Wiki revamp: Feedback wanted

[Veyrdite]

Hey guys!

As some of you may know I'm the new de-facto wiki admin.

Like the forums and IRC, the point of the wiki is to help the people in the community, wherever they sit upon the player and contributor line. I've seen a few gaming communities flourish and die -- people leave when the pastures in their community are no longer attractive. Tools that build the environment (like the forums, IRC & wiki) and the game itself are merely things that help gaining and retaining people.

For the past few months the wiki has become hideously out of date and useless. At this point it's doing some harm to the community because it misleads some new visitors, amongst other things. I'm trying to turn that around.

In short: http://unvanquished.net/wiki/index.php/ ... /Main_Page . It's very WIP and informal at the moment -- feedback of all kinds before I move it to the front is appreciated.

I need to make this clear: I am not asking you to start using the wiki just because I have now put effort into it. My effort is nothing: the real test will be whether or not anyone finds it useful. Be truthful, not kind!

Now for the annoying short answer door-to-door questionnaire:

b Have you been using the wiki the past few months, and if so what parts have been useful?[/b]
b Can you think of anything you would like on it to make your life easier?[/b] Open ended: the wiki is for everyone

(You will be marked. Losers will be forced to watch `Ishq's selection of anime for one hour)

Still todo:
(1) Get the tutorials up. I'm not finished https://unvanquished.net/wiki/index.php ... ox:Mapping yet but I've only spent two days on it, and there are others to do.
(2) Improve the wiki's usefulness for recruiting. I'm still brainstorming ideas for this -- feedback would be very welcome.

[Viech]

Hey, first off all it's good to see some progress on the wiki again! I haven't looked at your work beyond the front page yet but here is a quick feedback:

• A lot of links are broken or link to not yet created articles. Try not to link too many of those on the front page, it should generally help users finding resources, not contributors (who can use special sites to find articles that need work).

• Color usage: I'd prefer another background color for the programming section, red in a wiki usually creates the impression of something unfinished.

• "Have a chat via IRC and the Forums" doesn't need to be there three times. You could create a seperate/shared section for general information.

Then there's another thing that I'm not entirely happy with, which is the language of the current front page. I think that we need to be very firm about creating a mature community from the start, if we don't wanna end up as a soap opera or the average gaming community kindergarten. Therefor I'd insist on a rather formal and potentially even impersonal language on the wiki, instead of the dialogue style you've been using quite a bit.

A few examples of what I don't quite like:

• The "Quick Rules" section. This should totally go by itself. Also quite honestly the content ("explicit content: Ban", "Admins on this Wiki reserve the right to do almost anything") reminds me of topic forums with a primarly preadolescend audience.

• "Ordinary user permit", likewise. It really shouldn't be part of our wiki to explain people how to use one. If you find this necesseray, link to some relevant place at wikipedia where people have put a lot of effort into this (and where a significant amount of common sense and eloquence is expected from contributors, which should also be true for our wiki).

• Statements like "As of December 2013 Veyrdite has taken over the wiki" shouldn't go on the front page (if anywhere). This isn't of interest to users and creates the impression of a hierarchy.

• "Current Wiki Projects" should go on a different page and be linked from the front page. (Same reason as above: The wiki should resemble some sort of a document for most users, everyone who really wants or has to participate will need to dig deeper and show basic knowledge of how a wiki works.)

• Dialogue style phrases and opinions like "Imagine if one of the developers here did not exist.", "People are valuable in a project.", "Unvanquished might look like a commercial company's project, [but this] isn't true.", "The contributing community and core developer team making Unvanquished are people just like you", "We're not scary tyrants". I can agree with all of this but still the wiki shouldn't be talking to you like it was the word of a single developer (this doesn't promote participation at all!). This might be possible in "official" news posts that are always labeled with the author's name but it doesn't work too well on a wiki.

• Please don't use abbreviations like "comms" or "retexturer", this makes reading the wiki harder for people that don't speak english as a first language.

