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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the main talk page.

← April 2006 | May 2006 | June 2006 →

Redesign of <gallery> markup

The <gallery> tag produces an eyesore of a gallery. Could it be redesigned? An example of a gallery would be Counter-Strike: Source/Player models; the labels for each image are too far away from the image in question, and formatted like normal text. I would suggest that they be moved closer to the image, and formatted like the labels for thumbnail images. --DrBob 10:58, 21 May 2006 (PDT)

I've restored the Monobook default for now. You may need to hard-refresh (Ctrl-F5 in most Windows browsers) MediaWiki:Bluecloud.css and/or gallery pages before you'll see the results. GarrettTalk 18:40, 21 May 2006 (PDT)
That's loads better. Thanks. :) --DrBob 23:34, 21 May 2006 (PDT)


Transwikification EQ from wikibooks

Greetings :) here a repost from what I just put on the EQ discussion page

"looks like the transition from wikibooks went smooth (granted, some pics didn't come across yet, but we'll get that sorted some stage). what surprised me though was, that I wasn't aware of the change (did I miss something here?). was there an announcement? I always though that things like that should at least be announced on the discussion page i.e. (no vote necessary really from my PoV, but not even an annnouncement?). also, what I hate now is, to get all those pages watched again, which is a pita somehow...but hey..:-( --Kajolus 05:07, 11 May 2006 (PDT)"

in addition: Now I learned, that some other person (User Tendiin, wikibooks) is not able to contribute to the EQ wiki anymore (firewall access issues)...even worse, as he was picking up speed...is there anything we can do?--Kajolus 05:36, 11 May 2006 (PDT)

Bah, I knew I'd slip up eventually! :( Anyway, the official policy change has been being discussed for close to a month now at the Staff Lounge, although the issue had been brought up on and off for a good year beforehand. I decided to start moving the stagnant guides and worry about the active ones later, so that as much was dealt with as possible before any deadlines arose to complicate matters further. Yesterday I made another big effort, and it seems in all that busyness I forgot which ones I'd identified as still active! So, er, sorry! :(
As for re-watchlisting this list will help. You'll also find some pages on that list that seem to have become orphaned from the rest of the guide. You may also like to turn on "Add pages you edit to your watchlist" (under Editing in Special:Preferences).
As for the firewall, hm... echelon might have some ideas. It seems strange that Wikibooks can get through, although it could be that the firewall specifically allows Wikipedia, and thus anything else Wikimedia is hosting works too.
So, anyway, I hope that explains everything. GarrettTalk 21:08, 11 May 2006 (PDT)

Template:Title

This might be useful to some people...

User:Mason11987/MyTitlePage

If you need an explanation, let me know :). Hope you like it.

stolen from [1] :). -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 15:18, 9 May 2006 (PDT)

That's pretty interesting, though I wouldn't suggest its use on a widespread basis. --echelon talk 22:59, 13 May 2006 (PDT)

Auto-linking large pages, and Intro Pages

Two things, judging by the recently trans-wiki'd Chrono Trigger guide it looks like strategy wikis doesn't automatically link pages over the 32kb limit, setting them as edit links instead. Any way to fix this? Also, getting a decision on having intro pages that force the user to click through them to get any content would be helpful. --BigCow 10:53, 11 May 2006 (PDT)

No, that's because I checked it over while importing other pages. Doing so cached the redlinked copy. It's just how things have been configured. GarrettTalk 23:35, 11 May 2006 (PDT)


Vandalism comes to StrategyWiki

At 13 May, this user dropped photos of penis on several pages, mostly in the RuneScape guide: Special:Contributions/P0op0o.

Sysops, please delete the two images uploaded by that user. I would also consider an infinite block. --Kernigh 10:47, 14 May 2006 (PDT)

Banned and deleted. --echelon talk 11:27, 14 May 2006 (PDT)

Planning to host DB dump soon

Just a note: I'll be busy much of the week, at least until Wednesday or Thursday. Soon thereafter I am planning to host a tar.bz2 archive of the StrategyWiki database and a seperate archive of our uploaded images/files. I am going to begin on a once a month schedule where I supply a full backup (Minus the user table for security concerns) of everything. This helps to both preserve the content of the website, should anything unfortunate ever occur, and also to aid in distribution. Once we become popular enough, I do believe websites will want to mirror our content, much like Answers.com does for Wikipedia. I look forward to that day when we have become the de facto, and it will make me happy that we've provided such a valuable resource.

The archive files will be located on this server (we have plenty of bandwidth). If you would like to provide suggestions to me on alternative methods of distribution (torrent, mirrors, etc.) let me know. I hope you will all download a copy for safe keeping. --echelon talk 09:51, 15 May 2006 (PDT)

I would like to add that as our rate of growth increases, so will the rate of publically available backups. Currently, a once-monthly schedule should suffice unless we can automate it without a big impact to the performance of the site. Note that in addition to this, I personally keep full, regular backups on hand; I may soon make those available to Garrett and any future admins for the safety's sake. --echelon talk 09:58, 15 May 2006 (PDT)

The Front Page! (agh)

Every time I look at the front page, it's basically the same. The Digg stuff is fine with me, but the screenshots of the week thing needs to be updated more often or replaced with something else entirely. I'll do it if I have to.

Also, the Zelda screenshot says "Celda!" - Garrett told me in #strategywiki once that this is for "cel-shaded Zelda" but to me it's a glaring typo, and it may give people the idea that guides here are chock-full of typos. If it is cel-shaded Zelda, maybe we should say that it's a pun.

