Difference between revisions of "Talk:Main Page"

Latest revision as of 21:32, 26 June 2018

Cleanup

The main page could stand to be cleaned up now that we have many pages in the wiki. Also some pictures would be nice. Mborgerson (talk) 17:10, 25 May 2017 (PDT)

Re cleanup I was going to do something like the navigation at https://www.3dbrew.org/wiki/Main_Page - but I only ever finished the box on top. --JayFoxRox (talk) 01:34, 26 May 2017 (PDT)

Logo

Also we need a wiki logo. See here for some great high-quality pictures. Mborgerson (talk) 17:10, 25 May 2017 (PDT)

Agreed. I vote this one (Click here). Maybe we can add a text to it later or replace it with one which suggests we are interested in the internals, but so far, I don't like the others --JayFoxRox (talk) 01:34, 26 May 2017 (PDT)

Can someone look at this again? --JayFoxRox (talk) 11:13, 21 June 2018 (PDT)

Contribution Policy

I also think we should create a contribution policy page. One thought on the matter is this: Instead of linking to content elsewhere, we should try to bring as much content into the wiki as possible. This is so we don't lose valuable content as things tend to become unavailable over time (that is, dead links). It also makes for a better experience when browsing the wiki and provides a place for visitors to improve the info. Mborgerson (talk) 17:10, 25 May 2017 (PDT)

Agreed: the Template:Input-* templates are being used.. differently. we use `A+B`; `A,B`; `AB`; `A B`; `A then B`; ... all of them are supposed to mean: "press B after pressing A"

IMO: `A + B` is always pressing "A and B at same time"; for sequences we should always use something like `A, B + Y, X` (= press "A", then "B and Y at same time", then press "X")

--JayFoxRox (talk) 12:24, 5 September 2017 (PDT)

Translation to german

Hey i would like to translate some pages into german, can anyone explain how i can translate them? :) Greetings.

I'm not sure if there is any benefit in this.

As the articles mostly focus on technical documentation, there'd be a lot of english terms anyway (regardless of main-language).

I'd assume any reader who is able to make sense of this information already speaks english good enough.

Also, even internationally, we are a rather small community.

So introducing the small subset of germans with technical skills but without english language skills wouldn't add any new readers or writers.

We'd also run into further administration issues:

We currently don't even patrol page changes, because we don't have enough time / people to do it.

With 2 languages there's also the risk of articles going out-of-sync.

(There is also the minor issue that I don't know how mediawiki handles translations, but this is the least of our problems)

If you want to attract new people (beginners or people who still lack skills in english), I'd suggest writing posts on another medium instead.

For example, a blog post which puts stuff in layman terms (in whatever language you feel like), but might cross-reference XboxDevWiki as a source.

I think google or some other translation services have features which allow translation of websites as some kind of interactive overlay.

So it's auto-translated but you can improve the translation.

I'd prefer these methods over overcomplicating XboxDevWiki with niche features which target a very small fraction (maybe none?) of the community, but add a maintenance burden.

--JayFoxRox (talk) 05:27, 22 April 2018 (PDT) (This is my personal opinion, I don't speak on behalf of the other wiki admins / users)

+1 Mborgerson (talk) 18:22, 27 April 2018 (PDT)

MediaWiki upgrade and plugins

It would be nice if the MediaWiki was upgraded to 1.31

In addition, I'd like to see these extensions:

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SyntaxHighlight so we finally get good code display. This wiki is getting more and more code.
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Math to display formulas nicely.
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ImageMap to create block diagrams, although we might need a more feature rich extension in the future.
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EasyTimeline might be useful for Xbox production timeline etc.
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RevisionSlider Make it easier to compare revisions.

Note that some of these extensions should have been included in the mediawiki version we use. I'm not sure how our mediawiki was installed or if we might miss dependencies.

And possibly these (not sure):

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TemplateStyles to handle style changes for special pages such as the main-page, and making it easier to add good looking content / giving users more freedom. (This might be a security risk and could potentially be handled with templates instead)
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TemplateData possibly to make it easier to re-use wiki content elsewhere in ecosystem. (I did not review this extension properly yet, and I'm not sure if we'd ever use it)
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:StructuredDiscussions to make it easy to discuss stuff. I think the poor discussion/talk pages on wikis are horrible. (This is still in beta but had no development for 3 years. It's what mediawiki uses for their own discussions though; we'd also have to convert existing discussion pages - potentially manually)

--JayFoxRox (talk) 11:12, 21 June 2018 (PDT)

MediaWiki housekeeping

Our statistics have been severly broken for a long time: http://xboxdevwiki.net/Special:Statistics

This might fix it, so it could be worth a shot: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:InitSiteStats.php

--JayFoxRox (talk) 11:12, 21 June 2018 (PDT)

E-Mails don't work

LukeUsher reported trying to request a forgot-password, but got no emails either. Speculation was MX/SPF records.

While looking for admin options on mediawiki, I noticed:

 Your email address is not yet confirmed. No email will be sent for any of the following features. Confirm your email address

in http://xboxdevwiki.net/Special:Preferences ; so I pressed it and all I got was:

"Mailer returned: Unknown error in PHP's mail() function."

So it looks like mails are broken.

--JayFoxRox (talk) 14:29, 26 June 2018 (PDT)

Add extension to merge users

If someone creates a second account (password forgotten or something), we should have the option to merge their account with their old one.

We need an extension for this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UserMerge

--JayFoxRox (talk) 14:32, 26 June 2018 (PDT)