Community Portal

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This is the primary discussion forum for the CS Wiki. Decisions made by the editors here on the Wiki will be posted here, as well as links to on-going discussions. Please be sure to use Signatures and Indentation appropriately in discussions - if you are unsure of proper style, please see our Welcome to Wiki Syntax guide.

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Cleaned up Hosted Images

Just went through the image log, added {{afd}} to the ones that have no business on the Wiki. Leaving a note here so that if anyone decides to do so again at a future date, they know they only have to go through the ones after this date.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 08:19, 6 April 2008 (EDT)

Toolbox for Tutorials

I think it would be a good idea to add a toolbox on tutorial pages with the tools used in that tutorial. That way we can standardize all the "Tools Needed" and "Requirements" sections in each tutorial. On the Wiki pages of the tools we can add some installation instructions, trial programs and alternatives. Next to the TOC would be a good spot, it's only a list with links so there's not a lot of space required. Here's an example of what I mean:

Tools used in this tutorial

Required

Optional

I didn't want to go ahead and start adding this to the tutorials right away (first want to finish the help section anyway), but I thought I'd put it up here and see what you think.
--Qazaaq 09:50, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

Looks good to me, I say go for it when you get the chance.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 06:51, 14 March 2008 (EDT)
Very good idea - I wonder if we should do a similar bit for the scripting tutorials and list all of the "See Also", functions used, Standardized Snippets, and articles up top?--Haama 11:41, 15 March 2008 (EDT)

New Administration Noticeboard

Sheriff action requests and requests of Bethesda should now go here.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:56, 7 March 2008 (EST)


Pseudo-Code Examples on Function Pages?

A user on the ESF suggested having pseudo-code examples for functions, for the sake of novices who have difficulty understanding the more technical syntax section or are still new at reading code. On the one hand, I think pseudo-code is great for explaining things, especially to novices, but on the other hand I will worry that it will lead to clutter. So, do people think that adding pseudo-code examples to the function pages is a good idea? Should it be for all of them, or just ones that are particularly confusing? Thoughts on this would be appreciated.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 07:44, 7 March 2008 (EST)

There are some functions that need a tutorial/overhead explanation (i.e., Messagebox Tutorial). From the ESF thread, the GetNthActive... functions need one. Looping apparently needs a better one? And from another thread the Input functions need one (though, apparently, it will be moot by v15 :) ).--Haama 11:01, 7 March 2008 (EST)

Magic Function Subcategorization

Well, I was working on some scripts and I was getting tired of searching through that huge list of functions in the Magic Function section, so I added three subcategories to break things down somewhat. The Magic Item Functions category might be worth breaking down further, but right now I'd actually like to get back to those scripts I was working on.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 20:36, 1 March 2008 (EST)

User CSS Enabled

TS7 has enabled the Wiki's User CSS function, so no more messing with userContent.css or Stylish - you can just use your "User:Name/esstyle.css" page. See mine at User:DragoonWraith/esstyle.css.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 18:36, 25 February 2008 (EST)

This has driven me nuts a few times. Here's the link to the User Style page.--Haama 13:31, 26 April 2008 (EDT)

Functions in scripts category/pages

There's a category (set of pages?) that lists the vanilla scripts with certain functions. I imagine that all of these were determined with v1.0 and there have been some changes since then. This thread, for instance, points out one such instance where the function doesn't seem to be there (whether it ever was there).

It looks like these functions are easy enough to find (Find Text), and I imagine there are differences between the versions. So, should we delete the category/pages?--Haama 14:00, 15 February 2008 (EST)

Deleting Questions

I started the process - it doesn't seem to be as daunting as I thought it would be (hooray for Category:Request an Article). Anyway, should we make the decisions on where to put the question (delete, request, etc.) on our own or wait for a second vote?--Haama 18:17, 19 February 2008 (EST)

You can also use the {{Missing}} tag. Might be useful for questions that aren't formatted like proper requests (as described in the Request an Article page).
Dragoon Wraith TALK 18:52, 19 February 2008 (EST)
Good point, but not the main question :P I was thinking that the first person could make the suggested move (tag or category) and the second could remove the Questions category.--Haama 20:06, 19 February 2008 (EST)

Progress

Through the H's. Didn't mess with these questions:

Further Progress

I've done the rest, now we only have to do the answered questions?

