Talk:Main Page/archive2

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Archive 1

World Painter Page

The wiki has needed a page on the World Painter for a while, so I've started one. The information in there is decent, but I'm relatively new to wiki editing, so the formatting probably isn't. If someone wouldn't mind cleaning it up a bit for me I'd really appreciate it. --Timmeh 01:15, 3 April 2009 (UTC)

Well I don't know if someone helped you already, but it looks fine to me. --frandude

French language wiki

Can we have interlanguage links with the French wiki? -Alan Trick 17:48, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Add a CptnDuck page?

Captain Duck is a DF video tutorial maker, which an impressive collection of 40 videos on youtube (and a few extra videos of sieges and arenas and whatnot), and explains how to do most everything, from magma forges to Dwarven justice. He adds humor to it and he's the reason a lot of people understand the game...I think we should give him a page. – unsigned comment by Blackdoggie998

As it is insanely easy for anyone to sign up for editing priviledges on this site (I managed to, after all), I see no need to make one for him when he could make one for himself. However, if you wish to add user:CptnDuck, or invite him to make one himself, feel free. He can link to all of his tutorials from his user page. They even be searchable through that lovely little box to the(my) left. (Who knows where it is on your skin.) -- jaz ... on this day, at this time.

P.S. Does it seem odd to you to have it say "unsigned comment by [username]"? Or is that just me? -- jaz ... on this day, just a little after the previous one.

We don't need a userpage for him, but a page with the assembled listing of all his (and others of equal quality) video tutorials wouldn't be a bad idea at all. -Edward 16:47, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Articles on Olivine and other generic stones

There is a current discussion as to whether or not Olivine (and perhaps some few other stones) are duly covered on the current stone page, or are truly worth having their own article/page. This relates to a larger question of how this wiki is organized, and "What deserves a page" in a general sense. Any interested are encouraged to chime in, if only with a "me too" post pro or con. See Talk:Olivine for an idea of the issue. I'd like to have the debate move from the specific Olivine page to here since this is a more general issue that affects many potential pages. --Senso 21:29, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not really sure which way to go on this one. A lot of otherwise useless stones would need their own articles if the guidelines were expanded... and yet, there's a good amount of useful information that's not on the main pages, that would further clutter them if it were added; And permitting more individual pages would solve both those problems. I guess this ends up being a vote both ways, with provisions on each. -Edward 23:54, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

My vote is, if someone can make it amusing, then sure. If someone is of the bent to enjoy making such a page, then again, sure... otherwise, leave it at the bottom of the pile of "things that someday we might get around to if we feel like it" and don't stress. The relevant data is covered (or will be when someone notices it's not), and everything else is gravy. Beside, what would you rather do, play the game, or figure out how to make a whole page of jokes about how gneiss nice is.... (or did I get that backwards?)... ? --jaz ... on this day, at this time.

All relevant information is covered, yes. But not necessarily on a relevant page. Before the Olivine page was made you couldn't learn that olivine may contain native platinum from any page related to olivine or stone in general.

Another example is kaolinite. You can look it up in the table of Other Stone to see it can be found in sedimentary rock. But in order to see that it may itself contain alunite and marcasite you have to go through the entire table (or use the browser search function). Now, in order to see if it may contain anything else, you have to notice the note at the top of the page (just above the table of contents) that points to Metal Ore and Gem, whith another two tables you have to search through. (Kaolinite may contain turquoise). --Nahno 21:44, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

It's not just about "which stones" - it's a larger question of how the wiki is organized and presented. Should each separate and distinct item get its own page, like the current one- or two-line articles on vials, instruments or chains, (just as random parallel examples of some finished goods that have their very own, very short, very dull, and predictably repetitive articles.) Surely the Masons guild and miners guild don't deserve or need separate articles. Do we need a separate and largely redundant article for every trap weapon? What about the cookie-cutter articles on every individual animal? The GCS deserves its own, and many others, but one on each separate type of shark and hunting cat? There is no actual article there, only a template.