[kangz]

b Have you been using the wiki the past few months, and if so what parts have been useful?[/b]

I have been trying to document some of the things I do on the wiki, see the minimap tutorial and the engine upgrade short summary
When the big engine features (and) NaCl are done I'd like to do a programming-focused section to help newcomers (explaining some systems, the overall architecture, ...)

[Veyrdite]

Hey, first off all it's good to see some progress on the wiki again! I haven't looked at your work beyond the front page yet but here is a quick feedback:

Big thank you for your criticisms -- I am definitely not going to merge something like this to the front page without getting a good consensus.

• A lot of links are broken or link to not yet created articles. Try not to link too many of those on the front page, it should generally help users finding resources, not contributors (who can use special sites to find articles that need work).

• Color usage: I'd prefer another background color for the programming section, red in a wiki usually creates the impression of something unfinished.

• "Have a chat via IRC and the Forums" doesn't need to be there three times. You could create a seperate/shared section for general information.

Red links on this page are placeholders -- I'm going to spend today reading through all of the wiki's pages(there are not that many) to get a better idea of what is around. For a lot of the smaller ones with out of date content: I'll be merging them together. For other's I will be checking their factual accuracy, but I won't be trimming things just because I want to.

Colour is an experiment -- at the moment things look like a bag of old candy. Most of all: different cultures have different ideas about what colours represent, so I'll probably can this completely. If not: only subtle blue/grey shading to separate vertical, not horizontal, components.

Then there's another thing that I'm not entirely happy with,

Good :D

which is the language of the current front page. I think that we need to be very firm about creating a mature community from the start, if we don't wanna end up as a soap opera or the average gaming community kindergarten. Therefor I'd insist on a rather formal and potentially even impersonal language on the wiki, instead of the dialogue style you've been using quite a bit.

The wiki's normal front page is practical, but with this branch of it I was trying to make it more approachable. I can see what what you mean -- I've taken a good idea too far by sacrificing many other things.

Personal tone of writing: Velociostrich was kind enough to also give me some feedback on my talk page about this. Definitely an area I will fix.

I have been trying to document some of the things I do on the wiki, see the minimap tutorial and the engine upgrade short summary
When the big engine features (and) NaCl are done I'd like to do a programming-focused section to help newcomers (explaining some systems, the overall architecture, ...)

Thanks kangz. Believe it or not, small bits of information like this really help me understand this wiki and how it's used. Above all else I don't want to force change onto people who are happily already using it. Annoying people with change defeats the purpose here.

Also: I'm going to divide the mapping tutorial I've been writing into 'newcomer intro' and 'post-newcomer' sections. There is no point trying to maintain a 'you-don't-know-quake' all the way through it -- it takes more space, more time to write and by half way most readers will have enough skills to interpret difficult/terse normal guides anyway.

[Veyrdite]

Another note to make: this page has been an experiment in replacing the front, to test out a lot of new ideas at once. The final product will be much more like the original: with only a few successful ideas merged in.

I have been writing in a tone of this is going to be the future whether you like it or not :D

[Veyrdite]

FYI status: Most of the ideas on the page don't out-do the current front page, so I'm going slow on future revolutionary ideas. Thanks for the feedback!

[Viech]

I think what the wiki needs is either someone who maintains all the pages that are in flux on a regular basis or a cleanup where all pages that get outdated quickly are removed. I think you did a good start on this by replacing the Developers article with a link to the About page and marking Modeling progress out of date. The new front page looks good!

Some more feedback:

• I'd go one step further and remove Sound Progress and Modeling progress and anything else that is supposed to coordinate the developers in terms of project tasks such as asset creation, since all of this has been moved to the development section of the forums.

• The IdeaTorrent is still online but no one paid attention to it for a while, better link people that want to give feedback to the forums.

• You can mark the archlinux package "official" (I'd do it myself but I don't have write permission to the main site.)

• In the Players section, I'd link to categorys such as "Maps", "Weapons", "Classes", "Buildables" where players can find detail information and gameplay advice about the relevant entities. You could add a "Lore" category, too, to free up some space for this.