StrategyWiki:Staff lounge

__NEWSECTIONLINK__

Welcome to all users! This page is where you 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 the community issues forum 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 (e.g. 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 four tildes: ~ ).

PCGamingWiki
Should we set up a partnership with PCGamingWiki? We can link to them from our infoboxes, and they can do the same for us. We'd also add a blurb to Guide/Partnerships. -- Prod (talk) 20:44, 10 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Interesting partnership. What specifically would interlinking provide us or simplify for us? Additionally, is it complimentary to our scope or outside of our scope? 50% of their content is duplicate with our Getting Started scope. Elements they appear to provide and track: hardware compatibility, language localization, a summary of bug fixes (whereas we often go with a mirror of official patch notes), troubleshooting fixes, 'hack' tips (e.g. special console commands for Half-Life 2).


 * I'm cool with it if they're game. There doesn't seem to be much content overlap.  My only concern is growing the Infoboxes even further, but there's not much alternative if we want to give them some visibility.  I would just make sure we have a solid agreement on how a link back to SW would be displayed.   Pro  cyon  03:31, 12 April 2016 (UTC)
 * I think our scopes are complementary, with very little overlap. They help with everything non-gameplay (backing up saves, how to get the game working if it isn't), and we cover the gameplay itself. They're also an open content independent wiki and the cross-promotion should help us both. -- Prod (talk) 05:06, 12 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I only see overlap going as far as initial setup to get the game working. With PCGamingWiki, most of the content lists how the game technically operates and goes beyond what's necessary to play the game for the average user.  StrategyWiki's Getting started pages might only describe actions to make the game playable or otherwise familiarize the player with the interface, rather than digging down into more advanced configuration or potential source ports of Doom or Hexen.  There's almost always overlap, but I don't see it between PCGW and SW. --Sigma 7 (talk) 05:49, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

NMH/Sigma 7, do you think we should go ahead with the partnership? -- Prod (talk) 06:49, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

I support the partnership. Information on how to make something actually playable is an important (but not always vital) part of beating it.--Flufftailer (talk) 18:56, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

The partnership has now been implemented and I've added a section to Guide/Partnerships! We've both added parameters to the infobox to link to each other, and my bot has populated everything it can figure out. If there are links missing, please create a redirect from the PCGW name to the SW name and my bot will pick it up whenever it runs next. -- Prod (talk) 15:42, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Series template cleanup
Series has some parameters I don't feel are useful. I'd like to remove the following from the template (and all occurrences): -- Prod (talk) 03:56, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Japanese - No real benefit knowing the name in Japanese, since the category is just for organization.
 * Designer - More relevant to check the individual games, since we don't have this in many places.
 * Firstdate/Lastdate - No benefit to mention on the series page, it's just the release of the first/last game.
 * Systems - Just a list of systems the games support, doesn't really tie them together.
 * I agree about Japanese, use nihongo in the description text if truly relevant. I don't mind keeping designer if it's truly one guy throughout the whole series, but that's rarely the case.  I agree about the dates, dates are a constant problem in infoboxes anyway.  I could see keeping Systems, kind of gives you a quick visual on how many system generations a series spans...  Pro  cyon  00:37, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree about removing the four parameters. Maybe I would keep the Firstdate/Lastdate, but it's just because I like numbers. About systems, I'd rather list them next to the individual titles as I did here: Category:Dragon Slayer -- Abacos (talk) 16:21, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
 * The only one of these I feel has a higher value and would be nice keeping is the firstdate. The starting point is a special occasion. It's nice to be able to see when a franchise started and it is a static fact. Keeping lastdates current and up to date is a lot of constant work and would duplicate a piece of info if games are listed as a timeline on the page itself. Abacos' table is a much better way to show what the most recent game is. Actually I wish that itself was a template we could use for the listing of games in a series or what games a company has made. It's beautiful! (And the format for that varies so much each page it's annoying). Information on Japanese titles and staff like designers seems like something that would work better in the description. I think it is less common to have a series that has a large disconnect between their translated names. If it's a detail the minority of series categories will have it is better an optional section in the description than a parameter on every page. --Zaiqukaj (talk) 04:35, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, the game list tables are not a template, but I started working on some kind of standardization. So far, I tried to adjust four series. As you can see from the table headers below, if a column is redundant, I leave it out (e.g. original and localized titles are identical, or all games belong to the same genre). Any suggestion is welcome (thanks Prod already). ---Abacos (talk) 00:00, 21 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I've made some of the changes to Series, it's just a matter of clearing out the old parameters. Is it agreed to remove "Systems" from the infobox as well, or should that be kept? -- Prod (talk) 23:45, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
 * As the consensus was generally to remove the system parameter, and there have been no further updates, I've deprecated the system parameter. -- Prod (talk) 21:06, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Series game lists standardization
After the input from Zaiqukaj, I started a standardization of game lists table in series categories I know. Below are the first four examples I did. I set some rules to myself: You can see my progress on my user page. But now I'll take a break, and wait for your input. --Abacos (talk) 12:27, 24 April 2016 (UTC) Let me explain better. The original topic was to remove four slots from the series template. I think that three of such slots are better represented in game lists as the ones I'm making. --Abacos (talk) 21:55, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Thumb rule: if a column is redundant, I leave it out.
 * N.: include when some titles are numbered and some are not, or when official titles use Roman numerals;
 * Original/Localized titles: include only when the two are significantly different for a significant percentage of titles;
 * Genre: include only when the genre of some games is different from the majority.
 * Overall, I think these are pretty nice, but I think we should keep them as an "upgraded" form of series pages, and not something we set up as a default. My view is that these are primarily disambiguation pages. A few comments regarding the tables:
 * Is the blank row at the top on purpose? (Category:Castlevania)
 * I like the simplicity of "Year"
 * Having those extra internal headers looks bad when sorting. I'd prefer splitting into separate tables, even if we lose sorting everything together.
 * I'm not sure we should have all the localization information on the series pages, unless it's necessary for disambiguation, like, where names overlap.
 * Systems I don't think is unnecessary, for the same reason as above. It could be a point for re-releases though, to help with disambiguation. It is kinda cool to have in one place, but it's a big maintenance task to keep up-to-date.
 * My only issue is that it seems to take up a lot more space than the lists we had before.
 * -- Prod (talk) 22:43, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

