Ultronomicon talk:Community Portal

I completely agree with your point fadookie. As a matter of fact. I had got preposition for this community. I own a domain named http://www.sc2.info. I want to sell it. What better place then to contact this community if they were interested. So i thought of mailing this offer to Owner of this project. But alas! no email or contact was found here...Neways if any1 interested in this community for buying the domain www.sc2.info please contact me at cashontherocks@yahoo.com.Sorry if i said something wrong.

What would everyone think of having a Who's who page (in terms of wiki contributors)? Each person could write one or two sentences about themselves. I think it might help strengthen our community and help newcomers know who everyone is without going around to everyone's userspace. -Fadookie 03:37, 20 Oct 2004 (CEST)

???

You mean like This one? The trick would be to actually get people to write things about themselves, I'd wager.

-- Nic 03:50, 20 Oct 2004 (CEST)

I was thinking more along the lines of a list of main contributors with short bios. That special page only gives names- on a Who's who page you could say "I am a WikiGnome", "I enjoy contributing graphics and occasionally edit for asthetics", etc. -Fadookie 05:24, 20 Oct 2004 (CEST)

Personal pages

Isn't that what personal user pages are for? Click on anyone's name, pow, there's everything they wanted to say about themselves. Mmrnmhrm 14:52, 20 Oct 2004 (CEST)

Yes. I know it sounds redundant, but first of all, not everyone puts info about themselves on their userspace. Also, this would provide an easy way for newcomers to see who's who without having to go through everyone's user page. -Fadookie 16:36, 20 Oct 2004 (CEST)

I can see how this can be useful. I guess it would belong in the "Ultronomicon:" section. -- SvdB 21:57, 20 Oct 2004 (CEST)

Most frequently linked to non-existing pages

This is pulling links from talk and user pages which is misinformative. Is there a way to restrict this to only counting links from normal content pages?

I think such an alteration would require the wiki code to be modified, so you'd have to ask Svdb. -Fadookie 16:40, 20 Oct 2004 (CEST)

It's probably very easy to do if you are familiar with the wiki server code. But I would have to get familiar with that code first... is this really worth it? Probably eventually all non-existing linked pages would be added. That page gives an idea of which ones are more wanted, but is it really necessary to have exact numbers? -- SvdB 21:57, 20 Oct 2004 (CEST)

Some talk and user pages link to articles that have been purposefully moved or deleted. Keeping these "requested" links on the page only makes it likely that they will have to be deleted again. (example: 1 Link Pages) You're right that it's not terribly important, but I think it would be preferred, y'know, eventually. Mmrnmhrm 15:49, 21 Oct 2004 (CEST) Link title

The Captain: a question of style (style guide, that is)

Man, it's been a while since I was last here. Now that I found this discussion page, maybe I can put forward this question for the entire community that I originally asked Svdb:

What's the Ultronomicon style for referring to the Captain? I've seen The Captain and Captain Zelnick used interchangeably in the text, though the latter is, of course, a redirect to The Captain. Either use is fine, but it'll probably help to be consistent throughout the documentation. To help with this, I'd like to create a style guide (at Ultronomicon:Manual of Style or something similar) and mention such style decisions there. Of course, anything that we don't make a decision on will defer to the Wikipedia style guide, as per Ultronomicon:Editing Essentials. Thoughts? --Phoenix (t) 18:51, 3 Oct 2005 (CEST)

Sysops (ATTN: REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS)

I think this place may benefit from a few more sysops.

Sysops can delete pages, revert changes without editing, block IP's, protect and unprotect pages, edit protected pages, and probably some other things.

What I'm thinking of is people who

have made significant contributions over a longer time
know how to work with wikis
are reasonably perfectionistic

Things I don't care about:

being knowledgable about the game. Given some perfectionism, they'll look up the things they don't know, ask questions, or limit themselves to structural editing.

Some people I'm thinking of (in alphabetic order):

If I missed someone who you think should be a sysop, don't hesitate to mention it, even if it's you personally.

So, what does everyone think?

— SvdB 14:32, 19 Oct 2005 (CEST)

Well, for starters, I'm honoured by the recognition. :-) I think it's a good idea, especially when you consider that we've had regular scriptbot-based spam on Talk:Main Page. It would be nice to be able to block the IPs as soon as I revert it, and also to have one-click reverting. --Phoenix (t) 22:20, 19 Oct 2005 (CEST)

Likewise, thanks for the compliment and offer. I'd gladly help out where I can - those spam bots are just plain annoying. Fyzixfighter 23:13, 19 Oct 2005 (CEST)

Tag, you're it. — SvdB 12:46, 23 Oct 2005 (CEST)

I appreciate the offer, but I think I'll pass for the time being. I don't think that I pay enough attention to the Ultronomicon these days to make a promotion worthwhile. -Fadookie 09:12, 24 January 2006 (CET)

New category: game/meta/...?

