TripleA Wiki (?)
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What do people think if we launched a wiki for TripleA?
I've been wondering how to solve the 'documentation problem'. To this extent, how do we get:
- all documentation in one place
- easily edited, so that these are living documents
A wiki seems to fit the bill. It could be a treasure trove for map making information, systems & application design - really solving several problems.
The problems are:
- documentation is hard to find (multiple places)
- some documentation is duplicative
- some documentation is out of date
- some documentation is not easy to update
If we launched a wiki, the documentation from these locations I think could be moved:
- https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/tree/master/docs
- https://triplea-game.org/user-guide/
- any interesting/useful forum thread that are akin to a 'how-to'
The forum threads & wiki could go hand-in-hand pretty well, nothing is to say the wiki can't link to interesting threads. (I would envision that any forum threads that are moved to wiki are simply copied, cleaned up, consolidated, updated; and then a comment posted in the forum thread 'moved to wiki: link')
As far as tech stack and cost: JS.WIKI looks promising & we could probably squeeze it onto the existing forums server.
If anyone is intrigued by this - this project could use a leader and any help/volunteers that are willing. The big effort would be to move the documentation, and hella work is needed to clean it up and make it cohesive and complete. I suspect setting up the wiki would need some hours of work - it's not the hard part. The hard part of this effort is getting the documentation organized & good.
Please chime in if willing to volunteer. I'm otherwise interested to know if this sounds useful to others.
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Sounds intriguing! Also daunting hehe. Would be cool though to have all those docs in one spot though. Or also to have it framed out where a curious user could move from the more standard nuts and bolts stuff like say simple cosmetic edits (stuff from a player's perspective) into the heavier map making oriented stuff.
The docs here would be cool to have up for sure, since they're very useful and well organized...
Like I think that all still holds up pretty much, but then with a wiki we could update the screens for whatever makes sense, like if features have been added.
Especially if it's sorta mostly already in place and I could maybe add a quick blurb on how to do a couple additional things like upscale/downscale a baseline image and get it back to 1px lines, using Inkscape or GIMP with the various tricks on that stuff.
Anyhow, cool idea! Seems useful for sure.
A lot of the A&A wikis use tripleA for refs, but it would be nice to have something sorta comprehensive that could handle all comers here, like for the DIY on it. My threads ramble hardcore, but there a probably a couple screens here and there that might slot in for a how-to on some map stuff.
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@lafayette said in TripleA Wiki (?):
The hard part of this effort is getting the documentation organized & good.
yea that would be the hard part. Unfortunately I'm not smart enough to help.
One would have to decide what should stay and go. Probably best for the originators todo it but a lot of them not around anymore.
Good idea though
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@lafayette
I will help with getting some documentation onto the wiki -
@beelee
If this project is a go, would you help by scouring the forum posts for worthy links?Short term I can link to them in the wiki, long term I can reformat them?
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I think Roger would be better suited to it than I.
I'm not opposed to helping, but I don't feel qualified enough to edit other peoples work, is my main concern.
Probably best just to let it all roll as is.
Edit
I think a start would be to help , well i forgot his name lol, get his map uploaded to triplea via git.I mean a big ambitious outline is all good and in the long run a smart way to go, but, Tannebernie, ( i remembered lol ) map would be a good starting point for a thingy inside the outline of things
If that made any sense lol
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@beelee said in TripleA Wiki (?):
I'm not opposed to helping, but I don't feel qualified enough to edit other peoples work, is my main concern.
Don't think of it as other people's work. It's the projects documentation. Thinking of it as other people's work is a bad perspective IMO. It'll lead to some project anti-patterns. In part, it's how we got to the situation of duplicative & out of date & non-cohesive documentation. There is very little personal owernship in TripleA. Once it's merged, edited, updated, published - it then belongs to the project, not the individual.
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@lafayette Feel free to use my existing wiki, https://axisandallies.fandom.com/wiki/Axis_%26_Allies_Wikipedia
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@rogercooper I appreciate the offer! Though, unfortunately we can't have an official presence with something that contains the "Axis & Allies" trademark. There would need to be a prominent disclaimer text at each instance. Given A&A is in the domain name and the overall prevalence, it's probably unfeasible.
