Gineipaedia:News

From Gineipaedia, the Legend of Galactic Heroes wiki

Revision as of 04:59, 17 May 2011

This page contains news related to the operation of Gineipaedia. It serves as an on-going catalogue of site changes, content updates, project status, &c. Unless otherwise noted, updates are written by kine.

2011/05/16

Weekly back-ups

I have set it up so that back-ups of Gineipaedia content are made available to the public (as Canary and i had previously discussed). These back-ups are created automatically every Monday night (US time) and made available at Data.

Currently only the text is available, but i would like to eventually add images, if the execution time and space requirements are not too significant.

New templates

Mostly self-explanatory; these should all have documentation now:

• {{italic title}}
• {{dim brackets}}
• {{infobox game}}
• {{i}}

2011/05/10

Staff: name space

I've created a Staff: name space. All pages under this NS are automatically edit-protected for everyone but administrators, bureaucrats, and sysops. It is however viewable by anyone. At some point we may wish to move sensitive staff discussions to a more secure location.

In addition to this move, i have created an extension which adds a 'Staff discussion' link to the top bar for admins+. Since this is not really meant for end users, this is a better method than having it contained in the side bar.

New templates

I've created a citation template for Fleet Files — {{ffc}}. I am not sure about the formatting at the moment; please take a look at Brünhild's side bar and let me know what you think.

I've also created the imaginatively named {{rank}} to help with formatting and linking to ranks. This is mainly intended for use in front of names (like 'Lt Commander Schneider').

Several notification-box templates have been created as well. (These are mostly for administrative use)

Policy updates

Several policy questions have recently been resolved. However, we still have a few others remaining on Policy talk.

2011/04/25

LAUNCH!

Gineipaedia is now officially launched. LOGH Wiki is closed, with a link pointing here. I have also updated a link from another Wikia that used to point to LOGH Wiki. In the future we will need to update any other sites — for example, TV Tropes — so that they point to Gineipaedia instead. But let's wait on this a bit longer; i don't want to come off like some bull-shit advertiser or something.

Speaking of advertising — so far, aside from what i mentioned above, we have not been spreading the word. Canary mentioned that he might start telling people today. Ideas we had were chan sites, MyAnimeList, and so on. We also would like to have a link added to Wikipedia's LOGH page, but i think we should get a consensus first on their talk page — Wikipedia policy generally frowns upon self-promotion.

Time zone

I've changed the site's default time zone from PDT to UTC. Hopefully everyone agrees this is the best solution, given we have contributors ranging from the American Midwest all the way to eastern Australia. (But you can change the time zone displayed on 'Recent changes' and so forth in your preferences.)

Policy polls

I've created a few policy-related polls on Policy talk; please register your opinion. We need to get these sorts of questions answered before we get heaps of people making changes that we might later regret!

Forum

I've added a link to the LOGH Wiki forum to the front page. You can use this if you prefer the forum method of doing things; otherwise, feel free to add your comments to Policy talk, the Translation page, article Talk pages, or where-ever. (I always watch Recent changes, so i will see them.)

2011/04/23

A lot of things have been done since the last update :)

Theme (continued)

The new theme is now about 98% finished. The IE8 menu problem has been fixed, and all of the most highly visible site features (recent changes, search pages, edit pages, special pages, image pages) have been at the very least made consistent with the theme. There are a few places where minor details are missing; please let me know if you catch any (or any with big details missing, for that matter).

Rich text editor is still broken though. Frankly, i'm questioning whether it will ever really work 100%; they all seem to have huge bugs.

Content transfer and changes

The big news here is that we have moved heaps of content over from the old LOGH Wiki. You will find that most pages now have at least a paragraph or two of text, whereas before they mostly had only a sentence or two (if that).

However — with respect to the original authors — a lot of this content is in desperate need of clean-up in order to confirm to Gineipaedia's standards of tone, canon, and neutrality. Please work on this if you have a chance.

Additionally, most LOGH Wiki articles have zero citations. If you're able to, please start adding citations according to the MOS.

On that subject — i am about half-way through converting all episode title citations to episode number citations. If you see any that need converted, you can do them, but honestly i'd just leave them alone; i'll catch them with the bot eventually. (However, any new citations should use episode numbers.)

New templates

A few new templates have been created. {{cleanup-span}} and {{cn-span}} can be used to identify passages that need clean-up or citations, respectively. Using these templates on an article will automatically add them to Articles needing clean-up / Articles needing citations. This helps us keep track of what needs to be done.

Questions, suggestions, and concerns

If you have anything at all you want to ask or comment about, please feel free to let me know!

2011/04/09

Theme!

