Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Josephus]

So, I've heard endless stories about how the Wiki is untrustworthy, due to vandalism, speculation somehow making it into articles, and other such things. Is this true? And if so, how long would the cleanup take?

[ZeroGravitas]

So, I've heard endless stories about how the Wiki is untrustworthy, due to vandalism, speculation somehow making it into articles, and other such things. Is this true? And if so, how long would the cleanup take?

Well, notice how everyone comes to the forums asking the same questions over and over and over, usually either "How do I do XYZ" or "Could I do ABC"? It's in large part because the wiki is so bad.

Why is the wiki so bad? Because there have been many, many versions of DF. Information changes often. It's hard to keep up with all the changes. Further, there's a lot of stuff that's hidden from the user and it's sometimes difficult to know what's going on, leading to a very subjective game play experience, which means 2 people might interpret the same event differently and write conflicting things.

Cleanup would be a pretty serious project. Given the scope and complexity of DF relative to the community, I'm not sure a wiki is necessarily feasible or even desirable. Obviously someone is going to make one (or many), I just don't that as really a useful or good thing.

[Josephus]

Hum, it's good for those disparate elements, such as the vanilla game's creatures and such, but perhaps the inclusion of game mechanics in the wiki is one of those questionable things that cause much confusion.

I'm of the opinion that a cleanup can only be undertaken if everyone knows what's "clean" and what's not, for example, because of the "subjective gameplay experience" you brought up.

[Cyntrox]

I found the wiki very useful when I learned DF, which is not so long ago. I haven't seen much inaccurate information, and I've corrected some of it myself.

[vinegarninja]

The trick to having a wiki that is accurate and up to date is to have a dedicated team who are the ones who create the articles and maintain them, with help from the community via this forum, but who gets to decide who does that? Would that team be granted a little bit more access to what happens under the hood in DF? ect ect.
It takes a ton of effort, but it CAN be done.

[Grendus]

I dunno, the wiki has always been very useful imo, and fairly accurate. Aside from many of the pages not being fully updated from 40d (not surprising, we had 40d for forever and 2010 for just a few months), can anyone point me to a blatantly inaccurate page on something that isn't currently riddled with bugs (let's face it, nobody knows what's going on with the military atm, except perhaps Toady)?

[Salabasama]

Yes, I'd say the wiki's a great tool despite its current holes and failings.  After all, it's a wiki.  If something's wrong, someone will change it to be right.

Without the wiki, I doubt I'd have had as much fun figuring out the game when I first started, considering I hadn't played roguelikes before.  Need the wiki for the unexplained things, such as the blue ! marker for old forts, which took me a while to figure out, or the uses of the various crops.

[Kav]

To be frank I'm surprised, shocked even, that anyone has anything bad to say about the wiki at all short of constructive criticisms. Whenever I was uncertain about anything technical or game-play related the wiki always answered the question immediately, accurately, and completely save for only a few bleeding-edge "dwarf science" exceptions. I have never seen a single instance of vandalism. Only a select few things related to the latest version are lacking, and even then it does a half decent job of explaining them.

I hate to think where the community and this forum would be without it. The charts and diagrams alone answer 90% of my questions. I would love to contribute, but I've never found it lacking in any area that I had had enough knowledge and expertise in to write an article.

Here's to the wiki builders. I raise my glass to you.

[Organum]

I don't know about "cleaning" the wiki, but it would be nice for it to be a little more complete.

[Creamcorn]

A few things that could use cleaning up IMHO, military and hospital system.

[Rallion]

The "Bugs and Issues" page is pretty out of date. Of course, I haven't exactly taken it upon myself to fix it...

The problem with most game wikis that I've dealt with is that people would rather just play the game than edit the wiki, or else they've lost interest in the game and so also lost interest in the wiki. It's like a catch-22!

[Mason11987]

So, I've heard endless stories about how the Wiki is untrustworthy, due to vandalism, speculation somehow making it into articles, and other such things. Is this true? And if so, how long would the cleanup take?

As a frequent contributor to the wiki I think this is largely untrue. 

Incorrect information lingers on the wiki, but not regularly much longer then it lingers in the collective knowledge of the DF community at large (this forum and beyond).  Example:  Noise from workshops.  You'll often hear in this community and MANY other DF communities that workshops makes noise but the wiki has had it right for an extremely long time.  Normally when new information comes up it is immediatly added to the wiki or corrected.

Vandalism is very rare and almost immediatly undone, it's not as fast as wikipedia, but I'd contend you would find ZERO vandalism on the DF2010 or 40d namespace right now, unless of course you do it yourself (Don't though ).

There is some speculation, but it's almost always marked fairly clearly as such, since only one of us (Toady) has access to how DF REALLY works, our information about DF is very often speculation and only after many many tests, or confirmation from Toady do we really say something is "true".

I don't know if a concerted "cleanup" to fix these problems is necessary.  There is definitely a lot of need for elaboration and expansion of a lot of pages and some clarification and illustration, but I don't think any kind of vandalism cleanup program is necessary at the moment.

[Josephus]

I do remember one of the admins (His name starts with an A) bringing up a niggling bother about what he called "vanity pages". What do you, as a wiki admin, feel about that?

[cephalo]

Personally, I always take time to correct wrong information if I'm sure it's wrong. For example I'm sure you cant encrust weapons and armor with gems. Sometimes I'm not sure though so I leave it alone. For example, it appears that you can't trade for rough gems anymore, and I'm pretty sure you used to be able to, but I'm not comfortable changing the wiki which says that you can.

[Mason11987]

I do remember one of the admins (His name starts with an A) bringing up a niggling bother about what he called "vanity pages". What do you, as a wiki admin, feel about that?

Albedo?

My opinion (which I don't feel is any more important then another just because I can delete articles) is that in the DF2010 and 40d namespace the articles shouldn't use "I" or refer to particular people who discovered stuff or whatever, cause that isn't really important to the reader.  I don't really care at all what's on the User: namespace pages, mostly because the average reader will never find one in a search or follow a link to one anyway.

If it's something else, I'll have to know the context of the issue.

Cephalo, if there's something you particularly doubt but you're not willing to remove it completely, a middle ground would be to toss a {{verify}} tag on the end, which will signal others to continue research on that, eventually they'll remove the verify tag and remove the sentence or not, depending on what's discovered.