TASBot Wiki:Village pump

NEED MORE CONTENT in general (historians wanted). Fill out redlinks (and these, and also these) or work on a stub (list empty categories, list every article, list every category page).

Categories are arguably a direct upgrade to articles in that pages can have multiple parent categories, and categories have a nice UI for navigating to subpages. The longer URI is why you shouldn't just use them for everything.

Embrace hypertext—link to other pages (and also other sites, such as [[wikipedia:]] and {{TASVideos}}), but do also follow Wikipedia's linking guidelines: only link first mention, avoid adjacent links, don't over-link common concepts/entities (TASBot, in our case).

Use redirect shorthands wherever you feel they fit, with one exception: tagging pages with a category will not work if you use a redirect.

On that note, when tagging pages for appearances with categories, put the year category first, then the event category if it exists (or will later i.e. a redlink). {{infobox appearance}} handles this for you.

Familiarise yourself with what templates exist: inline/formatting ones, ones for infoboxes and other tables, complete list. Hit up User:YoshiRulz if you want help making new ones.

If you need to grep in wikitext, use this (change srsearch=querytext).

For those of us used to Git, it can be a bit confusing to look at contribution logs because page moves/renames are applied retroactively.

The banners at the top of the site are MediaWiki:Sitenotice (for everyone) and MediaWiki:Anonnotice (extra banner for everyone who's not logged in).

TODOs for admins

Now approximately sorted by effort required!

• There are 5 pages to delete
• visual editor is showing PortableInfoboxen as just the header, no content; supposedly fixed in MW 1.40
• can the PortableInfobox link an image's media page rather than hotlink?
  • bonus points if clicking it opens a preview with the file's description as the caption, like on Wikipedia
    • this feature is part of mw:Extension:MultimediaViewer, so just enable that
• if semantic citation markup is desired (and I believe it is), mw:Extension:Cite needs to be installed enabled --yoshi
• current MediaWiki:Sitenotice is fairly unintrusive, but should we want to make it bigger in the future it should probably be dismissable—that requires mw:Extension:DismissableSiteNotice w/ $wgDismissableSiteNoticeForAnons = true
• put an icon at /favicon.ico, rather than the redirect to the landing page that it currently is
• The current landing page is fine by MediaWiki standards, but as the face of https://tas.bot it's not great. Way too many links (above the fold, that is), and the only picture of TASBot is the one in the sidebar. --yoshi
• upload images (list existing media)
  • please try reducing filesize with WebP: magick convert input.png -define webp:lossless=true output.webp
  • since we seem to have dealt with the bot problem, can we loosen the perms and let regular users upload?
• There are 19 images/files missing copyright metadata
• fix quick search API
  • I researched as far as 'Generators' + prefixsearch and gave up --yoshi
    • Update: IIRC I saw a JS error and, assuming that was related, chased that to the above docs. But the error is gone now and yet the search still sucks. --yoshi
• consider adding {{#babel:}} template for user pages
  • I went ahead and added a template-based userbox; see Babel overview. It can even be used for programming languages, though it doesn't have any special handling for them at the time of writing. I've used the private-use code qhx for that, as you can see on my user page. --yoshi
• we haven't needed a TASBot Wiki:Sandbox yet, but if we're expecting an influx of editors unfamiliar with MediaWiki, it may be a good idea, which raises the question of excluding it from Special:RecentChanges. I found this from 2011, and the modern equivalent appears to be the ChangesListSpecialPageStructuredFilters hook. IMO not worth messing with that. --yoshi