Reduce SW scope and move content to PCGW
PCGW contains a lot of PC specific information about running the games, and I feel they would be a better home for some of the information we host, much of which they already have. I'd like to propose removing "engine" and "requirements", and moving all the content to pcgw. -- Prod (talk) 17:23, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm cool with moving engine, but I wish there was a way to import the requirements from pcgw so that they show here. I don't love the idea of shuttling people off to another site to get one piece of information.  I know what I'm asking for isn't really an option, but I feel like once you send a user off to another site, you pretty much lose them.   Pro  cyon  17:38, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Worldwide SNES buttons
Those faded-out US-only SNES buttons are so ugly! Let's get the original version: they're used worldwide (in Asia, Europe, and Oceania)!

Let's remember that citizens of the United States are just 20% of world native English speakers, not to mention all those who are not native speakers (like me). Therefore, the faded-out US-only SNES buttons are useful for way less than 20% of potential users of this website. ---Abacos (talk) 08:48, 2 June 2016 (UTC) 🇨🇴 🇨🇴 🇨🇴

I propose to add one option to the { {Control selector} }, that is to differentiate between "SNES" and "SNES (US-only)". --Abacos (talk) 08:59, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
 * There's no point of having two different sets of buttons. We should either use the blue ones everywhere, or the other set, but not both. If we choose to go with these images, they should be uploaded over the existing ones. Can you fix the transparency and remove the excess padding so it's just the buttons? Personally, I prefer the current colours, since they're less distracting, but it does make sense to use international colours. -- Prod (talk) 14:05, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I get the argument being made here, although I don't think the expression of bias against the US colors really helps make your case Abacos. There are legitimate arguments for using the international colors.  Your finding the colors ugly isn't really one of them.  If you want to alter the colors to the international version, that's fine, but like Prod said, they have to be at the same standard and quality as the existing images.  Fortunately, this is really the only system where this is an issue...  Pro  cyon  17:38, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

I removed the excess padding. I couldn't learn how to fix the transparency, though... Let me rephrase my originally biased argument in support of the original colors: ---Abacos (talk) 11:43, 8 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Less than 20% of potential readers of Strategywiki are familiar with the US-only colors.
 * Many users from outside the USA refer to the buttons through their color.
 * The original colors match the SNES logo (that, for some reason, was completely changed in the USA).
 * It's actually about 50% US traffic. I don't think that's as important as accuracy though. The n64 did colour-code their buttons, oddly with a different mapping from the SNES.  I'd say let's go ahead with the new buttons once the transparency is fixed.  Should they be the same size as the previous buttons (24x24)? -- Prod (talk) 02:26, 14 June 2016 (UTC)