Wiki Maintenance

Wiki Maintenance Notes

I tried to copy the old "Wiki Maintenance" page from the .XML backup file into this new wiki, but it crashed the page editor. Clearly, that ain't gonna work. Dammit, I really wanted all of Sgt. Stoner's template stuff. So, I'll slowly add stuff to this page from that one, saving after each section, until it crashes again. We'll see... ZM User (talk) 09:10, 22 April 2024 (PDT)

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

Operation Duplication Elimination

Move all useful content from Home to Main Page and Unwritten Stories -done 4/30/24 ZM, I left the history section for now.
Move all useful content from "Join" to Contact Us -done 4/30/24 ZM, including the "How-To" section. -done 4/30/24 ZM, deleted "Join"
If there's only one article listing stories, we'll never have conflicting updates where different articles say different things. And, if there's only one article listing stories, we don't need a category to list all the articles listing stories. -done 4/30/24 ZM, deleted Category:Story Listings
If there's only one article listing authors, we'll never have conflicting updates where different articles say different things. And, if there's only one article listing authors, we don't need a category to list all the articles listing authors.

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. Instead of Hell we have Hell. I should probably list them all here as I find them: Dreadnaught, Atlanta, Plasma Torpedo, list of pod freighters...

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. Meanwhile, I have made a page for all the "ZM" stuff including author info and story info at Zen Master. -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. I don't see why we often have separate pages about an author and about their stories. I've set up a combined Zen Master and ZM Synopses article as an example to see how it works. On 4/30/24 I created several pages for authors who can't speak for themselves: Artie, JJ, Just Jack, Robert Auld. Still need: Tomken, Lordshipmayhem, etc
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.

Helpful "Special Pages"

   The Wiki software gives us several management tools.  Some pages are simply lists of problems.
   Any broken redirects, where a page is redirected somewhere else but that new page doesn't exist, are listed here: [[1]].
   Any broken links, places where a link was made but it doesn't work, are listed here: [[2]]. The wiki software politely refers to them as 'wanted pages'. Many of them are simple typos but many more are actual pages we should have.

Backups and Redirects

(The below was valid when we were using a free wiki hosted in India. Now that I am hosting the damned thing, I should be able to figure out how to do a real backup -ZM)
   ZM: Occasionally I do a wiki-wide backup. 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 give it a list. I feed it a list, one entry per line, of all the pages in the wiki. Since we are constantly getting new pages (and occasionally throw one out), before I can do this I 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.
   Because of this, I've developed a knee-jerk reaction to any page that is nothing more than a redirect. I delete it. If we have a bad link because some page points to "Sarah" when the real page is named "Sara", the answer isn't to create an empty "Sarah" page that points to "Sara", the answer is to fix the broken link. Make it point to the actual page. For that matter, which one is right? Maybe "Sarah" is correct, and we need to fix _those_ links.
   The only reason to have redirects is if we have a standard name for a group, like maybe all the colonies have pages named for the star system. People will go looking for "Geratat"; and it should have a page, but some colonies already have their own page "Vulcan". In that case we should have the standard "Geratat" pointing to "Vulcan". That's about it. If I ever get bored I will move all content to "Geratat" and delete "Vulcan".
   (If someone ever figures out an easier way to do a wiki-wide backup, I may be willing to listen to reason here about redirects. Until then, though, no. -ZM)
   The wiki software manual at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki has details on several methods. I have not gotten any of them to work.

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. One thing his scripts did, for every page containing info on a particular story, was provide a list at the bottom of the page of Swarm-Cycle terms used in that story. This list included links to the page for that term, and in many cases that page does not exist. At one point the "Wanted Pages" list had more broken links (1600+) than we had actual pages in our wiki (~700)- and this was in large part due to links that only existed in these lists of interesting terms.
   In most cases we should have those pages, but in others we already have them. They just aren't named what he expected. A lot of them are collection pages listing everything known about several examples of a group. As we learn more about those items many of them may get their own pages, but it is senseless to create separate pages for a series of items when we don't know anything to put in those pages. Simply redirecting all the bad links in "Ship weapons (Story Usage)" to "Warship Weapons" would fix 80 of them.
   While someone could invest the time in manually re-directing all of those links, if those scripts are ever run again the manual corrections would be over-written with the bad links a second time. It would be better fix the scripts, then run them again and have the scripts fix all the errors. In the hope that he can get back to that effort someday, here is a list of corrections for V2 of his script system:

