CN Wiki Feedback Thread

[Bobogoobo]

Hello CN Community,

I'm Bobogoobo, a bureaucrat and long-time contributor on the Cyber Nations Wiki. I don't think anything like this has been done before, so I wanted to create a place where those who would prefer to give feedback somewhere other than on the wiki can do so. Any ideas for ways to improve the wiki, particularly ease of use, navigation, and editing, or anything else, are valuable to have from those who may not be the most active contributors to the wiki to get a different perspective and to hear from the demographic which is meant to benefit most from the wiki. Feel free to ask any questions you may have as well, or whatever else you want to say.

Cyber Nations Wiki: [url=http://cybernations.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page]Link[/url]
IRC channel: #cn-wiki on Coldfront ( irc://irc.coldfront.net/cn-wiki )

Thanks.

[xoindotnler]

Move away from Wikia. Kill it with fire etc.

[Rogal Dorn]

Hopefully there are some folks with good ideas lurking about

(also, following this thread so i can answer any questions if people ask them)

[Systemfailure]

Burn the servers and then salt the remains.

its an ok thing most wiki pages only problem is they are ugly as hell basically just have their charter posted up there and treaty's all on the most hand are stupidly outdated and generally useless

[Rudolph]

[quote name='xoindotnler' timestamp='1337907405' post='2971804']
Move away from Wikia.
[/quote]
I'll sort of echo this man's words and here's my question. Would it be possible to move away from Wikia or no?

[Bobogoobo]

[quote name='Rudolph' timestamp='1337911736' post='2971831']
I'll sort of echo this man's words and here's my question. Would it be possible to move away from Wikia or no?
[/quote]
I'm pretty sure it's possible, but none of the options are quite as good or they have other limitations (or cost money). Wikia is good enough for most things and fairly reliable.

[Rogal Dorn]

[quote name='Systemfailure' timestamp='1337911619' post='2971830']
Burn the servers and then salt the remains.

its an ok thing most wiki pages only problem is they are ugly as hell basically just have their charter posted up there and treaty's all on the most hand are stupidly outdated and generally useless
[/quote]

I think it's because no one (save a few alliances) actually update their page with their history and such. as far as treaties goes to my knowledge most of those are up to date. C-list alliances might have out-dated stuff though but most A-list alliances treaties are up to date (and if they arent let us know what to fix )

[xoindotnler]

[quote name='Systemfailure' timestamp='1337911619' post='2971830']
its an ok thing most wiki pages only problem is they are ugly as hell basically just have their charter posted up there and treaty's all on the most hand are stupidly outdated and generally useless
[/quote]
Thank god that every alliance has dedicated writers for it.

[quote name='Rudolph' timestamp='1337911736' post='2971831']
I'll sort of echo this man's words and here's my question. Would it be possible to move away from Wikia or no?
[/quote]
Possible with a bit of work, however you can't really close it. Alternatives like shoutwiki exist, not that hard to look around for it.

[quote name='Bobogoobo' timestamp='1337911844' post='2971832']
I'm pretty sure it's possible, but none of the options are quite as good or they have other limitations (or cost money). Wikia is good enough for most things and fairly reliable.
[/quote]

Fairly reliable in consistently breaking things and needed workarounds for everything you see and not see. It also has no problem shoving the next "great" thing in your face. Thank god for changing things so you can have said you changed something while no one needed it or wants it.

[USMC123]

Unban Hereno from being able to edit the wiki.

[Hereno]

[quote name='USMC123' timestamp='1337912669' post='2971850']
Unban Hereno from being able to edit the wiki.
[/quote]

Better yet, get mods who don't ban people for !@#$ they didn't even write because "he would probably do that" with literally zero other proof and then refuse to unban them when they find out who actually did it.

[Megabyte]

To the OWF with you.

[Scorponok]

Move the alliance side panel to centre position and have the flag as a more predominant focus. Below it have the charter and links and all that jazz.

Just my two cents.

Thanks

[Hereno]

[quote name='Scorponok' timestamp='1337966880' post='2972223']
Move the alliance side panel to centre position and have the flag as a more predominant focus. Below it have the charter and links and all that jazz.

