All The Tropes Wiki Project

[robkelk]

If the page says it's a policy statement and you don't want to be bound by it, then don't post it to the new wiki. Period.
--
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

[Morganite]

There is something of a precedent for templates of the form "This is from X, provided here for historical purposes, and does not represent the policies of Y, which is us."

-Morgan.

[Labster]

I also want a pony in the logo.
Note: My joke and pun ideas are not real ideas.  And also, the graphic needs to look good at Retina screen resolution, but also look good around 135x135 -- this size on screen with presumably be controlled by CSS.  Also consider that we'll want something recognizable at the 16x16 favicon.ico size.
Sorry Rob, it's too late on the not-post-it-period train.  The problem is that there are links to policy statements in the wiki, and we just don't want to redlink all of those.  Those are like reminders of policies we do need.  The rule of thumb here is that if it's in the "All The Tropes:" namespace, it's policy.  If it's in Administrivia/ or About/, it's historical or proposal.  And at this state, pretty much everything is open to discussion and editing.
Oh, and image and page import are under way.  Hopefully not much will break *crosses fingers*.
-- ∇×V

[robkelk]

Next-best is to make it abundantly clear that they aren't your policies, then...
--
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

[GethN7]

vorticityI also want a pony in the logo.

Note: My joke and pun ideas are not real ideas.  And also, the graphic needs to look good at Retina screen resolution, but also look good around 135x135 -- this size on screen with presumably be controlled by CSS.  Also consider that we'll want something recognizable at the 16x16 favicon.ico size.

Sorry Rob, it's too late on the not-post-it-period train.  The problem is that there are links to policy statements in the wiki, and we just don't want to redlink all of those.  Those are like reminders of policies we do need.  The rule of thumb here is that if it's in the "All The Tropes:" namespace, it's policy.  If it's in Administrivia/ or About/, it's historical or proposal.  And at this state, pretty much everything is open to discussion and editing.

Oh, and image and page import are under way.  Hopefully not much will break *crosses fingers*.

Minor update folks: The image upload is done, a few didn't go through, but we got about 99.9% of them. The text is still being uploaded, and so far, so good, but a few warnings:

1. We will be missing some templates. I'll be filling the blanks ASAP, but if you guys notice anything we need, just let me know.

2. We have {{trope}} and {{work}} templates at the top of every page and subpage, and unfortunately, we weren't able to perfect their placement, so some may be on the wrong pages, so if you see the wrong template, just change it over to the correct template.

3. Quotes have been rendered imperfectly on some pages. This was unavoidable, so many quotes will need fixed.

4. MediaWiki has a small change in how links back to the main page are handled from subpages. There will be a link back to the main page at the top of the page below the title, not on the templates, so the templates will not have "Main" link.

5. Categories work differently in MediaWiki. There are actual category pages and an entire namespace for categories, which TV Tropes doesn't actually have (the category system used on TVT is more a "breadcrumb trail" than actual page tagging. We managed to convert this into something that makes sense in MediaWiki, but for the longtime TVT users, categories tags have to placed on the page directly.

We'll let you know more when we get the news, but basically, we're almost ready for business

[Morganite]

Next-best is to make it abundantly clear that they aren't your policies, then...

That's really why I suggested placing a template with a notice to that effect on those pages. It's the sort of thing that's best made blatant.

(Or at least, I thought I was suggesting that...)

-Morgan.

[Bob Schroeck]

Brent, is the wiki entirely offline as you get things imported, or is it actually up somewhere we can get to it and start fixing things?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

We're technically "open for business" right now, but the database import is still ongoing.

Even after everything we did to condense things, included is everything that existed on TV Tropes circa June 2012, and thus the database is going to be HUGE.

We started importing pages around yesterday afternoon, and the server is still uploading all the content.

Once we finally get a good idea when it's stopped, we''ll let you guys know.

In the meantime, I can say this. We almost over halfway done with the database import, which is about 200,000+ pages of content (estimated).

If you want to see how much we have imported already, check the following page:

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Special:Statistics (check the "Pages" statistic)

If you want to see the wiki itself, go here:

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Main_Page

We still have a ton of red links that need filled in, which you can see by clicking the "Random Page" option on the sidebar and looking at various pages, but as I said, the database import is still ongoing, since we also added lots of deleted content from the Wayback Machine to complete our records, on top of what was already in the original torrent archive.
 

[Labster]

$GethN7[-1] =~ s/open for business/open for beta/;

Yes things are editable. It doesn't look like we're going to have to repeat the import either. Most things appear to have installed correctly, and the few that remain can be fixed up by bots. If you see things that look repeatedly wrong, ask GethN7 to run a bot to fix them. But I am just so glad that things *don't look awful*. Prettier than TVT -- maybe not yet.