This may be nothing to you guys, and if so, then okay, I can drop it - but it's really driving me mad, and I am not even mentioning the 'current' collaborations. If you need more screenshots or game artwork or anything, I will find it for you! I just really hate static home pages.

How do you guys feel about this? Am I just crazy? CosmoTalk

The best way to do a "something of the week" is to use templates which can auto update. This is what I did for the word of the day on the simple English Wiktionary. Here is the code on the main page
{{:Wiktionary:Word of the day/{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}}}
and the word of the day for today is saved at Wiktionary:Word of the day/2006-05-16. Advantages of this system is they can be set up in advance. Wiktionary's word of the day will continue until the 22nd until more need to be added. You have an auto archive of previous words of the day, and it makes the site look more active then it actually is. Gmcfoley 13:02, 16 May 2006 (PDT)
That could be really good. I am pretty sure though that a SysOp needs to implement it, right? CosmoTalk
A SysOp will have to edit the main page, yes, as it's protected. However the rest can be set up by anyone. Another option is to simply drop the "of the week" part as I did on my wiki. Gmcfoley 14:05, 18 May 2006 (PDT)
I added it, albeit that I followed Wikipedia's picture of the day format instead of the ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD...) Would you prefer this changed to ISO? Also, while SotD and AtoD are at our attention, we should probably create some kind of standard template and archive for them both, as well as a process/policy to select them. echelon talk 02:30, 19 May 2006 (PDT)

"{{CURRENTWEEK}} Number of the current week (1-53) according to ISO 8601 with no leading zero." This can be used for the "of the week" parts. The date format for the "of the day" parts are fine, as long as it's not 1/2/06, 2nd of Jan? 1st of Feb? Who knows! Gmcfoley 06:59, 19 May 2006 (PDT)

Yay, thanks echelon! I love that the front page looks more active now. As for ways to do it, I don't care. If ISO is easier, thehn let's do that. But either way, I don't think it matters. CosmoTalk

MediaWiki:Bluecloud.css not importing

I've tried making some tweaks to MediaWiki:Bluecloud.css, but it isn't working. Obviously the importing wasn't added after all. GarrettTalk 22:43, 17 May 2006 (PDT)

The page source dose have 

 <style type="text/css">
 <![CDATA[*/
 @import "/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Bluecloud.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css&smaxage=18000";
 /*]]>
 </style>

so it looks like it should be working. Gmcfoley 14:10, 18 May 2006 (PDT)

I copied Wikipedia's external link icon override to the CSS but it simply isn't going away (e.g. Template:Cover). It might be a version difference, but I'm sure I used this on a Wikicity back when they were running 1.4. Putting it directly into the true CSS file might get around this but it should be working to begin with. GarrettTalk 20:29, 18 May 2006 (PDT)
I don't understand why it isn't working, either. Do you think the CSS file is taking precedence over the imported MediaWiki:Bluecloud.css? While editing the static CSS file can be done, it's just not a permanant solution. So there's no question that I want MediaWiki:Bluecloud.css to work. Any clues here? --echelon talk 23:55, 18 May 2006 (PDT)
Just to make sure, you did clear your cache right? Gmcfoley 07:02, 19 May 2006 (PDT)
Yeah, Garrett and I just fixed this a little while ago. Sorry for not updating everyone. As he pointed out, the CDATA sections were not properly commented out. echelon... 07:37, 19 May 2006 (PDT)
Redlinks are red again thanks to "@import "/w/index.php?title=-&action=raw&gen=css&maxage=18000&ts=20060519220427";". You should probably just blank its changes, in case it being imported is actually required. GarrettTalk 15:43, 19 May 2006 (PDT)
I totally forgot that was happening! I had to enable User CSS to test the new sidebar, but I forgot that blank user CSS files make redlinks. For now I've disabled User CSS, but I may take a deeper look into MediaWiki to see if I can find and kill the source of that problem. echelon... 19:56, 19 May 2006 (PDT)

Spam

I noticed a lot of spam on this wiki. This page might help: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_Features Gmcfoley 16:28, 18 May 2006 (PDT)

Thanks for the excellent suggestion, Gmcfoley! I installed the blocklist, and the page is available here. This should surely help! --echelon talk 00:46, 19 May 2006 (PDT)


System requirements in infobox

My friend gave me the idea: it would be useful if (for PC games at least), there was a section in the infobox template for basic system requirements, such as RAM and processor speed. --DrBob 10:13, 23 May 2006 (PDT)

Sounds like a good idea to me. <("<) Alex (>")> 21:04, 23 May 2006 (PDT)
I added the spot (so you can put in the new parameter) like this:
{{infobox|
|title=
|boxart=
|developer=
|publisher=
|categories=
|systems=
|releasedates=
|players=
|ratings=
|requirements=
}}
It won't be displayed because the section that displays the requirements is optional, and it requires a feature of MediaWiki 1.6. Echelon plans to upgrade soon. As soon as he does I will tweak the template and it will start displaying the requirements for whatever infobox has them. We will be able to make any of the other parameters optional too after the upgrade. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 10:30, 24 May 2006 (PDT)
Great! --DrBob 10:49, 24 May 2006 (PDT)

GFDL goldmine

Today I had the bright idea of searching for GFDL guides... and there's a heap of authors who have already seen the light.

Unfortunately since I don't know much about these games I'm not the best person to wikify them, so if someone else knows the games and could help do it that would be great.

