Introducing the RPC Library wiki

[FreelanceWizard]

I've been mulling over releasing this, but I figure I've got enough of the templating done at this point that I can safely make the announcement.

 

The RPC Library Wiki is open for business!

 

Located at scenic http://www.ffxiv-roleplayers.com/wiki, the RPC Library Wiki offers players an opportunity to create pages for their characters, to report on discovered lore, to detail their linkshells and companies in exquisite full wiki detail, and to post stories, art, and other content relevant to the RP community as a whole.

 

I highly recommend making Help:Contents your first stop after the main page, so you can see the short list of rules, note the licensing (CC-BY-SA, for those such as artists who care about that), and see how to put your character page up with a simple copy-paste process. Those who've done any posts over on the VirtueVerse site for CoH should find that this process is quite familiar.

 

Obviously, all discussions about the wiki should be performed on these forums. Like all wikis, this one is a work in progress, and we'll (I'll?) continue to refine the templates and category design as we go.

[Kylin]

:cheer:

[Knave]

:bounce:

[Gossamer]

:moogle:

[Trizzip]

I moved the topic to the Headlines to increase visibility as this is a huge announcement. Links to the wiki will be set up in appropriate places throughout the RPC to ensure that everyone is aware of it's existence. The more community involvement, the better.

[Kejira]

Yah, incredible work FreelanceWizard :moogle:

 

I give this Announcement the rating of :chocobo: as it is so awesome ^-^

[FreelanceWizard]

Thanks for the kudos. I hope to see our wiki grow as people become aware of its existence.

 

One thing I want to point out is that I'll be doing a certain amount of RC (Recent Changes) patrol. A fair amount of that involves some simple wiki-work, such as recategorizing pages if needed, wikifying markup, and the like. So, don't be alarmed if I perform an edit on your page. I'll always leave a comment on the edit that you can view in the history explaining what I've done.

 

Also, if you run into issues working on a page, you can tag it with {{Help-me}} and it'll be placed in a category called Pages Requesting Help. Others can then find it and come by to offer assistance. And, of course, you can always ask for help here.

[Aveline]

Wow, amazing job! :bounce:

 

Now to find my notebook full of things I jotted down to add to the wiki.... :3

[Kylin]

If you haven't noticed, we do need a banner though >.>. Hopefully someone can come up with something sooner or later.

[Trizzip]

If you haven't noticed' date=' we do need a banner though >.>. Hopefully someone can come up with something sooner or later.[/quote']

 

Get hot on that banner contest folks!

[FreelanceWizard]

Indeed! I'm looking forward to getting a fancy banner up there. We can actually do banner rotations on MediaWiki (I need to install an extension to do it, but it's entirely doable), so we could use more than one if we wanted to.

[ArmachiA]

This is cool! I'm gonna pay way more attention to lore in game now >.>

 

[Trizzip]

I've not only added my IC and OOC data for myself, but I've added little tidbits from the Library on some of the categories that Brin falls under 'botanist, carpentry, lancer, etc'

 

Also got the Crimson Blades page started up, which made me think of a question for you FreeLance. Is it possible for a template to be created that accomidates linkshells? Something where we could have the member list all under the template?

[FreelanceWizard]

Funny you asked that. I've been pondering how best to handle that. Historically, the approach I've seen used is to create a category and a page for each group. This lets you have a list of all characters (in the category page) and a full page for the group (linked off the category page). Looking at your page, that's essentially what you've done.

 

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to template something like this, especially as you can have more than one LS, but I can write up some instructions on how to set it up for others.

[Trizzip]

Looking at your page' date=' that's essentially what you've done. [/quote']

 

Yar....I love wiki's. ^.^

 

I had added tons of content for Virtueverse back in the day.

[Asyria]

Awesome work!

As far as character pages go, should we use the same template as in the Archives?

[Trizzip]

I basically went with the same, but tweaked it a little so to make sure I included everything that I wanted from my character profile. If you want to bounce off that, you can always check my page.

[FreelanceWizard]

There's also a template implicitly built into the how-to guide, but whatever you want to go with is fine. I would highly recommend preserving the Infobox, however, as it offers valuable additional features besides a pretty box.

[Trizzip]

Yes, the Infobox is definitely made of win. Although, if it had room for a few more lines of info, that'd be pretty cool too

[Trizzip]

Hey FreeLance, is there anyway to make the 'Edit' links on the sides of the page a little smaller so they are less intrusive? Also, every time I make a 'thumb' of a picture, I get this white border around the image. Anyway this can be fixed?

 

Also, just want to add that what you've done is fantastic. I love the Wiki the page.

[FreelanceWizard]

By "edit links," do you mean the sidebar links? I suppose I can shrink them down, but I don't want to make them too small and impact those with high resolutions. On 1680x1050, they're pretty tiny.

 

As for the white border, I'll take a look at the CSS. I thought I caught all the white there, but I could easily have missed some. Thumbnail images in MediaWiki generally always have a border associated with them, but I agree that pure white is a little "loud" for our theme. A light greyish brown, similar to the background image, is probably better.

 

On another note -- and this is a more global question -- what do you think we should do about characters who have their own categories? I can see arguments for it both ways. The pros more or less boil down to: makes NPCs easier to find; groups can have them, so why can't characters?; more classification is better than less. The cons are essentially: clutters up the category lists, especially if the categories are themselves categorized, which is ideal; overproliferates categories, potentially slowing down the site; confuses searchers; promotes NPCs and other character-specific entities as being equal to PCs, as opposed to being subpages. I lean towards the "no," just because it's likely going to be me going through the Uncategorized Categories list and categorizing all of these pages, and because it increases the cleanup required in the event of a name collision wherein someone's NPC has the name of a PC. PC names always take precedence over NPC names when they collide. What does everyone else think?

[ArmachiA]

I think NPC's and PC's should have their own section, once people start putting NPC;s on there it's gonna be hard to tell which is which

[FreelanceWizard]

They currently have their own root categories, though I do need to make an Infobox-NPC to properly classify them. I'll probably do that when I extend out the infobox some; I think I'll bring it out to 10 stats and burn a couple of them in the derived templates for things like Known Disciplines. I don't want to make it as huge as, say, the Virtueverse box, as I feel brevity is a virtue and that box is damned huge.

 

My major concern is with NPCs being top level pages, as opposed to subpages of the character or group to which they're most relevant, and then having people self-categorizing them. Buuut this isn't my baby alone, and I feel all wikis should come to policy decisions not through Wikipedia-style politics but by discussion.

[Trizzip]

As to what to do about the NPCs, how you explained that made my brain very tired, but I can say that I love having a database of NPCs as well as sometimes I like to institute some insiginificant NPCs to my character's RP storyline (in a very insignificant way of course, so as to avoid bending canon).

 

As for the Edit links, yea those are the ones I was talking about. Also, I run a max resolution myself. I like how small they are on the Virtueverse page if that gives you a better idea?

[ArmachiA]

Got a question. Any template on adding NPC's and Canonical lore into the Wiki? I want to start adding the important characters (and not so important ones) and was wondering if there was any tipes. I'm VERY new to wiki's so sorry if this is a dumb question