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Note that I've used / to indicate the hierarchy because it shows up easier than anything else; whether / becomes the standard is another matter. | Note that I've used / to indicate the hierarchy because it shows up easier than anything else; whether / becomes the standard is another matter. | ||
=== Pages that should remain where they are === | === Pages that should remain where they are === | ||
Revision as of 05:34, 28 August 2005
Template:Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/Header
Welcome to the discussion page for the wiki book Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. To minimize editing conflicts, use the + button at the top of the page, rather than the edit this page button.
Mission page renaming
The mission pages are getting ridiculously long names. Like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Sean "Sweet" Johnson I.
Then if Aya makes his individual mission pages we'll have even *longer* names.
What I suggest is that we have pages named like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Missions: Sweet: Mission Here. Short and simple. We don't need the person's surnames etc., just the main name used for them. Similarly, the character page for him would be Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Characters: Sweet.
That is if we change Grand Theft Auto >> GTA for the longer page names of course. But they definitely need to be threaded together somehow, and not just by the character. Garrett 01:51, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
UPDATE: upon further investigation of the Wikibooks mechanics, shortening the name is not advisable as those pages would be "orphaned" from the actual namespace. Garrett 03:09, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
x mama suck it
Puzzling out the hierarchy
To try to get some agreement on how pages should be tiered, if at all, here is a list of all current and proposed pages.
Feel free to tweak the list to put the pages into whatever hierarchy or lack of hierarchy you think is right; when we agree on the list it can then become the standard.
Note that I've used / to indicate the hierarchy because it shows up easier than anything else; whether / becomes the standard is another matter.
Pages that should remain where they are
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- /100% Completion Checklist
- /Frequently Asked Questions
- /Contents
- /Index
- /Basics
- /Mods
- /Sources
- /Vehicles
"Almost final" ones (that are already sorted out)
- /Characters
- /(character name here) << each character would eventually have their own page
- /Characters
Latest Changes
I've made loads of changes today. I'm trying to see if I can squeeze everything into one of the four subpages "Basics", "Missions", "Vehicles" and "Items".
Aya 00:40, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- All looking good! Burglar should maybe be a subset of /Missions/Vehicles/ though, but that's just a minor thing. Garrett 01:30, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- I wasn't planning on having that many levels of hierarchy. I didn't have much time to explain last night. I'd been editing pages for about 12 hours and was starting to get a little tired. My latest design model is as per the next section: Aya 13:23, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
New design model
This is partly based on your comments that page names were getting too long, and that the use of hierarchies (using '/') was a good thing, both of which I agreed with (eventually :-)).
Even though I still believe that a full contents list is beyond the scope of the main page, I still think it a good idea to use the main page as a jumping-off point to the lowest level of the hierarchy (since that way, you can navigate through the entire book without resorting to the contents or index pages). To this end I figured it would be worth minimising the number of immediate children of the main page, to reduce the amount of links in it. This is based on my critique of the main page of the whole wikibooks site, which is far too confusing for a newbie, since is has far too many links in it, and many of them take you to either identical, or, worse still, near-identical duplicate pages which ought to be merged or whatever. The site is a bit of a mess as I had previously mentioned (e.g. the evilness of the page Appendix, which ought to be scoped into some sort of SQL namespace), but I don't have the time to fix the whole thing. Perhaps future releases of MediaWiki will make this easier. Anyways... on with the design:
The current low-level hierarchy looks like this:
I'm also thinking of adding one final page at the lowest level:
And now. A quick explanation of what content should go into what sections.
- Meta - Anything which is to do with the organisation of the book, rather than content for the book. This section won't be in the "brief contents" or "full contents" lists, since it's aimed at people who edit the book, rather than those reading it.
- Basics - Anything which is fundamental to playing the game, and doesn't fit into any other section (although there might be some crossover with the new Appendices section).
- Missions - Anything which is a mission. Including: story missions, asset missions, vehicle missions, challenge missions, collection missions.
