back then

).

BigSlark · January 14, 2008, 09:46:38 PM

Quote from: Shadow Assassin on January 14, 2008, 05:56:25 AM
Exactly, and in the case of a lot of things found in the early days of SC4, they are very close to being lost forever, now that Simtropolis [why ST? Back in those days, it was the site to go to for the discovery of new things in SC4] is archiving old threads. So, it's probably worth it if we can rescue that stuff before it gets lost in the mists of time.

Especially the stuff pertaining to transit-modding.

On the Wiki, we are going to transfer information over from various small repositories of information, such as RedLotus's Interchange Tutorial [which is hidden in some Yahoo! briefcase somewhere in the messy place that is the Internet]. An archives section will be created specifically for that purpose.

I agree entirely. However, there are techniques from the dark ages that are no longer used for a myriad of reasons. Granted, they should be preserved, but I feel they should be marked as "This is a historical article only and should not be used creating X."

Suggestions?

Cheers,
Kevin

Tarkus · January 14, 2008, 10:59:20 PM

I'd have to agree with Kevin. A lot of the transit modding documentation dates back to 2004 (like redlotus' tutorial), and it is more than a bit outdated, not to mention cumbersome and dense, but I'd still say it's important stuff, even if for nothing more than "historical" purproses, so marking these things as such seems logical to me. I'd also like to see Tropod's Network Specs document up there as well, as right now, it's only available behind closed doors (on the Private NAM Team Exchange).

Of course, that means we'll need new documentation . . .

I need to get around to writing that 0x10000000 tutorial one of these days (especially since redlotus' section on RUL files just says "send it to Tropod").

-Alex

krbe · January 14, 2008, 11:37:40 PM

Well, outdated information isn't worth hanging onto -- the trial by water isn't exactly mentioned in papers on modern penal systems either

But if it's knowledge worth to know, I agree with you guys.

But really historical stuff might need an entry after all, just to warn people that these practices are deprecated.

Shadow Assassin · January 15, 2008, 01:49:52 AM

QuoteWell, outdated information isn't worth hanging onto

How can we stop history from repeating itself if we don't know what caused it to happen in the first place?

By the way, with those links, MediaWiki does indeed support it. It's the same software that Wikipedia uses, after all.

wouanagaine · January 15, 2008, 02:36:41 AM

About wiki soft, I'm using http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki
which is simple, small and support image ( direct hosting on imageshack ), namespaces

one page features list :
http://www.wikimatrix.org/show/DokuWiki

and the 'Compare them all' web site http://www.wikimatrix.org

Make your choice wisely

Tarkus · January 17, 2008, 02:23:25 PM

I do actually have some experience using PmWiki as well. I managed documentation for a computer lab I was running at my previous university with a PmWiki. But I'm not entirely sure I'd recommend it, unless they've upgraded it quite a bit from a security standpoint in the past couple of years.

-Alex (Tarkus)

DFire870 · January 17, 2008, 02:36:45 PM

I think MediaWiki is the best one to use, because it is the most popular one, and it's fairly easy to use once you get a hang of the codes and such (actually, many of the codes are easier to use than plain HTML). It can be a pain to set up though.

-- John

freedo50 · January 17, 2008, 02:52:28 PM

We are most likely to use mediawiki, purely because it's the most popular, and therefore has the most support and is easiest to pick up. Unless there are some major problems with mediawiki, it is likely to be the one we go with.

Fred

Shadow Assassin · January 18, 2008, 05:02:19 AM

Plus, whatever works for Wikipedia should work for us.

krbe · January 18, 2008, 07:55:24 AM

I'm glad SA gracefully accepted to take care of the hassle of installing such an application

I wondr how Ennedi's doing with his list

Ennedi · January 18, 2008, 08:53:56 AM

Ennedi had a lot of RL work last few days

And now he is slowly regaining consciousness

I have something to tell you all, I will edit this post today (a bit later).
Thank you very much for supporting this idea!

Edit: I would like to tell you that we started experimenting with the MediaWiki software. Fred (freedo50) installed a wiki 13th January and we started to play with it. We organized a small testing team: Fred, Shadow Assassin, Kevin (Big Slark - he is waiting for first articles to edit

), and me.
We invited also Dustin thundercrack83 (he is an author of the SC4 Encyclopaedia idea - but now he has much work with the MD section reorganisation) and krbe (but we agreed we will have an occasion to cooperate at the later stage). Jeronij of course will look at our progress.