I'd say we're in an open beta now, because many things are not set up, from policy to branding. But you can feel free to edit.

As I'm typing this, the last few pages in the import are trickling in. Hopefully that will clean up the last major portion of redlinks.

Geth wants to get a forum set up anyway. We're still hashing out the details on that. But in the meantime, we're probably easiest to contact at #allthetropes on irc.freenode.net.
-- ∇×V

[robkelk]

I'm not a good artist, so I welcome any logo you guys come up with. Just make sure it can fit into a 135 x 135 px area at least, and 150 x 150 px area at most.

Also, I recommend it be made a PNG file with a transparent background. The stylesheets we're gonna use for the Darth/Sugar Wiki require custom CSS that will look really ugly with a non transparent background logo file. This also ensures, regardless of skin, the CSS and logo go together seamlessly. I also recommend it be cleaned of background artifacts and have bright, rich colors, so it will stand out against some of the darker style sheets and won't look horrible on really large monitors.

Okay, here's something with all the tropes that I could squeeze in.



Doesn't look very good at 150x150, does it? You can barely make out the John Lennon / Harry Potter glasses on the top shelf...

Back to square one, or can this be salvaged?
--
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

[GethN7]

@rob kelk: Actually, with some contrast edits, the logo you made should work fine. (already did that on my end, have uploaded it to Orain)

As for the wiki imports, things are editable text wise, but we do have a problem with pictures.

Technically, they all uploaded, but some of them did not form proper thumbnail images during import. It also seems we have trouble uploading images, which I'll be speaking to the Orain staff about. Also, some pictures and their associated captions will need fixing on a lot of pages even where the pictures work fine.

As for a forum, I do NOT mean one like on TV Tropes. I mean I simply would like an "in house" wiki strictly devoted to internal matters. Anything not covered by that criteria can be discussed here or elsewhere, to be exact about what I mean, below is a reproduction of what I discussed with vorticity via email concerning the inhouse forum and areas it should cover:

Announcements/Updates - A forum for important updates concerning the whole wiki. We could use Dismissible Site Notice (need 2 ask to get that installed) to post a brief blurb about the new announcement every so often and link to the forum thread with the announcement in question.

Frequently Asked Questions - This did serve a useful purpose on TVT for the noobs, but I definitely wouldn't handle suspension/bans through it (in MW, you can restricted a blocked user to their talk page for suspension purposes, and shunt off even that for a full ban.

Wiki Talk - Discussion about wiki policy

Trope Talk - Discussion about tropes and their meanings and usage.

Tech Wishlist/Bug Reports - Board for technical crap, reporting bugs in code (like templates and in wiki CSS/JS style sheets) and making suggestions for improvements.

Image Pickin - (Think this needs a different name, but meh, we could use this) Same purpose as is used for on TV Tropes.

Sandbox - Forum for test edits.

Past the above, don't really think we need any more forums, since the forums on TV Tropes for off wiki matters led to so many of the issues that made TVT suck so bad.

UPDATE - Image uploads and thumbnailing has been fixed!

[Labster]

This is my first choice for a logo, though there are obvious copyright concerns.  If the picture doesn't show, go here.So maybe not that, but I do like the idea of using a trope object though.Like maybe a Chekhov™ Gun.
-- ∇×V

[Labster]

Okay, here's my draft of a logo, based on some of the suggestions.  Realize that this is the limit of my artistic skills -- my artistic training consisted entirely of drawing diagrams on whiteboards for undergrads -- so I'm going to have to get a real artist to finish anything.


And at 150x150px:


I think that could work with some better linework, because the magical girl staff gets a bit lost.

Comments welcome.  I know I suck at visual art.
-- ∇×V

[GethN7]

@vorticity - Not a bad logo, just needs some contrast adjustments. It will also need to have a transparent background for custom namespaces.

[Morganite]

I think I could probably put together something like what I was imagining... tomorrow. '.'

Past the above, don't really think we need any more forums, since the forums on TV Tropes for off wiki matters led to so many of the issues that made TVT suck so bad.

Remember me saying that I thought the forums were worse for the wiki than Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel? That's because according to something that was posted after one of the various google incidents, the forums used up about 90% of the bandwidth, while providing less than half of the ad revenue. o.O To me that says "without the forums (or with less forums), advertising from a more congenial company could have paid the bills and We Could Have Avoided All This."

-Morgan.

[Morganite]

And here's my idea for a logo. Though it could still use a little more tweaking... and maybe more stuff.


-Morgan.

[Labster]

Oh, that's not bad at all, Morgan. Certainly the best I've seen so far. It's a bit um... black for my tastes. But that doesn't mean it won't look good in situ.

