[RFC] Wiki reorganization

[M Fnord]

Hokay, so as things slowly become more and more complex I've been putting a little thought into housekeeping work on FenWiki. Namely, the story archive's organization is pretty arbitrary & kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, especially for stories that take place *after* the end of the Boskone War. I propose that we reorganize the story indexing to deal with this. I've put up a prototype index page on http://fnord.sandwich.net/fenwiki/doku. ... playground]the Playground page that covers all the bases I'm concerned about, but before I go willy-nilly changing the namespace structure I figure I ought to get some input from the crew. Thoughts?
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Cobalt Greywalker]

OK, my first thoughts are:

If we're going with the two column format (which I don't see any reason not to as it looks fine to me), maybe we ought to make the story dates more
prominent. A simple bold formatting would probably work.

Also, we may want to pre-empt some questions as to how we do things on the wiki with some entries in the FAQ on how to format things like the story entries
(specifically, how to re-organise them if we add a story between existing entries because of the time period it covers).

[robkelk]

Looks good to me.

The original classification system was arbritary, yes. It worked when it was a dozen or so stories on my website; it doesn't work so well now that there's this much actual content. I have no ego wrapped up in the current layout.

Mind you, we're going to have to change a ship-full of links on a ship-full of pages - it seems sometimes that every character and ship page has a list of "featured in these stories" at the end, and there's a few links to stories in some of the other articles - but we should only need to do this once, right?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[M Fnord]

A couple of notes:

1) The two-column format is a stylistic tic on my part and not necessarily something that must happen with a reorg. We can go with it or not depending on how
we feel, and it's an easy enough edit to reformat.

2) Changing all the orphan links is the main reason I wanted to put this up to the group first, 'cause there's going to be a hell of a lot of 'em
and fixing all the pages will be a tedious business.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[robkelk]

2) Changing all the orphan links is the main reason I wanted to put this up to the group first, 'cause there's going to be a hell of a lot of 'em and fixing all the pages will be a tedious business.

If we go with a re-org, I strongly suggest dividing the link-fix job amongst all the admins. (What, there's only three of us? ) That way, we don't all change the same links while missing other links.

And, as I said, we're only going to have to do this once. (Assuming we put a decent organization structure in place, that is, and now we know what a decent structure should look like...)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[M Fnord]

And, as I said, we're only going to have to do this once. (Assuming we put a decent organization structure in place, that is, and now we know what a decent structure should look like...)

I wouldn't go *that* far, but still...

The proposed structure is as decent as I can come up with and still allow some flexibility. We could go to a year-based namespace structure (so instead of namespaces like fictioneason-n we'd have fiction:20xx) but I'm not sure how that would work out in the long term. I'm open to suggestions.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Bob Schroeck]

The prototype looks good. As for the namespace idea, won't that bugger up stories that span multiple years?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[M Fnord]

Well... yeah, which is kinda why I wanted input.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Bob Schroeck]

Well then, I'm against it!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

I think the "season" approach is the way to go. While I can easily imagine stories that span years, there aren't many possible plots that span story arcs. (If there were, they'd be story arcs in and of themselves.)

Mind you, LoGG has an entire prologue that's a flashback to the story arc before the one it's set in, but that's (a) a special case, and (b) clearly marked...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[M Fnord]

Allright kids, barring some sort of serious disagreement I'm going to go ahead and realign the archive tonight, probably around 8ish MDT. Fixing orphan
links will continue into the late night until it's done or I collapse from sleep exhaustion, whichever comes first.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[M Fnord]

Unless I missed something - which is possible, but unlikely - the namespaces have been reorganized and all links have been redirected. The Mgt. thanks you for
your patience, normal operations have resumed.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Sofaspud]

FWIW, I'm really digging the new look. I'd have preferred the two-column format just to save on vertical space (and get rid of all that lonely
wasteland off to the right), but even without that it's a nice setup.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

[M Fnord]

I'd have preferred the two-column format just to save on vertical space (and get rid of all that lonely wasteland off to the right), but even without that it's a nice setup.

I dicked around a bit with the two-column format, but if the TOC's active it squeezes the righthand column down something fierce. I don't really *want* to disable the TOC on the story index, so for now we're stuck with it.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[robkelk]

I dicked around a bit with the two-column format, but if the TOC's active it squeezes the righthand column down something fierce. I don't really *want* to disable the TOC on the story index, so for now we're stuck with it.

Well, if somebody was to write a decent-sized introductory paragraph for the story page, we could display that beside the TOC and set each of the season sections to two-column.

(What? Me? I just wrote the Main Belt page...)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Sofaspud]

I'm not sure a decent-sized intro -- as cool as that would be -- will do the trick. It's at best a stopgap solution, unless my understanding of Wiki
formatting (sparse, at best) is way off track.

As more stories are added, won't the TOC grow to match? Therefore, it will at some point exceed the vertical length of the intro (unless the intro is
grown as well, but That Way Lies Madness).

Hrm. Simple enough to solve with a regular webpage, not at all sure how it could be done with Wiki-style pages. Perhaps the TOC box itself could be
two-column? that way it would tend to stay 'short', as it were, and any reasonably sized intro paragraph would work for... well, quite a long time,
really.

Edit to add: I am possibly smoking crack, as the above glurge might suggest. I for some harebrained reason assumed the TOC was showing each entry, rather than
each section header.

So, yeah. Never mind most of what I said. An intro paragraph would work beautifully.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

[M Fnord]

As more stories are added, won't the TOC grow to match? Therefore, it will at some point exceed the vertical length of the intro (unless the intro is grown as well, but That Way Lies Madness).

In DokuWiki (which is our backbone wiki software) the TOC is automatically generated using top-level headings. So the only things that get listed are section heads. As long as we don't start adding new sections wily-nilly we should - emphasis on 'should' - be okay.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"