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| | This page is used for posting announcements and information for Project: Redcap maintainers and contributors. See also [[Project Redcap:Current events]] for news and announcements of interest to the whole Ars Magica community. |
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| This page is for administrative discussions among the site contributors.
| | == Templates == |
| | {{Main|Project Redcap:Templates}} |
| | MediaWiki [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Templates templates] are very useful for making repeated, consistent notes and info boxes. Perhaps the most familiar template is [[Template:citation needed]], but templates can do much more than that. |
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| | Using templates is a great way to ensure pages help the user easily find summary information and help make the whole site more usable by providing a consistent look-and-feel. [[User:Andrew Gronosky|Andrew Gronosky]] ([[User talk:Andrew Gronosky|talk]]) 13:49, 28 December 2015 (MST) |
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| | == Mediawiki Extensions == |
| | The following MediaWiki extensions are enabled on this site to help maintainers create and organize great articles. You can see a full and up-to-date list of extensions on the page [[Special:Version]]. |
| | * [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite Extension:Cite] for citing your sources |
| | * [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EasyTimeline Extension:EasyTimeline] for making timelines; see also [[Help:Timeline]] |
| | * [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Labeled_Section_Transclusion Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion] for re-using excerpts from a long article on other pages (so you [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself don't repeat yourself]) |
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| == Project Status & Plans == | | == Language Support == |
| | The Ars Magica community is international and Project: Redcap has always offered information in multiple languages. Please see [[Help:Languages]] for information on how to create non-English pages. Please [[contact]] me if you would like any help getting started; I am very eager to help people who want to expand Project: Redcap to include other languages. [[User:Andrew Gronosky|Andrew Gronosky]] ([[User talk:Andrew Gronosky|talk]]) 12:49, 28 December 2015 (MST) |
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| Updated 2010-03-25
| | [[Category:Project Redcap]] |
| | | {{Legacy|page=administration}} |
| We are preparing for a permanent merger with the [http://www.redcap.org/ | Project: Redcap] site. The new site will be called Project: Redcap, but it will have all the contents of this site (HermesWeb).
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| Pitt is planning to implement and test a software upgrade before we merge the sites. [[Andrew Gronosky]] will be shifting his efforts from content creation toward organization.
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| Andrew is also working on getting the [[writers guidelines]] page and other project-related pages into more useful shape.
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| == Getting Involved ==
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| In order to get a site added here, you don't have to edit the pages yourself. You can [[contact]] Andrew, and ask him to post material for you.
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| If you do have an interest in editing pages yourself, you are welcome to do so. You might want to experiment in the [[sandbox]] to get a feel for how editing works.
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| [[Contributing]] does not require you to open an account or join the mailing list. We have a guest accounts that occasional contributors can use. If you want to contribute regularly, using your own account just makes your contributions more visible.
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| == E-Mail List ==
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| We have an e-mail list that is actively used by team members to plan and discuss the development of this site. To join, send e-mail to %%mlm at lists dot ekkaia dot org%% with the words __subscribe hermesweb__ in the subject line.
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| == Design Questions ==
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| There are a number of design questions, articulated by Pitt on the mailing list, that we ought to keep in mind. It will take time and consensus-building to fully settle all of these. For now, the discussion is taking place on the Wiki.
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| === Scope ===
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| Basically, what is the site about? What kinds of content do we want to include or exclude?
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| {{quote| Even if we should come up with an answer like "infinite", we should still ask ourselves what the actual extend of the project is, as "infinite" would be still far better than "undefined", the current status. Is HermesWeb simply about collecting as much material about Ars Magica as possible? If so, are the sources supposed to be exclusively canon-only or rather unbounded, the latter including any sort of fan material? Is it about collecting links to external resources, or about hosting actual information on-site? We're likely to be revisiting the copyright dilemma here. We discussed most of this before, vaguely, but haven't found a solution yet, let alone nailed it down. All we know right now is what HermesWeb is not: it's not a collection of spells, effects, or items. SpellsWiki is far better suited for that purpose. It's (probably) also not exclusively about fan material, because that niche is covered by countless other sites, such as Durenmar et al. | |
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| When we decided to go for a wiki, we implicitly bought a concept that works similar to a dictionary: one page per term, with pages containing links to synonyms, antonyms, and other relatives. I'm not saying that a wiki can't be used to maintain a regular web site (in fact, I do that regularly), but I think that having ambiguous terms of any kind means to throttle its potential, especially in a multi-user environment with lots of different writing styles. If we went for the answer "infinite" to the question above, that is, for an unbound environment, we might be better off with a traditional hierarchical system, as it is represented by a file system, for example, because sooner or later we're going to find ourselves confronted with one of the following problems. }}
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| I think we all have ideas of what the scope should be -- it's just that, at present, we all probably have different ideas. ;-) My own opinion is that the scope should encompass two things:
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| # Providing ''findable'' links to as much Ars Magica material as possible. That is the original mission of Project: Redcap and the community needs a site that does that job.