Quivers and bolts are sub-sections of the crossbow article, and I think that's a great call. Olivine, talc and kaolinite are merely similar examples, distinct enough to warrant special treatment, but on the borderline of being so small to each only represent a stub. Ultimately, I don't think a functional formal definition would be easily achieved - rather guidelines and a fuzzy target, combining related info into groups with optimal size limitations (both lower end and upper end). Perhaps a template should not be forced on every lesser example, but they could be grouped into a table on their own article, "other stones of note" or "sharks" or "finished goods" or whatever.

In many ways, our only current guidelines are "what has been done so far" - and that varies widely and wildly. Too often, pages are cobbled onto related ones, or split off just because its a new topic, if a brutally short one. Myself, I'd like to see most related articles of less than 4 lines or so get grouped into larger, more universally informative articles, and anything larger than maybe 5 full sub-sections be considered for splitting up. If an item stands out from the rest, it should stand out somewhere, in an article - but that doesn't mean it has to have its very own, or invite every similar item to do so as well.--Albedo 03:30, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Please check out the (no longer) current Chalk page and tell me what you think. ... which is to say, it doesn't /have/ to be a stub, does it? It can be rich and detailed and sadly unamusing. It would please me to continue to do all stones in this manner, or another manner of your choosing.... Thus negating fussing over "this one was done this way, that one was done that way" arguments. I'll get to them all, in the order they appear on the Stones page. ... assuming you guys are ok with that. --User:Teres Draconis 08:28, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

P.S. Who's the outpost manager of this place, anyways? I'd like to know to whom I should be pandering. --jaz

I think 1) you should take time to read, if not learn the wiki format guidelines, 2) you should sign with your REAL user name, and stop using a pseudonym, and 3) you should not break someone else's post with yours in between their paragraphs. As to the chalk page, I think it's over-enthusiastic and pays no attention to previous article style or formatting precedent - which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending. --Albedo 09:33, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

1) You're right, I'm sorry.

2) We've discussed user names on my talks page. (Also, ~~~ still puts "jaz"... why bother with the link when it's just a P.S.?)

3) I'm sorry. I was (apparently) trained wrong, and that was a /long/ time ago. I was taught (20 years ago) that when responding, to do so in-line, so that people can tell what the response is actually relating to. (Like an actual conversation, except with a time warp. You say something, I respond, someone else adds, we all move on to the next topic.) It supposedly adds clarity. The style and curtesy rules of such things has changed. I can see I'll need to update myself. Thank you for pointing that out. =)

4) I was hasty. I had to have meatspace people explain to me why, as wiki-writers, you would not want so much detail on a page. Especially when, with every new game release, any given page on the wiki might need an over haul. I was only looking at it from the end-user perspective of "If I'm looking for information, I don't want a page that just tells me to go look at the three pages I've already looked at. I want a page that reduces the noise of the irrelevant, and distills to just that specific (sub-)topic." I /don't/ see the point of six pages that are identacle except for title, and all only three lines long. If it's got it's own page, it should have it's own page. If it just links back to the three pages that linked to it, and they all link to each other already, what's the point? If the only thing Chalk has going for it is that it's flux, why not just make a note on the Stone page reading, "These three rocks can be used as flux" and link to the flux page from there? Why should chalk have it's own page, if it's not going to be richly detailed and, you know, informative? - jaz 18:59, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

The templates are there because they are pretty, detailed, and condensed ways to display some key information. Rather than expanding existing information so that it takes up more space, it's more productive to add things that you think are lacking. VengefulDonut 12:15, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I changed the other Stones table to allow for interesting minerals that are in otherStones to be posted.--Mrdudeguy 22:17, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

What would actually be helpful is a Geology primer, indicating how layers and inclusions are placed, where, and what the implications of "You have struck XXX" are. I know, now, that if it's olivine, I have a chance of finding veins of native platinum. One good page explaining what all of the geological processes mean would be a lot more useful then all of the various descriptions of exploratory mining. Decius 22:35, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

That sounds like a great idea.--Mrdudeguy 22:46, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree! But I have no idea how to write it. Most of what I know about geology I learned from looking at the raws. Everything else is "OMG, is that a rock?! I've heard of those!" - jaz 18:59, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

"More useful" to some, but I agree it would be a great addition. Also, the more I think about it, the more I like what MrDG did with the table in Other Stone - tables could condense any and all small, individual articles into single pages w/ (sortable?) tables where all these various similar objects could be compared/contrasted at a glance. Templates are perfect when there is a lot of various info, but if the different topics (semi-generic stones, animals, finished goods) all differ only in one or two details, and there is just not that many variables to begin with, a Table would be (imo) preferable. (And imo that table now covers such stones as Olivine well, to get back to the original example that sparked this discussion.)