I'll do more later. In the meantime check out Pseudonym's FAQs. All GFDL. Wow. GarrettTalk 04:29, 23 May 2006 (PDT)

I half wikified the advance wars guide( Im playing through the game right now) by turning all the text headers to wiki headers and removed the text table of contents. Also, does anyone know of a fast way to get rid of the first space of each line quickly? It makes the wiki software format it as preformatted, which i eventually want to get rid of on the text guides. --blendmaster 20:08, 23 May 2006 (PDT)
The easiest way is to search-'n'-replace two spaces with one, and then hit delete at the end of each line to bring the next one up. This way the lines run on correctly and you also don't have to cut spaces yourself (except the first one of each paragraph). GarrettTalk 17:00, 26 May 2006 (PDT)

GameInfo

here is a category from gameinfo.com's wiki. Most of those would be VERY useful to you here. And they are under GFDL also :). -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 07:48, 23 May 2006 (PDT)

Definitely. And, even better, WikiKnowledge is public domain. GarrettTalk 16:10, 24 May 2006 (PDT)

Upgrade

As stated before, MediaWiki 1.6 is out, and there are several different advantage to it, mostly in the optional parameters addition, which would allow certain items in certain infoboxes and would definitly help with your TOC issue as well as with Allgamenav. You should really look into it. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 14:04, 23 May 2006 (PDT)

Thanks for the reminder again. I've been keeping incredibly busy. I don't know if I can get to it tonight, but I should have it taken care of before this weekend. echelon... 19:20, 23 May 2006 (PDT)
I'll put in the qif then, and when you do the change I can put it in the infobox so sections are optional :). Also, while you're doing stuff, the top-left icon doens't exist on the monobook style. If you'd put it there, I think it'd look nicer. :) -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 10:15, 24 May 2006 (PDT)
I should be able to fully install 1.6 this weekend. Sorry I've been so busy this week! As for the top left icon, what are you referring to? Are you using Monobook instead of BlueCloud? echelon... 22:17, 25 May 2006 (PDT)
Bolded previous comment for clarity. :). The infobox for games will work immediatly when you make the upgrade, all the PC games will have an "unknown" label in the requirements unless someones else puts them in. I did them all individually. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 07:25, 26 May 2006 (PDT)
The upgrade seems to have broken page listing in categories. For example, Category:Companies: the page doesn't show a list of articles in that category. If you try to edit a category which hasn't been created yet (but has articles linking to it), there is a PHP error. For example, this page gives the following error: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: openshowcategory() in /home/.batly/echelonre/strategywiki.net/w/includes/EditPage.php on line 1130 --DrBob 05:45, 27 May 2006 (PDT)
Interesting...it appears that EVERY category is broken...I didn't upgrade mediawiki on sporewiki myself, so I'm not sure exactly what could have caused that. But you can contact Zorlac the owner of sporewiki, (try his AIM), he might be able to help you out. In the meantime, I'll take advantage of the optional parameter feature :). -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 08:55, 27 May 2006 (PDT)
Okay, I've got it fixed. If a category appears not to be listing any items, try applying a faux edit to it. echelon... 11:58, 27 May 2006 (PDT)
Great! :-D --DrBob 20:03, 27 May 2006 (PDT)

Page neutrality

What do we do with pages who can't maintain a neutral POV like this one? Should this be a new rule which should be enforced?--Dan 09:22, 26 May 2006 (PDT)

I would agree that N-POV should be enforced, but not to the extent that it is on Wikipedia. I think it could be quite useful to have other gamers' opinions on games/maps/weapons/etc., but it would be quite biasing to have whole articles with a non-N-POV. --DrBob 12:32, 26 May 2006 (PDT)
Whether someone thinks a game is good or not doesn't really have a place in a game guide. There shouldn't really be any opinion whatsoever besides what you think is the best strategy, and others should be able to suggest other strategies. Whether you think a game is great or horrible gives nothing useful to the reader. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 12:43, 26 May 2006 (PDT)
Certain historical viewpoints, such as the assessment that Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII were among the best videogames ever created, are valid and have even been stated in Wikipedia. Likewise, I don't think anyone would disagree that E.T. or Superman 64 rank among some of the worst videogames ever. This knowledge is a part of our gamer culture. Nevertheless, the last thing I want any of us to do is discourage people from playing games. I would be more open to having historical, retrospective claims about why gamers should play a game rather than why they should not, and only where they are tactful. My position would be for an NPOV StrategyWiki, especially if this becomes a heated issue in the future. (You know how crazy we gamers are about asserting our opinions...) echelon... 14:55, 26 May 2006 (PDT)
True, I think more of a historical outlook on opinions is better then a personal one. I don't want to see people saying that FF7 is worse then FF8 or vice versa, because that's the kind of thing that coudl annoy some people. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 08:48, 27 May 2006 (PDT)

That guide along with many others are imported from GameFAQs (see Talk:Brain Lord). I haven't yet changed the text of any of Pseudonym's guides beyond formatting. GarrettTalk 16:30, 26 May 2006 (PDT)

Image metadata table

The appearance of the metadata table for images isn't too good. There need to be borders, or for it to be styled similar to the infobox template. A metadata table can be seen on the Image:Css_de_dust_b.jpg page. --DrBob 12:30, 26 May 2006 (PDT)

It might be useful to find the appropriate system message (or messages) that would need to be edited to fix that, unless someone else knows which ones. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 12:43, 26 May 2006 (PDT)
I can find relevant language strings, but not the markup itself. Then again, I'm not particularly familiar with how MediaWiki works, so I've probably missed something. :-( --DrBob 16:17, 26 May 2006 (PDT)
I've restored the default Monobook CSS but it's not affecting it. I assume it's to do with style layering (BlueCloud has one layer more than Monobook) but my understanding of CSS is too vague to diagnose it beyond that. GarrettTalk 16:27, 26 May 2006 (PDT)

