Talk:Main Page

We should talk about how to organize the wiki.

Hi, I'd like to help with the Wiki (I was thinking of starting one myself, but someone pointed this out), maybe we should start by getting as much detail as possible? It can be easily tidied up in the future. Maybe just a note of places, characters, items? - LordBiro

I say, start putting in some information, get it formatted how you want it. The raw information is more important than the formatting at the moment, sure.

- Phil

What if we had our own Column section were anyone can add and write their own guide. -Cirdan

How do you mean? Of course you can write a guide for anything you want. - Phil

I've been thinking about this over night, and I've been looking at the documents that exist on this wiki at the moment, and they aren't very wiki-like. I think this is because there are lots of guides, but not many facts, as you'd expect to find in a wiki. A way to improve this would be to create different types of stubs (which I'm going to try and do now), such as:
 * Location stubs
 * Item stubs
 * Skill stubs
 * Profession stubs
 * Character stubs (for NPC's like Rurik etc.)
 * Mission stubs
 * Creature stubs
 * Monster stubs

Then we can go through the documents that already exist on the site and change any potential article text (i.e. the word Prince Rurik, Orison Of Healing or Ascalon City) into a link to an article. Since the article doesn't exist yet it will link to a blank page. We can then replace those blank pages with stubs. I've started making stubs, and I'll start listing them in Stub Templates. - LordBiro

Birdo: Excellent. I started doing this myself with the skills. - Gravewit

We definately need to get some kind of structure to the main page. Perhaps we'll do some kind of split column like a lot of the other mediawiki-based wikis do. wikipedia.org, http://www.hrwiki.org/ etc.

Hey guys, I turned on image uploading. Use it wisely. - Gravewit

flooded recent changes! sorry!
Hi Guys, I've been linking to all the skills and locations from the elite skills location page, and I haven't been setting "this is a minor edit", so I've pretty much flooded the recent changes page, sorry about that! - LordBiro

No problem. Re: formatting: I've been adding bits and pieces (started setting up the Mission Guides section) as I've thought of stuff. Should definitely feel free to "fix" information into a better format, especially mine. ;p -nunix/rood

Hehe, I think I'm going to have to go through some of the things I've "stubbed" :)

skill stubs?
How do I add skills to the skills catagory? -Cirdan

re: skill stubs
hi cirdan, i've been meaning to write how you expand on a stub, but haven't got round to it yet :)

if you edit the page you'll see that there's a line that says. Leave that in for the time being, then put in any information you like about the skill! One you're done, if you think you have enough information then put in the line to include it in the Skills category, and take out the bit of text that says. This will remove the article's "stub" status, and put it into the Skills category :)

alternatively if you don't think you have enough info on the skill yet then you can leave the there :)

there's no real harm if you do either, if someone disagrees they can easily modify it in the future :)

on another note i've been thinking about whether we could make greater use of templates for some articles. Wikipedia use templates to add information to pages in a standard way. For example, if you look at the pages Beaver and Woodpecker you can see they both have the same little box on the side, the template for which can be found at Taxobox. This would be really useful to have on details about all kinds of things in Guild Wars, most obviously the inhabitants of Guild Wars. I think using templates might help bring together a lot of the pages in this wiki!

- LordBiro

using templates
Ok, I gave this templates thing a go, the results can be seen on Resurrect, still working on cleaning it up a bit :) The skill template is pretty useless really, just a small one to test if I understand templates properly :) but still will be useful in tidying up pages - LordBiro

PS. just looking, wikipedia does this in a slightly different way. If i have time tomorrow I will improve on the template so that it can be more easily customised.

Awesome! I like where this is headed. ~ Gravewit

Hi
Hi all,

This is Isbot from www.gamesanalysis.com I found your page because you link to an article written by one of our authors - The PvP guide by Standard AI. I like what you are doing with your site and think you have some good ideas.

I was about to link to your guide to not getting scammed as part of my hint of the day but as I have quite a few regular site visitors I was a little concerned about sending a bunch of people here due to how easy it is to edit and/or change your pages. If this is your format and you are sticking to it with a the more the merrier approach then let me know in this space or via email and I will do my daily hint as planned. If you wish to change security or don't want a bunch of visitors coming in like that then let me know that as well and I will not put up a link to your site. In that case if the person(s) who wrote the scam guide would like to submit it to our site we would love to have it simultaneously on our site as well as this one because I think the information needs to be out there. I personally have never had anyone try to scam me in a Guild Wars trade but I don't doubt that it is happening. You might want to add what the reporting procedures to Anet are if somebody tries to scam you.