Big change: The new theme is about 80% in place. Some more tweaks need to be made, but this is basically it. Suggestions welcome. Note: The menu is broken in IE8 (not sure about IE9). Need to work on this. The site likely will not function very well at all in IE7 and below; too bad, frankly. Sorry business users :/

Rich text editor is broken; i need to work on this some more.

Front page

I've redesigned the front page to incorporate a table layout like other wikis. This needs more content and some other things, but hopefully it's an improvement over what we had before.

Policy pages

Created/updated a few more policy pages. Policy:Images has a new section (moved/updated from the MOS), and there is now a Policy:Sections, which lists the appropriate order for section headings and also describes what some of those sections should be used for.

2011/04/05

Name spaces

I have now properly set up the Portal: and Policy: name spaces. Since i consider these critical to the functioning of the site, they are editable only by administrators and bureaucrats — not regular users. (The talk pages, however, can be edited by anyone.)

Policy pages

Yesterday i created Policy:Images regarding our (preliminary) image policy. I've also updated Policy:Manual of Style to add the appropriate order for sections and headings. Another thing i had done — this was actually a few weeks ago i think — was update the licensing terms and add Gineipaedia:Copyrights and Gineipaedia:Creative Commons licence. I might actually move these into the Policy: name space, not sure yet.

Rich text editor

I have installed a rich text editor (you can test it by editing any page and clicking 'Rich Editor'), but it is very plain right now and has been minimally customised. I would like to update this further very soon.

Things to come

Theme changes in the works, hope to get this all updated shortly as well.

2011/03/27

Citing by episode number

It is now possible — and encouraged — to cite episodes by their numbers rather than titles. For instance:

{{logh|002}} produces: LOGH: 'The Battle of Astarte'

This is something that we had wanted on the other wiki, and it's finally implemented now. The following changes were required:

1. {{titles}} and its sub-templates were created. There are a number of parent templates, including {{titles}} itself, which do nothing on their own, but...

2. Each episode will have its own sub-template. To continue from the example above, the sub-template for 'The Battle of Astarte' is {{titles/LOGH/002}}. This template contains nothing but the full title of the episode.

3. {{e}} has been updated to check to see if one of the above sub-templates exists and, if so, to pull the title from it. This provides automatic support — with no other changes required — to the various shortcut templates ({{logh}} and so on).

So far i have only added the appropriate sub-templates for SWV, DIS, and the first nine episodes of LOGH. But the rest should follow. Once they are all in place, i am going to encourage, if not mandate, that all citations be done with the numbers rather than titles, because i expect that several episode titles are going to be changed due to improved translations, and this will make it a simple matter to update all of the citations at once.

Template linking, misc.

Another new template i've created is {{t}}, which makes linking to templates consistent and easy. You can see it in use in this very paragraph!

Other news: Still working on screenshots. Still no spam. I have also fixed (i.e. removed) MediaWiki's irritating 'self-link' feature, which de-linked side-bar links and so on when the page in question was being viewed.

2011/03/25

Spam update: none so far!

My last captcha change seems like it might have done the trick! Almost 18 days and not a single spam sign-up or edit. I am pleased. Given how successful it's been i think i am probably going to remove the captchas from everything but sign-up — but let's give it another few weeks to see how things go.

Screenshots

Have recently been trying to get screenshots for each episode. So far i'm up to episode 14 — start here and then work your way forward if you want to see them. This is more time-consuming than you might think, in large part because it's so difficult to find one shot that encapsulates the entire episode.

I am trying to balance:

• (a) the image that would best help me identify the entire episode (for example i could identify 'The Battle of Astarte' by the ring formation);
• (b) the image that best corresponds to the episode title (for example the titular birth of the 13th fleet only occupies a brief period of the episode in question, whilst other, unrelated, events occupy the rest); and
• (c) what just plain looks best (i didn't use the ring formation mentioned above because its appearance in the episode is sort of subdued and it's somewhat difficult to comprehend it for casual viewers).

???

I realise that i add far too much detail to these updates, especially since nobody reads them but me, but i honestly have nothing better to do :(

2011/03/07

More more spam-fighting

I've returned from a Pokémon marathon to discover an enormous amount of spam. Clearly ReCAPTCHA is not the solution. I have instead modified the captcha system to use a pool of questions i have selected which are extremely simple for a human user but somewhat difficult for a bot to solve. You can see it on the account sign-up page. Once again i'm hoping that this will resolve the spam problem, but we'll see.

