Topic on User talk:Harakoni

Hi Harakoni... Just to let you know that I've started making some checks and corrections to the surgery section and other related pages.

The entire thing seemed to have become a bit confused on the wiki - bits and bobs had been added in different places: some repeating the same thing, some contradicting, some just wrong, as I'm sure you're already aware.

I noticed that:

• some of the pseudocode on the Doctoring page was incorrect (like outdoors modifiers etc.)
• the pseudocode itself it was incessantly complicated for a non-developer to understand.
• The explanations on the Doctoring page mish-mashed the concept of surgical success chance of the doctor, with the type of bed, with the instance of bed.
• The explanations appeared to get confused with environmental factors such as cleanliness and light level - in fact these affect the bed's surgery success chance multiplier which is a separate stat.
• The concept that operations have their own individual success modifiers appeared to be missing completely.
• The concept that facilities such as vitals scanner could modify outcome probabilities wasn't mentioned.
• The concept of lighting was alluded to, but contradictory and not complete.
• Generally the nomenclature "surgery" and "operation" seemed to be inconsistent across the Doctoring page; the entire wiki, and references back to the Doctoring page. It's quite confusing from a new reader's standpoint as they sound like two different things. It's admittedly a bit inconsistent in the game itself especially the descriptions - but one thing is clear, that the action on the colonist is an "operation".

So what I've done is:

• Simplified the pseudocode into simple, worded equations like you'd see on wikipedia - no mathematical symbols, variables or logical control statements (viz. "if"s).
• Broken up the different concepts onto their respective pages: Colonist Medical surgery success chance/Doctoring, Bed Surgery Success Chance Factor, medicine potency and operation chance multiplier.
• Broken up the concept between the type of bed and the placement of a bed in-world (i.e an item or instance of a bed). This is explained fully, with the equations on the Sleep Furniture's Surgery Success Chance Factor stat.
• Added previously omitted per-operation success multipliers to the Doctoring page.
• More consistently referred to operations as "operations" on the Doctoring page (at least in the scope of my edits so far).
• Checked contradictions or questionable claims against the latest game version and adjust as necessary.

What I'd like to also do is (pending acceptance of the further edit):

• Put in a redirect for Surgery -> Doctoring#Operations (Surgery) (there's already one for Operations -> Surgery).
• Consider further breaking down the doctor's stat calculation to the Medical Surgery Success Chance page (where from an engineering standpoint it should really live) - then refer to it from the Doctoring page.
• Do a quick check regarding nomenclature across the wiki wrt surgery vs operations - and make any changes needed if it will make things clearer. They should always link to the right place regardless.

Apologies that the diffs from my edits must look hefty and complex - however if you look at the resulting pages it makes the entire thing simple to understand, plus from an algorithmic standpoint it's accurate and complete. The changes are very localised and specific to the operation chance factors, even verbose. I've tried to ensure that no pertinent information has been discarded (if you see this, they have probably been moved to the correct page). I hope this explains my string of edits! It's difficult to explain this in an edit summary.

Sorry about the delay in responding, been a hectic week and I wanted to make sure I could read everything in one go lest I miss or misremember anything.

I appreciate you keeping me apprised but its ultimately its unnecessary - you made your edits in good faith, you didn't needlessly blank good information, and added more - the edits speak for themselves. I do want to say I'm very glad you took the time to go through and organize it all, it is massive improvement over what it was. You're absolutely right that it used to be a mess - it mixed up sources, it conflicted with other information and itself, and was outdated in parts. I really appreciate you putting the effort in.

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That said, I am always happy to help if you need anything though. Always feel free to HMU if you need a hand. So regarding some of the things you mentioned:

Re: Moderation permission. Permission for all those edits should already have passed through when or not long after you posted this, and I've quickly checked & approved all the pending ones you put in today. You also shouldn't have issues waiting for moderation from now on either.

Re: Medical Surgery Success Chance, what more do you want to add beyond whats already tagged for addition via the recode tag? Just an equation with the sight and manipulation percent? (also the stub tag can probably also be resolved now because of what you've already finished) Feel free to be bold on this, I'm just curious about what you intend and whether I can help, not requiring information to grant permission.

Re: Operations vs Surgery, afaict the closest thing to a differentiation might be the surgeries have a risk of failure, while operations are the hypernym - including surgeries but also everything else, but even there the game is not consistent. Given this lack of consistency I'm happy for everything to be placed under Operations and "Operations (Surgery)" to be changed to "Operations". A line that mentions that sometimes things refer to them as surgery in the intro is all it really needs and would be cleaner than the double section title.

Some minor notes on the edits:

1. The capitalization of the first letter is ignored when linking, so [[Doctoring]] and [[doctoring]] turn out as Doctoring and doctoring and go to the same place without a redirect. Capital letters elsewhere do matter though. Stat names being capitalized is annoying but its a standard I inherited rather than implemented, and unfortunately there are some things that depend on it. Another thing for the to-do list.
2. Related, things added after links without a space are also included as part of the link. So instead of [[Carcinoma|carcinomas]] you can instead just go[[carcinoma]]s and get carcinomas. This and the first one might make it a just slightly easier when editing, so thought I'd point them out.
3. STDT tables aren't necessary for the equation boxes, also have a look at Templates or other uses of them for color options. Theres a rough color coding - purple for psychic for example, but there are no hard and fast rules.
4. The line specifically calling out inspirations not affecting the cap was added because its a common misconception - what you've written is still 100% accurate, but sometimes spelling it out for people aids clarity.