Thanks again and I too am working on skills, armor etc lists would love to have more data...

Good Gaming,

Isbot isbot@gamesanalysis.com

Hey isbot :) nice to hear from you! It's up to gravewit, the owner of this wiki, to decide whether you should link to this site, but I don't see any harm. We are currently working on standardizing a lot of pages, but I don't personally think any more people viewing this site would cause a problem. Like I say though, I would wait for a response from Gravewit :) - LordBiro

---

Re: the scam guide, it was ripped from one of the forum sites (though I can't find the original link which should be cited). I think the wiki is a great place to distribute information like that. If someone places something inappropriate in, the people who observe changes (I do myself) will tweak/remove it.

Re: the skill taxonomy, this is a great format! -Adam Skinner-

Thanks Adam :) I'm thinking of putting a brief guide up on how to use it properly, so anyone can add one easily. It's pretty straightforward though as I'm sure you've seen :) just a case of getting all the skills in now!

I think maybe we should start making use of the community portal since this place is getting a bit crowded ;)

Anyone who wants to link here is more than welcome to. I've made Adam and Biro sysops, so you guys can help keep the riff raff out if need be! ~ Gravewit

Oh, and by the by, if either of you wanna join up and do some quests or joing my guild, send a whisper to Rojhaz Gravewit. ~ Gravewit

Hey Gravewit, thanks very much :) by the way, if you want to contact me on Guild Wars my name is Lord Biro ;) hehe - LordBiro

Skill Images
Hey Gravewit, I noticed the Necro images you uploaded, they are really good quality :) where did you get them from? - LordBiro

From the official site. I ran them through photoshop to cut down the filesize (they were originally jpegs. ew.). It was a pain in the ass uploading them all one by one, that's for sure. Gravewit

ah, fantastic :D i'll get working on some monk skills then ;) good stuff gravewit, i had no idea this minisite existed!!! - (this was meant to be me...) LordBiro

The fansite kit has them all in .docs, but if you open the file up in Microsoft Word and just Save As... HTML, it'll output to an HTML file + folder full of the seperate images. Nunix

Just as a not, I uploaded all the monk skills, but some of them had apostrophes in the file names, so you have to reference them like this: - LordBiro

Other Wikis
Hello.

My guild and some members of the Guild Wars Guru community have been working on a wiki as well: http://www.tanatopia.net/wiki/index.php/Sacred_Dragon:Index. There is no need for more than one wiki, so I'd like to consolidate. Since your site doesn't require namespaces, it would probably be best to move everything here. Any objections or other ideas?

Problems will very quickly arise if multiple wikis pop up, each with their own format and contributors. It slows the progress of everyone. Are there any plans to advertise this and assimilate (or be assimilated by) other wikis across the web (assuming more exist)?

&mdash;Tanaric 20:39, 18 May 2005 (EST)

I'd suggested as much on the GWG forums. I think it's a great idea to consolidate the GW wikis, regardless of where they're hosted. Adam

Hi Tanaric, yeah this sounds fine (Gravewit is the owner, so it's his call, but i'm farily certain he will be ok with this), i can see how having to use a seperate namespace would be very annoying! I really like your wiki. It seems to have some good guides :) will be good to see them 'merged' with our existing documentation! Although I notice that you seem to tend towards large articles rather than smaller ones, and we have been trying (in most cases) to do the opposite, i.e. a page for every skill, rather than one for simply monk skills or necro skills. I suppose this could have something to do with the namespace though!

Practically speaking, can we assume that it's OK to simply copy and paste any content across, making reference to original authors where necessary? And will a number of editors be moving from your wiki to this one? If so we should perhaps focus our time on completing documentation on standard formatting to avoid any confusion.

As for other wikis, I had planned on starting my own, as I couldn't find any Guild Wars wikis on google. There might well be other wiki's out there, but I don't know how to find them. I think that it's fairly safe to say that if any other Guild Wars wikis do exist they wont be as large as this one, and as long as we make it clear that any information from other wikis is greatly appreciated then I don't think we need to worry about it too much. - LordBiro 22:24, 18 May 2005 (EST)--

I just did a search for wiki on GWG and found the posts you referred to Adam, good stuff :) nice to see you've been advertising ;) hehe.

Adam: Yeah, sorry, should have given you credit. Your comment on GWG was right on the mark, and I'm trying to make it happen.