Just my two cents.

Thanks
[/quote]

This reminds me of something else, and goes nicely with my other post about how !@#$%* the mods and rules are for the wiki. When trying to clean up Tetris' wiki page back in the day, I removed the long version of the charter and instead placed a link to the charter which would be available to anyone, and would also allow the page to look nicer and things that people actually care about, like contact information, treaties, etc. to be more prominent. Instead, the changes were reversed and I was told what I did was "against the rules because you're deleting content", despite those changes not just being my idea, but things our alliance thought would be a good idea. As you can see, our wiki page still looks terrible and is almost entirely just a copy of our charter that nobody gives a !@#$ about. You sure showed us about not messing with our wiki overlords who clearly know what's best for our own alliance's page.

I also loved the similar incident where, against the will of the community, the wiki mods decided that they had a better name for the war that had already been named; a name that wasn't in common usage at all that nobody wanted except a few people who ran the wiki. I'm sure most of us remember that, though. Basically, the wiki staff are completely terrible.

[xoindotnler]

[quote name='Hereno' timestamp='1337970922' post='2972254']
I also loved the similar incident where, against the will of the community, the wiki mods decided that they had a better name for the war that had already been named; a name that wasn't in common usage at all that nobody wanted except a few people who ran the wiki. I'm sure most of us remember that, though. Basically, the wiki staff are completely terrible.
[/quote]
Reminds me of the time that the alliance page of Avalon got moved to make place for some [url="http://cybernations.wikia.com/wiki/Avalon_%28military_vehicle%29"]CNRP garbage[/url].

[Icewolf]

With the charters it might be nice of all alliances had a seperate wiki page for the charter rather than having it on an external page or in the main page. Having it as a link to a forum is annoying as the forum might require you to log in and runs the risk of being bumped to a potentially dangerous external page (if vandals wanted to get viruses to people). However, if you are trying to get a quick overview of an alliance the charter is not the place to start as they generally do not include history and existing treaties.

[Franz Ferdinand]

I'd say buy a domain name and maybe ask for hosting from Bros2 with which to port the wiki to a new MediaWiki build.

[Custodian]

Hi Bobo,

One feature that may encourage participation from those less familiar with the wiki interface would be a "default nation" template whose structure remains fixed, but whose content could be edited to add information specific to a ruler's nation.

From what I can see, the Wikia platform has much more functionality than most users will ever require. This suggests that the question of "improving the CN wiki" is more an issue of applying the facilities that already exist rather than searching for a newer, shiner platform.

Also, shixty yayt.

[RandomInterrupt]

I basically use the wiki as a reference to treaties and that's about it. It's fairly useless as historical documentation due to the constant slant in many articles. Basically, when it comes to article entries on wars, it should be impartial and factual to have any real meaning. However they most certainly are not, and most war entries treat one parties opinion as fact. It's perfectly fine to document and explain one parties alegation/charge/etc, but it should be clearly differentiated from objective facts.

Also, as noted by many already, wikia is pretty much awful.

[potato]

[quote name='Hereno' timestamp='1337970922' post='2972254']
This reminds me of something else, and goes nicely with my other post about how !@#$%* the mods and rules are for the wiki. When trying to clean up Tetris' wiki page back in the day, I removed the long version of the charter and instead placed a link to the charter which would be available to anyone, and would also allow the page to look nicer and things that people actually care about, like contact information, treaties, etc. to be more prominent. Instead, the changes were reversed and I was told what I did was "against the rules because you're deleting content", despite those changes not just being my idea, but things our alliance thought would be a good idea. As you can see, our wiki page still looks terrible and is almost entirely just a copy of our charter that nobody gives a !@#$ about. You sure showed us about not messing with our wiki overlords who clearly know what's best for our own alliance's page.

