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.

MediaWiki Migration

Updated 2012-08-12

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. Page

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 manually imported because I don't want to just drop content on the floor without leaving an audit trail for what happened to it. But yes, I think in many cases it makes sense to manually delete the stubs. 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 12 August 2012

Legacy Page

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