As far as permission goes, editors here may copy and paste articles, may reformat them, may do anything. In essence, everything Guild Wars–related on the Tanatopia wiki should be treated as if it was hosted here. Reformat it, restructure it, and move it over. I'll make a similar announcement on the Tanatopia wiki: right now, the community supporting it is pretty disjoint compared to this one, so it shouldn't make much difference to them where they're posting. A transitional page for style differences would be good&mdash;I haven't read much here, and I haven't written anything here, so I'll leave it up to one of you to write. :)

I only ask that when you empty out a page, throw a link to the corrosponding page/index/category/whatever here, so the users can find the information they're looking for. I'll add an announcement to my wiki telling all my contributors to hold off for a few days, or to come here.

I unfortunately won't be able to do much for the next few days, as I'm boarding a plane to Germany in just a few hours. I'll get as much done as I can.

&mdash;Tanaric 20:22, 20 May 2005 (EST)

CSS messed up?
is it just me or does the css look like its been altered? for some reason the article box is overlapping the sidebar... if anyone wants to edit the css i believe they can create a new stylesheet and modify that, and then once it looks correct replace the existing one with that :) - LordBiro 22:24, 18 May 2005 (EST)

Yep, it's definitely changed. However, I don't know CSS at all, so.. hopefully someone else can tweak it. Nunix

Well it looks like the Monobook.css file has been changed (I think) which is seperate to the one at MediaWiki:Monobook.css (I also think). So I dont know if we can change it! hehe :) - LordBiro 05:52, 19 May 2005 (EST)

Clarifying CSS
Just to clarify, to modify Monobook.css, rather than touch anything in the css file itself you can simply add some CSS to MediaWiki:Monobook.css. - LordBiro 03:56, 19 May 2005 (EST)

RE: Merging, Et. Al.
I see no problem with adding your stuff here. I welcome more content. It's a community effort.

Especially since "merging" is just a matter of where you decide to post content, so.. not like you need a special badge or anything. It's just, you know, a wiki. ;p Nunix

Yeah, we definitely need to get more of a solid game plan for how things are going to be organized. I think Skills are a pretty good example of how we should have things work. Templates are good. But we surely need to get things sorted before this gets bigger than any of us can contain. So, I am open to suggestions, more :Talk page threads would be useful. Gravewit

The Front Page / Credits
Why is the front page protected? I'd like to add the pre-Searing Guide to it, as I think it's valuable for new players. Secondly, why is the Guild Guide credited to Gravewit? While I respect the fact that he wrote the original article, there have been other minor editors. Furthermore, I am loathe to add my own insights, as they would be credited to Gravewit on the front page. Perhaps there is a way to tastefully, publically thank Gravewit for his work, but wiki really doesn't lend itself to this sort of thing. &mdash;Tanaric 02:33, 25 May 2005 (EST) -
 * You make a fair point Tanaric, the reason the Main Page is protected is to avoid vandalism. Ideally there should really be a template from which the main page takes its content, which is not protected, which acts as a halfway house between having a protected main page and a non-protected one. I believe this is what wikipedia do.


 * As for credits, I agree that articles should not really be credited in such away. Perhaps a "featured contributor" might be useful... but that might not have the desired effect :) I don't know the answer, but I do agree that crediting articles to one person (statically) when several people have contributed is not very useful. It almost persuades people not to carry out minor edits, since they won't get credit for it. I know that's taking this to extremes, but I'm just making an elaborate point. In summary, I agree. - LordBiro/Talk 03:44, 25 May 2005 (EST)


 * I see you removed your credit Gravewit, good stuff :) LordBiro/Talk 05:54, 28 May 2005 (EST)

1) re: credit: pretty sure this was simply a matter of one person writing the bulk of it, posting it, and then some edits slowly trickling in. 2) re: guide: the link has been added, but it VERY SERIOUSLY TREMENDOUSLY needs to be broken up into component articles and sub-articles. It's way too long right now. That's my project for the weekend if no one else tackles it first. ;p Nunix

Photics' Wiki
Photics.com has launched a wiki. You can find it linked from the homepage. To put it bluntly, it's not very good -- whatever software they're using pales in comparison to MediaWiki (no category support means they're maintaining indexes by hand!), and there's very little unique content.

I posted angrily there, but... uh... I might have been a little less than diplomatic. Seriously though, a move so shortsighted and anti-community from somebody who is supposed to be a community leader bothers me.

