StrategyWiki:Staff lounge

__NEWSECTIONLINK__

Welcome to all users! This page is where people can ask StrategyWiki-related questions to the staff and senior community figures, and they will do their best to answer. If you want to raise a topic for discussion (rather than just ask about it), please use community issues instead. New issues are entered here, with the most recent at the bottom of the page. If your question does not pertain to editing StrategyWiki (i.e. asking for hints or game-specific information), please ask on the guide's talk page or on the forums.

Please review the Table of Contents to see if your issue has already been raised; also check the archives (to the right) in case it was discussed some time ago.

To facilitate ease of browsing and replying, please:
 * 1) Place your question at the bottom of the list
 * 2) Title the question (by placing the title between equals signs: ==title==)
 * 3) Sign your name and date (by adding two hyphens and four tildes: --~ )

Main page templates
Above are suggestions for cleaning up and making some of these templates more useful. Please add your opinions and ideas. The only one that may not be very straightforward is the change to sys. This is helpful in circumstances where the redirect is getting the system category, but there's some information you want to put in the main page's infobox. This may be a usage issue rather than anything lacking in the template. I know I've created mock "sys" divs in the infobox before, but I can't think of any examples at the moment. — najzere T 21:46, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) infobox: Get rid of some parameters.
 * 2) *japanese: redundant, should be in the main writeup in the nihongo template
 * 3) *distributor: who cares, rarely used
 * 4) *media: noted elsewhere, rarely used correctly
 * 5) *input: noted elsewhere, rarely used correctly
 * sys: Add a parameter to not include the category, or to go even further, make a new template that just has the formatting so you can specify your own system name and icon.
 * co: Add a parameter for alternate link text.
 * I only have a strong opinion about the japanese parameter. While I agree that, in some cases, it can be redundant, it isn't always.  For example, it would be a little strange to nihongo something like "Donkey Kong" or "Super Mario Bros." because they're not Japanese names.  Yet, having the katakana in the infobox is a handy way to have something to copy/paste into Google if you wanted to see what searching in Japanese would reveal.  For me personally, this is a handy research tool, and I would hate to see it leave.  Since it's an optional parameter, if it doesn't get filled then it doesn't get filled.  But I would argue that it has a useful purpose, even if not always 100% of the time.   Pro  cyon  00:22, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * We might as well leave the others in, considering the future scope of SW. -- 00:48, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * @Procyon: Donkey Kong (ドンキーコング) looks strange? That's how I've always seen the template used, as a way to get that "?" link at the end of the Japanese. For the japanese parameter, I'm suggesting moving it out to the main body if it's not there already, so it would still be usable for searching (I use it all the time too, I definitely don't want to see the Japanese go). I always wondered why, if the japanese parameter is there, there's no "european" parameter, as there are tons of games that have an alternate PAL name. Those work just fine noted in bold in the writeup as well.
 * @Notmyhandle: Do you mean the inclusion of non-commercial and/or non-notable games? Could you elaborate on how the other parameters will be used?
 * — najzere T 06:33, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't mind seeing the |japanese go, as long as the information wasn't lost. Just because |distributor is rarely used, doesn't mean we should get rid of it.  If the information is found, include it.  How are media and input noted elsewhere?.  I don't understand your reasoning for changing sys and co.  Additionally it's too complex and widely used to complicate and increase the load on the servers. -- Prod (Talk) 15:09, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
 * The distributor has no impact or say so in the development of game, they're just a glorified middleman, so I'm not sure why anyone ever thought a field for a purely business-related item would be relevant, except that our infobox seems to be modeled heavily after WP's (meaning encyclopedic). For media and input, they're being used to show highly obvious and redundant material, such as Nintendo 64 games play on cartridges, or Windows games use keyboards. I can't even think of why we need a media field – is there a system that doesn't just play its own standard media? Input is useful if used correctly, when the input is non-standard, like when a game uses a floor dance pad or something, but it's mainly being used to display the standard controllers, or even worse, a list of all types of input that work with the game. By and large these two fields mirror what's found on the game's WP page, but I think WP's approach to articles is different than ours. The problem with all these extra parameters is that people want to fill them. We don't include them in the preload, so it's not like we want them to do that. Especially when they're mostly used incorrectly, as with media and input.


 * I remembered why I needed the formatting from sys: when a game has an alternate name/release on PC, the redirect gets categorized, but the pc requirements are found on the main page. If sys is needed in the requirements field, it will erroneously categorize the main page with the system category. Also concerning the requirements field, I've seen the formatting mocked up so we could distinguish between Windows Vista and XP, for example.


 * The co template I thought was pretty obvious and didn't expect to find any opposition to it. As it stands you have to put in the full category name, so in the case that a category link redirects to a category with a different name (e.g. Psygnosis), you wouldn't be able to put the name of the developer at the time at which the game was developed. Of less importance, you also can't use it to shorten the link name (e.g. SCE) or use an alternate name (e.g. Bally Midway). In short, there's no way to use our helpful category redirects.


 * About the server load, I'd hate to see that reasoning become an excuse not to clean things up and make the site better. Can the job queue be controlled in any way? Such as allowing the servers to perform certain tasks at designated times? I know that during the week in the middle of the day (PST), there aren't a whole lot of edits being made, though what that says about viewership, I don't know. — najzere T 16:01, 3 October 2009 (UTC)