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| # Being an encyclopedia of the canon, current and old. This is the dictionary idea Pitt discussed above.
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| Fan-created content is welcome, but it is not our primary mission to host it. For my part I am more interested in linking to fan content than in hosting it. That said, if someone wants to put fan content here in order to make it easier to find (and to give it a wider audience), I see no reason to discourage him/her.
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| === Threshold/Transition (between Scope and Namespace & Nomenclature) === | |
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| Agreed, this is the way most of our pages ought to be designed. The [[Writers Guidelines]] page (or something like it) should be updated to express this idea.
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| There will be a few exceptions, for lengthy articles or pages where it makes sense to collect together a large amount of information. For example, most of our topic pages such as [[Welcome to Ars Magica]] and [[Order of Hermes]] will be big. But, 90% of our articles should be short -- a few paragraphs with some links and references.
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| === Namespace & Nomenclature ===
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| -* dilemma, where * is one of the twelve Hermetic houses, and eventually created a reasonable bijective mapping of all information involved, yielding 3 times 12 distinctive pages.
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| What I'm trying to say is that, under the premise of a wiki, it is imperative to have a clearly structured nomenclature, one that more or less stands for itself, and one that can be used to comfortably retrieve the information contained in it. A wiki is not only about "use it, share it, contribute" - we could have that with a forum as well. It is also about structure.}}
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| I think the page categories help to make the information discoverable. Nomenclature in general is something that we should address on the "How to Use this Site" page, which doesn't yet exist.
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| In addition to the \{founder,house,member\}-* dilemma, I think nomenclature issues occur in the titles of Ars Magica supplements: for instance, there are two supplements titled ''Covenants'' (one for 5th Edition and one for 2nd). We should straighten it out with a consistent solution. Pitt, I think you have more experience with this than I do. Can you make any specific suggestions?
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| === Navigation ===
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| {{quote|When I'm consulted to design navigational mechanisms of web sites, I usually try to go for a 2-action limit, meaning that it must not take a visitor more than two actions to find what he's looking for, provided that
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| * he knows what he's looking for,
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| * what he's looking for exists somewhere on the site,
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| * the retrieval key to the final result is appropriate.
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| The first two points should be self explanatory. A unique key yields a result in just one action. In the context of a wiki, page name -> content mapping performs a 1-action navigation. If I know the name of a page, I can evoke it through a single page search action, or by following a single hyperlink.
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| An "appropriate" key, on the other hand, means some sort of partial information that differs from a unique key in that, when applied in the first action, it does not take the user more than one additional action to retrieve the final result. In our wiki, a partial match of a page name, or a category/tag match both take me to a preselection of matching candidates from which I can choose by performing a second action, a final click. However, this concept works only for clearly defined namespaces, and/or properly assigned categories. That's why it is so important to have a clearly defined nomenclature in a defined scope. Right now, we already have lots of contents, but are only half way to a suitable solution for uniform information retrieval. }}
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| The two-action limit makes sense and is consistent with what theory I've read about usability. This is why it is better in some cases to have big, complicated pages with many related things in one place. (The table of contents feature is important in that case).
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| It seems to me that we have two sorts of categories: categories that apply to things within the game world (such as Domus Magnae, the Hermetic Houses, etc.) and categories that matter to gamers (published books, authors, editions, "fluff" vs. "crunch").
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| So I'd welcome a bit more thought and discussion about categories and nomenclature, and it would be good to capture that discussion on a page somewhere.
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| === Legacy Page ===
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| The history of this page before August 6, 2010 is archived at [[Legacy:administration]]
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| [[Category:Project_Redcap]]
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