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[Nopenope]

Let me be frank, the wiki is currently in quite a dire situation.

The reason the wiki is in a dire situation is that a significant chunk of the bay12 community does not actually play the game (and hasn't done so for 5+ years), and many DF players do not engage the bay12 community (and stay on the same six or seven websites as do most people on the internet). People are intimidated by the wiki, and don't edit; conversely, lots of information is posted on reddit or the forums without ever making it to the wiki. As a result, the wiki is really, really obsolete - it took several years for the article about bogeymen to be corrected to reflect their new powers.

I don't have any solution for this. I try to edit the best I can but sometimes I don't have time and most importantly I can't reliably test every aspect of the game. That's what the power of the crowd is for, and that's what a wiki is for. But if there is no crowd to sustain it we might as well revert to a good old fashioned manual with a yearly reprint or something.

[Feeona]

Hi folks, Fiona the Kitfox Community Manager here.

I'm really interested at working with folks on updating the wiki sometime in the future. It is absolutely something we want to maintain and become an excellent source of knowledge for both those new and old to Dwarf Fortress!

EDIT: Just as I'd said in a previous thread, I don't see there being a problem using the Premium sprites in the wiki.

[lethosor]

Given the info and examples in the 2021-01-14 dev update, in my opinion at least the case for a new wiki namespace has become much stronger.  It looks like the new version will have a radically different UX / UI even in the ASCII version; with most modal windows going away, a whole slew of new pop-up windows with multiple tabs, major changes on how scrolling works, significantly rearranged key bindings, and so on.  It seems likely at this point that the vast majority of instructions, and many guides and suggestions, will need to be reworked for the new version; preserving the old version instructions (for historical reference, and for those players who do not update for whatever combination of reasons) with an archived namespace is precisely why one would want multiple namespaces.  Arguably, a "player muscle memory and operating instructions" compatibility break is even more disruptive than a savegame compatibility break. 

This makes sense to me. I don't think a ton of pages refer to specific UI elements, though, but I know there are a good number of keyboard shortcuts in many places. My understanding is that keyboard shortcuts would be retained for the most part, but if there are many new UI elements, adding conditional references to them across pages in the DF2014 namespace would be confusing.

I like and strongly support the idea that the new namespace be "Current" or some similar take; and that as time and versions roll along, older versions are archived off into a separate namespace (as needed by major game changes) with a name determined at the time of archiving, with the considerable advantage of hindsight. 

I want to do this too; I would prefer to discuss it somewhere more centrally, though (i.e. not this thread). It also hasn't been a super high priority for me to even start a discussion on the subject. There is technically one on the wiki, but there's not a lot of activity on wiki-related discussions these days.

As far as presentation of the graphical  vs. ASCII take on things, I am less sure of the optimal approach, but in general I think that templates that are designed to present both appearances on the same page / sidebar would be the best.  I'm a long-standing proponent of the keyboard-driven ASCII take on things... but what we've seen of the Premium version has me seriously considering a change, and I think the level of both refinement and utility it will bring may convert a fair number of us old-timers.  But not all, and if for no other reason than preserving the ability to play on less-than-ideal devices and for universal accessibility (ie, handicap assistive device compatibility), I think preserving the old-school Roguelike roots and ASCII display as a parallel presentation is important. 

One wrinkle not previously discussed is that there are rumors that there will be a fully modern "free" new-style graphical tileset (which is far more than a traditional tileset, given all the interacting and blended layers) available around launch.  Given that it seems like creating these is dramatically more work than a traditional tileset, it is possible that in practice there will effectively be three common looks for some time; paid Premium, the aforementioned work, and new-ASCII; so that may be worth thinking about.  Is it possible to create a template with basically three slots for the visual, where the third one is pulled from some user preference setting?  (I.e., the sidebar for something would show three icons; how-it-looks-in-Premium, how-it-looks-in-stock-ASCII, how-it-looks-in-the-tileset-you-indicated-you-prefer-in-your-user-settings, with some sensible default for the last.)

EDIT: Just as I'd said in a previous thread, I don't see there being a problem using the Premium sprites in the wiki.

Thanks for confirming! We do have some existing support for raws (the DFRawFunctions extension) and tilesets (the DFDiagram extension) in templates, so we might be able to make this a fairly non-manual process, although it would require some dev work.

Let me be frank, the wiki is currently in quite a dire situation.

The reason the wiki is in a dire situation is that a significant chunk of the bay12 community does not actually play the game (and hasn't done so for 5+ years), and many DF players do not engage the bay12 community (and stay on the same six or seven websites as do most people on the internet). People are intimidated by the wiki, and don't edit; conversely, lots of information is posted on reddit or the forums without ever making it to the wiki. As a result, the wiki is really, really obsolete - it took several years for the article about bogeymen to be corrected to reflect their new powers.

I don't have any solution for this. I try to edit the best I can but sometimes I don't have time and most importantly I can't reliably test every aspect of the game. That's what the power of the crowd is for, and that's what a wiki is for. But if there is no crowd to sustain it we might as well revert to a good old fashioned manual with a yearly reprint or something.

I will admit that I am one of those who hasn't had a lot of time to dedicate to playing DF or updating the wiki. However, I'd like to push back against the "dire situation" part a bit - I've seen a number of good edits and a decent amount of activity recently. Some pages haven't been updated in a while, but in many cases, they haven't needed to be due to a lack of recent changes. I wouldn't say that some incidents of outdated pages warrant scrapping the wiki altogether.

I would probably encourage continuing this discussion in the "let's fix the wiki" thread, at any rate, and keeping this one dedicated to the namespace discussion.