Non-existent templates

As I've been going through Special:Wantedpages, I've found many pages link to templates which don't exist, most notably things like Template:Screenshot and Template:Startfaq. However, they're only pages in the same type of article (e.g. Zelda for Template:Screenshot and RuneScape for Template:Startfaq). Do these templates need creating? If so, what should be in them? If not, I'm going to have to remove the references to them. --DrBob 02:33, 28 May 2006 (PDT)

I would leave a message with the users responsible for each of these. It looks like Garrett created the Screenshot template, as he's doing BS Zelda. I'm not sure what the purpose for these two is, so I would advise against deleting them until we know. Maybe the people who implemented them are planning something? I would suggest we wait a few days for an answer. echelon... 13:52, 28 May 2006 (PDT)
These are due to XML importing. Screenshot is from Gameinfo where it was used to attach a generic fair use statement. Startfaq is from Open Game FAQs and was similar to {{wip}}. Regardless, neither is used here. GarrettTalk 15:34, 28 May 2006 (PDT)
If neither's used here, would you mind going through and deleting all references to Template:screenshot please Garrett? --DrBob 07:13, 30 May 2006 (PDT)

Categorisation by multiplayer/singleplayer

A fair few pages link to Multiplayer and Singleplayer/Single player, which got me thinking. Why don't we categorise by whether a game's multiplayer/singleplayer or both? It would be helpful for people looking to find multiplayer or singleplayer games. We could also put a link to the game's type in the players section of infobox (e.g. "Multiplayer (1-2)"). On a related note, should I create the MMORPG category? I'm not particularly good with that type of game, and I don't know if it's sufficiently different to MMOG that it should warrant its own category. --DrBob 03:32, 28 May 2006 (PDT)

Category:Multiplayer and Category:Single_player are great ideas! I highly suggest this. As for MMORPGs/MMOGs, I wouldn't know much about them either; I can't give you any advice there, unfortunately. echelon... 13:49, 28 May 2006 (PDT)
I've decided that MMORPGs should just be categorised as both MMOGs and RPGs; it makes things neater. I'll go through and do that now. --DrBob 07:15, 30 May 2006 (PDT)

Dynamic navigation

I was wondering if editors here would find a dynamic navigation template (or simply the code for it) useful in writing guides. Here is an example of a template that uses it and this is an example of the code in action. For this to happen the skin.js (for bluecloud and/or monobook) as well as the skin.css (for those) would have to be changed similar to this monobook.css and this monobook.js. We copied our Common.css from wikipedia and parts of it may or may not be required for this to work. It SHOULD work if you copy directly from our monobooks css and js directly to yours, if you're interested I'll get it going, I imagine it would be good for navigation things for guides. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 14:13, 30 May 2006 (PDT)

I tried installing this about a week ago but it broke the OOT sidenav. I don't understand Javascript so I have no idea what went wrong. GarrettTalk 15:47, 30 May 2006 (PDT)

Interesting...we took a few tries to get it to actually work correctly, did you try in on monobook.css and monobook.js? Since neither of those work for the Oot sidenav, maybe this would be more useful for that at least? And perhaps if we get it going on monobook we can figure out what the problems would be between the two of them. Did the dynamic nav actually work? Or did it just mess up the OOT sidenav? I'm going to go check out some page histories. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 16:11, 30 May 2006 (PDT)

Hm, I could try that I guess. It was completely broken in BlueCloud. The show/hide link didn't show up and the sidenav also lost its positioning. It looks like the sidenav can be done without JS though (Wikia's AdSense is positioned using CSS only) so that will help. Right now I'm working on adapting the AdSense CSS to work for Monobook's sidenav, and once that's working the dynamic nav won't clash any longer. GarrettTalk 16:17, 30 May 2006 (PDT)
When we were setting ours up the show hide didn't work either, there is a small bug in it if you transfer directly, I'll make a personal js that will work and you can transfer it as a test. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 16:33, 30 May 2006 (PDT)
I see... well I've worked out how to make a JS-less sidenav in Monobook (it needs serious tweaking, but it works). Hard-refresh the CSS and it should work. The loss of the right-hand area is unfortunate, but since all guides will probably be using this eventually the full width probably isn't going to be used much anyway. GarrettTalk 16:38, 30 May 2006 (PDT)

SVG file format

As of now, Strategy Wiki does not allow uploads of *.svg file formats as wikipedia does. These are very small XML based vector graphics. For an example, check out the flag icons on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FF6

I'm also trying to copy over some very important templates from Wikipedia, importing its http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Logo to our very own template:logo. This is important so that we can legally cover our butts when I add the copyrighted ESRB rating icons to the template:Infobox. I hope to eventually add an {{{awards}}} variable to that template as well and would like to use those individual awards graphics, in fair use, of course. I'm working on a replacement infobox with rating icon implementation, but this server needs to allow the upload of *.svg file formats so we can also use this current standard of small, simple and most important, scalable graphics..--Filthy swine 15:26, 28 May 2006 (PDT)
Did I also mention that when *.svg files are used for location maps, anyone can edit an inaccurate picture with out having the original photoshop layers? SVG should be implemented on the server ASAP.--Filthy swine 13:50, 31 May 2006 (PDT)
I do the map overlays (well the first one for now) for Earthbound in inkscape, an open source svg editor. If they were uploaded in svg, it'd be a lot easier for someone to edit the overlays, as they are done in svg. --blendmaster 15:19, 14 June 2006 (PDT)

SVG graphics renderer implementations in browsers are also few and far between. IE (which is unfortunately by far the most commonly used browser) doesn't have one, and many people wouldn't want to download a third-party plugin such as the Adobe SVG Viewer to view the images. --DrBob 14:19, 31 May 2006 (PDT)