2011/03/03

This update is quite late, but:

Episode/film infoboxes

I have added infoboxes to all episode and film pages that currently exist. Probably the most useful feature of these infoboxes is the navigation aspect, which allows you to quickly move backwards and forwards through the series. You can see an example of the episode infobox on 'Into the Eternal Night', and an example of the film infobox on Overture to a New War. The template page has not yet been updated with the documentation, but it will be.

In implementing these infoboxes, a couple of other templates needed to be created:

• {{nth}}, which adds the appropriate ordinal indicators to numbers (for example, '1' --> '1st'); and
• {{const}}, which technically does nothing, but as the documentation mentions it has several 'sub-constants' that can be used to represent episode counts and so on.

More spam-fighting

Putting the captcha only on the user-creation page unfortunately didn't seem to help much. I have now implemented the 'auto-confirm' feature of MediaWiki, which forces users to solve a captcha for every edit or page creation until both (a) a few hours have passed since account creation, and (b) the user has made at least a few edits. Maybe this won't help either, but we'll see.

Misc.

The site may not see much action for a while — other things are going on. For instance, the new Pokémon game is coming out this week. :)

2011/02/12

Side-bar navigation

I wanted to get back the multi-level tree menus that Wikia had, so i've implemented a similar behaviour in the side bar (on the left). This is very haphazardly hacked together (Vector required some modification to even support doing this), but it does work pretty well, so i'm happy with it for the most part.

There are only two issues:

(1) There is a rendering bug in Chrome/Safari (for Mac anyway) that i can't figure out: It displays an ugly gradient thing on the right-hand side of each menu. I have no idea why this is. Will try to investigate later.

(2) MediaWiki's parser thing automatically removes the linking from links to the page you are currently on. (For instance, try clicking on 'Technology' on the side, and then note what the side bar looks like after the page finishes loading.) This is not a completely unwarranted feature, but in this case it is very irritating because it messed up the display of the menu a bit.

Redirects

I've added like 400+ redirects this morning (mostly for FPA characters, a few for Imperial) — this should greatly reduce the time spent navigating through MediaWiki's idiotic search function. You can now search for things like 'Bucock', 'Reinhard', 'Hilde', &c., and be taken to the pages you expect.

2011/02/11

Translation

In the course of adding some episode citations to articles, it started to bother me that many of the episode titles i'm using are not translated as well as i'd like them to be. If there were an official English release, that would be fine, i would probably just leave them be. However, since there are not any official English titles for anything in the series, i feel compelled to make sure mine are as faithful and correct as possible.

In an attempt to achieve that, i've started recording some notes/questions/issues in Gineipaedia:Translation. I will be adding other issues here as they come to me.

Spam (continued)

Apparently i under-estimated the spammers. :) Added some further black-listed terms (wgSpamRegex) to hopefully capture some of the remaining stuff. I am also considering making the first 3 to 5 edits for each user require a captcha solution, but i suppose if they've got past the first one that maybe that won't help as much. We'll see.

Misc.

Added some of those appearances i mentioned in 'Previously'. Still a bunch to go. Also remembered that most of the ONW screenshots had no real summaries — added a bunch of these. Some of them i didn't touch because i'm still deciding on what the 'canon' name should be, or i need to find a character's rank or something.

2011/02/10

Spam

It turns out that having a publicly editable wiki invites a lot of spam, even when registration is required. (shock) In response to that, i have installed two new extensions that should hopefully eliminate 99% of spam:

ConfirmEdit

ConfirmEdit is an extension that makes users solve captchas in order to proceed with certain actions. Since registration is required to edit the site, i have currently only enabled this at the point of account creation.

SpamBlacklist

If a spam bot — or human spammer — manages to solve the captcha, there's SpamBlacklist. This is an extension that blocks edits containing links to certain banned URLs (almost all wiki spam comes in the form of URLs; they intend to game search engines this way). The extension pulls spam patterns from two sources: Wikimedia's list, which is quite extensive, and our own, which so far contains patterns matching past offenders.

Misc.

Updates have slowed recently. Other things going on, feeling slightly burnt-out after editing something like 250 articles i think in less than a month? However, i am still excited to get this off the ground. Hopefully in the next few weeks i will get back some of my stamina.

Previously

Briefly:

• Dates: Standard date format is UC, unless we're referring to something from earlier. All dates should use the date template. {{d|799|uc}} = 799 UC (1 NIC / 490 IC / 3599 CE)

• I have a great deal of appearance information that can be added for maybe the first half of the OVA series. I have it spread across a few documents and will be adding it as the mood strikes me.

• I would like to work on a new theme, a new logo, and possibly even a new name (although i'm not sure about the name — it is somewhat unique after all; i'm not sure we'll find anything better). However, this can wait until after we get more content.