Dwarf Fortress Wiki:Versions

This is an in-progress method of organizing information on the wiki in light of the release of Dwarf Fortress 2010. Please feel free to make suggestions on the talk page.

Goal

The goal of this effort is to effectively mark articles according to the version they are about. Ultimately there are two goals:

• Allow users to know what major version (23a, 40d, etc...) an article pertains to.
• Allow editors to easily find topics for which a current version article is not complete.

This is not intended to:

• Remove all information about older versions. These articles have been moved to appropriate namespaces (ex. 40d:, 23a:), and the {{ArticleVersion}} template (which should be added to every version specific page) links between the various versions, noting clearly (through color and message) whether it is the current version.

In-Progress Approach

Per topic

Each feature or idea that has an article will feature the "up to date" version and "old" versions: (note, if an article is version independent these points do not apply)

• The mainspace article will never contain anything but a redirect to the cv: alias.
• There will be namespaces for every major version: "DF2012" (likely to be renamed once a new save-incompatible DF version is released), "v0.31", "40d", and "23a".
• The cv: alias will redirect to the current version, ie. "DF2012".

Version articles

There is a template that should be placed on all version-specific pages. It looks like this (though it looks different on actual articles):

This article is in the DF wiki namespace. More Info · V

An example of this template on a real page can be seen at 40d:milk.

This template is added by placing either {{av}} or {{ArticleVersion}} at the top of an article.

The template will read in the namespace of the article and use that to determine if the article pertains to the current version or not.

It will also place an article into a category based on whether or not it pertains to the current version.

One version will be considered "current", and articles in that namespace with the version template will be placed into a category marking it as such, all other articles will be put into a category marking them as Obsolete, and also placing them into a category based off of their version (from the article namespace).

With very little effort (read the documentation) every page's version template can be automatically updated when a new version arrives. This process automatically changes what namespace shows up as current on each page and what categories pages are put into. This makes it wonderfully easy the next time a new version comes around.

Redirects

Mainspace article pages should use the cv: alias when redirecting to a versioned page, which will automatically update the link when a new version is released. For example, page "Main:Foo" should redirect to page "cv:Bar" (where "Bar" is the page that best describes the topic Foo in the current version).

Pages in mainspace should only redirect to an older versioned page if that content no longer exists in the current version of the game (e.g. Cave river, Chunk). In these cases the cv: alias cannot be used.

Pages inside a versioned namespace should not use the cv: alias. Instead, they should redirect to the best page within that versioned namespace (e.g. DF2012:Dodging, v0.31:Drink).

Due to limitations of the wiki software, double redirects should be avoided if possible. When fixing double redirects in mainspace, please make sure to use the cv: alias as appropriate.

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Although a lot of this is already underway, you should still feel free to make suggestions or bring up any comments on the talk page.