Topic on User talk:PigeonGuru

(I'll write to you here instead of various talk pages and such. Sorry if it's not ideal, but this aspect of wiki-ing is always a bit hard -- effective communicating).

From what I can gather there aren't individual pages for each technology, is that correct? It also looks like you may have one main template for things, is that correct? I'm more used to having several templates, so each is easier to understand and use. So then I would think the main template would need to be adapted if we are to make pages for all technologies, with for instance information currently contained in the main research page. We'll also run into the typical naming issue, for instance both the tech and product called pemmican or passive cooler. Typically solved by adding a suffix, although it makes easy linking more bothersome. E.g. [[passive cooler (tech)|passive cooler]]. I'm thinking it might be useful though. Also worth to keep in mind that those big research tables are hard-coded currently, and may (or may not) be outdated.

Much the same deal with skills. Might be useful to have a page for each skill? But again, we'd need some type of template for it, or bake it into the current Thing template, if needed.

Let's say we have these pages: We could then have a small infobox for each tech/skill in the relevant overview skills and research articles.

I doubt that each research project has enough importance to have its own page; for simplicity I would rather add detailed research information to the existing pages.

As for your other suggestions, I haven't quite evaluated their usefulness, and to be fair many of them predate my participation of this wiki, so I am not very familiar with them. The infobox overhaul and expansions can be quite useful, so I'll let you experiment with them a little, to see how well it goes.

That's a fair point, although it might also apply to some other pages with limited information. For research projects, each page could for instance have info about what they unlock, and each production bench and such can be tied to it by requirements.

But I'm kinda just throwing out ideas here. Sadly I don't have as much time to dedicate to working on wikis as I did a few years ago, so wholesale changes to templates and writing lots of content is probably out of reach currently. Stuff quickly takes on a life of its own, and once you start looking a bit deeper, there could be a lot of stuff to do. Feature creep I suppose, heh, or wishes creep.

In general, though, I prefer to have one page for each "thing". Makes it easier to maintain and update. And maybe easier for the end user as well, as opposed to pretty big articles. They're great, don't get me wrong, but it may be a little daunting as well with a tiny scroll-bar :P

In any case, having more details about research and skills in infoboxes/templates could be useful, whether they have their own page or not. But it's always a bit daunting to try to get to grips with templates. Often it's like a huge tech tree with one template calling another, calling another, and it's easy to lose overview. I've had a look at some, and may look into adding stuff. Am not terribly familiar with SMW, though. Sort of got that plants query working, eventually, but the pictures are gone now :/

Hi again. If you have a good grasp of the template structure, how they are all connected, would you mind giving me a quick overview? I had a look at it yesterday, but it's a bit confusing with so many nested chains, and hard to get a good grasp on it. If I am to change something in what appears to be the main template (Template:Infobox_main), or add entirely new ones, what would I have to do? What would I need to make sure is done so that they work correctly, and play nice with the other chains?

As a sidenote: Have you heard about AutoWikiBrowser (AWB)? I found it really useful back in the days. If it's possible to use here. It was kind of a pain to set up on Gamepedia (especially as I'm on a Linux system, and it didn't play very well with it). It can get fairly complex, but it's possible to make similar changes on loads of pages in quick fashion, using RegEx. Naturally, for the same reason, it's important to check some pages manually first, so one doesn't make wrong changes on hundreds of pages :P

I've no idea how applicable it might be here, but one of the things I used it for was to update infoboxes on loads of pages; for instance adding a new line, or changing something else on all pages that called a certain template.

Still not so familiar on templates and stuff, so can't help you on them yet. When I edit them I mostly duplicate existing content and hope I don't break anything.

Also, for implementation of bots or other major stuff you might want to ask User:Zesty, he's the admin and has the ability to do large-scale changes to the wiki while my job is mostly to keep the wiki safe.

Thanks for the advice. I wrote him a message, as I also wonder about the wiki's license due to some copying ideas from elsewhere. Hopefully he pops in now and again.

I'm no expert myself and often have to learn by erring (and countless Show changes...), but it's been an interesting process -- although I've been out of it for a couple of years now. Trying to get to grips with CSS was a pain too, as it's ever so sensitive, and I spent countless hours with Firefox' code inspector, and bugging other mods and admins :shifty:

I've tried to contact him both here and on the forum, but to no avail. But from the steam profile he appears to be active. I don't have one, but do you? Would you be able to shoot him a message or something? This is actually a very important issue, and it should be resolved. But it must be done on the admin level. Some of the other pages I've edited/commented on lately should be looked at as well.

A lot could be done, but without the license thing cleared up I can't just copy from Wikipedia or Gamepedia or anywhere really, so we would have to start from scratch. Kinda losing the motivation here tbh. And on the template side, that still doesn't make much sense to me. And there are some errors somewhere, but it's hard to know where with all the nesting going on, and I don't dare to try to fix it.

Do you know if there has been discussions about the design of the frontpage? I'm thinking things could be done there as well, for starters some pictures would be nice :) But if it needs to be plain to keep down loads on the server or something, I would understand why it's so clean. Had a look through the history, and it has kinda been the same since 2013-14. I've copied over the contents of the mainpage and CSS so may play around, but the changes may need to be pretty massive, and I'm not skilled enough to do so without heavy trial and error, so it will take time. For instance, it shouldn't use tables, but divs instead.

Well, I'll fire up the game in the meantime and try a new colony. The last one basically burned to the ground :D

For further references, I've brought up these issues from different angles here:

• Ludeon forum
• Gamepedia Help Wiki

I sent him a message on Discord, hope he'll come to look, no guarantees however.Update: Zesty will look at this after the weekend

Thank you for contacting him and updating about it. Good to know he'll be on it soon :)