Making the wiki a better place

[Kulik]

We've heard a lot of complaints about the wiki being hard to navigate, containing a lot of obsolete stuff and generally not being in a good shape. Even though I fully agree with that, the reason the wiki is in a bad shape is because of lack of edits in it. Wiki is supposed to be a community documentation where people fix mistakes they find and slowly make incomplete articles more complete. This unfortunately is not happening that much.

When you look at the list of active users (any edits in the last 3 months) - http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/ ... ctiveUsers - the list is not large at all. Even though the wiki gets 7132 unique visitors per month (according to google analytics), only 9 can be bothered to edit something? (and one of them is just a bot I run ).

The wiki used to be painfully slow, we've fixed that (or rather, sourceforge.net update fixed it). Source code highlighting didn't work, we've fixed that. Categories were non-existant or messy, we've fixed that. Articles didn't have any info about version of CEGUI they were written for, we've fixed that (See Template:VersionBadge).

Right now the only thing we lack is manpower to clean the wiki, upgrade articles for newer CEGUI versions and make new quality articles. Please don't be afraid because of your English skills, there are a lot of people out there capable to fix spelling errors, not so many capable of writing good wiki articles. Also don't be afraid to start small, incomplete articles and let other authors refine them. This is how it should work. Right now the articles are usually created in a semi-finished state and never touched again (which is entirely the wrong approach).

In the meantime I have created a new category and massed unknown articles into it. The category contains stuff we need to put into HowTo, Tutorials or Manuals. If you feel like helping a little bit, pick one from the Uncategorised category and put it somewhere by just editing the [[Category:Uncategorised]] to [[Category:HowTo]] for example.

Furthermore I have a bot called "Capek" that I can make wiki-wide regex replaces, mass categorisation, etc with. If you have any suggestions/uses for the bot, please share them. If you have any other tips for us how to make the Wiki better, reply to this post. We are by no means Wiki experts (this is frankly the first Wiki I am involved with and I doubt CrazyEddie is wikipedia enthusiast himself).

I am planning to create a wiki page with a TODO list or something so that it's easier to get into wiki editing.

Thanks for listening

[Ident]

The wiki used to be painfully slow, we've fixed that (or rather, sourceforge.net update fixed it). Source code highlighting didn't work, we've fixed that. Categories were non-existant or messy, we've fixed that. Articles didn't have any info about version of CEGUI they were written for, we've fixed that (See Template:VersionBadge).

I see, we've fixed that.



I'm for moving old pages to some sort of archive, deleting all useless/small pages, and adding more pictures. People like pictures.

[Kulik]

I think using disambiguation pages for multiple versions of the same article is the way to go. I am against deleting old stuff since it can be migrated to newer versions (and that can be easier than writing something from scratch). We all like images, I agree with that point and would welcome any images to the wiki

[Kulik]

I added some mediawiki templates that will hopefully make our lives easier.

Version badge:
Defines what major versions of CEGUI the article applies to

Code: Select all

{{VersionBadge|Major version}}

Example: This should be all over the wiki right now

Version at least:
Defines what minimal CEGUI version is required.

Code: Select all

{{VersionAtLeast|Version}}

Example: Animation System page in the wiki

Series interlinks:

Code: Select all

{{Series|Name of the series|Position in the series}}

This will automatically create boxes with chapter links with minimal added effort. Caveat: When you create the first chapter, you have to click the red category link at the bottom of the page and add anything here. Otherwise my template won't find the category and won't know where to get the links. I sadly have no way to go around this but having content in the series category would have been advised anyways.
Example here: http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/ ... Practice_1

I have no idea how to document usage of these on the mediawiki. I will have to look up some good practices on wikipedia or something...

[Kulik]

I've added a new tag called <tabs>, you use it like this:

Code: Select all

<tabs>
  <tab title="First tab">
    Stuff in the first tab
  </tab>
  <tab title="Second tab">
    Stuff om the secpmd tab
  </tab>
</tabs>


The look may change but the syntax will stay the same so feel free to use them. The reason why I added this is to make source tab alternatives between languages (the same snippet in C++, Python and Lua). This can be seen in action in avengre's tutorial series - http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/ ... troduction

[DougS]

wiki is in a bad shape is because of lack of edits in it

The reason may be not what you think.

I was put off from editing the wiki because I wasn't able to. The instructions seemed to indicate that if you have registered with the forum (here) then you are able to post to the wiki. But I was not able to do so. I had thought I was missing something or had misunderstood how to register. Now not so sure...

[Kulik]

You should be able to login with the same username and password as the ones you use to login to this forum. Send me a PM if it doesn't work.

[CrazyEddie]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think in this case the issue is related to the underscore in Doug_S and the way that MediaWiki deals with those.

CE

[Telcontar]

I think that an invaluable addition to the wiki would be a page or series of pages detailing the look and main uses of some of the basic widget types (or window types, I'm not clear on the terminology).

For instance, I've looked at the documentation for Menubar and some other items, and it takes a good deal of digging to get a picture of what it does and what I might want to use it for. If it had its own wiki page (or a segment of a larger wiki page, depending on how long each entry ended up being) all that information could be gathered together in a concise, newbie-friendly format.

[Kulik]

I think that's a great idea and is already on my todo list, however I have a lot of stuff there I am basically waiting for CrazyEddie to finish AlfiskoLook (the new skin) so I can shove screenshots of widgets in the pages. However that's a lame excuse

I would prefer if people just went ahead and made some pages, I would be happy to fix errors and interlink them.

[Telcontar]

I'll be happy to start it soon, once I've acquired a critical mass of knowledge about the code base.

[DougS]

You should be able to login with the same username and password as the ones you use to login to this forum. Send me a PM if it doesn't work.

I'm all sorted there now and able to log in ok.

I was about to upload a small example cegui_opengl_example.zip (~300k) to the wiki and link it to
http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Using_CEGUI_with_GLUT (in preparation for updating the tutorial text itself for CEGUI 0.7.5). While the upload limit of 2M is fine, the wiki upload only allows images and so would not allow the zip archive to upload. Might be nice to allow tar and zip (etc) archives to upload there or elsewhere, to be able to link in complete examples like that to the CEGUI wiki.

[Kulik]

If you want to upload source files, the preferred way is to put them to the page directly and use the <source lang="cpp"> tag to highlight them.

Even though I understand your point, allowing zip archives on the wiki opens up a lot of ways to abuse it. (which is probably why it's disallowed)

[DougS]

If you want to upload source files, the preferred way is to put them to the page directly and use the <source lang="cpp"> tag to highlight them.

Even though I understand your point, allowing zip archives on the wiki opens up a lot of ways to abuse it. (which is probably why it's disallowed)

Fair enough ... I was thinking that having the complete source files in a zip etc would be a very fast for me to upload, while the more involved wiki editing will take a bit longer. I'll go ahead and redo http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Using_CEGUI_with_GLUT

I do have to say i am very happy with cegui: it was just what I needed for my application - really lets me concentrate on what I want instead of the gui. The learning curve is definitely worth the effort Thanks to everyone involved!

Cheers,

Doug

[blackzafiro]

I've added a new tag called <tabs>

Hi, I think I just abussed your tabs idea and used it to show code for CEGUI 0.4 and 0.8 in http://cegui.org.uk/wiki/The_Beginners_Guide_to_Falagard_skinning_-_Part_I#Basics. This was a minor edit, but please let me know if you like the idea or if I should refrain from using that.