As an additional example of how current stub-articles could be combined into a simple table, I've made this page - Example - some fish - which could be a model for such. (A page/table with all the "Sea-creatures" would be more likely approp, but this was faster for now.) It would replace every stub-article on related "generic" items, but any truly noteworthy items would still have their own full articles for expanded information and commentary (here, "carp"). It still has 100% of the prev information, but also allows immediate comparison and contrast, and, if sortable, allows a User to more easily compare relations between similar aspects (like "biome", in this example.)--Albedo 00:13, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible to put the expandable version of the raw ("game object data (show)" seen at the bottom of the carp page) inside the table, instead of the whole thing? Or does the one preclude the other? - jaz 18:59, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, if someone finds it easy to extract that information from the .RAWs, I would find that an improvement on what Creatures currently has. Decius 17:52, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

If someone here knows PHP they may be able to write a new wiki hook that pulls information from raw entries. That would make many things much easier. VengefulDonut 22:22, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Which information do you want extracted? I can probably do it for you, but you may have heard, I'm in the doghouse for not paying attention to style and formating rules. =/ Show me what there is, and one example of what you want, and I can probably do it for you with a minimum of stupid questions. ... Probably. - jaz 18:59, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

@ jaz, Dec - Did either of you look at this sample table? Example - some fish Does that cover what you were envisioning? It's just a rough idea - but it could work the same way that the table on the stone page currently does, to cover all the generic, almost-identical objects. Same w/ finished goods, weapon traps, probably many other sim categories of like items.--Albedo 22:52, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

I've read this sort of. My view is, wikis add value to the game far more for noobs than they do to legends who have been around since when the z-axis was just an idea. With this in mind, I reckon if everything with a name in the game had an article that would be *A Good Thing* (tm). Just my own opinion, feel free to disagree. Ideally, articles for things like stones should contain a template constructed from the raws, with prose/dialogue manually added. Even things like screw pump could have a template driven section, advising what the components are / who makes it etc. Maybe {{building|Building Name|Component 1:Component 1 name|Component X| component X name|Constructed by|trade}} or similar.GarrieIrons 08:45, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree, probably, although that sounds like a lot of work. I think the stone templates and articles could do with a bit of a cleanup and more in-game information. I mostly use the articles to see if there's anything notable about a particular stone and then check out the wikipedia page. Some of the wikipedia links are broken or indirect now because disambiguity pages have been added since. Also, the wikipedia links are right at the bottom of very long boxes listing ores and gems and the like - I suggest adding drop down boxes to the templates that contain all that information but which are minimized by default. Or changing the template so that the wikipedia link wraps around the stone name at the top. --Harmonica 01:36, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Way late to this party, apologies. Tables are no good (to me) if they aren't sortable. The World Ends With You (a Nintendo DS game) Wikia portal/wiki thing has an awesome method for adding sortable tables. Some gadget called Semantic MediaWiki that hooks into the Wiki to automatically pull data out as you request it, then display it in easy-to-read and use sortable tables. The TWEWY Wikia has a page on it for their editors, giving a few examples of how powerful it is. Their use of the tool is to easily pull information from a table of 304 items, each containing 30 attributes, to generate lists comparing and compiling various items. Hugely powerful, extremely flexible.

This type of tool would work wonderfully with a PHP RAW parser, or even simple dumps of the RAWs to the Wiki. Think of how easy it would be to update the entire Wiki across the board when new versions come out. New critters? Changes to existing critters? Update the information in one spot and it trickles down through the entire Wiki! That's in addition, of course, to being able to, say, generate tables listing how many bones each creature drops when killed, then sort to see which one drops the most. Pretty sweet stuff.