- Vehicles - Anything which is a vehicle: cars, bikes, planes, boats, but NOT the jetpack, since this follows the behaviour of an item (in the sense that you can't store it in a garage).
- Items - All weapons, tool items (spray can, extinguisher), gift items (flowers, dildos), and the jetpack.
Regarding the appendices section, I felt it might be worth including that for things which aren't really that "basic". Futhermore, I think we ought to keep the "basics" section completely free from spoilers, and I'm wondering if that really is the case. I'm thinking at least the 100% completion should go in here, and maybe some other bits and pieces. Perhaps also the dating guide, if it gives away the names of girlfriends, and/or other plot information.
Now the important bit. To minimise the length of page names, all other pages should be direct children of one of these pages. I've checked, and there should be no namespace collisions by putting all missions in the same namespace. Arguably, the side-missions are just as important as the story missions (sometimes more so) for 100% completion.
Regarding the actually subpage names. For the missions section, I've been using the canonical mission name (including capitalisation and punctuation) as per the TEXT/AMERICAN.GXT file on the game DVD. This way, there can be no arguments about correctness.
The same can be done with vehicles (I already have a complete list of all vehicle names, including those which are removed from the game), but I don't think it's worth creating any subpages for these yet, at least until we have some screenshots of what they look like. I can grab all the other canonical data about each vehicle (top speed/acceleration/etc) from the DATA/HANDLING.CFG file and other files on the DVD.
Based on the minimal amount of information we currently have about characters, I don't think it's worth making a separate page for each character, but I wonder where the page ought to go. Is it "basics"; does it contain spoilers; should it be an "appendix"? If we do decide to create subpages, then perhaps it deserves its own root node (i.e. GTASA/Characters/<charname>).
I shaln't make any more structural changes until you've had a chance to read this, and comment on it. I'm beginning to think perhaps my rule about having no more than 2 levels of hierarchy to be a bit harsh to apply to all sections. One of the reasons I think it's useful in the missions section is to make it easy to reclassify missions later on if need be. At the moment, my classes (e.g. story mission, asset missions, vehicle mission) are as per the bottom of the page Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/Missions/In the beginning, but this is by no means a final classification. I may decide later on that perhaps it's worth subclassing "required" and "optional" story missions, and this will be a whole lot easier if I don't have to worry about page hierarchies. Page renaming is still a bit messy, since it requires you to manually redirect all links to the old page name. To be honest, I think this feature could be implemented automagically in a wiki server, but I haven't seen one where this is done yet. I was thinking quite seriously about getting involved with the MediaWiki project, but I really despise PHP. PHP is great for small projects, but it's not really that scalable (notice the number of squid proxies this site has to employ to get around that problem). Maybe I'll write my own from scratch. ;-)
For now, I'll carry on with mission walkthroughs until we get a concensus on the remaining organisation. When we do, I'll move it to the "standards" page, and move the section "puzzling out the hierarchy" from the "information" page back to this page. Arguably, I should never have moved it anyway, since it's really "speculation" rather than "infomation".
I hope this re-organisation of the "basics" and "missions" sections hasn't bugged you too much, but discussions via this page are rather slow, and I'd never get anything done otherwise. Perhaps it might be easier to communicate via MSN/Yahoo/ICQ/whatever. FYI: I am:
- adrian_eyre@hotmail.com for MSN (don't send email there cos I never read it)
- adrian_eyre@yahoo.com for Yahoo (ditto)
Anyways. Let me know what you think.
- I can't really talk to you directly at the moment, but the new structure is sounding fine. I'm not at all bothered and it certainly makes sense to put everything extra under Basics. As for Appendices that's also fine, that's just what you'd have in a printed book to cover non-essential stuff.
- I'm not sure about calling item-collection a "mission", it's not structured or timed or even labelled. Maybe under Appendices since you don't (really) need them anyway?
