Community Portal/General Cohesion Initiative
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Decision: Break up tutorials into smaller, more general segments where possible (i.e., creating a new FormID should be a separate tutorial). Inter-link tutorials where possible.
General Cohesion Initiative
Something I personally I feel is lacking here is cohesion amongst the articles. Too many articles are stand-alones, with few links to them and few links in them. Everything should be interlinked - you've all, I'm sure, had the experience of looking up something on Wikipedia and suddenly realizing that you've spent over an hour reading a dozen or more different articles which have increasingly little to do with whatever you looked up. That's how a Wiki should be - links everywhere, where you can move through the pages just by clicking and learn about everything. Navigation needs improvement here, as does the amount of linking we use.
I also recommend breaking up tutorials somewhat. Avoid large, scratch-to-finish tutorials, favoring shorter pages which focus on one specific thing, with links to the next step's page. This makes specific information much easier to find.
So in general, we need ideas about what this Wiki needs. Please post your ideas. --DragoonWraith TALK 00:12, 27 June 2007 (EDT)
- Before everything was lost, Wrye mentioned something about a breadcrumb trail like the UESP. I like it, but I'm not sure if it's that's going to solve the problem with the tutorials. --Qazaaq 10:06, 27 June 2007 (EDT)
- I completely agree with your first point (about interlinking). This definitely needs to be corrected wherever possible. I've tried to fix some obvious ones in the past, like adding links between related GMSTs, but a lot more work along these lines is needed.
- I'm not so sure about your suggestion on tutorials. Perhaps in some cases it would make sense, but in most cases all that's really needed is a good TOC.--Dev akm 12:57, 18 July 2007 (EDT)
I have been writing tutorials for a long time and the ones I created for Oblivion started out as individual "micro" articles and some people were like "huh?" because they were so specific. It was only after I had about 20 of them done that the more general and powerful "macro" articles could be written. It is very handy to have an article that covers the big picture and allows the individual to click topic links that drill down for more and more detailed info and tutorials that can get to click-for-click details. But you have to first build those click-for-click tutorials before the higher-level tutorials can be effective.
For example, the How To Create New Re-Textured Items tutorial would have been extremely long if I had to give all the details for the little steps but instead, I was able to push off the details using tutorials previously written and allowing the flow of the tutorial to stay on track. It references 9 other tutorials for handling steps that the reader may or may not already know about and those might reference other tutorials.
Although you cannot create every article to be interlinked with every other article simply because they were not all designed that way but there should be a "related" section in articles that contain links to related articles.
An example of this is the Paintshop Pro: Creating Inventory Icons tutorial I wrote about creating menu icons using Paint Shop Pro. At the bottom are links to similar tutorials but using different tools: GIMP and Photoshop. Those tutorials really should have the same related links somewhere on the page so that people can find either of the 3 tutorials no matter which one they viewed first.
Now that I think about it, a "Related Pages" section should be common to each and every page for this very reason. If for no other reason, just to let readers know the section exists and if the reader finds an interesting article, the "Related" section should contain links to other related articles. Almost (but not exactly like) Amazon's cross-selling technique that says "xx people that read this article also found these useful too."
--LHammonds 00:49, 17 April 2008 (EDT)