This doesn't apply to MediaWiki though; it prerenders a PNG version. Check out commons:Image:Red copyright.svg with IE. GarrettTalk 14:40, 31 May 2006 (PDT)
I must apologise then. :-( --DrBob 16:03, 31 May 2006 (PDT)
I'll try to implement this tomorrow. If for some reason I forget, feel free to antagonize my email address. :) echelon... 22:46, 15 June 2006 (PDT)


Videos

Will there be support for any video files? Although I'm not for adding obnoxious videos of every level to your guide, there are instances when that could be beneficial. If you are going to enable video files, I would recommend Ogg Theora format for two reasons: it's patent-free, and it's an extra step to take and to worry about, which will probably keep vandals from uploading a lot of porn....

theEXIT talk 17:07, 17 May 2006 (CT)

This concept actually does interest me. Some problems that come to mind are bandwidth, overuse, redundancy, and quality. But if we could overcome this, I have no problem with video. Ogg format is definitely the most open one to go with. Another possible idea is streaming FLV to embed directly into the website. --echelon talk 23:51, 18 May 2006 (PDT)
I admit that this video business would have to imply certain guidelines. So far, in everything that I've thought about, you hardly need videos over a minute in length, and most of the time, the video is supposed to show a particular tactic that is easier to show than to explain. I know that with the use of images, there is a policy that "each image must serve a purpose," yet truth of the matter is: images help layout (like the little cartoony image of Link and Navi in the OoT guide...) and provide a minor decorative frame of refence. With video content, however, that simply is not the case. I have to say that FLV embedding sounds rather obnoxious, or at least I can immediately see how it CAN be extremely obnoxious in wrong hands. All I'm saying, I guess, is that peer review would be more important than ever in this. TheEXIT 05:40, 19 May 2006 (PDT)
Hmm, if there was some way to embed flash into pages, we could use google video or youtube for walkthroughs like that, without worrying about bandwith. The only problem is people could embed other flash stuff into pages, which would be annoying/destructive, so there would have to be some way to only allow google video/youtube/other video sharing site flash files. --blendmaster 09:55, 21 May 2006 (PDT)
That's a good idea, if their policies about outside linking allow that. It would certainly be possible to design a tagging format whereby {{youtube:mFQz98jAcg8}} would result in an embedded Flash with http://youtube.com/watch?v= already appended to the beginning. GarrettTalk 13:51, 21 May 2006 (PDT)
Flash is good, but there are many people without it, so it would be good if the proposed "youtube" template also took in the name of an image to which it can fall back if the user's browser doesn't have Flash. --DrBob 13:59, 21 May 2006 (PDT)
I think that most of the video format here should be "the last resort" of communication. In that respect, I see nothing wrong with allowing upload/download of ogg-theora files. I can not say that I support the YouTube implementation of video into guides: it can be very annoying, and it also takes away from the polished visual appeal of the guide. Regardless, I do believe that video-based media ought to be allowed, but I'm also afraid that I've opened a can of worms that could make Walkthroughs here more obnoxious than anywhere else... --TheEXIT 15:43, 21 May 2006 (PDT)
Oh, definitely, inline movies would be awful. The way I see it the movie would instead be in a sidebar with a preview thumbnail. Clicking the YouTube option would unfurl an overlay containing the player, while the download option would link to the Ogg. GarrettTalk 16:55, 21 May 2006 (PDT)

Hmmm... after experimenting with a quick sample I'm not so sure about using YouTube. The player forces video at 4:3, meaning direct emulator output (such as this) can't be used as-is. I haven't tried Google Video yet, but since they say content might be cut when the beta ends I'd still prefer YouTube. If everything else fails perhaps a custom FLV player supporting dynamic perspective could be made (maintaining the logo overlay, thus being technically identical and not violating their Terms of Use). GarrettTalk 22:12, 21 May 2006 (PDT)

Google video now has the near instant uploads youtube has, and it has a nicer player that resizes dynamically. As long as they don't delete stuff when they go out of beta (which i haven't heard of until now), then they would be the nicer solution. To avoid unnessecary video, you could make it so embedded videos would require approval from an administrator before put on a guide too. --blendmaster 20:03, 22 May 2006 (PDT)
That's sounding good. And now that I've looked at it again it doesn't say what I thought it did, but instead that the videos have to be approved for inclusion at the end of the beta. To me Google Video looks to be aimed more at being an online video store than a place for your own random clips, but I may just be misunderstanding it. As for overuse, really disruptive videos can be added to the spam blacklist. GarrettTalk 22:29, 22 May 2006 (PDT)
If we really want to be as open source-strict as Wikipedia, it's best we show our ownly bias into open source. Meaning, we will have to host our own Ogg videos that will be available for download, since hosting our videos on YouTube or Google Video implies the inclusion of closed source software. Remember, SW is the 100% open source alternative to GameFAQs and every other closed source video game site in the world. We need to show them that a video game site, such as a replacement to GameFAQs, can live off of nothing but non-propriety and free code.--Dan 08:36, 26 May 2006 (PDT)
I'm with Dan on this, despite the obvious problems that may arise from hosting the videos. In any case, sooner or later it would have to be implemented. As I've stated before, I don't think that inclusion of any 3rd party video hosting will do much to make this webspace appear more professional. --TheEXIT 02:27, 29 May 2006 (PDT) P.S. Don't hate me for this. :)
Actually, I have no problem with developing our own open source streaming FLV server akin to that of YouTube or Google Video. While the FLV file format isn't open (Macromedia owns it), the videos themselves would be. As would the player/server we use to broadcast and host them--I'd develop it and release it under the GPL. I actually need to develop the program for another gaming website project, so developing it would kill two birds with one stone. And as I stated before, I would want to have the videos hosted in FLV *AND* Ogg, and neither would be inline. echelon... 22:48, 31 May 2006 (PDT)
Well, look what i found. --blendmaster 20:41, 5 June 2006 (PDT)
Most excellent! :) echelon... 22:47, 15 June 2006 (PDT)