- Other than that everything's fine. Except I keep screwing up on OG Loc, bah... :( Garrett 06:57, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Content moved from Information page
I've moved the Puzzling out the hierarchy section back to this page, since it wasn't being maintained. It's probably redundant now anyway, but worth keeping in this page for posterity.
I also removed this:
- the "invisible" parent page Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/Cheats does not exist; perhaps something could go there, maybe a master cheats overview like GTASanAndreas.net has?
Due to restructuring the content, it no longer seemed relevant.
Aya 21:06, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Final Naming Convention
I've reorganised the remaining pages. There's still a few more bits and pieces to sort out from the Orphaned Pages list, but at least now it's obvious where they need to go.
Check out the metadata pages for the gory details. I'm off to bed.
Aya 00:55, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Misc
Perhaps the text you added to this page should be moved here instead? It's already in the FAQ, as well as in a couple of the walkthroughs that require it. Personally I would've deleted the question. I doubt the user who left it will even return.
I'm assuming you've only just recently acquired the game itself (PC version?). How's it going?
Aya 14:03, 29 Jun 2005 (UTC)
GTA Pages
N.B. Some of this text has been copied from User talk:Aya#GTA Pages. - Aya 4 July 2005 14:29 (UTC)
Hi Aya, been doing some patrols of the edits. Can you check the GTA pages for consistency/ correctness? Some newbies had been tinkering around with some pages (and not all are nice cuddly newbies either). There's way too many edits over the weekend for me to look through while at work. :P - Lynx7725 4 July 2005 02:29 (UTC)
- I have been doing so on a daily basis (for the most part). Every page in the book is in my watchlist, and I tend to check every diff, especially those from non-registered users. The problem recently has been that the Mediawiki upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 (on or around the 2nd of July) seems to have removed all this history from my watchlist, so I've had to manually go through all the pages' histories to check. I checked all the pages on the 3rd of July, with the exception of the mission walkthroughs (there are about 100 of these), and reverted any intentional or unintentional vandalism. I'll check through the remainder when I get a chance, but I tend to find most of the vandalism happens in the same few pages each time, none of which are mission walkthroughs. - Aya 4 July 2005 14:29 (UTC)
Please let the other GTA contributors know as well. - Lynx7725 4 July 2005 02:29 (UTC)
- Hopefully, moving this text to our talk page will have that effect. Perhaps in future it might be better to express your concerns on this page, then perhaps provide a link on the talk pages of the users concerned, although personally, I will always check a diff made to this page. - Aya 4 July 2005 14:29 (UTC)
Orphaned GTA Pages
Hi y'all. Can someone please look into the following pages?
Wikibooks' Orphanage has them listed (i.e. not linked to other pages). I'm not sufficiently familiar with your book structure to know whether it's a Wiki error or something wrong with these pages. Thanks in advance. - Lynx7725 7 July 2005 07:07 (UTC)
- Thanks for helping out, but we were already aware of these. We've made an effort to keep track of all pertinent content (especially since the search function seems to yield results which appear to be months out-of-date).
- We have a project metadata page, which links to an informational page, containing a list of all orphaned pages. This is slightly more organised than a talk page could ever be. This content will be merged in at some point. It's just a case of who can be bothered to do it (probably it'll end up being me). :-)
- To be honest, I don't see why these pages are showing up in the Orphanage anyway. I'm beginning to think that this page, and various other 'special' pages are generated using cached content which hasn't been updated for months. I no longer trust them. I'm beginning to wonder if my time would be better spent fixing these problems in the MediaWiki source code, rather than using the system, but I'd much rather do the first project off this list.
- As for you lack of familiarity with the book's structure, you should find the pages linked from the project metadata page enlightening. ;-)
- Aya 7 July 2005 16:09 (UTC)
Minor/Major changes
I have a minor idea of page linking and special wiki stuff, but will finish off the stats section of the guide.
AkumaZ 02:29, 17 July 2005 (UTC)