"Answered" Section

Everything in the Answered section, in theory, "isn't of real importance to the public" - I vote for whole-sale deletion of everything in the category. I recommend that people go through, give things a cursory glance to make sure that it actually isn't anything useful, and if not, yeah, we can just ditch all of it.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 15:58, 24 February 2008 (EST)

2nd vote. Treat it like we did the questions and list which ones might be useful and why?--Haama 16:35, 24 February 2008 (EST)
Yes, but I expect that most will not be.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 17:27, 24 February 2008 (EST)
We should go through the category briefly, look at the titles and open anything that could be interesting. There are 269 answered questions and most can be skipped by looking at the title, this shouldn't take very long.
Before deleting the category and the pages within we have to make sure none of them are also in the solutions category. Shall we call this decided then?
--Qazaaq 19:05, 24 February 2008 (EST)
There's only like three of us here, anyway. If we've all commented, I'm going for it.
Gstaff probably won't be around to delete them for a while yet, anyway, so we don't have to worry about losing anything if I make a mistake.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 00:58, 25 February 2008 (EST)

Progress

Well, I've done the Answers starting with A, B, and C. There are 216 answers left to go through. I'll continue working my way through those. There were a few that I didn't delete, which I placed in appropriate request places (either request an article or interesting discussion tags).
Dragoon Wraith TALK 00:28, 29 February 2008 (EST)



Questions on (advanced?) wiki syntax

I have a couple of questions on wiki syntax, if anyone knows the answers:

I would like to work on the OBSE v14 functions as soon as the Beta comes out. If I do so I'll need to mark them as beta, and once the beta is over I will have to mass edit and remove the Beta tag. I would also like to be able to put them into a v14 Beta category and then move them to a v14 category. Does anyone know an easy way to do that?

Some of the formulas on Category:Potion Strength are incredibly long, but I'm not sure how to condense them, especially because some require powers of fractions. If at all possible, I would prefer to place the fraction on two separate lines with a paranthesis big enough to cover both lines, and maybe even superscript the power. However, I don't know if that is even possible. Any suggestions?--Haama 21:02, 6 January 2008 (EST)

For the beta thing, you might try a template? I dunno, you could create a template {{OBSE v0014}} and at first have it warn that it's a beta, and then later blank it or give a simple mention that it was first added in v0014 (or use it to add the category tag).
As for the math stuffs, see here.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 13:34, 16 January 2008 (EST)
Thanks DW. I've already started adding the v14 functions with a beta tag (I'll just have to remember to take them all off with the final release). That formula page looks great - starting to comb through it!--Haama 17:36, 16 January 2008 (EST)
I tried out some of the stuff from that page. I don't think the MediaWiki or TeX that the page talks about are available here.--Haama 17:54, 16 January 2008 (EST)
I'll e-mail Gstaff, but in the meantime (or if nothing can be done), since the TeX stuff on Wikipedia creates an image, you could always create the formula on Wikipedia (in a preview page), save the image, and upload it here - which is similar to what I did for the Trigonometry page (I didn't bother to create the formula since Wikipedia already had one, but I did grab theirs and upload it here). This has the advantage of giving you the ability to remove the white background from the image if you would like - not a bad idea considering the background here. It is, of course, more work and more time-consuming.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 15:04, 20 January 2008 (EST)
For the record, I just talked to Gstaff and apparently he never got or accidentally deleted the e-mail without seeing it. I've resent the e-mail to him.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 19:14, 19 February 2008 (EST)

The Wiki Sys-Admin (TS7? not sure) said he'll add the LaTeX stuff next week, and he'll look into the Parser stuff when he does that.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 16:53, 21 February 2008 (EST)

