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[edit | edit source]

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)

Alright, we'll open this back up (probably needs it anyway). I think having the so-called "master article" which references more specific things in other tutorials is an excellent way to do things. That way you can cover the entire process without creating a huge, unweildy article. Very good suggestion.
In the future, please note the warnings about archives - there are rules about these things to make sure that everyone has their say. I'll handle this one, but it would be appreciated that when you want to re-open something you actually publicly re-open it so people can respond. Thanks.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 03:24, 17 April 2008 (EDT)
Sorry, I did not understand the whole active/inactive thing. I thought that if you subscribe / watch a page, that you will get an email notification if anything is changed. DoH! I should probably just stick with writing tutorials.
My thoughts on this subject are not necessarily to force everyone to create tutorials this way but rather organize the existing content. You cannot expect everyone to contribute a bunch of tutorials to be organized that way but if there are excessively long tutorials, it might be wise to re-evaluate them and see if they include any details that can be pushed off into their own tutorial and simply reference it similar to how I referenced those articles in the re-texture tutorial. The other suggestion is to have a "Related" section for listing articles that might be of interest or similar in nature.
Now that there are quite a few articles created, we can start to see more high-level / general information being shared that is composed of many links to more detailed articles. Example: How To Create Mods --LHammonds 12:18, 17 April 2008 (EDT)
It's cool, don't worry about it, I had it. It's mostly just putting the link in the right place on the Community Portal so people who go there can see it.
Anyway, yes, I agree with you. We just need people to do it - I don't really have time to, and I don't believe Qazaaq or Haama do either.
Dragoon Wraith TALK 17:25, 17 April 2008 (EDT)
Interlinking needs to be done for just about anything (we've been using ==See Also==). I guess we need to push it in a "Here's what you can do" type article, but that requires writing it up. And it requires placing it in the right place, which is also in the works. As DW said, I don't think we have the time or manpower at the moment.--Haama 11:03, 19 April 2008 (EDT)
I think new category pages based on tools would be useful as well. There are category pages for 'Texture Tutorials', 'Modeling Tutorials', 'Animation Tutorials', etc., but the only way to find all of the GIMP tutorials, Blender tutorials, Photoshop tutorials (regardless of topic) is to go directly to the top level tutorials page or do a search. There should be category pages collecting all of the tutorials available for each tool, with links to the tools pages, and to the related pages for other tools. This way, I know I have all of the information currently available for using a particular tool without having to search through the listings and I can navigate by tool as well as by topic. TheMagician 12:50, 19 April 2008 (EDT)

Qazaaq and, to a limited extent, DW would know more about the art side of the wiki. However, there is a Tools category - it just doesn't look like there are any GIMP tutorials (but there is a Nifskope category). Err... looking at NifSkope - should it be part of the Category:NifSkope_Tutorials, and maybe matching "Nifskope" pages?--Haama 13:40, 19 April 2008 (EDT)

I have a few plans for the tools category (different categories, install instruction, etc), but I haven't had the time to reorganize that section yet. If you'd like to help feel free to add new tools and recategorize the existing ones (the same counts for tutorials). It's best to discuss big changes on the talk pages of those categories first, but if you can finish what you start it's usually alright.
I've always thought the tools tutorials category was useless, the biggest part of the tutorials section is about tools (other than the CS)... The reason I made a NifSkope tutorials category was because most of those tutorials were cluttering up the modeling and texturing tutorials category, which was still one huge category back then. Other tools don't have their own categories because they can be found easily by looking into the category that tool belongs (texturing for the GIMP, modeling for Blender, etc). Again, feel free to add those extra categories to the existing tutorials, if you finish what you start I see no harm in making these changes.
--Qazaaq 07:40, 20 April 2008 (EDT)