[1] For reasons best known to itself, Courier (at least, given its usefulness) doesn't interpret as the monospaced type it should, on my tablet's browsers, sticking to the proportional sans variety of default. (But code-tagged stuff works as it should, and I'm sure I could manually edit my own BBCode parameters to work better for me.) But I digress, save that it illustrates the possible need to serve 'what I want' with the page as much as possible where you can't rely on other

We can specify multiple fallback fonts, and most templates do that already. Can you point me to an example of one that doesn't work for you?

[Starver]

[1] For reasons best known to itself, Courier (at least, given its usefulness) doesn't interpret as the monospaced type it should, on my tablet's browsers, sticking to the proportional sans variety of default. (But code-tagged stuff works as it should, and I'm sure I could manually edit my own BBCode parameters to work better for me.) But I digress, save that it illustrates the possible need to serve 'what I want' with the page as much as possible where you can't rely on other

We can specify multiple fallback fonts, and most templates do that already. Can you point me to an example of one that doesn't work for you?

Sorry, that was an example of the forum failing to fallback (or, rather, my browsers), SFAICT, there's no wiki issues. It was more an analogy.

Spoiler: To be precise (click to show/hide)

When using the BBCode font-tag I don't get Courier-like rendering from: <span style="font-family: courier;" class="bbc_font"> (using the 'obvious' [font=Courier] markup)
But I do get it from the DIV structure that contains: <code class="bbc_code"> (part of what I get with [code] markup)

(The latter cascadingly invokes font-family: "dejavu sans mono", "monaco", "lucida console", "courier new", monospace; and manually invoking "monospace" (no other(s)!) in the font-tag works for me, at least. So now I know! Though I can't imediately tell if this breaks others' experiences instead.)

But that's not your area of responsibility. FYI just to explain.

It also looks like Firefox For Android has lost the ability to view a page source (also not your fault), so I had to switch over to the Chrome one to actually inspect elements and get into the .css source as well.

(Requesting perhaps another thread (point me at it in Private) or just in PMs if anyone wants to discuss this non-wiki stuff further. Sorry for the brief additional diversion!)

[clinodev]

Let me just throw in that Feeona comes to Kitfox by way of Paradox Interactive, so she knows the importance of a ☼wiki☼ like ours to a complicated game.

[lethosor]

Sorry, that was an example of the forum failing to fallback (or, rather, my browsers), SFAICT, there's no wiki issues. It was more an analogy.

Oops, I skimmed a bit and missed what your footnote was referring to. Sorry!

It doesn't look to me like this is configurable in user settings (unlike another thing I looked at earlier today), but if you want to bring it to the attention of Toady/ThreeToe, a thread in General Discussion might work.

Let me just throw in that Feeona comes to Kitfox by way of Paradox Interactive, so she knows the importance of a ☼wiki☼ like ours to a complicated game.

Hi folks, Fiona the Kitfox Community Manager here.

I'm really interested at working with folks on updating the wiki sometime in the future. It is absolutely something we want to maintain and become an excellent source of knowledge for both those new and old to Dwarf Fortress!

EDIT: Just as I'd said in a previous thread, I don't see there being a problem using the Premium sprites in the wiki.

Forgot to chime in earlier: thanks for swinging by Bay12! Perhaps not the most glowing thread about the wiki here, but we'd be glad to have additional contributors to the wiki.

[Pillbo]

I really think the new namespace is necessary for the same reasons other people have said. In my opinion if we continue to just update the DF2014 namespace it will change so much that the wiki will no longer be useful for people playing the 47 version, just as it's currently not accurate for people playing 0.40, 0.42, 0.43, 0.44.

I don't think save compatibility is a good choice for namespace determination. The effect this choice has is that it's easier to learn about the game in version 0.23 than 0.40, I just don't think that makes sense.

[lethosor]

I agree. A counterpoint is that creating new namespaces takes a lot of effort, and is somewhat taxing on the wiki servers, so it is preferable to avoid it when possible. For instance, the 0.42 to 0.43 bump probably would not have warranted a new namespace even if we were making new namespaces more often.

I think save compatibility is a reasonable choice - the original reasoning was that if anyone can upgrade a save from version X to version Y, we shouldn't spend a lot of resources on maintaining content for version X specifically. The main issue I see here is naming the namespace after the oldest version in the series ("DF2014"). Switching to "Current" would resolve this without ever needing to rename the current version's namespace (which is also somewhat taxing on the servers) so I would like to move forward with that.

[Pillbo]

I sympathize with the effort involved concern, it's probably much more work that I realize and you have a life. I think save compatibility made sense when that was a factor that changed regularly, but it isn't anymore. Realistically the Magic release could still be 6 years off, that's a huge range for the namespace and I think doing a namespace change after 7 years, with the expectation of another in 5+ years is reasonable- more reasonable than lumping 13 years of the game together. After magic if Toady plans really well maybe it's the last save break, at that point does the wiki never change namespace again?

The other thing with save breaks is that if someone is playing .40 still, they aren't updating for a reason. Just like if someone is playing 0.23 it's very unlikely that they are playing a game from before the new save-breaking versions were released (wasn't the Boatmurdered save lost?), they likely just enjoy that release. I guess what doesn't make sense about the current system to me is that it looks like the wiki was concerned with preserving info for users of different release versions until 2014, then it decided players should just update instead. Not to say that's an invalid way of running a wiki, maybe only a current version is the only one that's important enough to maintain- but if that's the route you want to go maybe we should just plainly state that somewhere.

That said I do like the Current Version namespace more than the current system.