Lastly, the Skills section of Doctoring seems somewhat redundant and linking to it rather than the dedicated stat pages seems like you'll run into issues with factors again. Any plans for that? Is that included as part of your intended changes to Medical Surgery Success Chance? If not, thats OK, I just don't want to get in your way if I make changes. After the effort you've put in, I'm happy for you to take the lead on it.

Oh thanks so much for replying; I realise it's not necessary to constitute my edits, but given that there was an overall "strategy" to a series of edits (and the fact that I am a new user) I thought best to explain.

Operations vs. Surgery; so glad you said this. Absolutely, my first thought was to simply call it "Operations" but didn't have the guts to in case there was some hard and fast reason why a member of the edit team staunchly stuck by "Surgery". I'll call it operations as suggested, thank you. It certainly suits me as it's what the game calls it when clicking on the "Health" tab of a colonist. Also, indeed, the most appropriately suitable in-game hypernym† as pointed out.

1. I realise this should be the case regarding case-sensitivity. However when referring to "doctoring", my links went red in preview. I figured it was probably just rendered incorrectly (two links in the same section were precisely the same; one blue, one red). Maybe I should have just committed. But what with it being pre-moderated, I couldn't quickly double-check if it was OK once published. Still trying to prove myself I didn't want my first edits to potentially contain dopey-looking dead links. I've got a bit more confidence with your kind response now, plus as you state I should now be automoderated... (thank you) so if the worst does happen I can sneak back and make a re-edit if the link is genuinely dead. Point noted for future; any resulting weird aliases I notice I've put in I'll go back and correct.

2. Ok that I didn't know! Thanks for setting me straight.

3. I'll revisit and put them in as a wikitable again; taking Nutrition and Doctoring as examples they do that. I was actually under the misapprehension that wikitable wasn't used. NB. I did originally look for the "math" template (I think that's the one; the Wikipedia template for LaTeX) but that didn't seem to work. I kind of expected some kind of serif font based template for equations.

3a. Regarding colours I did have a detailed look through and indeed concluded it was a tad inconsistent; I concluded for that reason to go with grey as some other pages did so to be safe. (I noted Doctoring was red... it didn't "feel" very medical!) But thanks for pointing it out... I'll have a look at revisiting and putting in appropriate colours, thank you.

3b. Just on the subject of equations I wondered where most of this stuff is figured out. I tried to stick primarily to what was there already; refactoring and simplifying the pseudocode and suchlike, then trying out the resulting equations in-game. But do we ordinarily do something to come up with these equations in the first place? Has someone decompiled the IL and figured out what the precise equations are?

4. Ah - yes I had a note to put that back in when I was juggling everything around. I actually thought it was such a good point that I went looking for a good tip box template. My conclusion was that I couldn't see anything used across the site other than the "meta-note" (i.e. "Edit me for this reason") notices, so decided not to use. And then forgot about it. So let me get on to putting that back in... superlative attention to detail thank you.

Re Skills in Doctoring becoming redundant - indeed I did recognise that this seems to be increasingly the case the more other appropriate places are fleshed out. You pointing it gives a lot more confidence in it making it a overall goal. I can totally have a look at doing that. I've already started bulking out Medical Surgery Success Chance and it could be the natural place for some of this to be anyway. I might have to think about XP gain and suchlike and where that should live, but totally doable I think. So glad we're on the same page.

† Completely irrelevant note regarding nomenclature of surgery "things" and forming hypernyms. I've coincidentally spent hours in meetings with hospital directors across the UK, working with the NHS (UK National Health Service) on software UI design and nomenclature (I know, exciting career choices there). The most superordinate hypernym is "procedure". This captures any kind of work performed by surgeons, including diagnostic procedures which aren't strictly classified as an "operation". In fact if you require health insurance pre-clearance in a Western country, you might know already that you're likely to be asked for the ICD-10 "procedure code". But that said it of course makes no sense to use nomenclature which the game itself doesn't use, however correct it may be in real life.

3a. Haha, I didn't choose the color, but red on white for doctoring always made sense to me - its the classic medkit colors!

3b. Equations, processes, and other info around the wiki have been taken from a variety of places. Some are experimental (which isn't always accurate and tend to be couched in language or noted as such - most get replaced), some are from the in-game documentation (which isn't accurate either), and others are from looking through the .xmls and the code. Rimworld has a large part of itself in .xml form where its pretty easy to read - most of the time I fill in the infobox for something, its by taking the relevant info from the .xml for it.

Something like dnspy or ilspy is necessary to read the C# that makes up the majority of the rest of the game, though. That is also done (for example Rest, Tolerance, and Raid points) but because its somewhat technical and can be very involved finding the relevant part, tracking down every branching part, and resolving it into real effect, its not always done. Its not that it shouldn't be done, its just that its a lot of work, and other things tend to get priority over it because more can be done elsewhere for less editor time and a lot of editors don't have the expertise required.

Anyway, I'll leave you to it. If this topic is closed, then you can close it with the ... in the top right hand corner. You're also welcome to leave it open or reopen if you want the option to chat later. I'm also on the Discord fairly often, if you post in #wiki-suggestions I'll see it.