Wiki Maintenance

Wiki Maintenance Notes

   This is a discussion and notes page for ZM, Sgt. Stoner, Omachuck, and the others who maintain the Swarm Cycle Wiki.

Article Improvement

   Article Structure: This wiki has three general types of articles, plus some management-type articles that don't fit into any of the three.  Each 'story' article should have the same information about that story as all other story articles have about theirs, organized the same way.  Similarly, each 'author' article should have the same information about that author as all other author articles have about theirs, organized the same way.  All of the 'subject' articles should have the same organization as all the other subject articles.  This principle isn't as important as adding useful information to the wiki, but it should be in the back of each editor's mind as they work.
   Each article should have management template 'tags' at the top.  Examples are 'Temp', 'Stub', and 'Duplicate'.  These should be followed by the article text, and then below that several reference sections at the bottom of the article, in the same order, whenever appropriate.  That way, readers can easily see if more info is available.  Currently, that list of standard sections is:

• "Story Statistics", for articles on specific Swarm Cycle stories
• "Story Usage Statistics" for articles on technical terms
• "Story Quotes" for articles on technical terms
• "See Also", a list of links to related articles
• "References", a list of links to information outside this wiki

   We place all the 'Category' tags together at the bottom of the article, since that's where they are seen in a 'live' article.  Sometimes we try to organize them into a coherent order, but we haven't decided what that order should be.  Certainly, the 'Category:All' entry should be on a line by itself, on the very bottom.
   Ongoing Work: There are a lot of articles which are obviously incomplete.  For instance, the Timeline page only shows 88 stories.  As of 12/22/24, SOL has 323 stories listed, and we know of several more that we lost.  Where do the other 235 stories belong on the timeline?
   The "List of Sleep-Trainer Modules" needs adding to, also.  We have 38 general-use, 70 CMC, 74 general CN, 62 Castle-specific, and 18 CS for 260+ total.  There should be many more.  Certainly, if there are 62 for such a small and simple ship as a Castle there should be at least that many more for each class of ship we use.  We list 12 other classes of warship...

   Categories: An article may have a list of 'Categories' at the bottom.  Each category is a property which the article's subject has, and a reader may click on that category to see a list of other articles about that same property.  For instance, the article on Castle is about a particular design or 'class' of ship.  The bottom of the article lists five categories that the Castles are included in: 'Canon', 'Navy', 'Warships', 'Corvettes', and 'All'.  The reader may click on those links to see lists of all articles that have been declared to be canon, or which are about the Confederacy Navy, or which include all Confederacy warships, or which include all corvettes, which is a functional label that means 'small patrol warship'.
   Anyone can edit an article to add other categories.  Popular ones include 'Stubs' which means this article is very short, and 'List of Lists' which is a collection of all of the wiki's varied 'List of <this>' articles.  Of course every article should be a member of the 'All' category.
   Some categories are special-purpose.  The 'All' category includes all articles in the wiki.  The reason for it is to allow any user to make an XML backup of the wiki's pages.  The only reasonable backup method available to users is the 'Export' function, which allows you two options: you can export all pages on a list you provide _or_ you can export all articles in a particular category or list of categories.  The 'All' category allows a user to easily do a backup of all articles simply by selecting Category:All.  As of 1/31/26, all articles in this wiki are members of this category.  All editors are requested to ensure that every new article is added to Category:All, if nothing else, so that we can easily do backups. ZM User (talk) 10:34, 31 January 2026 (PST)

   Templates: A wiki can gain a lot of functionality by enabling templates, but as of mid-2024 they do not work here as they depend upon back-end processing not yet installed.  Sgt. Stoner had taken the time to add a HUGE section on available templates here, but apparently there are enough differences between that wiki and this one with the latest version of WikiMedia that it crashes this copy of the editor every time I add it in.  I still have it as a text file, if we can get any use from it. -ZM

Operation Duplication Elimination

• If there's only one article listing stories (or authors), we'll never have conflicting updates where different articles say different things.  And, if there's only one article listing stories (or authors), we don't need a category to list all the articles listing stories (or authors). -done 4/30/24 ZM, deleted Category:Story Listings
• I guess I don't understand the difference between a "listing article" and a "category".  Exactly what added value do we get by having both
  • a "Corvette" article which describes the class of ship and lists all known designs, and
  • a "Corvette" category which describes the class of ship and lists all known designs?

  From where I sit, the two do the same thing.  Duplication in a critical warship system is good, as it improves your chance of surviving damage.  Duplication in a 600-article hobby wiki is stupid and leads to confusion when one is updated and the other is not.  One or the other is going. -ZM

• Similarly, there is an article Characters and a category which do the same thing, which is to list assorted characters.  One or the other should go.

Pages Still Needed

   As I go through the "Wanted Pages" list of bad links I'm finding several places we _should_ have an article, but we don't yet.  I'm 'fixing' the bad link by replacing the double-brackets with triple-apostrophes.  Of course, in one instance Heaven we don't really need that page.  It's just an example of how to use links.  I should probably list the individual pages we need here as I find them: Dreadnaught, Artillery...

