Community Portal/Questions on the Wiki

Decision: Allow questions on the wiki because they cover information that should already be on the wiki. Note that this decision has since been reversed.

Highlights: There is now a tag. Place this tag on any page (especially Questions) if the information needs to be better integrated into the wiki (more appropriately placed, etc.).

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Questions on the Wiki

There are a lot of questions on the Wiki that should be on the forums instead. The Wiki isn't designed for this and I've seen a lot of questions of people who just don't use the search function, this annoyance should be relocated to the CS forums. I'd like to avoid this, but I'm not sure if banning questions entirely is a good plan, any thoughts?

--Qazaaq 13:44, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

I feel exactly the same way, including the bit about not being sure what to do about it. I almost posted exactly the same thing a couple of days ago.

The biggest problem is that stuff is sometimes hard to find on the Wiki. Before we ban questions, I feel like we should do an audit and determine exactly what information is and is not on the Wiki, and where it is. That would take an insane amount of time, though, and I know that none of us has the time to do it...

Maybe somewhat less ambitious: determine which questions were legit (asking for information that should be on the Wiki [not something extremely specific], but either is not or is in a very random and difficult to find place. From that we could build up the articles so that the information is easier to find.

But I think that as things currently stand, we can't just refuse to answer questions. We need to do some work to make sure that people can find the information they need.

A start would be to reformat the Questions category text to encourage the use of the CS forum. I'll do that now.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 14:28, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

Convince Bethesda to include an Oblivion version checker with CS v1.2... well, at least, that seems to be the most common repeated question here (on the forums, etc.).

More on topic - I somewhat like the questions, as it's a bulletin board of what info still needs to be placed onto the wiki. However, it's too big, and too hard to search through, leading to people asking questions that have already been answered, causing it to get even bigger...

Until it gets organized, maybe we could ask people to submit their name to the questions section instead, leading to their talk page where we can answer it, rather than the giant list it is now.

--Haama 16:24, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

Of course, if it they end up on the forums, the same things are going to happen that we see now...information links that go to "Thread not found". Some of them are legitimate, since there are ways of doing things that others don't know or can't think of (mine about collision objects in Nifskope, for example). Some, like the ones that turn into "write my script for me", aren't so legitimate. In my opinion, some of the functions and such could use some example scripts to better define how they work. I recall having to experiment with a number of functions while trying to write scripts in order to figure out how to use them. And I have learned things by going through the questions and either seeing how it was solved or solving it myself and writing an answer. If the questions were completely broken up to peoples talk pages, then they would be hard to track down after the fact unless there is a list going to all the talk pages (which would probably become a bigger mess).

--ShadowDancer 17:28, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

I think Questions in general may be necessary, especially for the reason Haama suggests - it provides feedback, letting us know what we're missing. And it does help to keep information available, avoiding thread pruning. However, both those functions are useless if it's too much information to go through, and it is. Anyway, as a start, what do you guys think of my rewrite of the Questions category page?

Dragoon Wraith TALK 18:43, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

It looks good. I got sidetracked reading through questions though. LOL! Truthfully, there are a bunch of questions that are, quite frankly, next to impossible to do without major scripting work or are just outright impossible. Some of them I could think of ways to do them, but I sure wouldn't want to try to implement them as I think the time spent scripting would be more than the outcome would be worth. Perhaps we need a "Not Currently Known to be Possible" or "Not Possible" category? You are right in that there are way too many questions to take in at one time. The only thing that I think can be done is to chip away at it piece by piece. There are also some that have been answered when someone else asked a similar or the same question.

--ShadowDancer 21:40, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

The explanation looks good, thanks DragoonWraith. How should we handle duplicate questions? I'm thinking leave a link to the original question on the User's Talk page, and deleting the new question.

--Haama 09:36, 22 August 2007 (EDT)

That sounds perfect.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:12, 22 August 2007 (EDT)

Here's one - Ingame Water Height Increase. Is there a way to delete it, or do we just notify you?

--Haama 13:09, 22 August 2007 (EDT)

I can't actually delete, but Gstaff comes by periodically and will delete anything in the "Articles for Deletion" category.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 14:19, 22 August 2007 (EDT)

So, we're not going to redirect the questions to the forums because it's useful as feedback. As long as we make clear that the write me a script kind of questions don't belong here.

I like what you did to the questions page, that will keep out a few people who actually read that stuff. Looks good!

--Qazaaq 06:19, 23 August 2007 (EDT)

I've created a tag for questions that we want to add to the rest of the Wiki. This should help the Questions category give us feedback about what we need.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 13:45, 24 August 2007 (EDT)

This will centralize all the missing content on one page if categorized properly. Good thinking DragoonWraith!

--Qazaaq 17:28, 24 August 2007 (EDT)

It also seems to me that we need either a full-blown tutorial for scripting or a revamp of the current ones since we seem to get so many questions about scripting. Maybe a Better Scripting Practices sort of thing? Explainations of why certain things work or are better and others don't with light examples (not full blown scripts). There is a lot of information that is scattered across the wiki pertaining to scripting that is hard to find unless you know where it is.

--ShadowDancer 23:37, 24 August 2007 (EDT)

I personally found the Questions category to be the most useful source of information on the Wiki, and obviously the first place to look when you have a question. As the Construction Set did not come with a technical manual, the wiki is the best we've got, and we need to ask questions on it somewhere, otherwise we learn nothing and the wiki will never be updated with new information. I should also point out that much of the information regarding Animation, Collision, Normal Mapping, LOD Visible When Distant problems and various other subjects came from the Questions page first. Problems are addressed there, then solved and answered there, then moved to the Answered section, then eventually put into a tutorial in it's own category; so to even think about deleting this category shows a great lack of understanding about how this wiki actually works. It is a mistake to underestimate the importance of this category. Deleting it is like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs; you'd have to be insane. The Questions Category should be valued for the great source of information that it is. It should be restored to it's former state and it's importance appreciated more. 2008:--Waerloga

What you should understand is that the questions category hasn't been useful and functioning as you describe for over a year before this decision was made. The main reason for that is the lack of contributors on the Wiki. It was possible to maintain the questions category before that, because questions were actually answered. This is no longer the case, only a fraction of the people active in the beginning are still here. We can't answer all the questions, let alone turn them into articles. This never happened anyway, only a few of the hundreds of questions have been turned into an article. Now that's how the Wiki works.

The reason why the questions are not only disallowed, but also removed is because all the unanswered questions clutter up the search results. This makes it difficult to find what your looking for.

The answered questions are looked at before they are deleted. Valuable information is marked and not removed, we're not throwing away anything useful.

--Qazaaq 08:53, 8 May 2008 (EDT)