In my continuing quest to clean up the uncategorised pages, I'd like to create a new category, but I'm at a loss about the name. I plan to have this category includes information about the game itself. Articles that I want to put in this category include the following: 3DO, Accolade, Aftermath, Infogrames, Role Playing Resource Guide, Star Control, Star Control II, The Ur-Quan Masters, TimeWarp, Toys for Bob, and yes, even Star Control 3. Maybe Canon belongs here too.

After Svdb's change of "editorial comments" to "meta-information" in the style guide, perhaps we can call this "Category:Meta", or maybe "Category:About Star Control", or "Category:Star Control series", or even "Category:Reality" (okay, maybe not). I'm not sure. Any suggestions? --Phoenix (t) 17:30, 11 Nov 2005 (CET)

I think maybe "Category:About the Star Control series" is the best. It might even be a good supercategory for such things as the People category. --Phoenix (t) 19:12, 14 Nov 2005 (CET)

Ideas on cleaning up

So we've grown a bit, perhaps a bit too much. Slightly prompted by my own concerns and Svdb's comments [here], I was wondering two things: 1) how do we determine if a topic deserves its own article? and 2) should we have templates to indicate proposals for deletion/merger/expansion into separate articles/etc?

1. Which topics? There's quite a few articles out there, the products of excited and maybe overzealous editors (myself included), that either repeat what's found in other articles or will never grow beyond a single sentence because there simply isn't anything more or significant to say. I think that some of these could be consolidated into a single article or merged into existing articles under new/current subheadings. For example, Non and Void could be merged into Juffo-Wup, and Ta Puun stick and Puun-Taffy could be merged into the Spathi article under a subheading for Culture.

Then there's the locations. There's some disagreement on whether every single constellation and star system need there own pages. I've been creating articles according to my personal beliefs that significant places or, in some cases, planets/constellations for which we have extra, interesting information should have articles. For planets this also means creating short infodump-type articles for the constellations and star systems, though merely to organize the information and create an across the board standard for location articles.

2. I'd be willing to work on some templates for these if the other editors see a need for them. I do worry that simply putting comments on the talk pages would be sufficient to drive discussion among the regular editors. On the other hand, such highly visible templates might encourage the casual perusers to get involved with the discussion, enabling us to get a better view of the issues beyond our own personal opinions and biases. If there is interest in this, discussion on this might be better over on Ultronomicon_talk:To-do.

--Fyzixfighter 06:30, 24 January 2006 (CET)

I'm undecided about the general proliferation of information across several stubs and the like. I'd be more comfortable dealing with these on a case-by-case basis.
Templates are a good idea. We could start with a general "notice" template that will allow us to loudly declare proposed actions. It should be simple to invoke, such as: {{notice|It has been proposed that this article be merged into [[Juffo-Wup]]. Please see the [[Talk:Non|talk page]] to voice your opinion.}} We could also have a bunch of specialized templates like wikipedia does, but my guess is that there are too few cases that will call for the use of these to warrant a whole new set of templates.

-Fadookie 09:21, 24 January 2006 (CET)

I don't consider there to be anything wrong with a page containing only 1 paragraph. What counts for me is accessibility. If someone searches for "None" he should end up at a segment explaining what "None" is, whether it's in a seperate page, or part of "Juffo-Wup". He should not have to read through alineas of text on something else to find a quick remark about the subject.

Duplication of information is a bad thing, because that means double work. If some piece of information (of significant length) is relevant to 2 pages, then one of them should link to the other, or there should be a new page where both link to. Think of the "Main article:" references in Wikipedia.

I also think a page about a subject should be complete, but not over-complete. If there's only 1 paragraph worth of information, then the page should be 1 paragraph in length. One shouldn't try to spread that information out over several paragraphs, or add speculation, just to make the page larger.

As for merge templates, I agree it would be nice, and I also think one will be enough. — SvdB 20:23, 24 January 2006 (CET)

Thanks for the comments so far and for the additional explanation SvdB. In the meantime I've created an experimental template User:Fyzixfighter/Sandbox/Notice per the suggestions above. I agree that we don't need several tags, one is sufficient. Any suggestions before I move it off my sandbox? --Fyzixfighter 23:12, 24 January 2006 (CET)

Perhaps make it a bit more visually prominent, but in terms of functionality it looks perfect. (Would using {{1}} instead of {{message}} in the template make it easier to invoke?)

-Fadookie 00:12, 25 January 2006 (CET)

I changed the {{message}} to {{1}} to make it easier to implement. I also tweaked it a bit and added an image to draw attention. I wasn't sure what image to use though. Right now the image is more of a place holder (actually it was an available image that kind of matched the idea of "Important News"). Does anyone have a suggestion on what image to use, if any? It also does look kind of wierd without the border now that I see it up against the other tags w/ borders. I'll keep on working on it... --Fyzixfighter 06:50, 25 January 2006 (CET)

Perhaps a thin, colored border such as the boxes on the Main Page would work? As for the image, I don't think the current one is suitable. I'm sure we can find a creative commons licensed icon that would work, though. -Fadookie 11:29, 25 January 2006 (CET)