The MediaWiki software is really easy to use, but there is an incredible amount of options in it. I started to build the categories tree (based on my proposition presented in this thread earlier, there were no other propositions), but I must say I spent most time reading the MediaWiki Help

Fred and Shadow Assassin (who seems to be the most experienced one) did the same. We've got to know much things, but we have a long way to go.
Unfortunately I was very busy in RL and wasn't be able to do as much as I planned last week.
I want to finish creating categories this weekend, then we will start to write some articles and general introductions to particular categories. This will be an occassion to to create article templates and learn editing. It is very important, because if we want to have our knowledge well organized and easy to read, we must show you examples. Of course we will ask for your opinions at that stage.

The next thing we must perfectly know before we will make our wiki public, will be all admin and moderating tasks. We will be able to practice with them when we will have some articles yet. In other words, we must run the wiki some time with some (but not too much) content and make it in a small team to be able to track all our operations and their effects. when we will achieve enough experience in managing te wiki, we will make it public, ask for opinions and invite to the common work

We will inform you about the progress, we will also ask you for opinions if we will have specific problems.
In the meantime - please post here everything you think about it, all ideas and propositions. This is a "brainstorming" period.

After some days (maybe next weekend) we will try to analyze your thoughts and maybe come to any conclusions.

As for your last posts:

- I agree with Shadow Assassin, Fred and Dfire870: the MediaWiki is the most popular one, many people are familiar with it's codes and functionality. As Shadow Assassin said - whatever works for Wikipedia should work for us

I think the main reason of creating a lot of versions of the Wiki software is a need to simplify it and modify according to various users needs.
Many of these wikis can be easier to manage in some aspects, but in fact we don't know what will be useful for us. So it would be very difficult to decide which version would be the best for us. MediaWiki looks very flexible and it has very detailed help section - and it is very important for us now.

- As for the outdated stuff: this theme needs a discussion, but I think we can't give a simple rule here. Some information can be copied from other places (after an author's permission), some other can be leaved in the source place (but what daeley said is very important, it is more safe to have as much information as possible inside our system), and in many cases an article author should make some work to extract everything valuable information from all sources and organize it. This is the ultimate goal of making an encyclopadedia - we want not only to collect, but to organize our knowledge and make it easy to learn and use also for beginners!

That's all for now, thanks again for your support, we are waiting for your ideas and opinions!

Adam

JoeST · January 18, 2008, 01:58:28 PM

I was just contemplating... we could go as far as making an information page for every lot created..... LOL... a bit OTT really

Cant wait to get going on this project... I'm itching to be of some use to the community LOL

Joe

krbe · January 19, 2008, 07:16:46 PM

Glad to see that we have someone to take care of the technicalities in a team. I found myself sweating over the help pages more than working with the software when I tried it last time

Since I've reinstalled Windows (I'm running it on a Mac in order to play SC, and Vista was far too bloated and big to have on a 20 GB partition), I have the opportunity to "test drive" the articles without having too much else to worry about

As key HTML tags don't work here (table, a, img tags, if anyone wants to enable them

), I had to use a blog to post progress; see the Fairmont Report if you have anything to help me with

Well, that was the advertising; if anybody really wants to, they may well provide information on every lot existing; but I believe some broader categories will work better (and will get the job done quicker). We may start with providing information on the lots on the LEX (how many do we have?) and expand with quality lots found elsewhere. We risk having to write about the same lot in more than one category, but that also makes it possible to find information on lots based on several themes (example: the SMP Police station is both good for your military and your police service). Anyways, if anything of this seems odd or unclear, it's because it's late

And people, don't forget to read Ennedi's thoughts two posts up!

Shadow Assassin · January 20, 2008, 02:48:59 AM

Actually, looking at that Wordpress page gives me an idea. I wonder if there's a way to add meta tags/keywords [like in a blog] to a particular page to assist with searching...

I'll look around in the help files and see if it's built in or requires an extension. They probably have to do it with searches anyway...