Dwarf Fortress Wiki:Versions

This is a proposal for a new method of organizing information on the wiki in light of the upcoming release of Dwarf Fortress 2010. It is completely up for discussion and all input is welcome. Feel free to make changes to this directly if you think you have a great idea. If you have a suggestion you think might be questionable or if you disagree with a portion of the proposal that has already been suggested, please bring it up on the talk page to get the input of every editor until we can hopefully reach a consensus on the best way of approaching the recent change, and all future upkeep of the wiki to avoid obsolete information.

Goal

The goal of this effort is to effectively yet subtely mark articles according to how up-to-date they currently are. Ultimately there are two goals:

• Allow users to know exactly how up to date or not a particular article is
• Allow editors to easily find articles which are out of date.

Proposed Approach

We could utilize an approach based off of creative use of templates and categories. We can have a template that we place on all relevant articles which marks how up to date the article is, for example:

{{Version|40d}}
Article information

{{Version|pre DF2010}}
Article information

{{Version|DF2010}}
Article information

This will place a small box in the top-right corner of the article which will give information to the user that this article is either up to date, or how out of date it currently is. It will also place an article into a category based off of how obsolete or not the information currently is.

One version will be considered "current", and articles marked with that version 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all other articles will be put into a category marking them as Obsolete, and also placing them into a category of how out of date they currently are.

In this way when a new version comes out, a small change can be made to the template which will mark many articles "obsolete", and editors can comb through these articles over time and making sure all information on them is accurate as of the most recent version, which they can note in the template at the top.

This ensures that random articles don't lay dormant without being updated for many versions, and also that this can be done with minimal effort.

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It is likely that the above description will require some tweaking over time so feel free to make any changes you think might be useful or bring up any comments on the talk page.