Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Gameplay Questions => DF Wiki Discussion => Topic started by: Josephus on July 29, 2010, 06:27:39 am
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So, I've heard endless stories about how the Wiki is untrustworthy, due to vandalism, speculation somehow making it into articles, and other such things. Is this true? And if so, how long would the cleanup take?
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So, I've heard endless stories about how the Wiki is untrustworthy, due to vandalism, speculation somehow making it into articles, and other such things. Is this true? And if so, how long would the cleanup take?
Well, notice how everyone comes to the forums asking the same questions over and over and over, usually either "How do I do XYZ" or "Could I do ABC"? It's in large part because the wiki is so bad.
Why is the wiki so bad? Because there have been many, many versions of DF. Information changes often. It's hard to keep up with all the changes. Further, there's a lot of stuff that's hidden from the user and it's sometimes difficult to know what's going on, leading to a very subjective game play experience, which means 2 people might interpret the same event differently and write conflicting things.
Cleanup would be a pretty serious project. Given the scope and complexity of DF relative to the community, I'm not sure a wiki is necessarily feasible or even desirable. Obviously someone is going to make one (or many), I just don't that as really a useful or good thing.
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Hum, it's good for those disparate elements, such as the vanilla game's creatures and such, but perhaps the inclusion of game mechanics in the wiki is one of those questionable things that cause much confusion.
I'm of the opinion that a cleanup can only be undertaken if everyone knows what's "clean" and what's not, for example, because of the "subjective gameplay experience" you brought up.
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I found the wiki very useful when I learned DF, which is not so long ago. I haven't seen much inaccurate information, and I've corrected some of it myself.
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The trick to having a wiki that is accurate and up to date is to have a dedicated team who are the ones who create the articles and maintain them, with help from the community via this forum, but who gets to decide who does that? Would that team be granted a little bit more access to what happens under the hood in DF? ect ect.
It takes a ton of effort, but it CAN be done.
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I dunno, the wiki has always been very useful imo, and fairly accurate. Aside from many of the pages not being fully updated from 40d (not surprising, we had 40d for forever and 2010 for just a few months), can anyone point me to a blatantly inaccurate page on something that isn't currently riddled with bugs (let's face it, nobody knows what's going on with the military atm, except perhaps Toady)?
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Yes, I'd say the wiki's a great tool despite its current holes and failings. After all, it's a wiki. If something's wrong, someone will change it to be right.
Without the wiki, I doubt I'd have had as much fun figuring out the game when I first started, considering I hadn't played roguelikes before. Need the wiki for the unexplained things, such as the blue ! marker for old forts, which took me a while to figure out, or the uses of the various crops.
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To be frank I'm surprised, shocked even, that anyone has anything bad to say about the wiki at all short of constructive criticisms. Whenever I was uncertain about anything technical or game-play related the wiki always answered the question immediately, accurately, and completely save for only a few bleeding-edge "dwarf science" exceptions. I have never seen a single instance of vandalism. Only a select few things related to the latest version are lacking, and even then it does a half decent job of explaining them.
I hate to think where the community and this forum would be without it. The charts and diagrams alone answer 90% of my questions. I would love to contribute, but I've never found it lacking in any area that I had had enough knowledge and expertise in to write an article.
Here's to the wiki builders. I raise my glass to you.
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I don't know about "cleaning" the wiki, but it would be nice for it to be a little more complete.
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A few things that could use cleaning up IMHO, military and hospital system.
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The "Bugs and Issues" page is pretty out of date. Of course, I haven't exactly taken it upon myself to fix it...
The problem with most game wikis that I've dealt with is that people would rather just play the game than edit the wiki, or else they've lost interest in the game and so also lost interest in the wiki. It's like a catch-22!
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So, I've heard endless stories about how the Wiki is untrustworthy, due to vandalism, speculation somehow making it into articles, and other such things. Is this true? And if so, how long would the cleanup take?
As a frequent contributor to the wiki I think this is largely untrue.