I also loved the similar incident where, against the will of the community, the wiki mods decided that they had a better name for the war that had already been named; a name that wasn't in common usage at all that nobody wanted except a few people who ran the wiki. I'm sure most of us remember that, though. Basically, the wiki staff are completely terrible.
[/quote]

To be fair, I think there is a new team right now and I have found them to be much better and dealing with this. Instead of being on a power trip (sup MvP), they have been quite understanding when I tried to make changes to my page. And I think it was Rogal Dorn who actually PM'd me to check a few things. As opposed to going straight for the ban hammer, even after identifying myself (sup MvP).
But yeah, what I think everyone is trying to say is that not everyone is a hardcore roleplayer. Not everyone of us want to invent a separate language for our CN nation. Not all of us want to have a long and detailed history and end up with 356 seperate pages for the different mock philosophers you invented. Now, I'm OK with people doing that but you just can't expect the same level of commitment from everyone. I understand the need for guidelines but there ought to be some sort of middleground in between the "MY WAY OR NO WAY" stance some mods have taken in the past (sup MvP) and the general anarchism other would prefer.
I do think by adopting a hard stance of banning people who don't do things your way you're losing participants. Starting from me since I deleted my wiki because it wasn't up to some made up standards (granted, my page wasn't the center of attention of the CN wiki).

Edited May 26, 2012 by potato

[Sandwich Controversy]

Remove all admins and "bureaucrats", they don't do anything constructive (well, beyond elaborating on National Unionist theory) and actively harm the image of the wiki.

[Sigrun Vapneir]

I havent used it enough to say whether many of the criticisms are accurate, or just dissing.

That said, a large part of why I havent is that it does seem very unfriendly. Rules, if there are any, are unclear. It's quite intimidating to think that you will spend your time documenting something then have it reverted. Also this:

[quote name='RandomInterrupt' timestamp='1337983750' post='2972398']
I basically use the wiki as a reference to treaties and that's about it. It's fairly useless as historical documentation due to the constant slant in many articles. Basically, when it comes to article entries on wars, it should be impartial and factual to have any real meaning. However they most certainly are not, and most war entries treat one parties opinion as fact. It's perfectly fine to document and explain one parties alegation/charge/etc, but it should be clearly differentiated from objective facts.

Also, as noted by many already, wikia is pretty much awful.
[/quote]

The sustained tendentious slant of many of the major articles has always left me with the feeling that the whole platform is obviously untrustable.

[Neo Uruk]

Can you unban Chief Savage Man for that time MvP literally got angry that his moderation abilities were brought into question on a day that the wiki was vandalized? Because that was !@#$%^&*.

[Rogal Dorn]

[quote name='Scorponok' timestamp='1337966880' post='2972223']
Move the alliance side panel to centre position and have the flag as a more predominant focus. Below it have the charter and links and all that jazz.

Just my two cents.

Thanks
[/quote]

I do like the idea of adding the charter link to the bottom of the alliance infobox (where it says IRC info, forum link, member "factbook" and whatnot. thats a good idea scorp.

[quote name='Hereno' timestamp='1337970922' post='2972254']
This reminds me of something else, and goes nicely with my other post about how !@#$%* the mods and rules are for the wiki. When trying to clean up Tetris' wiki page back in the day, I removed the long version of the charter and instead placed a link to the charter which would be available to anyone, and would also allow the page to look nicer and things that people actually care about, like contact information, treaties, etc. to be more prominent. Instead, the changes were reversed and I was told what I did was "against the rules because you're deleting content", despite those changes not just being my idea, but things our alliance thought would be a good idea. As you can see, our wiki page still looks terrible and is almost entirely just a copy of our charter that nobody gives a !@#$ about. You sure showed us about not messing with our wiki overlords who clearly know what's best for our own alliance's page.

I also loved the similar incident where, against the will of the community, the wiki mods decided that they had a better name for the war that had already been named; a name that wasn't in common usage at all that nobody wanted except a few people who ran the wiki. I'm sure most of us remember that, though. Basically, the wiki staff are completely terrible.
[/quote]

Hereno, i believe you're refering to [url=http://cybernations.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_(2nd)?diff=next&oldid=393821]this edit[/url] which was "undone" by Locke. I'll work on this in a minute when im done replying to this wall of replies


[quote name='xoindotnler' timestamp='1337971258' post='2972257']
Reminds me of the time that the alliance page of Avalon got moved to make place for some [url="http://cybernations.wikia.com/wiki/Avalon_%28military_vehicle%29"]CNRP garbage[/url].
[/quote]

I see that happened 1.5 years before i even started editting on the wiki but i will never allow primary CN material pages (alliances, wars, etc etc) to be moved to make room for "CNRP garbage" as you so call it because they're secondary, aka not directly about the game like alliances, treaties etc are.