This does raise an interesting topic - regarding existing wikis. I'm not familiar enough with the existing wikis to comment on it, but there is a question whether these can be lasso'ed in, or if there is an example where we could the existing wiki wholesale.
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@lafayette It is not hard to create a new wiki on fandom.com. The real work is creating the articles and keeping them up to date.
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Good point. Not hosting a wiki ourselves is certainly a plus. @rogercooper Are there any drawbacks you can mention regarding fandom?
I'm also curious, does anyone know of similar open-soruce gaming projects that also use fandom for a wiki, similar to us?
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@lafayette The problem with any Wiki is that it is not a database from the point of view of the user. You need to have a lot of discipline when entering categories because of the lack of tools to work with them. You can easily create duplicate categories and you can't search for articles based upon multiple criteria.
For example, in my Wiki every entry in the category "TripleA Scenarios" should also have the category of "Historical", "Hypothetical", "Fictional" or "Abstract" but I have no way of enforcing that.
Furthermore, I can accidentally assign "Triplea Scenarios" as a category and I will not be stopped or warned.
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@rogercooper Here is an example of open source project using a wiki, https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page
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@Alexei-Svitkine / @RoiEX - I'm curious specifically if you two have any thoughts?
The proposal is to move all user, developer & player facing documentation to a wiki. Github wiki would be a natural choice but it is feature under-par and we have rejected its use in the past. The current proposed choices for wiki is between a wiki powered by node.js that we would host, or to use fandom.
Fandom would be nice because we don't have to worry about wiki infrastructure, but the drawback is ads & a one-time cost of changing the wiki markup that we currently have from markdown to an older and more classic wiki markdown syntax.
Hosting our own wiki gives us more control, but we need to manage it. I think we can co-host the wiki on the same server as the forums without any additional server costs, but we would still be hosting our own thing.
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Side-note, I'm trying to look a bit at different wiki engines.
There are a few things I'm looking at:
- (A) whether images can be pasted from clipboard into the wiki
- (B) automatic table of contents
- (C) clean view of all wiki pages, with nesting so we can group pages
- (D) to a lesser extent, wiki syntax
- (E) able to handle page renames cleanly
So far, wiki.js does not support pasting of images at all, fandom has support but it's not super clean. (nodebb, this forum, does have super clean support to paste images).
I'm thinking to add 'mediawiki' to the mix for a wiki engine to evaluate.
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As I use Fandom can I answer some of these questions for Fandom
- (A) whether images can be pasted from clipboard into the wiki
Yes, but they always have the same name and format. I find it easier to upload the image. - (B) automatic table of contents
You can see the tree view structure, but not very well - (C) clean view of all wiki pages, with nesting so we can group pages
Wikis are not hiearchical. - (D) to a lesser extent, wiki syntax
Easy to view, I often work directly in the wiki code. - (E) able to handle page renames cleanly
No problem.
- (A) whether images can be pasted from clipboard into the wiki
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tripleA is big enough to deserve a wiki. its not that hard if you have a good plan as you said. there are wiki sites with web search traction (potential exposure), but tons of adds. very slow. i think we're better than that. i see our community as an intelligent bunch. (i have experience with wiki organizing - i would have one or a few ppl lay the foundation first.)
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@rogercooper
On Fandom can you control the number of adverts shown, as there are just so many?
They really slows my browser down, to the point it starts to annoy me. -
@thedog I have not seen many ads when I use it. Check it out Axis & Allies Wiki
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On a related topic I think what we as players need FAR MORE is a DISCORD server. A place for people to communicate outside of the game that isnt like the "old" forum heh. Where folks can organize games, post screenshots, memes about world war 2, discuss history, etc.
EDIT:If you mean a Wikipedia focusing on modding, development and map making then I'm sure that could be a great resource if you like the Wiki-format. I just dont know enough about it to fully comment!