TODOs

• There are 0 pages with malformed template calls
• There are 1 pages which need copyediting (check spelling and grammar)
• finish moving event pages to Category namespace, and cleaning up names
  • GDQ—either move to Category:Awesome Games Done Quick, or keep it as a disambiguation page (moved to Games Done Quick ofc) and create the category page from scratch
    • need someone to make the call here; should there be a page for GDQ as a whole, or not? --yoshi
  • MAGFest is all cleaned up and ready for new articles
• infobox for individuals
  • Done, but it doesn't render correctly close enough now thanks to TheMas
  • consider adding fields for country/flag and for pronouns
    • Copied over a template from Wikipedia, and while it currently only works for users of this wiki, I have an idea for extending it if that ends up being necessary. In the meantime I suggest not making dummy accounts for people. --yoshi
  • could add email, but I'd like to have it deobfuscate on click (with JS) if it's going to be included, and with a personal site field and editors able to email each other via MediaWiki it would be rather redundant --yoshi
  • consider adding field for (programming) languages spoken
    • see Babel overview and relevant notes above
• consider redirecting (not sure how when #REDIRECT only allows local links) e.g. desync to TASVideos.org/Glossary#Desync
  • - introduces chance for link-rot
    • + can leave notes for TASVideos editors
  • - not everyone can add to that glossary
    • + yet
  • counter-proposal: could instead make a {{TASVideosGloss}} and use {{TASVideosGloss|term}} instead of [[term]]
    • + easy on a technical level
    • - no way to see valid link targets without visiting TASVideos
    • - same problems as above re: "delegating" content to TASVideos
• it seems reference lists e.g. Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:TASVideos don't differentiate between direct and transitive transclusions (that is, where the template is used as itself vs. where it's only used via another template)
  • worked around this by using search API e.g. this, but it's not ideal --yoshi
• why are category pages wider than articles? affects both Citizen and Vector themes
  • this was an explicit choice (namespaces -1, 6, and 14 are Special, File, and Category, respectively):

@media screen and (min-width:1300px) {
	.ns--1, .ns-6, .ns-14 {
		--width-layout:var(--width-layout--extended);
	}
}

• • • I'm not a fan of the postmodern max-width: 800px; margin: auto; epidemic, squishing all the text into the centre of the screen, but I understand it's a popular style. --yoshi
• use shorthand redirects in {{prevnext appearance}}, like {{prevnext of type}} does already?
  • would help with float-right text being left-aligned in practice due to a line break (why), as you can see on ESA Summer 2019 (that was from {{prevnext of type}} which is now using shorthand)
    • found that removing the inner {{float right}} and making the outer {{float right}} dir="rtl" will work around this... but that feels like a bad idea --yoshi
• speaking of, need to suppress {{prevnext of type}} in {{infobox appearance}} when it matches {{prevnext appearance}}
  • simply commented-out the first few entries in {{prevnext of type}}; for finer control we could comment-out individual fields too --yoshi
• improve contribution docs for {{format run data}}
• consider a single-source-of-truth for YouTube video IDs
  • + would make it easier to see what content needs backing up
  • - steeper learning curve for contributors
    • + it could be optional
      • - even so, it would contribute to cognitive load, and that's also making more work for janitors
  • + allows quickly checking if a source (read: video) is known
    • - not much of an improvement over site-wide page source search (linked above), and I think literally only I will use this --yoshi

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Qs for dwango:

• I take it the focus here is on history, so how much technical information should be here vs on TASVideos?
  • tl;dr: we should put [technical info] on TASVideos. However, I have one pause here; there is a huge barrier to entry for TASVideos [wiki] at this time [...]
  • In essence, we should first and foremost ensure things like replay device and console verification documentation is complete (enough) on the TASVideos wiki. As CompuCat pointed out however, our needs and perspective is a bit different, and there's no harm in us also having technical details on the TASBot wiki with a perspective more geared toward live presentations at charity events. In fact, that's where I see the TASBot community as differentiated from the TASVideos side when it comes to on-hardware work; the TASBot community is centered around having our cute robot mascot play video games during public presentations, and our needs are going to involve things like proper presentation with visualization on camera that aren't relevant for just seeing if something syncs on hardware. To that end, I think there's room to have the core concepts explained from the different perspectives even if some of it may end up overlapping documentation on the TASVideos side. More documentation (so long as it isn't wholly inaccurate) is always better. There's another caveat here - despite my best efforts, it's still a lot harder for folks to edit wiki entries on TASVideos whereas anyone willing to share an email address is able to edit the TASBot Wiki
• apart from Ambassadors, how should individuals be categorised?
  • DWYW
    • pages can be in multiple categories, so I guess could just have one cat per role/specialty?
  • to that end, a definition of "notability" for inclusion here would be helpful
    • anyone who was credited for any event/showcase