Multiple types of guides

I was just thinking about the possibility of hosting multiple guide types. Many at Gamefaqs have criticized this project for not supporting more than one type of guide. Though I still stand completely firm about no redundancy in this project whatsoever, I can imagine different types of walkthroughs being made. For example, there might be a speed run walkthrough to supplement the regular one. I do not see these as repeating anything, but simply "branching" from the main guide. What do you think? If we do implement this, it may require we change some things about our URL and article naming policy. --echelon talk 22:57, 13 May 2006 (PDT)


It'll be kind of an inevitability if the site gets popular enough that people will have more than one type of content they'd want to host, but I think that could still be handled with one main guide. Consider the typical types of guides featured on GameFAQs:
  • Boss FAQs/Strategy FAQs against the weapons in FF7 for example: covered under our system, since we have more sub-pages than just a walkthrough.
  • MiniGame Guide: Same thing, see the imported Final Fantasy VII guide.
  • Game Script: These would actually be nice to have, but they could work as sort of an "Additional Content" thing under the main guide, kind of like a Plot FAQ again.
  • Specific Character Guides for fighting games like smash bros, same kind of thing
  • Maps/Charts: Integrated into the walkthroughs or given their own section
  • Speed Run/Low Level Guides: these are the hardest since they're often a complete departure from a normal walkthrough, and they can be an entire walkthrough of the game with a specific goal in mind. I'd prefer to give them their own section underneath the main guide, as in something like Chrono Trigger/Speed Run/Introduction or something similar. Basically make them a subpage.
The main problem we might have is that people might have very conflicting strategies for a game like Starcraft, or even something like Final Fantasy VIII about the best tactics to use or way to build levels. In some cases we may just need to list multiple strategies or link to different pages which describe different approaches, a Starcraft Guide might have some sub guides on teching, rushing your opponent early, etc.
Our table of contents could read like a complete GameFaqs list of guides, with the advantage of having no redundancy. They would link Plot FAQs and Boss FAQs as separate guides, we'd just consider them to be a part of a single complete guide.--BigCow 00:30, 14 May 2006 (PDT)
Game scripts would be another good idea, but that's not possible under the GFDL (where all content must be either GFDL or the precarious "fair use"). Changing to CC-BY-SA would free up multi-licensing some. GarrettTalk 03:39, 14 May 2006 (PDT)
I don't think there's any need for more than one guide hub though. Maybe a separate TOC for each walkthrough type, but certainly not a completely separate guide. Supages make that unnecessary. GarrettTalk 03:37, 14 May 2006 (PDT)
Yeah, I so no need for something like Metroid Fusion (speed run) and Metroid Fusion (1% run) at all, when they can be subpages, as Garrett said. I was thinking of implementing those after I finished my work on MF, as optional quests towards the bottom of the TOC. Cosmo
(I've also added seperate map pages within the guide for things like getting 100%.) Cosmo
I am really new to wiki scripting, but since we have multiple pages with tags everywhere, is there a way to use a command similar to php "include" so that you could pull bits and pieces from a page? For instance, in a game like Zelda, a person may wish to create a little floating blue box page per every Boss (with strategy to beat him), and then simply include them in various files, sorta like the Category tags work. Except instead of providing mere links to a page, it would pull out every boss in order and put it in a nice guide (perhaps even with it's own navigation, etc.) Similar ideas could be applied to everything, so then the information would be stored as pure data, and then TOC would contain every viable option to view that information in a sorted manner... I don't know if that's possible to do with the way Wiki stores things, though. --theEXIT talk 00:24 May 17, 2006 (CT)
The easiest way is to transclude a page like a template, e.g. {{:Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Ganondorf}}. Note the : before the page name, without this it'll look in the Template: namespace. You can see this in action at BS Zelda: Kodai no Sekiban/Printable version. This page has no real content of its own, meaning it only has to be updated when an entirely new page is added to the guide.
For really fancy results you can tag parts of a page that are not to be included (<noinclude>) or else are shown only when included (<includeonly>). You can see this demonstrated rather confusingly at this source page vs. this target page. The first has all the text, but due to the mixed tagging each page has its own unique links.
Wikipedia's Navigation popups use a fancy Javascript method to extract a chosen section but I haven't looked into it. For most purposes the other two methods should be sufficient. GarrettTalk 16:19, 17 May 2006 (PDT)
I've thought about that... But Templates are designed for something else entirely. Despite the fact that you can create {{{Template:GAME_NAME/BOSS_GUIDE/BOSS_NAME}}} it would get confusing quickly. For that very reason I chose to copy/paste my own 'custom' navigation bar with "elite" (pun intended) icons throughout my SQ3 guide. I guess there is no other way, really, to include such pages. Perhaps if the community could decide on a global format for certain data output (like for bosses), the Wiki could be better "suited" to fit our needs. Thanks for the JavaScript link, however... I'll investigate that. --theEXIT talk