With some sort of system in place for wading through all the data on the wiki, one wouldn't have to worry about having too much information, right? -- Blank 04:44, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Particularly for stone, I think that it would be a good idea to describe each individual stone relative to other, similar stones. Let's use sandstone as an example. Suppose that I read (either in its own article, or in a table) something along the lines of "Sandstone is a sedimentary layer. Unlike most sedimentary layers, it may contain aquifers or veins of native copper." If I already know what a sedimentary layer is (and how it differs from other types of layers), this information will be much easier to process and much more useful than a full list of everything that appears in sandstone. If I have no idea what a sedimentary layer is, this will tell me that there are several sedimentary layers and that they all have many things in common, which is again more useful than a list of everything that appears in sandstone. --LaVacaMorada 08:56, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

That's not the way this (any?) wiki is set up. The idea is that a lesser concept (here, "sandstone") need not include redundant info from a larger, parent concept (here, "sedimentary layer"). If you don't know what a sed'y layer is (or an aquifer or a vein or whatever) you click that link. If, then, you don't know what a "layer" is, you click that link. Sounds good at first, but if every lesser article included an explanation, even a quick synopsis, of the info for all relevant articles on broader, umbrella concepts, the articles, and this wiki as a whole, would explode beyond usefulness. --Albedo 23:43, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for making my point for me. If you look at the current sandstone article, it lists everything contained in sandstone. Looking at just the ores and non-generic stones, we have: Native copper, Hematite, Limonite, Magnetite, Native platinum, Tetrahedrite, Bituminous coal, Lignite, Bauxite. All of these except for native copper appear in every sedimentary layer. That's not even counting all of the generic stone (especially gypsum with its five other types of generic stone contained in it) and (mostly low-value) gems. 95% of the text in this article is redundant, and could easily be summarized by "This layer is exactly like every other sedimentary layer except for these two differences". --LaVacaMorada 09:06, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Ah - that's your point. (When you said "describe", I thought you were advocating a narrative commentary on and verbal expansion of the info included in the sidebar.) When I was talking about not having redundant info, I was talking text - which is quite terse in this case, exactly because of the point you make. Those sidebars were designed to encapsulate the key info, an "at a glance" sort of thing, to avoid exactly what you're talking about in narrative form. Are the sidebars redundant? Often, yes. But they are the style this wiki has adopted for all stone. So you're talking not just about changing sed'y layers, but the style approach to all stone, since they would not then be consistent across the board. (Not how I would have personally designed the layout, but it's there and it works, and well. Any stone, same layout, same info in the same place, bam got it.) And when discussing presentation and usability issues, any article has to be taken both individually and in the context of others "like" it - here, any "stone" article is the same layout, the same info at a glance, which (for now) trumps whatever redundancies exist. Perhaps a quick line such as you're stating would go well, since there is, indeed, very little unique to say about any one sub-type of sedimentary layer, and that is info in and of itself. (Take a look at any igneous extrusive except obsidian for something similar.)--Albedo 16:46, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Not a Roguelike

Dwarf Fortress only resembles a Roguelike in the sense that everything kills you. ASCII graphics haven't connoted Rogue-resemblance since Diablo came out with modern 3D graphics and was still considered a Roguelike. LogicalDash 22:08, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you for Fortress mode, but adventurer mode is rogue like.--Mjo625 22:54, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

DF is rogue-like like.Garrie 08:59, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Link to Add Quotes

To get help on how to add quotes to the main page, consult this link.

Incoming New Version

Guys. We might as well prepare for the new version that will be coming by the end of the year (maybe). What will need to change? Weapons and armor, the underground stuff... I don't know all of it. But it's extensive. Get ready.--Zchris13 17:02, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, we don't know all the details, and names of jobs/items can change before actual release. Kurokikaze 16:14, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't see what this has to do with anything, i guess it's nice of you to tell us. But what do you mean "get ready?"

Gird your loins, gentlemen. Or something.

It'll be hard to cover every page - if you edit, try to follow up on links, etc. Might also have to check the "oldest pages" listing to see that they've all been updated (except it's broken atm). The worst currently is that we still have legacy crap from earlier versions in obscure corners and comments that's not relevant to current version. Bonus.--Albedo 06:11, 19 October 2009 (UTC)