Anyone have any plans? The exposure Photics' wiki will get just by virtue of being his will greatly overshadow ours. Yet his wiki platform sucks (registration required, even!), and seems a grandiose self-promotion. Tanaric 07:01, 5 Jun 2005 (EST)

I don't know, are we getting the address out there? Advertising on forums, 'cetra? I know I don't do a lot of posting elsewhere.. although a gamefaqs board post would probably be a good start. I'm not -really- concerned about "competition" because it's really a case where if one site's clearly got more/better organised info.. people'll go there. Also, need to absolutely submit it as a fansite to the guildwars.com community listing; I think mostly that means just pasting the ArenaNet logo all over the place? Nunix

Yeah, I mean, we've done a whole lot of work here (especially everyone but me!), I'm not worried. So long as you guys keep doing the awesome work you have been, we've got no problems.

I think more grass-roots advertising on some boards is good (that's what I did when we first started, and I'm sure the regulars here found it via guild hall or the other big site), but it also means we've gotta be more vigilant in keeping the spammers and assholes out of our nice little resource.

Now that we're pushing 300(!!) articles, I think we're just about ready to submit to the GW fansite listing. I'm still working on the site logo, but it's coming along. There will most likely be a domain soon, also. Gravewit


 * I'm quite concerned about this as well, for the same reasons as those listed above. I think we should continue to push this site as hard as we can. I suggest we start a project detailing what needs to be done for us to fall into the Official Fansite and Elite Fansite categories on guildwars.com. I am sure we are capable of it, we have a team of very dedicated admins, and an increasing number of involved editors. And overall we haven't had to deal with very much in the way of vandalism or anything.


 * Gravewit, could we perhaps share ideas for logos on a specific page? Would be good to see everyones ideas! :) LordBiro/Talk 10:47, 5 Jun 2005 (EST)


 * Oh for sure. Any ideas or mockups or whatnot are welcome. How about Logo or something similar? Gravewit


 * Sounds good to me :) LordBiro/Talk 11:46, 5 Jun 2005 (EST)

Fansite Status
In order to determine how we are doing with regard to applying for fansite status I've created a Fansite Status page to discuss how we are doing. Please have a look and get involved :) LordBiro/Talk 08:12, 7 Jun 2005 (EST)

ease of use
So, I mocked up the "new contributions" and "add a new skill" articles (see the green box on main page) to assist with what's being talked about above re: name-recognition; specifically, making how-to-contribute information very easy and simple to find and parse. It's wiki! Works best when lots of people come in and do stuff!

Are these enough, what needs to be improved, 'cetra? Also think about if anything needs to be significantly reorganised: are the main page article links the RIGHT ones, or should things be tweaked? Things like a link to all our style/formatting guides should be on front page, I think. Stuff like that. Nunix


 * Hey Nunix, I was just thinking, a How to Help page would be useful. It could tie everything together. Start by saying what needs doing, then quickstart guides such as your "how to write a skill in 30 seconds" and then more detail about standards. LordBiro/Talk 11:46, 5 Jun 2005 (EST)


 * exxxxcellent! Made sure that got into the help-box on Main Page and tweaked stuff in that section a little. Still needs some work.. the article's a great start! Nunix

more restructuring
I tweaked Main Page a bit; we had links to the same article from different places, links to articles which were depreciated and no links to the NEW article, stuff that was completely unused and could be folder into something else, etc. Better? Worse? Meh? Nunix
 * 1) "Featured Guides" is now "Quick Links". This is completely an ease-of-use box for things that people would probably want to get to right away and that might normally take several steps to get to but that you'd want to access to easy. And since we're avoiding "Long Guide Pages" the previous box purpose didn't quite seem appropriate. ;) They can just be found In-Depth.
 * 2) "Maps and Locations" are gone. Some of it got moved into Quick Links. Most of it actually, I think...
 * 3) Some stuff - especially in General and In-depth - was moved as a link into a higher-level article (collectors, specifically, got done this way; probably others).
 * 4) Renamed "Help Us" to "Helping Out"; I don't like "Helping Out" that much (primarily because we have a "How to Help" article and I hate re-using words so close together like that), but we should probably get away from language that suggests standard "site admin" stance. It's wiki! We want strange people to come in and type a few lines! Anyone have nicer box heading?


 * I like it :) Good stuff! LordBiro/Talk 08:20, 7 Jun 2005 (EST)

'Jargon' vs 'Slang & Terminology'
Currently 'Slang & Terminology' is a category, but the main page links to 'Jargon', which does not yet exist as a category. Should we change the main page to link to slang & terminology or move the documents from to jargon? LordBiro/Talk 08:23, 7 Jun 2005 (EST)

Ahh, didn't know about the other category! I'd just change the main page link then, and make sure it's an active category. Nunix

Ads
So, how do you guys feel about ads? I was considering sticking it in the bottom left, under the toolbox. A single google ad, or possibly a "your ad here" type of thing, so we can have more control over what goes there. It would be the size of the toolbox, not much bigger. This will be used to pay for more hosting space, of course, and the domain name. I'll keep full-disclosure on anything that comes in. Nobody's going to be getting rich off this, of course : ) Gravewit