Anyone have any objections to me moving the template out of my userspace to the main template area? I think it's at least workable now with a more appropriate image to grab the eyes, and the finer details can be worked out by people with more talent than myself. --Fyzixfighter 05:02, 26 January 2006 (CET)

No objections here. — SvdB

Go for it. -Fadookie 15:16, 26 January 2006 (CET)

Other nav templates

Hey all, I've been thinking about/working on creating some new nav plates for the alien races and the gameplay items related to quests. I don't know how much a race nav template would be as some races are a bit hard to categorize, and it's pretty simple to just click on the link to the Races category and navigate that way. The quests nav template might be a bit more useful, especially with the gameplay notes section, as it can sum up pretty quickly the items needed in each quest. I've created some quick mock-ups at User:Fyzixfighter/Sandbox/Template:groups and User:Fyzixfighter/Sandbox/Template:quests. A downside in general would be on very short articles, where such a nav-plate might be comparable to the size of the rest of the article. Thoughts? --Fyzixfighter 17:10, 22 September 2006 (CEST)

I'm not necessarilly opposed to it, but how would be decided what to put in a side-box and what to put in one of these things? — SvdB 01:33, 23 September 2006 (CEST)

You mean sideboxes like Template:UrQuanNav or infoboxes like Template:RaceBox? As I understand the convention on wikipedia, sideboxes are for article series - tying together many topics on very broad subjects. I think this is probalby what motivated UrQuanNav. My thought was that these would be much simpler lists that would be a way to navigate to other articles in a much smaller topic (something like Template:Elementary which I used as a starting point). To me the footers seem like they are much more of a subtle afterthought to suggest related articles when someone is done reading something, while sideboxes immediately show that the articles are a subset of a much larger picture. I don't know if I can come up with a better criterion than simplicity and breadth, which is still subjective. There is some overlap with the infoboxes in the case of races, in which case my initial thought would be to mainly use them only on the group page and on the race pages with no racebox possible (sentient milieu members). I hope this somewhat helps elucidate my thoughts - I'm still trying to figure out how they would work myself. In all honesty, I started working on them in part to distract myself from my studies for awhile so I won't be hurt if they're never used ;). --Fyzixfighter 05:33, 23 September 2006 (CEST)

I think they can be useful, so I won't object to putting them in. — SvdB 14:43, 23 September 2006 (CEST)

In-game documents

What's the community's feeling on putting all the in-game documents in the ultronomicon, such as the Earth-Alliance treaty? This could work as a single, large page with subsections for each document or (my preference) a single page for each document with all included in a In-game documents category. Thoughts? --Fyzixfighter 01:30, 24 April 2007 (CEST)

"Safe" Category

Hi, I'm new to this wiki and, being playing Ur-Qun for the first time, I've got one suggestion : if Template:Safe included a Category:Safe link, it would automatically create a category containing all Safe pages, which would be very useful for beginners.

My question is : at first sight it seems a good idea, do you see any reasons against that ? Yopai 23:46, 5 May 2007 (CEST)

linking to pages on other sites/databases

I've got two ideas in particular (mainly after seeing something similar on a wiki for another video game):

Including a "quotes"/"dialog" link in the RaceBox to the appropriate part of sa-matra.net's database of SC quotes. We have something similar, but that's for a different purpose. Honestly, I use sa-matra.net more frequently and it this would be a friendly nod to an excellent resource.
A "3DO" link in the ShipBox to the appropriate SC 2 3DO page on PONAF. I think this is a nice compromise that still gives access to those 3d spinning vids (and narrations) without having to upload them here.

I can't think of any other sites that have unique databases that we could use in a similar manner. I don't mind the linking to wikipedia to explain esoteric terms, though I don't think it benefits much to link to wikipedia's (or other database's) articles on the actual SC topics (like "****_(Star Control)"). Thoughts on including these links? --Fyzixfighter 20:19, 10 October 2007 (CEST)

I like these ideas, but, regarding sa-matra.net — we might want to link to uqm.stack.nl/diff instead (since the 3DO version is quite different at times, and we sometimes use this fact in the articles).

Also, I think that the quotes thing might be expanded — if it would be possible to install an extension to allow for a context-sensitive pop-up thingy (showing the in-game quote the respective information is based on) to appear when you roll the mouse over certain areas (like what happens here when you hover the mouse over the red "speech" words). It might be not worth the effort, however. Valaggar 20:29, 10 October 2007 (CEST)

I was actually thinking about doing a link to both the sa-matra.net page and the appropriate diff page. I think both would be useful - my main problem with just including the diff page (while useful as you point out) is that it's format is very specialized for showing the diffs and not easy reading. I'll see what I can pull together on both these ideas...

As to the mouse-over thingy, I remember briefly looking at something like that when I was working on the note and ref templates. I have no idea though if it's possible, but for me (<sarcasm> a completely unbiased editor </sarcasm>) the current note and ref format works fine for referencing the controversial/esoteric bits (I don't think we need to reference every little bit else every sentence would be referenced). --Fyzixfighter 22:13, 10 October 2007 (CEST)