Good news indeed. I'll PM Niaht and tell 'em.--Haama 18:02, 21 February 2008 (EST)
Erm, any update? I noticed the Toolkit (sweet!), but haven't heard about anything else.--Haama 12:01, 7 March 2008 (EST)
Parser extension should be added, TS7 says we should test it to make sure it works. The LaTeX stuff is giving him trouble, but he's still working on it.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 16:36, 27 March 2008 (EDT)
I had contacted Niaht earlier (Feb) and never heard back. Otherwise, I'm not too sure what to do with the functions - I tried looking at [1] but that doesn't give a good starting place for ?web?wiki? design. Are these for templates only? I wanted to be able to create one page/template for all of the functions that need to worry about message spam, lag, etc. while still having relevant text for each (i.e., using the function EquipItem instead of AddItem), but I'm not sure how. There's a "page exists" function, but... no seriously, what's the point of a page exists function? When is it necessary to know what's on another page, let alone that another page exists? Confused...--Haama 19:19, 27 March 2008 (EDT)
{{PAGENAME}} should be able to do what you want. Write the message and replace the function with {{PAGENAME}}, that should change to the page it's displayed on. This is what you can use to change larger pieces of text: {{#ifeq: {{PAGENAME}} | Community Portal | This is the Community Portal page. | This is another page. }}. But for the function name {{PAGENAME}} alone should be sufficient.
--Qazaaq 20:19, 27 March 2008 (EDT)
The parser functions work! At least this one does, I don't know about the others.
--Qazaaq 20:23, 27 March 2008 (EDT)

Thanks Qazaaq - I'll try it out in a bit.--Haama 21:02, 28 March 2008 (EDT)

Works! - I've updated the Update template to say Article for articles and Category for categories.--Haama 01:02, 3 April 2008 (EDT)

Function Info Template category

I've added a Function Info Templates category so we can know which templates (i.e., MessageEXFormatting) have been created and can centralize function information. I've placed this in the Toolkit as well so it'll be easy to find. I know I haven't gotten all of the templates, so please add as needed.--Haama 19:21, 2 April 2008 (EDT)

Uploading test mods

I'd like to upload a test mod for the Variables category. I'm hoping that this will make it easier for others to run duplicate and counter tests, as well as lend a bit more legitimacy to the wiki. It will require OBSE and Pluggy to make testing easier and to have a text file with the results. Format will be along the lines of 

Global Float tests
Test 1a: aaaFValue = 8388606 (exp: 8388606)
Test 1b: aaaFValue = 8388607 (exp: 8388607)
Test 1c: aaaFValue = 8388608 (exp: 8388608)
Test 2a: aaaFValue = 16777215 (exp: 16777215)
Test 2b: aaaFValue = 16777216 (exp: 16777216)
Test 2c: aaaFValue = 16777216 (exp: 16777217)
Test 3a: aaaFValue = 33554432 (exp: 33554431)
Test 3b: aaaFValue = 33554432 (exp: 33554432)
Test 3c: aaaFValue = 33554432 (exp: 33554433)
Test 4a: aaaFValue = -2147483648 (exp: 2147483646)
Test 4b: aaaFValue = -2147483648 (exp: 2147483647)
Test 4c: aaaFValue = -2147483648 (exp: 2147483648)
Test 5a: aaaFValue = -2147483648 (exp: 440359962751356)
Test 5b: aaaFValue = -2147483648 (exp: 440359962751357)
Test 6a: aaaFValue = -2147483648 (exp: 44035996275135651)
Test 6b: aaaFValue = -2147483648 (exp: 44035996275135652)

--Haama 23:43, 5 April 2008 (EDT)

Last I checked, the Upload thing only accepts images. Otherwise, I'd be all for it. Perhaps e-mail Gstaff about it?
Dragoon Wraith TALK 03:08, 21 April 2008 (EDT)

Wrye Changes

Okay, I'm sure that this stuff has been talked about before. For sure there was a major effort at putting together portals. But I'm not sure that was a good idea. To some degree it seems that we're now lost in a plethora of index pages (portals + categories + sub-categories). Kind of a lot.

And I've never been very happy with the combination of articles and categories -- you just end up with a mess (IMO). (In contrast, I think that something like this is better: Modding@UESP -- a nice long list with short descriptions which I can easily scan up and down. In other words, it's better to have less index pages with more links on them.) But not to spend too much time arguing.

Sorry if that sounded like a rant, I know you all have worked hard on this, but it's still fairly hard to find your way around and figure out where to add new material.