Incorrect information lingers on the wiki, but not regularly much longer then it lingers in the collective knowledge of the DF community at large (this forum and beyond). Example: Noise from workshops. You'll often hear in this community and MANY other DF communities that workshops makes noise but the wiki has had it right for an extremely long time. Normally when new information comes up it is immediatly added to the wiki or corrected.
Vandalism is very rare and almost immediatly undone, it's not as fast as wikipedia, but I'd contend you would find ZERO vandalism on the DF2010 or 40d namespace right now, unless of course you do it yourself ;) (Don't though :D).
There is some speculation, but it's almost always marked fairly clearly as such, since only one of us (Toady) has access to how DF REALLY works, our information about DF is very often speculation and only after many many tests, or confirmation from Toady do we really say something is "true".
I don't know if a concerted "cleanup" to fix these problems is necessary. There is definitely a lot of need for elaboration and expansion of a lot of pages and some clarification and illustration, but I don't think any kind of vandalism cleanup program is necessary at the moment.
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I do remember one of the admins (His name starts with an A) bringing up a niggling bother about what he called "vanity pages". What do you, as a wiki admin, feel about that?
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Personally, I always take time to correct wrong information if I'm sure it's wrong. For example I'm sure you cant encrust weapons and armor with gems. Sometimes I'm not sure though so I leave it alone. For example, it appears that you can't trade for rough gems anymore, and I'm pretty sure you used to be able to, but I'm not comfortable changing the wiki which says that you can.
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I do remember one of the admins (His name starts with an A) bringing up a niggling bother about what he called "vanity pages". What do you, as a wiki admin, feel about that?
Albedo?
My opinion (which I don't feel is any more important then another just because I can delete articles) is that in the DF2010 and 40d namespace the articles shouldn't use "I" or refer to particular people who discovered stuff or whatever, cause that isn't really important to the reader. I don't really care at all what's on the User: namespace pages, mostly because the average reader will never find one in a search or follow a link to one anyway.
If it's something else, I'll have to know the context of the issue.
Cephalo, if there's something you particularly doubt but you're not willing to remove it completely, a middle ground would be to toss a {{verify}} tag on the end, which will signal others to continue research on that, eventually they'll remove the verify tag and remove the sentence or not, depending on what's discovered.
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So, I've heard endless stories about how the Wiki is untrustworthy, due to vandalism, speculation somehow making it into articles, and other such things. Is this true? And if so, how long would the cleanup take?
Depends on how many people work on it, right? You can see the edits to the 2010 wiki here:
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php?namespace=112&limit=500&title=Special%3ARecentChanges
It looks like a steady number of small changes. You can see Mason11987 on there. It looks like Quietust has taken it upon himself to be an editor and move pages he considers "low quality" to the Talk page.
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So, I've heard endless stories about how the Wiki is untrustworthy, due to vandalism, speculation somehow making it into articles, and other such things. Is this true? And if so, how long would the cleanup take?
Depends on how many people work on it, right? You can see the edits to the 2010 wiki here:
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php?namespace=112&limit=500&title=Special%3ARecentChanges
It looks like a steady number of small changes. You can see Mason11987 on there. It looks like Quietust has taken it upon himself to be an editor and move pages he considers "low quality" to the Talk page.
Seems reasonable to me, this could be some useful information but since there are often complaints about how difficult it is to read information on the wiki, putting it on the talk page where it can be developed and improved until it looks more like it fits on that page is probably a good idea.
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I've found the wiki to be a great tool. I can't recall anything I've looked up to be wrong, although I have found a few things to be "incomplete". Where I've known more than the article, I've expanded the wiki. But I think it's one of the very best wiki's I've used for being focused on its subject, and for its accuracy about its subject. (knock on wood for it to stay that way.)
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I haven't noticed any inaccuracies or vandalism on a live page.
I do have a criticism about the way content is being pushed down by UI cruft:
1) I don't want a big blue box at the top of every page, open by default, giving me Site Announcements which are really just kinda sidebar stuff. Yeah, I can hide it, and never open it, but a) then what's the point of it long-term, and b) first impressions are important.