Site status: The import seems to have stalled with about 50,000 pages to go -- roughly 1/3 of the import. I thought it must have been some huge page with strange markup that stopped it, but then I looked: the page it stopped at was Main.Anticlimax. Huh, that was kind of a letdown.

But I think we're probably going to redo the import anyway. There were a few bugs I've just squashed:

• CamelCase within image names getting expanded into links -- that CamelCase regex has always been too aggressive. This should fix image links and image captions.
• Multi-line quotes not working right, due to two bugs.
• Removing Notes section when there is no note/hottip markup. Actually, just adding it automatically on the other side.

Let me know if you see anything else that needs fixing (other than the redlinks lol). But for the most part, it doesn't seem like there were too many bugs, and certainly not hard to fix ones.
-- ∇×V

[Bob Schroeck]

Mm. Found entirely by accident a page that we should either remove or flag as historical or something, because it's basically about "people who've mentioned us", where "us"="TVT": http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/One ... s_Trollers

Searching, btw, is incredibly slow; is it safe to assume this will be optimized somehow when the entire wiki is in place?

Section hiding doesn't work for me; clicking the "[hide]" link just takes me to the top of the page.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Bob SchroeckMm. Found entirely by accident a page that we should either remove or flag as historical or something, because it's basically about "people who've mentioned us", where "us"="TVT": http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/One ... s_Trollers

Searching, btw, is incredibly slow; is it safe to assume this will be optimized somehow when the entire wiki is in place?

Section hiding doesn't work for me; clicking the "[hide]" link just takes me to the top of the page.

Well, we do plan to mark a lot of pages historical, that being one of them.

As for searching, part of the problem is that Orain only recently fixed their servers (they had a caching issue) for better performance. The other half is that, by default, MediaWiki's stock engine relies on it's internal searching via the MediaWiki API, which can be really slow on large data sets like ours. I could look into getting a few search extensions that should improve things. Even TV Tropes relies on Google Search as a backend for searching, and since we don't currently have one, I'll look into getting that fixed.

As for SectionHide, the caching issue is partially responsible for the problems you may be facing. The other half is that, due to way the sections work in MW, the page acts as if you clicked on one of the links in the table of contents. There isn't a much better alternative ATM, though if you were trying the feature before the caching issue, I recommend purging your cache and flushing any cookies, then trying the site again.

Further, TV Tropes uses a template based folderization system, and since there isn't a really reliable way to do that in MW (so far) that will auto collapse entire sections (on a large scale, at any rate), Section Hide is the best (and currently, most compatible and reliable) analogue to how TV Tropes does things.

[robkelk]

And here's my idea for a logo. Though it could still use a little more tweaking... and maybe more stuff.



-Morgan.

I'll stop wasting time on my suggestion...
--
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

[Another Troper]

The wiki looks good, and the WP-like search is a nice touch. I don't find it's too slow. TVTropes should have done this long ago.

Only thing for the moment: Why doesn't "hide section" work?

[Morganite]

I'll stop wasting time on my suggestion...

... Should I take that as a compliment?

vorticity: Yeah, I'd like to recolor the books. (Probably *all* the books at this point.) But the process to do that and make it look good tends to be a pain, so I thought it could wait until I saw what people thought of the rough version.

-Morgan.

[Labster]

Yeah, I think that means it looks good Morgan.  Nice butterfly/heart wand, too.  With the people on this board, I was halfway expecting to see Raising Heart in a logo suggestion. (Of course, my favorite magical girl staff is this real one. That's right, Queen Elizabeth was a magical princess back in the day.)

Two more bugs spotted today: One on the page the Bob mentioned earlier -- the quote template is causing issues, giving us multiple bullet points (• • •) in a row. A fix is in the works for that, but I'm afraid that's going to be nasty. The other one involves equal signs inside of templates -- which mediawiki assumes means you're giving a parameter value -- but breaks code like {{spoiler| [http://youtube.cøm/watch?id=i123612 video link] }}. This looks easier to fix.
Hide section doesn't work because it was broken, Another Troper, and we had a help ticket on that.  Actually, it's working now, if imperfectly, but you might be trying it on a page that was cached before the fix.  Either make a dummy edit, or just wait until we redo the import.
-- ∇×V

[Morganite]

Well, like I said, I don't think using anything recognizable as from a particular show is a great idea. (If I did think it was a great idea, I'd probably use something from Sailor Moon.)

Speaking of the quotes, this look seems okay for page toppers, but it's a bit jarring when you're reading examples and the text suddenly jumps to the middle of the screen. Having big quote marks around something that's already in quote marks feels a bit off too. Especially if it's multiple lines.

-Morgan.

[nylor]

I've been a little buried, but I finally got a chance to take a look this morning - and it looks great so far. Next, I need to register an account - after I ponder what username I want to work with.