TWC Wiki:Pub

The TWC Wiki Pub is intended to be the central meeting place for users and contributors interested in policy and technical matters concerning the TWC Wiki.

Whether you assume 'Pub' stands for Public Discussion Area or Public House may depend upon your age, inclination and nationality. Unfortunately drinks are not served and spam is not welcome but please feel free to raise any TWC Wiki related issue here. If a discussion is going on in an individual talk page or policy area that you think more people should be aware of please also link to it here.

TWC Wiki News

Changes to be aware of:

Simetrical has been adding some useful information to policy area concerning such things as what Sysops actually are and are meant to do.

You can view all articles in the policy area by going to 'Special Pages' (in left hand side bar) then selecting 'All Pages' then 'TWC Wiki' in drop down box.

Some items have also been moved to the 'Help:' namespace which is also recently created.

Discussion Area

please edit in your comment under the appropriate heading, use : at the beginning of paragraph to indent, and use ~~~~ to sign your comment.

New Skin

There is a new TWC (default) skin in operation now (thanks Simetrical)- unless you have pre-set something different you should be seeing this page currently in TWC style candy colour (or beige, depending on your colour perception). Main skins we intend to design for in the future are TWC (default) and MonoBook, so switch around between those and report any things that don't work well in either one.

As skin can be varied according to namespace. I would personally like to propose discussion on whether we should vary between namespaces, so for instance the main area with TW, mods and modding info could be more like typical Wikipedia white colouring (to make it more intuitive that it is a freely edited area) - and that the TWC: (official docs area) is TWC coloured in all skins (to mark it as something separate and controlled). If the scriptorium uses its own namespace that would be another area that could have either a separate or more TWC like design.--Makanyane 17:23, 6 July 2007 (CDT)

Namespaces

As noted we do have some new namespaces already - if you are not familiar with the concept think 'sub-forum'. Namespaces start with a different prefix, like this one TWC Wiki: which is for project policy pages. They can have a different design controlled via the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), different default protection settings, and they when you use most search functions you can select to view only certain namespaces. For instance if you want to look after a certain area selecting 'Recent changes' then 'TWC Wiki' from the drop down box will let you view only the changes to the policy pages.

Namespaces are likely to develop further - current status is on TWC_Wiki:Namespaces please refer to talk page for discussion of possible changes. Things still to be decided are if we should create new namespaces to move the Scriptorium articles, and Registry forms to (to give separate type of protection / control), and if we should make a Member namespace for forum user biogs etc. (advantage would be reduction in confusion when naming pages)--Makanyane 17:23, 6 July 2007 (CDT)

CSS

The Cascading Style Sheets that control the appearance of this Wiki are now actually hosted on it. We are not encouraging any sysops to try and amend them unless they are absolutely sure they know what they are doing, as obviously they control the appearance of the whole Wiki. If you have any comments about how they / the currently available classes are behaving please discuss here;

Page Naming

Am starting to think we are about to get in more dilemma's with page naming as more M2TW stuff is added, have issues with faction names between RTW and M2TW being shared, they and culture names are also real world place names, and games also share same file names which we started using for RTW modding sections. Questions:

• Should we have separate 'RTW file name' and 'M2TW file name' (or 'file name-M2TW') for modding info with some duplication where info is similar - or have RTW and M2TW info combined on same 'file name' page.
• For faction names etc, can we come up with standard suffix / prefix? I'd favour suffix I think as it still allows articles to sort by name in category better so, 'Spain-M2TW Faction' ?
• Any other things we should be watching out for? --Makanyane 18:00, 10 July 2007 (CDT)

We could namespace them, and then just have redirects (or disambiguation if appropriate) in the main namespace. And I was thinking a "TWC Forum:" namespace for all the forum history and so on. Of course that doesn't leave much of anything in the main namespace, but we don't have anything really logical to put there, in my opinion, so why not? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 00:48, 11 July 2007 (CDT)

It might make sense to give games separate namespaces, I'm not honestly sure yet, looked at Wikipedia and they don't seem to have many, not sure if too many will confuse people. We need to have a bit more of an overall plan for this, would need to work out how that relates to mods as well. Have just been asked about how a mod should properly set up pages for their factions; again they will tend to share names with the vanilla games factions but need separate pages. Saxons - EoD Faction ? (does having : in non namespace name mess anything up BTW?) -Makanyane 06:26, 11 July 2007 (CDT)

The English Wikipedia doesn't have many namespaces, true, and we could certainly go with that model. Other Wikimedia projects have multiple content namespaces. On consideration, I think you're probably right that we can keep all Total War stuff in the main namespace and just categorize it. I'd still like to move the TWC forum stuff to a separate namespace.