2) If the current page is good for the current version of DF, I definitely do not want to see an attention-grabbing version box anywhere near the top of the page.
Together, these two push content halfway down the window, making the wiki annoying and ugly to the default visitor IMHO.
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I haven't noticed any inaccuracies or vandalism on a live page.
I do have a criticism about the way content is being pushed down by UI cruft:
1) I don't want a big blue box at the top of every page, open by default, giving me Site Announcements which are really just kinda sidebar stuff. Yeah, I can hide it, and never open it, but a) then what's the point of it long-term, and b) first impressions are important.
2) If the current page is good for the current version of DF, I definitely do not want to see an attention-grabbing version box anywhere near the top of the page.
Together, these two push content halfway down the window, making the wiki annoying and ugly to the default visitor IMHO.
1) The top box reminds editors of a few things they should follow. We've tested removing them (and the box) and those things almost immediately start being ignored and causing us to do huge fix-up, such as removing pages that are mass-copied from 40d. I don't know why people forget, but they do and this saves a lot of work for the people who are willing to do it. That being said I think having the option to minimize it as requested is a good compromise, and if something is added that you need to see we can make it pop open as a one-time thing so you can see changes.
2) I think the box is actually fairly modest, and on many occasions people have said they want it to be more noticeable. Perhaps an option? I'm not sure how to best satisfy everyone on that but I could see how that might bother someone.
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I never really had a problem with those two things in particular. Most websites like that will have something up top anyway; having article content start at the very top of the page might look jarring.
I personally think the two major problems with the wiki are people copying over unverified data from the 40d pages (I've seen this far too often), and the fact that things are so much in flux right now that information tends to get out of date relatively quickly, or at least the fear of it might prevent people from updating. For the most part, I think things will get a lot better as time goes on, assuming contributors do their job right.
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I agree with G-Flex. Sure the wiki has a few problems with people mass-copying from 40d, but the places where I have seen that have been decreasing a lot lately. I mainly think that the largest problem with the wiki currently is just that there hasn't been enough time for the DF community to figure out all of the missing holes yet. This isn't something that we could do anything about anyways, except maybe work to discover more things through dwarven science by ourselves. The only real cure for the problem is time in my opinion, as time goes on, more of the new holes will be filled and the wiki will become better as a whole.
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I've found the wiki to be a great tool. I can't recall anything I've looked up to be wrong, although I have found a few things to be "incomplete". Where I've known more than the article, I've expanded the wiki. But I think it's one of the very best wiki's I've used for being focused on its subject, and for its accuracy about its subject. (knock on wood for it to stay that way.)
The wiki was a great help for me as well, but if a player is starting in 31.x, they at least deserve an accurate array of information. The 31.x information is mostly complete, now that I look.
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The wiki maybe should be more aware of it's actual role. In my mind, there are two purposes that a great dwarf wiki can fufill. Obviously to be a factual encyclopaedia of DF. Additionally it can serve as a useful tutorial for the game. Now the latter is an additional bonus, but I think that the encyclopaedic pages should not get bogged down with tutorial pages. In my mind tuts should have a separate section of thier own. Tutorials are after all mostly opinion of ways to negotiate facts.
Saying this, I have found the wiki incredibly useful, and was constantly used when I was first learning the game. Well done everyone. :)
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The wiki maybe should be more aware of it's actual role. In my mind, there are two purposes that a great dwarf wiki can fufill. Obviously to be a factual encyclopaedia of DF. Additionally it can serve as a useful tutorial for the game. Now the latter is an additional bonus, but I think that the encyclopaedic pages should not get bogged down with tutorial pages. In my mind tuts should have a separate section of thier own. Tutorials are after all mostly opinion of ways to negotiate facts.
Saying this, I have found the wiki incredibly useful, and was constantly used when I was first learning the game. Well done everyone. :)
There is a Guides category:
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Category:Guides
Though I do agree this could be improved.