Project Redcap talk:Administration

Archived Discussions from 2012

Formerly, the main page was used as a discussion page. I'm changing the purpose of the main page, and copying the discussion here for archival purposes. Andrew Gronosky (talk) 12:36, 28 December 2015 (MST)

Mission Statement for Online Encyclopedia

The original mission of Project: Redcap still applies to the Internet Site Index aspect of the site. That mission is "to collect links to as many online Ars Magica resources as possible, regardless of language, age, or perceived quality."

I am not normally a fan of corporate mission statements and the like, but that one has clear implications for editorial policy: we link to anything. :-) I've found in quite useful over the last several years.

I'd like to build consensus behind an equally clear statement for what we're accomplishing with the Internet Site Index -- the Wiki part. We have enough experience now to have opinions on what works and what doesn't. Before I suggest anything that looks like a statement, I'd like to mention some possibilities to consider.

• We could emphasize fan-created material and try to be like Durenmar or Sanctum Hermeticum.
• We could try to provide a comprehensive index of Fifth Edition material. Since Fifth Edition books often lack an index, and material is spread willy-nilly through an every-growing library of supplements, it is increasingly hard to find information. For my part, I bought PDFs of the entire Ars Magica catalog and configured my computer to search across them, but that's kind of extreme. If this is what we want to do then we should have lots of pages with long lists of {topic, page reference} pairs, and look into things like plug-ins that convert Wiki pages to spreadsheets and vice versa.
• We could try to be a companion to the rules that explains the application and implications of the RAW, as well as alternatives where appropriate.

Yair Comments

I think we don't have the manpower for either of the first options. I would like to have a comprehensive Encyclopedia, but with so few contributors this is not feasible. A site providing fan-created material likewise requires a stable of authors that would at least semi-regularly create articles for it; we don't have that, though even if we would-have I don't think this is what the Encyclopedia should be about. Instead, I think the primary goal of the Wiki should be to be a companion to the game.

Note that this is precisely what the Project Redcap:About page says -

Project: Redcap has two related goals.

1. Provide a centralized place to where visitors can browse and find links to as much Ars Magica material as possible, in as many languages as possible. We want to link to everything related to Ars Magica, without passing judgment on the importance or quality of the site. The Main Page provides an entry point for the major topics in the game. You can also browse by category.

2. Be a guide and companion for the rules and game world of Ars Magica, providing useful rules summaries, examples, and especially page references to topics from across the game's extensive product line. Again, the Main Page and categories provide the starting points (and this site also has a search function).

The only thing I'd change is the emphasis on page references in the second point; I'd replace it with "commentary".

I can also see a secondary goal of serving as a home to any fan-created content, but we don't really have any at the moment and I don't see this site moving in that direction.

Yair 09:25, 15 August 2012 (MDT)

Based on the above, I would suggest the following sub-projects for the wiki:

1. Maintain the Internet Site Index, by removing dead links and adding new ones.
2. Create and maintain a suite of Introductory Material to help new players and storyguides, including pages such as Learning to Play, Character generation, advice on storyguiding, an overview of Hermetic Society, and so on. This includes generating summaries and overviews of key issues, like Magus, the tribunals, and so on.
3. Compile commentary on any topic, to the benefit of players of all levels. This includes the FAQ, providing historical details such as the "previous edition" part of many tribunal descriptions or the History of Ars Magica page, analysis of the implications of the rules and suggestions on house rules, and so on.
4. Create and maintain Complete Indexes on a few select topics. This includes our pages on the Peripheral Code, Creature Index, and so on.
5. Create and maintain the Product list, as well as reviews and summaries of all products.
6. Create and support foreign-language pages.
7. General clean-up and maintenance. Which is top-priority right now.

I suggest strengthening ties to our "sister-site" is not really needed. We do our thing, they do theirs.

Should we have formal categories for the different projects? Should pages be marked with Category:Internet Index, Category:Introductory, and so on? Or should the categories be strictly topical? Or perhaps just include some projects as categories, e.g. Introductory Material, so that a user could look for those, but leave the rest as projects and not categories?

Yair 10:01, 15 August 2012 (MDT)

I merged your suggestions into the Project Redcap:Sub-Projects page, including your suggestion about dropping the "sister site" project.

As far as formal categories are concerned, that is something to think about. I like your suggestion of including some projects as categories, and Introductory Material is a great example. Let's start working with the categories we have and if we think of a good reason to add others, we can do that on a case-by-case basis.

MediaWiki Migration

Updated 2012-08-15

Everything that could be automatically imported from PageWork to MediaWiki has been. We have two main things to import manually:

1. All the pages for which we lacked up-to-date XML: the 65 pages that were edited between August 2010 and August 2012.
2. Pages with character-encoding issues.

Stub Article Cleanup

I (Andrew Gronosky) am coming to believe it was a mistake to upload the hundreds of short articles that were auto-generated from lists of spells and Virtues and Flaws.

There are three problems with these short articles:

1. They don't add much value to the site. I would argue having hundreds of one-line articles is a lot less valuable than just uploading the Virtues and Flaws Index PDF and pointing to that.
2. They give the impression that Project: Redcap is trying to be something it's not: an exhaustive index for the game. If we had a hundred contributors maybe we could maintain an exhaustive index. With the number we actually have, I'm actively opposed to taking on that thankless and tedious job.
3. They only cover a fraction of the Virtues and Flaws (and spells) in the game, so they give the impression that the site is a half-hearted job. The fact that most of them consist of nothing more than a page reference and a (probably dead) link add to that impression.

So, I think we should get rid of most of these stub articles. If we actually have something useful to say about a Virtue, for example, Animal Ken, by all means put that in the article and leave it in place. I also think it's important to import such articles so they show up in the database and project logs, in case anyone ever wants to resurrect them (say, to put in actual content).

I've already got started on consolidating articles. We had a situation where there would be one stub for a Virtue like Animal Ken and a separate Stub for the corresponding Ability or Art or whatever. Since the Virtue and the Ability have the same name and we have only one line of text for each, I think it makes a lot of sense to have a single page covering both.

Update 15 August 2015: per discussion on the mailing list, Pitt, Andrew, and Yair are in agreement that we are going to remove most of the stubs.

I've tagged all the orphaned articles, which are almost entirely stubs, with a Category:Orphan tag. Many, though not all of these are probably appropriate for deletion, or for some them, merge a group into one new article or an article that already exists. I know the Orphaned pages exists in the Special pages section, but the tag had the added benefit that if anyone independantly comes across it, they're alerted to the fact the page is an orphan. Inquisitive 22:43, 10 October 2012 (MDT)

Legacy sections

A very minor point, but also easily fixable. The legacy section of most pages are what I call a subsection, meaning they have 3 or more equal signs on either side of their title in the edit page, as opposed to a section, which has exactly two equal signed on either side of the title. This gets weird in an article that does have sections, because the Legacy Page becomes a subsection of whatever happens to be the last section. If you come upon a page like this while you're doing something else, please take a quick moment to edit the title so there's only two equal signs on either side. Inquisitive 20:49, 20 November 2012 (MST)