Panoramic screenshots

I made a couple of panoramic screenshots using GoCubic for the Counter-Strike: Source pages. However, every time I try to upload them, I get given a '".mov" is not a recommended image file format.' error message, and I can proceed no further. I think it would be a good thing if people were allowed to upload .mov files, as then the wiki would benefit from panoramic screenshots for games, which really do help show the reader what the level's like. --DrBob 12:58, 17 May 2006 (PDT)

Actually ".mov" is only a container format for various "codecs" of video, audio, image, and text streams; it can contain everything from raw, uncompressed "digital video" streams and linear audio (which use huge amounts of storage) through to MPEG4 format (which compresses well but has patent issues). Thus any decision to allow .mov files would involve the question of which codecs to allow. --Kernigh 22:41, 17 May 2006 (PDT)
This then moves into the "videos" discussion below, but I do think it would be of real use to the wiki if panoramic screenshots were allowed. --DrBob 15:10, 19 May 2006 (PDT)
DrBob, I agree that this could be of a real potential use. If you wouldn't mind, do you think you could create a demonstration to show us exactly how it could be applied to Counter-Strike: Source? I am not certain whether "panoramic screenshots" or downloadable ogg videos or embeded FLV (like Google Video) is better, so it would be great if we could see a demonstration of each technology in use. It may be that we will come to use a combination of two or more of them. echelon... 22:01, 19 May 2006 (PDT)
Even if we do offer FLVs there should still be a downloadable equivalent. It would be great to watch part of a solution while the rest is downloading, and then refer to it later without having to return to the site and wait for the part you've already watched to load all over again before you get to something new. GarrettTalk 22:47, 19 May 2006 (PDT)
I've put two sample panoramic screenshots up on my site: inside and outside views of Counter-Strike: Source/Maps/cs_assault. They're 512px by 512px, which is probably about the right size for the wiki (you can't easily make larger ones in Counter-Strike: Source anyway). :-) --DrBob 06:10, 20 May 2006 (PDT)
This is a very original idea, I love it. However, there is one flaw that's just killing me. QuickTime is closed source. If we could find an open source paranormic viewer, preferably in Javascript (is that possible?), I see no reason why we shouldn't do this.--Dan 11:37, 26 May 2006 (PDT)
The goal of this wiki (for me) is to be the best. OSS is good (and I personally love it), but the only alternative to QTVR I could find was SPi-V, which is Shockwave, and costs money. QTVR is decent, and if you don't want to use the official QuickTime player, OSS movie players such as Totem can decode the file and play it as a conventional movie. Writing a viewer in Javascript is a completely implausible idea: Javascript was never designed for rendering images in 3D, and neither were browsers, so the clipping and image distortion functionality needed to implement one isn't available for Javascript. My vote goes for QTVR. --DrBob 12:09, 26 May 2006 (PDT)

Zelda OOT

Talk:Zelda: Ocarina of Time I'd like some comments about potential merger of the cover and TOC pages. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 14:41, 23 May 2006 (PDT)

I do have an idea for that, but we'd first have to solve the the issue of navigation. See the new post I made. echelon... 22:16, 25 May 2006 (PDT)



Icons

I think there should be some kind of "icon" system in place for in-guide links. Each link could have a small template before it which displays a small "icon" image which shows what that link is for. For instance, in the LOZ:OOT link Zelda: Ocarina of Time/The Beginning there is this section:

== Welcome to the Kokiri Forest! == {{big|L}}ink, our young hero, is the only boy in the Kokiri village without a fairy. Suddenly he is awakened from a particularly disturbing nightmare to find a fairy in his room. The fairy, exasperated, beckons Link to come with it to the '''[[Zelda: Ocarina of Time/The Great Deku Tree|Great Deku Tree]]''', in order that he would hear important, if not urgent, news. The young boy bursts through the doors of his home, only to be greeted by '''[[Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Saria|Saria]]''', his childhood friend. She is overjoyed that Link has finally gotten a fairy of his own, but Link knows deep inside that this was not to be the happy day his friends would expect it to be. The jealous '''[[Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Mido|Mido]]''' will do his best to make sure of that too. Shocked inexplicably by the apparent favor that both Saria and the Great Deku Tree have shown to Link, he will do everything in his power to prevent you from seeing the great tree. He insists that you must have both a sword and a shield before you can pass. What a jealous fellow, indeed! == Getting past Mido == Clearly, this portion of the game was designed in order for you to become accustomed to the controls. Fortunately, this is unlike almost any other in-game tutorial out there: it's fun. Already, you have been presented with a problem—that Mido is blocking your way—and now you must set out to find a solution. You will need to find the '''[[Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Kokiri Sword|Kokiri Sword]]''' and the '''[[Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Deku Shield|Deku Shield]]'''. While you can get the items in any order, [[#Getting the Sword|getting the sword]] first may help you acquire the 40 Rupees necessary to [[#Getting the Shield|purchase the shield]].

I think it would be useful before the Saria and Mido if there was {{npcicon}} which would let you know that that is an NPC, and would link to an NPC page. (Or enemy, or friend page). Also, for the Kokiri Sword and the Deku Shield links, maybe little {{swordicon}} or {{weaponicon}} and {{shieldicon}} to symbolize what they are. In certain games (FF in particular) this would be very useful. That's because the guide could say you picked up a Gyshal Green in a chest or on the ground, and the since we aren't going to have a Gyshal Green page, we could just have that icon to let you know that that is an Item and the link would lead to an item list page or something. I think this would be especially cool because it would liven up the pages and allow for more information in less space when listing tresures that could be found somewhere or things like that. I don't know exactly what images we'd use or anything like that, but I thought it would be fun and useful. I saw it used very well in an awesome FFVII guide (far better then the wikibooks one) I'll just have to find that to show what I mean. It doesn't need to general templates for all guides, they can definitly be specific if there is a need (like deep rpgs might need their own set), but I think it'd be worth it to try to make things like that. Red links in the "feature guide" isn't really a good thing and while just changing it to the weapons page would be useful, this might be an extra touch that differentiates this site from other game guide sites. -- Mason11987 (Talk - Contributions) 19:17, 23 May 2006 (PDT)