So, I've done a couple of things. If these go over well, then I'll do some more if I have time (what I actually wanted to do was write an article on standardizing menu behavior -- but I couldn't find a good place to put it -- where it was likely to be found). Anyway, the two things that I've done are essentially both article/category splitting efforts (see first two sections below):

Cheers! --Wrye 04:16, 31 May 2008 (EDT)

Glossary

This is a conversion of the Category:Glossary page to single page article. I copied most definitions to it, while expanding some. I have intentionally left some articles out which didn't really seem to belong on a category page. If this page is well received, then the old article pages that have been completely included should be deleted as should the Category:Glossary category itself. --Wrye 04:16, 31 May 2008 (EDT)

Data Files

Category:Data Files - I've removed the article type text off this page into several articles TES Files (actually a major rewrite) and Windows Vista. I've also added a new article: Esp vs. Esm. I've then gone back and changed Category:Data Files to be just an manual index page. At which point I hit the "too many index pages" and "category pages should not be treated like articles" problem. So I figured I had done enough damage and stopped. :evil:

One point here is that the TES Files page is a good introduction to very basic issues in modding. Moderately thorough and not too technical (unlike e.g. the Modding Terminology page, which is a bit thick.) IMO, TES Files probably should be linked to directly from Getting Started or something like that. But I looked at the HTML code and went "eep". So I left it alone. (And again, enough damage already.) --Wrye 04:16, 31 May 2008 (EDT)

I haven't had a chance to read everything here, but I agree that the TES Files page ought to be on Getting Started, and will put it there. But where did you run into ugly HTML? The only pages with that are the Portals and the Main Page... (I used tables for formatting, a major no-no in this Web 2.0 world of ours)
Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:33, 1 June 2008 (EDT)
Complicated Html -- just the portal pages. --Wrye 18:00, 1 June 2008 (EDT)

New Templates

I've added link templates: Template:PES and Template:Tesnexus. Idea is to make adding such download links easier. These turned out to be useful at UESP after a while. --Wrye 18:18, 31 May 2008 (EDT)

I've added a Prod (Proposed for Deletion) templage: Template:Prod. --Wrye 20:06, 31 May 2008 (EDT)

Message Spam Consolidation

I've cleaned up Message Spam (formerly Avoiding Message Spam) and integrated Preventing messages (which I've now Prod'ed). I've also gone through to individual pages and removed redundant "how to avoid message spam" from them (instead, linking to updated page). Observation on this is that some info is common and should not be repeated on multiple pages. --Wrye 20:10, 31 May 2008 (EDT)

Appreciate the clean-up and agreed on the links - how did you find the places to replace the links? Something like that has long been on my "wish I had the time" list, but you seem to have done it rather quickly.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:35, 1 June 2008 (EDT)
Finding usage... I think that I just replaced the on five or so relevant command pages (equipItem, unequipItem, etc.). I may have also searched on "message spam" and looked at the pages that linked to those pages. --Wrye 18:03, 1 June 2008 (EDT)

No Fluff Scripting Portal

I'm creating a no fluff scripting portal. This is sort of public sandbox. If it's well received, this could take the place of the current portal. --Wrye

Done. Check it out. --Wrye 02:18, 1 June 2008 (EDT)
Personally, I think the scripting Portal needs something like this. The Portal design used for other things doesn't seem to work well with Scripting (or maybe at all) - Seems that too often, there's not really places for things.
That said, the Portal design does do well in visual flair (not insignificant; it does draw a users attention to the fact that it is a special page) and in compactness (perhaps not a good thing however). I also think that there some things which would make sense to have on the side, perhaps... I will look into the page more in-depth, and I may try some changes.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:38, 1 June 2008 (EDT)

Deleting Articles

I'm using the Prod (Propose for Deletion) template a lot.

  • Tutorials - There seem to be way to many tutorials. Especially tutorials which are: incomplete, erroneous, bylined, chatty, poorly written, not useful. (The chatty tutorials are really getting on my nerves.) I'm prodding those that don't look useful.
  • Usage Pages - At some point someone went through and documented where functions were used in various scripts. Which is completely pointless since the same info is more readily available through use of the Text Search command. I've prod'ed one of these pages (AddSpell Reference), but really all such pages ought to be summarily deleted.