   Anyone logged in can edit existing pages or even create new ones.  We have several articles to help with this.  Sample Article has an outline of the way info articles are organized in this wiki.  The Wiki Editing Guidelines has advice on how to make your article look good and be helpful.  The Wiki Test Page has a 'sandbox' section where you can try out different formatting codes and see how they look.

   We still have three big groups of 'needed pages':

• All stories - Every Swarm Cycle story should have its own page, filled with all the metadata that Sgt Stoner was working on.  This is an automated task better left to someone who deals with scripts better than I do.  As of 2025, Charlie Foxtrot has created stub articles for all the stories hosted on SOL.  Meanwhile, I have made a page for all the "ZM" stuff including author info and story info at Zen Master.  All the metadata for each story will have to wait.  There is a template for new story articles at Sample Story Article. -ZM
• All authors - Every writer who has published a Swarm Cycle story should have his own page.  It should, at the very least, list all stories he/she has published, as well as a link to where it can be read or downloaded.  If the story has been removed from the publication site (Silly Artie and Just Jack are good examples) this should be noted.  This need is taken care of by the Library.  In many cases, we have both the 'author' article and the 'story' articles, but they are empty shells; they have absolutely no information about either one beyond their names.  It would be nice if someone with nothing better to do could add info about author and stories.  I've set up a combined Zen Master and ZM Synopses article as an example to see how that idea works.  On 4/30/24 I created several pages for authors who can't speak for themselves: Artie, JJ, Just Jack, Robert Auld, Tomken.
• All colonies - Every colony should have its own page.  These would be great places for the various writers to tell other writers about 'their' colony and surrounding system.  A script can create these and populate them with basic information pulled from the "ColonyList" page, but in many cases there really isn't anything there so there's no point in creating empty pages.  Best to simply leave them on the "ColonyList" page until we have more detail to put in the dedicated pages.

Pages We DON'T Need

• Duplicate lists of anything.  If you have added info for a group of articles, add that info to those articles.  Don't make new articles about the same things.
• The 'old' Confederacy stuff, their capital and the guard and the first fleet and all, should all be on one page.  Or thrown out, it's heresy and spam.  They don't have a military: no guard, no fleet.

Helpful "Special Pages"

   The Wiki software gives us several management tools.&nbsp; Some pages are simply lists of problems.  They can all be found off: Special:SpecialPages.

Backups and Redirects

   Anyone can make an .XML text "backup" of the wiki:  The wiki software has a built-in function at Special:Export for this, but it's awkward.  The function is set up to "export" a particular page to a local file, but you can feed it a list, one entry per line, of all the pages in the wiki.  Before you can do this you have to go to the "All Pages" page and convert that screen-list of all the pages in the wiki to a .txt file with the name of each wiki page on a separate line.  Doing that once was a pain in the butt.  Doing it every time I do a backup got old fast.
   The easy answer to that is to ensure that all articles are members of the Category:All which allows someone to simply select "All" in the category field, click on "Add", and get your complete backup of all articles.  Note that this still does not back up the rest of the wike, like the categories, the graphics, etc.  That's why we're still trying to make "Wiki Mk3" as good as the "Wiki Mk2" that we lost in 2024.
   Anyone with server admin rights can do a complete database backup in several different ways.  The wiki software manual at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki has details on several methods.  All are awkward.  Some of them require all users to be logged out.  If the admin forces all users off, any editing being done at that time is lost.
   ZM: Since I'm (as of late April 2024) hosting the wiki now, I can do a site backup, including the complete MySQL database.  I will periodically do that and put the SQL.gz file in our DropBox account.  Only issue is that the hosting company limits us to twice a month, no earlier than 15 days after the last one.  Supposedly, if anything ever happens to me and my wife stops paying for my hobby hosting stuff, anyone can create a new wiki on the host of their choice, upload the latest SQL.gz file to it, and be back in business.  I have no intention of ever actually doing this here as a test, but anyone else can if they want.  I'd love to hear how it went.

Script Management

   Sgt. Stoner wrote a series of scripts that added a lot of functionality and cross-referencing to the wiki.  Naturally, the initial run showed several issues that would have been corrected in V2 but he had a computer crash and that effort ground to a halt.  In the hope that he can get back to that effort someday, here is a list of corrections for V2 of his script system: (This list has been moved to the DropBox "Wiki Maintenance" folder.)

Secure Pages

   Several of the wiki's pages seem to be magnets for vandalism.  Those pages have been protected; only people listed as management in the wiki host's system can edit them.  Naturally, those few people never get around to needed updates.  We need more management people.

How-To Notes

• Wiki pages are linked by [[This]] or [[Go here|Show this]].
• Templates are called by {{This}}.
• Categories are joined by [[Category:This]].
  • Anyone adding pages should put at the bottom [[Category:Needs_Category]] to tip admin staff off that they need sorting.
  • A category doesn't really exist until it has a member.  Also, there must be some text in the description/text box or it isn't created.  It appears easiest to add the new category to a member article, save your changes, and then click on the red link to create it. -ZM
• To see any of these codes (like here on this page) instead of them 'working', you surround the text with < nowiki > Whatever < /nowiki > without the spaces.
• To delete a redirected page, click on it.  You get sent to the replacement page, but now when you click on the back-link you go to the original page in "edit" mode.  From there, you can delete it.

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))