Talk:Main Page

Page from the old wiki has been moved across with a few changes where appropriate. -CC

"You shoulder your backpack and start walking." ... would be nice if it was true! is this sacred lore or can we get rid of it and make a few other language and line-break tweaks here without getting shot? -sep

Item Reorganization

Hi all, I just got into this game recently. Wikis are a very useful resource after the first few weeks of exploring the game, but this one isn't organized in a way that's very friendly to people looking for information. I wanted to see if there was any feedback on reorganizing the wiki (particularly the sections on game items).

The wiki for Nethack is a great example of a very friendly wiki for this type of game. They have an index page for item types, like this: http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Weapon

But each item also has its own page: http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Scalpel

Which is really great for noting strategy tips and other little bits of information about particular items, and can let us reduce the amount of clutter in the tables (they're pretty hard to read right now, lots of information packed in that small space).

I can operate a bot that would probably be able to generate the basic information on these types of pages without much hassle. BMacZero (talk) 14:04, 3 May 2013 (PDT)

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Sounds worth a try.

I finally implemented a hint template a few weeks back, so that extra info can be added to the description/notes column without the extra clutter (which was a real problem, particularly in the clothing page). IMO that's good enough, but that might be because I'm already used to the wiki after all this time.

I say, do a test run in one of the pages so we can see how it'll work out. If for some reason it's decided that it's not desirable or not particularly advantageous it can always be rolled back.

--Kenoxite (talk) 02:01, 4 May 2013 (PDT)

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Did the edits for the melee weapons page to demonstrate. Rock and wood axe show how these pages might look when including more specific information. The actual table pages can remain almost untouched, with the individual pages just having more information (though I did remove the Flags and Desc columns from the Melee weapons table to see if that was neater). BMacZero (talk) 12:40, 4 May 2013 (PDT)

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OK, this will come handy.

I think it's time to post about this in the wiki thread in the forums before going further, mainly so all the most common contributors and particularly GlyphGryph (the top admin) are aware of our machinations. Actually, consider PMing him also, if you haven't already. Just to make all this more visible, as not everybody reads the talk pages or follows the changelog.

About the changes done already, consider using the TECtoname template for the Flags row in the individual items table. Just note that it isn't able to translate more than one flag at a time. For that the flags should be divided into their own row or column. I didn't bother before, as it would have meant to create 5 or more flag columns, when maybe only a couple items would actually fill them all. But now, seeing that they have their own table and flags are placed as rows it might be worth separating them. By default they're just separated by blank spaces.

In fact, the Flags sections of all tables should be ideally not necessary at all if the information about each flag would be included in the flag entries themselves, by using <abbr/> tags, linking them to a page describing that particular flag, etc.

And some questions:

• Can the bot be used to update the pages with info directly from the game source files?
• Does further manual editing of pages created by bots conflict with future bot updates of that page?

--Kenoxite (talk) 00:29, 5 May 2013 (PDT)

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Gotcha, I'll post over there.

I'm still not sure how to get multiple flags into the template separately without multiple fields. I guess the bot could split them and TECtoname them before passing them to the template, i.e. |flags={{TECtoname|TEC_WHATEVER}} {{TECtoname|TEC_OTHERTHING}}.

Could you elaborate on what you said about the flags? I'm not following you there.

Answers:

• Yeah, looks like the items are all defined in a nice JSON file. I should be able to read those and cross reference them when the pages are being created.
• Nope, the bot should be able to work around manual edits no problem, if we need to use it to update anything on pages that already exist.

Are you thinking a bot might be used for updating the item pages when the game is updated? BMacZero (talk) 13:07, 5 May 2013 (PDT)

Attribution?

No idea who this coffeespoons person is, nor why his name should be stuck front-and-center on our mainpage. KA101 (talk) 19:10, 9 January 2015 (PST)