--Wrye 21:50, 31 May 2008 (EDT)

Agreed on both counts. The reason such has not already been done is because while many tutorials are poorly written or incomplete, most would be valuable written correctly. So we mark them with the delusion that we'll get back to them, fix them and/or finish them. Of course, that hasn't happened.
As for the function references, yeah, I don't know who did that or why. Seemed like an awfully large amount of work to just throw out; someone might have found it useful, was my feeling on it. But if no one finds it useful, it could be deleted.
By the way, first off, we had {{afd}}, which you could have co-opted for this had you wanted, further, while it is probably not a large concern, GStaff does delete everything in the Articles for Deletion category without checking what is on them. So if these are only proposed for deletion, that may not be the right place for them, as they could be deleted without input from anyone else.
On the other hand, GStaff doesn't come by all that often, so the risk is pretty low.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 11:44, 1 June 2008 (EDT)
Afd? Oops. Missed that. Hmm... Could two stage it. Afd for "this really should be deleted" and "prod" for "think this should be deleted, but maybe wait for some vetos." --Wrye 18:12, 1 June 2008 (EDT)
Agreed. I'm making a pfd category.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 18:43, 1 June 2008 (EDT)

Deprecated Articles

I've also established a category and a template for Category:Deprecated Articles (and {{Deprecated Article}}). This is for articles that are deprecated for some reason (erroneous, undesirable, outdated, etc.), but which we don't want to delete for some reason (historical, contains some useful info, etc.) --Wrye 18:12, 1 June 2008 (EDT)

Colons and Namespaces

When definining new pages under a namespace (e.g. Category or Template), you should not include a space after the colon. E.g. a name should be Category:Something, not "Category: Something". The main reason for this is that "Category: Something" doesn't define a category named "Something", it defines a category named " Something" - i.e. the name starts with a space instead of "S". This will cause problems when the page is alphabetically sorted. It's also likely to cause various other minor problems with current or future versions of wiki software. (If you'll poke around Wikipedia or UESP, you'll see that colons are not followed by spaces.)

Some background. MediaWiki divides articles into different namespaces, e.g. Category, Template, MediaWiki, etc. Each primary namespace has a second talk namespace associated with it. With one exception, these second namespaces are always the base namespace + " Talk" e.g. "Category Talk", "Template Talk", etc. The exception is the main namespace which has no name, and the corresponding main talk space, which is simply "Talk" instead of " Talk".

Namespaces are defined at a low configuration level of the wiki. I.e. you can't just create a new one by including a colon in the name. E.g. if you create a page named "Foo:Bar", then:

  • if there's a namespace named "Foo", then this will become an page named "Bar" in the "Foo" namespace, but...
  • but if there're not a "Foo" namespace", then this will become an page with the name "Foo:Bar" in the main namespace.

Again, if you created a page name "Foo: Bar", then this would become a page with the name " Bar" (leading space) in the "Foo" namespace.

There's another feature of MediaWiki which is (partially) active here: Subpaging. If you define a page with a '/' in the title, e.g. "Foo/Bar" and if the page "Foo" exists, then Foo/Bar is considered to be a subpage of "Foo". A practical result of this is that a backlink will appear on the subpage (e.g. User:Wrye/Demo). Well, should appear. For some reason the backlink is appearing user space pages, but not in main namespace pages (I imagine that backpage linking needs to be activated for the main namespace).

Hence:

  • Don't use colons in the names of articles. Colons should only be used to designate namespaces.
  • When creating pages in namespaces, don't put a space between the colon and the next word.
  • When desiring to create page hierarchy, use '/' to define subpages.
  • Ask GStaff to turn subpaging on for main namespace.

--Wrye 19:17, 1 June 2008 (EDT)

Will e-mail GStaff about sub-paging.
Also, stylistically, it is favorable (at least in my opinion) to include the space in links. You can do this with actual namespaces (Category:, Talk:, Help:), but not with 'pseudo' namespaces (Portal:, most notably). So [[:Category: Getting Started]] will work perfectly, and not cause the problems Wrye has mentioned above, while [[Portal: Scripting]] will not. Obviously the exception is when you are using a link to create a new page.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 21:09, 1 June 2008 (EDT)
Testing: 1) Category:Proposed for Deletion and 2) Category: Proposed for Deletion (second one has leading space). If you mouse over these, you'll see that auto-generated link has no space after the colon. Similarly if you try to create a page where the name (after the namespace) starts with a space, the space will be removed.
Apparently the wiki software automatically corrects the page name, both while creating and while linking to remove the space. Which is convenient, but I would regard that as the wiki software fixing a user error. If you'll check Wikipedia (e.g. Wikipedia:Categorization), it never uses "Foo: Bar", but rather always uses "Foo:Bar" in the text of the link. So for MediaWiki based wikis, the stylistic standard is that links that display the namespace should not include a space after the colon. --Wrye 00:32, 2 June 2008 (EDT)
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