When multiple pages would otherwise have the same name, the Wikipedia standard for disambiguating them is using parentheses: Saxons (Bob's Mod). This actually has a shortcut built into the software from when MediaWiki was more English-Wikipedia-specific, in that [[Saxons (Bob's Mod)|]] (note the extra |) will turn into [[Saxons (Bob's Mod)|Saxons]] when you save.

Colons are fine in article names, obviously except if it's in the main namespace and the part before the colon corresponds to a namespace. (Wikipedia would have a bit of trouble writing an article on a book named Wikipedia: The Real Story or something, since of course "Wikipedia:" is a namespace there.) —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:32, 11 July 2007 (CDT)

Will try moving the M2TW faction articles to 'Spain (M2TW Faction)' as that shortcut sounds handy - I'd been avoiding () because of the %28 display... Note to self and everybody using suffix does seem more useful, if you have multiple tabs open you can see relevant bit of title eg 'Spain' instead of 6 tabs all starting 'Medieval II:/.......'

I'm personally happy with TWC Forum: namespace idea, could you put a summary proposal of what should be in it on TWC_Wiki_talk:Namespaces? Otherwise I'll do my guestimate examples of what would be in/out of that later, main query / cross over point would be should Category:People articles go in, some of those pages are really just forum related, though we also have a few pages on Guild members, CA people etc. -Makanyane 00:08, 12 July 2007 (CDT)

Use of categories for content?

I'd think it's a bad idea to use category pages for content, like :Category:Medieval 2: Total War. Category pages should best be left mostly blank as at Wikipedia. For one thing, categories currently aren't searched by default. That could be changed, but you also have the issue of the page name's oddity, and in many cases we're going to be getting a quite large number of pages in the category anyway. Perhaps best to have a link to the category at the top of a "See also" section that has selected useful links pertaining to the topic. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 00:53, 11 July 2007 (CDT)

Ugh you're probably right, unfortunately its the way I've been doing most things so far, as it looked like a simple way of finding all the links to related things! I've directed Medieval 2: Total War links to the Category you mentioned at the moment to get over the fact the article page needs sorting. Have a very rough plan for possibly doing a more portal like approach on that specific one. I'd like to make the M2 area a priority to get sorted so can try unravelling things from category pages as we go through that. -Makanyane 06:36, 11 July 2007 (CDT)

License / Copyrights ?

The TWC Wiki does not use any sort of license agreement at the moment. See TWC_Wiki:Copyrights for current situation. Adding a license agreement like Wikipedia's which formally allows re-use of the Wiki's information elsewhere at this stage would cause some problems in terms of making sure previous contributors agreed to it, and possibly make it more awkward to re-use old forum contributions for the Wiki. If any one has any opinions about the way the Wiki should go with this please reply here. -Makanyane 15:36, 11 July 2007 (CDT)

Although the GFDL rather appeals to me, it would be simplest to just go with the same idea as the forums: you implicitly let us display your content, and since this is a wiki also to modify it and so on, but nothing about redistribution or irrevocability. If you'd prefer to go for some formal license, I wouldn't mind, depending on the license. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:40, 11 July 2007 (CDT)

Like you GFDL appeals to me but as there don't seem to be many others with strong opinions about it, so simplest route would probably be best. I think we'd have difficulty getting everyone to understand a complex license. With reference to using TWC forum contributions I've put proposal on User:Makanyane/imported_policy, I think we need to pin things down a bit and imply a restriction to staff so people don't just borrow everyone elses posts without asking / crediting.--Makanyane 05:58, 17 July 2007 (CDT)

I don't see the point in the namespace restriction. Also, the templates should not be mandatory or even encouraged in cases where the author has given permission, and they should only be used if the author specifically requests them (or if permission hasn't been sought to start with). A note giving the source should always be left in the edit summary, however. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 12:24, 17 July 2007 (CDT)

OK, if author has given specific permission for inclusion in Wiki I would agree to only using template if requested, though mainly the permitted one was just way of keeping links to source material. But would still prefer to use imported template with edit restriction, or some other type of differentiation for ones were permission wasn't requested / reply received.

Namespace restriction idea stems from problem with importing some scriptorium stuff, as a fairly minor instance: Perikles on the causes of WWII whilst I don't disagree with it, its not entirely accepted history so if we import that as a general article what's meant to happen to it? Other people attempt to change to their interpretation - or we end up with separate pages for "Makanyane's Causes of WWII.."? Was trying to work out way of saying its just in here as example of good TWC post as decided by staff / librarians, which allows it to remain as expression of personal opinion, unless author agrees to give article over completely to allow change of meaning etc...-Makanyane 18:53, 17 July 2007 (CDT)