Do you mean something about the size of the icon next to my username to designate what the link is? echelon... 22:10, 25 May 2006 (PDT)
I am fairly certain that's what he means, but I am sort of on the fence about this. On one hand, it would look really great. On the other, it may be difficult to do for some guides, and not all writers may be spriters on the side. I'll wait for more input from other users before making a real decision. Cosmo talk
It could be an interesting thing to do. I would definitely be in favor of having guides with their own game-specific flair in order for them to have personality, so long as doing so doesn't deviate too much from a standard formula. echelon... 22:19, 15 June 2006 (PDT)

Upgrade Completed! Now our next problem...

We're now running on MediaWiki 1.6.6! You can now use default values in templates. On this note, I need to bring up a potential problem: Our database has grown quite large, and it's difficult to easily manage. While this server has a ton of space available to use, I am getting archive errors every time I try to tar the database. In fact, the database dumps themselves might be to blame; I am not sure mysqldump is handling it correctly. I have tried both with and without the --hex-blob parameter. Any suggestions? echelon... 22:14, 26 May 2006 (PDT)

New community portal

Aside from the big task of finding a solution to the intro pages we unanimously voted to remove, I would also like to bring attention to the community portal. I was growing tired with how outdated it was, since with most wikis the portal serves as a valuable information resource and collaboration tool. I think that we should take advangage of it. By emulating Wikibook's model, the page can serve to host a "collaboration of the month", list "wanted guides", and introduce new users to StrategyWiki. Any thoughts and opinions on this? echelon... 22:20, 26 May 2006 (PDT)

Requests for help in articles

As I've been going through sorting out categorisation issues, I've found quite a few articles have their own non-standard requests for help, pointers to the editing guidelines, and lists of contributors. I think this is quite poor; it takes the attention away from the article itself, and isn't standardised. Articles like this should be using the wip template, but perhaps it isn't helpful enough to persuade potential contributors to improve the page? Regardless, I think articles like this and this (at the bottom) should be changed and standardised. --DrBob 12:37, 27 May 2006 (PDT)

I think that your concern is valid, and that it could scare people away from our wiki. We could devise a standardized "work in progress" template that, with careful wording, explains that the present guide is a work in progress and directs users to the talk page to discuss the guide's proper creation. Perhaps something that looks like the box at the top of the OoT guide, but with much better and clearer wording. echelon... 22:17, 15 June 2006 (PDT)
I would agree with that. Perhaps it should be part of the Template:wip template? --DrBob (Talk) 22:48, 15 June 2006 (PDT)
That works for me. The wip template needs a little beefing up though, perhaps some more text and a link to pages that explain the editing process as well. A border wouldn't hurt either. echelon... 00:31, 16 June 2006 (PDT)
I've done the work on the wip template, but I haven't been able to link to pages on editing technique yet, as we either don't have them, or I don't know where they are. :-( --DrBob (Talk) 10:09, 16 June 2006 (PDT)
The wip and stub templates look nice, but why an icon and big box for the spoilers template? It seems kind of unnecessary. Well, I made some icons for the wip, stub and a possible wikify templates in svg. They are here. I think they do a better job then the stock tango templates like the raincloud and paintbrush thing, but they aren't the best. Any comments/complaints on them before i upload? --blendmaster 18:35, 23 June 2006 (PDT)
Your icons look great, but I'd make the body of the stub star a little darker (more visible). The spoilers template has an icon and a big box to make it highly visible. We don't want people stumbling into spoilers sections when they don't want to, and we've got to cater for people with all sorts of levels of visibility. --DrBob (Talk) 19:02, 23 June 2006 (PDT)

New collaboration of the week

May I suggest that we get everything categorised as a collaboration of the week? Half the games don't have any categories, and the other half aren't fully categorised. One major thing which needs to be done is to add multiplayer or single player categories to every game (either, or both; depending on what the game is like). If this goes ahead, it should be added to the main page. --DrBob 07:11, 30 May 2006 (PDT)

DrBob, categorization would be made much simpler if template:infobox.new enabled inputing multiple genres in the {{genre}} value. I'm trying to learn wiki markup language as much as possible, but there are a few things I don't quite understand. Right now, I'm stuck on how the arrays are structured.
(^--That was Filthy Swine. Please sign your comments in future.) Whatever's put into the page's Template:infobox (or Template:infobox.new) template doesn't categorise it; it just links to the specified page. Categorisation is performed by putting [[Category:Category name]] links at the bottom of pages (note the lack of preceding colon). This includes a page in the specified category, and is what I was talking about. Of course, if you add a category to the bottom of the page, chances are that it should also be linked to in the appropriate place in the Template:infobox, but for that we just use comma-separation, and that's why Template:infobox.new won't work, because in its present state it only allows a link to one category for each heading. --DrBob 01:35, 31 May 2006 (PDT)
I'd have to agree with DrBob. It's a clever idea but it doesn't allow multiple values. Another way to streamline would be a template ({{cat|Whatever Category}}) that expands to [[:Category:Whatever Category|]][[Category:Whatever Category]]. However a major problem with both of these methods is that the infobox is often on a subpage, meaning the automatic categories would be categorising the wrong page. GarrettTalk 04:31, 31 May 2006 (PDT)
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