 * I feel very strongly against ads. I would gladly pay to help with the server costs rather than use ads. LordBiro/Talk 02:56, 8 Jun 2005 (EST)


 * Maybe a tip jar donations bin thing. I'm not sure. It'd be a fun experiment to see if a free (and awesome) guide like this can grow and sustain itself without getting bloated and ad-riddled. Gravewit


 * I second Biro's statement. Tanaric


 * No, I agree that ads are a bad thing, unless done extremely carefully. I do think a tip jar might be nice. If this thing were completely self-sufficient, I'd take it as a great victory for gamers everywhere. Who needs Prima! This would also allow me to accelerate the switch over to it's own dedicated hosting, seperate from my own site, and give @guildwiki.org email addresses, which might be nice. Gravewit


 * So toss us a tipjar, or your email address, so we can send you money. :) Tanaric 03:08, 11 Jun 2005 (EST)


 * I think the "tip jar" might look better if it more resembled the link on the hrwiki main page. LordBiro/Talk 05:21, 12 Jun 2005 (EST)


 * Well, I've done my good deed for the day. It'll at least register the domain name (I recommend http://www.godaddy.com, as they're cheap and have always given me great service). Tanaric 07:03, 13 Jun 2005 (EST)

Search Box
Is there any way to change the search box so that is acts like a normal search engine instead of acting like Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button. For example, if you search for "elite" you get sent to a useless stub page instead of getting a list of all the pages related to "elite".

yes there is. instead of clicking the "Go" button, usethe "Search" button instead. pressing Enter will by default use the "Go" function. Nuble 16:07, 10 Jun 2005 (EST)


 * If you type in 'Elite' and get taken to a stub Elite, then think about redirecting this page to something like Elite_Skills_Location (which I'm doing now). This way in the future people won't be so frustrated :)
 * The reason the wiki acts like this is that searching through a database is intensive, and so it will try to avoid having to perform a search if a page with the same name as your search term already exists. Afaik all MediaWiki sites use the search function like this. LordBiro/Talk 21:41, 10 Jun 2005 (EST)

Is it really using that much cpu power? This is the opposite of the expected behaviour of a search box. One of the tenets of good user interface design is to never surprise the user. This might seem like a trivial problem now, but as we fill up the Wiki it will only get worse. Consider: "Shield Stance", "Illusion of Weakness", "Echo" versus "Arcane Echo", "Smite Hex", any of the "Energy ..." spells such as "Energy Tap".

Redirects only make the problem worse. "Illusion" redirects to "Illusion Magic". This hides spells like "Illusion of ...". Will we redirect "Earth" to "Earth Magic"? Then say goodbye to easy searching for "Armor of Earth". I know this probably seems silly to most of us. However, we are the people editing the Wiki. Of course we know where to find things. The problem is first-time users. People are impatient and quick to judge. One or two failed searches is all it takes to make someone decide that the wiki "sucks".


 * Well, in fairness, if you search for something, it stands to reason that you are looking for what you searched for. If you search for "Elite", odds are, you're looking for information on "Elite", which would be on Elite. 99% of the time, this is what the user wants. It is exactly the expected behavior. You can't expect the search function to make up for a user not knowing what they are looking for. Searching for "Elite skills", on the other hand, turns up just what you want. Remember: Go takes you to the page if it exists, Search performs a full text search. This is a Good Thing. It's like Google's "Feeling Lucky" button. Gravewit


 * "Redirects only make the problem worse." In that case do you think it would be better to remove these redirects? This is a serious question. The reason Illusion redirects to Illusion Magic is (I think) because someone moved Illusion to Illusion magic some time ago. Since Illusion means nothing really, how about just deleting the page?
 * On another note, try going to wikipedia and "searching" for "guild". You are not presented with a page showing all articles containing the word "guild" (if you press enter in the search box), but rather you are taken to the page Guild. You don't see many people saying that wikipedia "sucks" ;P I really think the search box is low on this wiki's list of priorities. LordBiro/Talk 06:04, 11 Jun 2005 (EST)

Fansite Status
We discussed earlier the steps that need to be taken to ensure that the GuildWiki can qualify for Fansite Status. I've started Fansite Status to formalise these steps. They are taken directly from the Guild Wars site, so please don't edit the 1st level in the list, but feel free to add sub-levels, as I've started doing already :) LordBiro/Talk 23:26, 11 Jun 2005 (EST)