StrategyWiki:Staff lounge/2014/May

Editing privileges for 77.251.240.152
I am really concerned about both the quality and quantity of the edits coming from the user at IP address 77.251.240.152. I'm sure all of the staff is aware of this. I don't feel that these edits significantly improve the quality of the guides that are altered. It was one thing when it was the addition of controller input, but simply adding shrunken down inline images of items, or boldfacing occurrences of the word "map" do not strike me as constructive, and personally, I feel lowers the quality of the guide. I would like to ask the staff for their opinion on this matter. The fact that the edits are aggravating to me personally is not reason enough to block him/her, so I would like to know how others feel about it. At the very least, I would like to propose that we block edits from the IP address, but permit the creation of an account from that address. How do the rest of you feel?


 * Control edits were helpful, but anon has not been wholly aware of the cleanup I have been doing. Slow to learn, no desire to be fully engaged. A ban for wasting our time is fine. We should give them an explanation of our requirements for this particular editor to continue editing here (e.g. registration is mandatory and other improvements in their guide editing). Registration will help them learn more quickly.
 * Inline images are great, btw. He may be referring to the section I added to SW:Guide, Guide/Polishing a guide. There I wrote about in-line graphics as being beneficial and desired. -- 18:18, 30 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I feel like it is fine that we let him continue. Although it "adds work", it is beneficial that anon is spurring us (me/proc/paco/whoever) to improve our guides where possible. I have been working on im in response to help ease the process of setting up guide-specific in-line image templates. -- 15:56, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Strife
There doesn't seem to be any content here on Strife: Quest for the Sigil (Rogue Software, 1996). However, as the link indicates, there is ample information on the Doom Wiki, and there would be no legal problem with copying this here as (1) Wikias operate on the CC-BY-SA license, so as long as they are acknowledged they would have no problem with this; and (2) I wrote the walkthrough pages (mostly from scratch) and created all the maps, so I wouldn't need to obtain permission to copy those.

However, I'm wondering if there would be any ethical/social problem with respect to the culture of this wiki; some wikis have a problem with copying (even with editing of the copy), others don't, so I've decided to float the idea here before taking any action. — RobertATfm (talk) 16:14, 10 May 2014 (UTC)


 * We are completely cool with it, and actively encourage it. If you are interested in helping to bring that content over, we would be more than happy to have it.  Thank you very much for checking with us.   Pro  cyon  18:19, 10 May 2014 (UTC)


 * You may add the source to this list: Content import. Remember to add a link back to the source whenever you are adding info or images you copied. -- 22:04, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
 * If copying text from another wiki, and not all the contributions are yours, you need to either attribute the previous authors (or put a link to the original page/history) in the edit history of wherever the text is copied to. I would rather not encourage copying data from another wiki, but as long as attribution is preserved, there's no issue. All uploaded images here are assumed to be under fair use, unless explicitly tagged with something like GFDL. -- Prod (talk) 02:38, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Pharaoh/Walkthrough table issue
I don't know where to put this, but I've placed it here for a quicker response. :)

I checked on the wiki page just to see if it had been vandalised or the links changed at any point, but it appears that due to the left panel and the narrower layout, that the video links are lengthening the table and make the layout messy. Is there any way to fix this or is the wiki simply using a fluid layout so that the issue doesn't materialise on larger resolutions? --Super Sajuuk Talk Page 11:41, 12 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Please ignore this message, I've tinkered about with the page and fixed the layout problems. --Super Sajuuk Talk Page 12:01, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Footers in hub-style walkthroughs
This has come up in copying over the Strife walkthrough, and in the process editing it to conform to the style of this wiki (e.g. a "spoilerpages" tag at the start of the page, instead of a "spoiler"/"endspoiler" tag pair around the main body), because one major style difference is that this wiki uses headers and footers, whilst the Doom Wiki (where I originally saved this walkthrough) does not. This is no problem in games such as Doom where the progression is linear (except for the one level per episode where there's a secret exit), but in hub-style games there could be (and often are) multiple previous/next levels for each page. In such circumstances, is it OK to use multiple footers to cover all such combinations?

I tried looking at the Hexen walkthrough for guidance, that being the only other hub-type game I'm familiar with, but nobody has written one yet, so it looks like I'm blazing the trail here. See Strife/Town for how I've tackled this problem. — RobertATfm (talk) 08:30, 18 May 2014 (UTC)


 * No offense to you Robert, but that's... that's just terrible. Our Footer Navs provide the ability to specify custom nexts and custom prevs, but for what you need, those won't do.  I would not rely on the Footer Navs at all in this case, and write your own custom template.  You can either generalize it so that it can be used across titles, or make it specific to Strife.  But please, get rid of those Footer Navs, that's not at all how they were intended to be used.  Wherever possible, they should point to the linear progression of the Walkthrough for the player, but when that's not possible, they should just point to the next "chapter" of the guide, whether that chapter immediately follows the current page or not.  Pro  cyon  13:58, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I would suggest using a list of links to all the next locations, maybe as a table. But the Footer Nav is best to only use for the next most "obvious" (or recommended) path.  Generally we just match it to the ordering in the Table of Contents. -- Prod (talk) 14:11, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Because this problem is far from being unique to Strife, I think a generic template would be better than a specific one. One idea I've had is to make the prevpage and nextpage parameters conditional, so that if entered as "$hub" or some such, instead of a link to a page, the text "progress-dependent" (or equivalent) is generated. I'll try out this idea by creating a new template which is an edited version of , and testing that.


 * This problem is why (with the exception of Town and New Front Base, on the latter of which I used the standard footer although it's not totally applicable) I have so far only imported levels where the progression is strictly linear. — RobertATfm (talk) 16:01, 18 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Actually, it looks as if the existing template can be used the way I envisage already, by using "prevname" and "nextname" (unless those require the others to work). — RobertATfm (talk) 16:04, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
 * The FN template is actually pretty flexible. Check out the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas guide for some more advanced usage. -- Prod (talk) 23:47, 19 May 2014 (UTC)


 * All of our walkthroughs are linear. If you haven't written Strife's to be linear yet, then you haven't expanded it enough. We often have walkthroughs that return to old areas. These are often included as sub-sections of a particular page where it is relevant. If an area is wholly explored again, sometimes we have a new page that says (revisited) or something in the title to indicate this second time returning to the location. See Chrono Trigger/Table of Contents for some visit notation. -- 16:22, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I disagree with the assertion that all of our walkthroughs are necessarily linear. They may be arranged linearly because that is the format which suites the site best, but the walkthroughs themselves need not necessarily be linear.  You can direct a reader to another page in the middle of one page, with the notion that they will return to that page eventually (or perhaps not).  I know I've done that in the Metal Gear walkthroughs because they are arranged by location, not by progression.   Pro  cyon  19:46, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I have seen some alternative walkthrough description methods that stray from the traditional "describe everything in narrative prose". I do like guides like The Legend of Zelda where the dungeons are split up and the walkthrough points out key points as the player goes through the areas. The best way to do a hub-style ToC per page would be to just make a little section like "Next areas to explore" and then use a bulleted list of the other pages to go to. The footer nav prev/next page links would be less important then, but could act with a secondary function of just pointing alphabetically to the next page, or in Strife's case, to the next map number in the sequence. -- 00:07, 23 May 2014 (UTC)