[quote name='Icewolf' timestamp='1337971455' post='2972258']
With the charters it might be nice of all alliances had a seperate wiki page for the charter rather than having it on an external page or in the main page. Having it as a link to a forum is annoying as the forum might require you to log in and runs the risk of being bumped to a potentially dangerous external page (if vandals wanted to get viruses to people). However, if you are trying to get a quick overview of an alliance the charter is not the place to start as they generally do not include history and existing treaties.
[/quote]

I do think that's a good idea Icewolf especially if it's a login-required forum. However the charters not being on the alliance's main page would have to be on a case-by-case basis as some alliances may want it on their main page and some may not.

[quote name='Custodian' timestamp='1337981002' post='2972365']
Hi Bobo,

One feature that may encourage participation from those less familiar with the wiki interface would be a "default nation" template whose structure remains fixed, but whose content could be edited to add information specific to a ruler's nation.

From what I can see, the Wikia platform has much more functionality than most users will ever require. This suggests that the question of "improving the CN wiki" is more an issue of applying the facilities that already exist rather than searching for a newer, shiner platform.

Also, shixty yayt.
[/quote]

hrmm, do you mean something similar to the [url=http://cybernations.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Nation_infobox]Template:Nation infobox[/url]? Whenever someone creates a new article at the top there are pre-loadable templates to choose... "Nation, Alliance, Alliance War, Treaty". and hitting "nation" will automatically load up the Nation infobox template.

[quote name='RandomInterrupt' timestamp='1337983750' post='2972398']
I basically use the wiki as a reference to treaties and that's about it. It's fairly useless as historical documentation due to the constant slant in many articles. Basically, when it comes to article entries on wars, it should be impartial and factual to have any real meaning. However they most certainly are not, and most war entries treat one parties opinion as fact. It's perfectly fine to document and explain one parties alegation/charge/etc, but it should be clearly differentiated from objective facts.

Also, as noted by many already, wikia is pretty much awful.
[/quote]

I have been updating the treaties alot and quite a few people can attest to me querying gov and asking about treaties and their validity or asking for a link to them to provide for the wiki. Whenever an alliance posts a new one on the OWF and it's not updated on the wiki by the time i'm able to then i'll do it as well. (the past couple days there was what, like 3 or 4 treaty signings and 1 cancellation. all updated on the wiki) the ones that are difficult to track down are the fark ones because they dont post them on the owf often but they do post them on their forums which dont require login thank god.

i understand that the wars etc are not/have not been without bias and that's something i'll try and keep an eye out for in the future. obviously i cannot go back and change all couple hundred war pages and make them from a neutral PoV, especially when i started CN in 2010 so i wasnt there for any of them.

another thing that's widely debated is alliances winning/losing wars. alliances putting they "strategically won" while in they surrendered for example. while other alliances put the simple outcome like "~ victory" or whatever. people have their own way of doing things heh.

[quote name='potato' timestamp='1337992448' post='2972495']
To be fair, I think there is a new team right now and I have found them to be much better and dealing with this. Instead of being on a power trip (sup MvP), they have been quite understanding when I tried to make changes to my page. And I think it was Rogal Dorn who actually PM'd me to check a few things. As opposed to going straight for the ban hammer, even after identifying myself (sup MvP).
But yeah, what I think everyone is trying to say is that not everyone is a hardcore roleplayer. Not everyone of us want to invent a separate language for our CN nation. Not all of us want to have a long and detailed history and end up with 356 seperate pages for the different mock philosophers you invented. Now, I'm OK with people doing that but you just can't expect the same level of commitment from everyone. I understand the need for guidelines but there ought to be some sort of middleground in between the "MY WAY OR NO WAY" stance some mods have taken in the past (sup MvP) and the general anarchism other would prefer.
I do think by adopting a hard stance of banning people who don't do things your way you're losing participants. Starting from me since I deleted my wiki because it wasn't up to some made up standards (granted, my page wasn't the center of attention of the CN wiki).
[/quote]

erm, thanks potato :3 and for the record, no im not a hardcore roleplayer. i do have 2 crappy pages that i made when i was bored my last deployment because i was fortunate enough to be "stuck" at a computer.

