Dwarf Fortress Wiki:Versions

This is an in-progress proposal for a new method of organizing information on the wiki in light of the upcoming release of Dwarf Fortress 2010. Although a lot of this project is already in motion, 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: DF2010: (though the naming will likely be different), 40d:, and 23a:.
• The cv: alias will redirect to the current version. So right now, that's "40d", after the release it'll be changed to "DF2010".

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

Please, please, please make sure you follow this rule about redirects.

Mainspace article pages should never redirect to anything but the cv: alias. For example, page Foos can redirect to page cv:Foo. It should not redirect to cv:Goods. Basically if the terms are synonymous it's okay, otherwise, make a double redirect. Don't worry about double redirects, they work just fine on this wiki, and actually save us a lot of trouble. Here's a good real-wiki example:

Article cheese used to redirect to article cv:cheese maker. This may not seem like that much of a problem, but it actually is. 40d articles that used to link to cheese that have had their links automatically updated to add the 40d: prefix are in trouble because [[40d:cheese]] never actually existed. This is the first reason you should follow this rule.

The second reason is that if cheese ever gets it's own article all the links to cheese would have to be changed.

Basically it boils down to this: any mainspace article that has a redirect must redirect to the cv: alias. If it does not, it will just cause headaches down the road.

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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.