Project Redcap:Administration

This page is for administrative discussions among the site contributors. Anyone is welcome to join the discussion.

We use this page to make decisions about the content and presentation of Project: Redcap. Once we've made decisions, we move those over to the Project Redcap: Sub-Projects page.

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 About Project Redcap 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)

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.

I'd like to enlist the help of the other maintainers to review and clean up most of these articles. The situation I'm trying to avoid is for Category:Virtues to contain 500 stub articles with that overwhelm the handful of articles where we really do have something to say, and is nothing more than an unusable and incomplete imitation of the Virtues and Flaws Index PDF.

Deleting the stubs sounds like a good idea. These are good arguments for that. I'd add that many time the entry is simply wrong or misleading (putting down invested effects as spells, or so on). The only bad thing I can see about it is that someone searching for a spell's name won't find it; I don't think we can import the indexes over, they're Atlas/creator's property. Still, we should just back-off the aspiration to be complete, as you say we have too few contributers for that. I'm not sure just what it is you want us to do, however. You want to (automatically) import the content over from PageWork, and then for us to manually delete and consolidate/expand the entries? Yair 06:38, 6 August 2012 (MDT)

The pages have been automatically imported because I don't want to just drop content on the floor without leaving an audit trail for what happened to it. It turns out MediaWiki has a script for automatically deleting articles by title: you feed it a list of titles, and it deletes them all. Where a spell actually deserves discussion and commentary, by all means expand the stub: for example, Ball of Abysmal Flame deserves a page both because it's commonly used by fans as an example of an attack spell, and because it's an archetypal Flambeau spell. Wizard's Communion and Aegis of the Hearth are both complicated and have non-obvious implications. But for run-of-the-mill spells, I think deleting the page is the best course of action, if we can't think of anything to add. User:Andrew Gronosky 15 August 2012

Where human decision-making can help is in identifying orphaned pages that we definitely want to save. User:Andrew Gronosky 15 August 2012

Legacy Page

he history of this page before August 6, 2010 is archived at Legacy:administration.