Wiki Planning Talk

cd: The footnote discussions on how to best organise the wiki were getting a little unwieldy to edit, so I've stolen Wikipedia's thing and made us a disposable talk page. Might be easier for more longform notes, drafting category structures, etc.?

At the very least we don't have to shove everything between double brackets now!

cs.: thanks cd! for convenience, here's the draft from the start page

• Characters: individuals of the island, subdivided into
  • npc - non-player-controlled characters like Mister Stern, Maiko, Seth, Emily, Dan, etc.
  • monster - npc jungle enemies like Lions, or the Hounds of a Minor Diplomatic Incident.
  • player - player-controlled characters
• Gameplay: mostly deals with stuff that has to do with the game side of things.
  • concepts: for things like stamina, armor, marriage, buffs, weapons
  • guides: walking a player through how to engage with titans/stones/puzzle combat/places and programming
  • classes: container for beings of the Improbable Island (classes like Jokermorphs, Titans, etc. — individuals go above under characters)
  • lore: stuff about currently(ish) applicable island canon. If there is a lot of it on a single topic (as with Alexander Quandle's Squat-related stuff), it's getting a sub-header.
  • pubgames : a container for people to post about on-Island games.
  • story: (maybe people want to post stories of theirs as they did on the old enquirer? idk)
• Places: overarching category
  • player - player-created places
  • outpost - for the outposts themselves
    • building - contains non-player-created buildings (NB some “buildings” listed here actually have the structure places:jungle:placename, bc it felt weird to call the Failboat an outpost place, and I'd argue the Raven Inn, Stonehenge, etc. could fall into that category too)
• Items: contains concrete equippable/buff-granting items, I assume things like req and cigs and SFFC items too
• Meta: as CMJ suggested, I've been putting things that relate to Island history here
  • History: this is where stuff that no longer exists on the Island has been placed - things like Dwellings, and eventually Trains.
  • concepts: this has been kind of my bucket for things that aren't directly relevant to gameplay, but which feel like fun things to port over in the spirit of the old wiki (and with every expectation that they'll continue to grow!) So this is where I put in lie or reality tv for instance.

I'm no librarian and this is not at all comprehensive, nor have I decided where to put things like “req” or clans, and most importantly sort of “meta”/humor pages that used to exist like lie, spoiler, etc. so please let me know if there's a big gap in the tree you've spotted!

So here's some further thoughts as they emerge from the footnotes on the start page.

1. We should have “landing” pages for weapon, armor, etc. I have those loaded up and ready to be imported into gameplay:concepts which is where we can link the guide for newbies, etc. If someone wants to build the reference tables, I say definitely have fun. I think there should definitely be a master list of available food, broken down by restaurant, that belongs in gameplay:concepts:food, but if people want to write paeans to the Unrep or anti-paeans to whatever is going on at the wacky fun faktory, then that should be…
2. items:food, items:weapon, items:armor, etc. I think not every item needs a subpage, but there are items that got subpages on the old wiki, and either as we import them or as we link to them from guides here, or even as we make up fake comedy weapons like the Banhammer Hammerer (it's hammers all the way down…) it makes sense to have a structural category where they would belong.
3. there also should be a food guide; the link's been created on the gameplay guides page, I just need to scrape in the guide to not starving from the old wiki.
4. re: cd's very reasonable question about whether meta:concepts:lie is meant to be a container: I had not thought of it as such. In part I think that ruins the jokiness of the unreliability of parts of the wiki, so I think it is a rational response to how many of those pages there are (and hopefully will continue to be!) that they just go into where they would belong, if true. Does that make sense?
5. that said, some of these pages (e.g. the page on “death,” or the page on “truth,” etc.) start to stretch the bounds of meta as a category, and it seems like it will be useful to have some division there. Meta:history is, I think, for Island-related things that no longer exist, as discussed above. In the meantime, I think meta:items, meta:concepts, and possibly meta:beings (for people and animals) should cover some of the stuff that isn't obviously definitely gameplay (that will always be a judgment call I guess, but like “reality tv” is not really relevant to the gameplay, and only makes a fleeting appearance in the lore! so that's why I've put it in meta:concepts)

Finally, as you'll have noticed, we've alphabetized the new character list, scraped the old character list and shoved it in meta:history:characters:player:list (not opening the can of worms about outward links yet, there's enough other stuff to import first), and also added a mirror of player Places so that they are organized first alphabetically, then by X coordinate, then by Y coordinate. Happy wiki'ing!

cd: argh, saw your note about running the A Strange Meeting mirror past CMJ too late. It's one of the few plot things that don't show up in the Notebook and doesn't have a story pass, so I moved it over without thinking. Happy to dumpster the page if he'd rather not have it up in full.

(We should probably avoid making a category for official plot scenes, specifically for this purpose, huh.)

cd: A quick note for anyone needing to scrape info from the old forums to fix red links. While they're completely and totally offline at the moment, the Wayback Machine archived a good number of posts! Currently, this is only useful for scraping text discussions (e.g. what people sent to Rohit, and (hypothetically) the pre-“report a monster sighting” player suggestion discussions), or images (e.g. old contest entries uploaded to the fileshare.)

Flash files are right out. The URLs can be retrieved by clicking the “about this capture” button, but even with Ruffle or entering the URL directly into your browser, they can't be played. The source of some of those Pilot-era in-jokes remain an enigma for now.

panda: Ok, I have thoughts about how to wrangle the “items” namespace. Currently we have so much stuff in there that all counts as “items” in a real-world sense, but doesn't work the same way in-game. My proposal is to limit items to just “stuff that goes in your inventory” (candy, grenades, mementos, etc). Weapons, armor, and mounts are equipment. Req, cigs, cobblestones, and Supporter Points can be grouped under Currency (and probably share a page).

Then… food/drinks. I think we can avoid page overproliferation with judicious use of headers and internal links… here's my basic idea: gameplay:cooking contains info on the inventory-based cooking system. First paragraph: this is one way to refill stamina (gameplay:stamina) and reduce hunger (gameplay:hunger), the other way is to buy food at a restaurant (outposts:restaurant). The rest of the page is just about cooking - Maiko, meat, herbs, pans, etc. buildings:restaurant has the data tables about all the food sold at restaurants: one table for each restaurant, separated by headers. Then a more lore-focused description of, say, Cool Springs Cafe found in outposts:kittania#Cool Springs Cafe can have a little thing under the header saying “for the list of food sold here, see buildings:restaurant#Cool Springs Cafe. (I have tested that this linking method works. Whee!)

Pubs contain multiple types of gameplay, so they can have their own pages linked to on their respective Outpost pages. And they only sell a drink or two each, which have fewer stats to track than food, so it's not a big deal to have those listed in multiple places if need be.