for the large part i try to do "my homework" but mistakes have happened. like when zoomzoomzoom edited himself out of gov for non grata and it was by "anonymous user" i assumed it was someone just removing him since it didnt have a reason why or anything so i undid it. and as i now know after an irc convo with NG that it was infact zoomx3 himself so that's one instance. another is when i edited MK's page because TOP got sanctioned that day (this was recent) and i saw soviet canuck undo it later on. i was confused because on my CN screen it still showed top. so i asked in IRC what someone else's showed and they said MK so i was confused as to why mine had TOP as ranked 12 but nevertheless.

i think (dont take this as gospel) but my bans have been to people very clearly vandalizing pages.

[quote name='Sandwich Controversy' timestamp='1338013019' post='2972670']
Remove all admins and "bureaucrats", they don't do anything constructive (well, beyond elaborating on National Unionist theory) and actively harm the image of the wiki.
[/quote]

National unionist theory?

[quote name='Sigrun Vapneir' timestamp='1338017969' post='2972680']
I havent used it enough to say whether many of the criticisms are accurate, or just dissing.

That said, a large part of why I havent is that it does seem very unfriendly. Rules, if there are any, are unclear. It's quite intimidating to think that you will spend your time documenting something then have it reverted. Also this:

The sustained tendentious slant of many of the major articles has always left me with the feeling that the whole platform is obviously untrustable.
[/quote]

The rules on the wiki are pretty lax compared to the actual wikipedia (if you think our wiki is bad... dont ever edit the real one because they're even more elitist pricks)

the only real "rule" is the [url=http://cybernations.wikia.com/wiki/Cyber_Nations_Wiki:Vandalism]vandalism policy[/url]. the [url=http://cybernations.wikia.com/wiki/Cyber_Nations_Wiki:Style]"style" policy[/url] is a guideline to help newer folks who arent familiar with wiki format and such. like i started editting a year and a half ago and it took me forever to learn but i guess persistence paid off? :3


another thing people have been clamoring about (/me points at crymson in particular) is everyone making new war pages in the middle of a war. take the TOP/IRON-NpO War for example. there's 4 subconflict wiki pages about it. Fark-NPO, MJ-SF, DH-Chestnut, C&G-MHA War(which is a subconflict of a subconflict!) despite all of this all DoW's and etc are still on the TOP/IRON-NpO War page but duplicated on the subconflict pages with more "history" on the particular subconflict.

can i get a consensus on subconflicts pro/against just for future reference?

Edited May 26, 2012 by Rogal Dorn

[Demag]

Well if you can define what a sub-conflict is then I don't see reason why not too have them but a lot of them are just seem tenuous at times like the Mjolnir - SF front its still part of the TOP/IRON-NpO where as the MHA-C&G and Fark-NPO where pre-empts and can be more easily defined as a sub-conflict as there wasn't a direct relation to the main war initially.

I hope this makes sense basically as long as sub-conflicts have decent definition to apply it to I don't see an issue.

[Bobogoobo]

Okay...
For many of these comments I can't be sure whether they're referring to the current admin/bureaucrat team or older ones, because the set of active people changes pretty often and the only older team member I'm really familiar with is MvP, and Lol pie to a degree.

xoin: most of the biggest new features are optional and we've been keeping them off. The new editor (not to mention Oasis) and such are annoying, but it's not too hard to make a few workarounds and get used to it. It still works well as a wiki. Also, my custom CSS that I've done to fix some of the changes they've made and make it more like Monaco used to be can be found [url=http://cybernations.wikia.com/wiki/CN:CSS]here[/url]. A lot of it is personal preference (I do all my code manually, no visual editor or any of that) but some of it might be helpful. Especially extending the page width, since with the sidebar the content space is tiny.

Scorp: I'm not sure what you mean :S

Hereno: from the edit Rogal linked, it looks like Locke left the external link but also left the charter text there because the link requires a login. Things need to be visible without logging in if you're going to link straight to them from the wiki.
Which war are you talking about? It's tough to name wars because everyone wants a different name. If there's a consensus on the war's talk page, generally that's what we go with. For many recent ones, it's just been left as ABC-XYZ War and alliances are free to refer to it however they wish on their pages.
And I'd rather not rekindle all these arguments, but we do have proof.

xoin again: it wouldn't be fair to RPers to subjugate them. The wiki belongs as much to them as it does to alliance and nation pages, and everyone has the right to enjoy what they like doing there. In most cases there's a disambiguation (like if a nation and alliance share the same name), but in this case I don't actually see anything like that.

Icewolf: indeed it would, but some prefer to leave it on their pages, and either way works pretty well. Generally charters go below everything else if the full text is on the main alliance page, so the other things retain focus.

Custodian: hopefully Rogal's post answers your question. An alternate way to reach the same point is to use the create nation box on the main page of the wiki.
True, most people don't get really deep into what mediawiki can do. So for improvements I mainly was talking about ways to improve consistency and help people find what they're looking for as efficiently as possibly. This can include how templates are displayed and formatted, how other parts of the interface are done, etc. As an example, a couple days ago I made a new template to standardize the display of all the templates that list the alliances for each team. That kind of thing makes the code neater and easier to use and update, makes things look nice because they're all displayed the same way, and such.

RandomInterrupt: yes, unfortunately that can be a problem. The other side of it is that it's often hard to represent both viewpoints neutrally, and people trying to remove bias can just shift it to the other side and get the edit reverted. It would be great if all pages were written without bias (especially since that's part of the style guidelines).

potato: currently, it's pretty hard to get banned just for not following a few policies. It's when people start edit wars, argue with admins trying to get them to stop being aggressive about it, and essentially vandalize pages just to get it their way, when things go badly. Generally we don't change the content of articles unless they contain clearly biased or non-factual statements; we mainly format it to look nice on the wiki and mark it if it has some policy issues. I apologize if sometimes I or we are too strict about anything, but it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between vandals and people who just aren't familiar with the standards and guidelines, and we do our best to keep the wiki of high quality.

Sandwich Controversy: removing admins and bureaucrats would remove the abilities to block accounts, to delete pages, and to edit pages that are protected because of high usage rates. All of these are important things to have someone able to do in order to keep the wiki as clean, factual, and organized as possible. Plus, if people know that there's no one to stop them, there would definitely be even more vandalism.

Sigrun Vapneir: we're not trying to be unfriendly, but we have to be somewhat strict in enforcing the rules so that the wiki doesn't devolve into chaos. If you have questions on any policy please feel free to ask an admin about it, that way you can get it cleared up and we can also try to word it more specifically on the policy pages. If you honestly spend time working on something and put it in a reasonable format, it's very unlikely to be reverted.
I'm sorry you feel you can't trust the information there, but that kind of comes along with the concept of a community-run reference. There are many pages that are written well, so not all of them are bad. And even if there is some bias you can usually find some good information in there.

Neo Uruk: give me a link to his user page and/or what happened and I will take a look.

As Rogal said, people have been kind of putting whatever they want for their war results, so it can be hard to tell what really happened. I'm not a historian and I don't really get into inter-alliance politics so I can't really improve that beyond asking people to try to avoid bias.
And Rogal, you had a different thing because you were looking at All Alliances and the individual stats pages are updated more often, remember? But yeah, that whole situation was kind of chaotic, it's pointless to keep editing every hour when they switch position, so I thought it was best to wait a day or two until there was a clearer margin.
And yeah, the only bans I've done in a while are spambots and the usual one-day ban for first-time blatant vandalism. And sometimes I don't even do that if I'm not really sure what an edit was trying to accomplish, even if it could look like vandalism.

Yeah, having a standard definition on all these things helps, but the standard can also change and then there are complaints again. It's just difficult to keep things organized with so much going on all the time.

Hopefully this answers some questions...