To simplify things, I have developed a convention of capitalizing page names.
Why have "Stable/Silo etc Class"? Why not just "Stable" or "Silo"? Easier to type, easier to find.
A story may use any or all of the phrases "CAP SCORE", "CAP Score", "Cap Score", "Cap score", "Subscore", etc. If you want to list these variants on the story page that's fine, go ahead, but they should all link to "CAP Score".
We have a page named "Central Command". All variants Central command, Centralcommand, CENTCOM, CC, etc should point there.
"Pistol", "Rifle", "Machine Gun", etc if linked should all point to "Small Arms". They are generic terms and their use is often about an Earth weapon, anyway.
"RS-1", "RLA-10", "RLA-20", etc should all point to "Small Arms".
"Styx" should point to "Small Craft"..
The class name is "Asian", not "Asia". I know, it's confusing because one destroyer class is "Africa" (noun form) but its brother class is "Asian" (adjective form).
"A-20", "A-22", "A-28", "F-104", "F-105" should point to "A20", "A22", A28", etc.
"Year XX" and "Month YY" should all point to "Timeline".
"Cannon", "Turret", "Mines", etc should all point to "Warship Weapons".
"CIWS" and other generic weapon terms should point to "Warship Weapons".
"Assault Ship" is a job, not a design. This should point to "Warships". Or maybe to "Ground Combat Support Ships" if that ever gets split out into its own page.
All colony and system names should point to "ColonyList" unless we already have a page for that colony or system. Yes, eventually we should have a page for each colony but in most cases we don't know anything about them beyond their name. Rather than create a bunch of pages that do nothing but redirect to a useful page, the link should go directly to the useful page. Someday I'll move that to "Colony System List" or "List of Colony Systems".
"Signifier" is a typo. The title is "Signifer". Advertising the mis-spelling just makes it worse because aspiring writers will see the wrong spelling in the wiki and think it's correct.
Signifer, "Dux", etc should point to "Rank", since that is a comparison across services.
"Deco" should be looked at. If it means "DECO", point to that page.
"Hive sphere" and "Hive Sphere" should both go to the same place. Maybe "Sa'arm Ships" since this is a general descriptive term for several types?
"Lactanus", "Lima" and "Lares", etc should go to "Sa'arm Ships".
"Missile Launcher" should point to "Missile Launchers". (For inert projectiles, the launcher (gun, cannon, etc) is usually more interesting, so we have pages on them instead of the bullets and shells. For missiles, the self-propelled and self-guided missile is usually what's interesting, not the device that sends it out. More people will be interested in "Missiles" than "Launchers". I would have put all that info on "Missiles" and then redirected "Launcher" to it. Is "Missile Launchers" linked by anything _other_ than the lists of terms? -ZM)
We should have a collection page for Sa'arm shipboard weapon systems.
We should have a collection page for Sa'arm ground and air vehicles.
We should have a collection page for Sa'arm individual weapons.
We _do_ have a collection page for Confed ground vehicles at "Fighting vehicles". It has a section on armored tanks. If you don't like a bad link that says "Tank", change it to point to "Fighting vehicles". Or, if the story mention is actually about tank tops or fuel tanks or someone's car which is huge and heavy or someone 'going into the tank' meaning a Med-Tube, it doesn't need a link.
All of the "Military District" entries should be redirected to "District". Which should be renamed "Military Districts". It's on my to-do list. -ZM
"Claymore", "Claymore Mine", and "Claymore mine" - Do we need three different versions of this? Why not just "Claymore", and have it point to "Small Arms" since it's a type of mine?
"Tuul" is simply mis-spelled. It is "Tu'ull".
"Cargo" is not a technical term with special meaning in the Swarm Cycle universe.
A "Display" of female anatomy does not need a link to a page on computer displays.
A single "Nanite" isn't going to do much. Point it to "Nanites".
"Atlanta" often means the city in Georgia, in a story about pickups.
A "Hero" getting rewarded is not a reference to a ship design.
People who drink "Beer" are not talking about the planet.
A mention of Newton and "Einstein" is not about the colony.
Mentions of "Asia" or "Africans" may be about places and people, not ships.

(2/22/23: I'm tired of fighting with those lists of interesting terms, where so many are linked to pages that don't exist and never will. My scripting skills aren't up to fixing them, and it appears that Sgt Stoner is MIA. I'm going through every page and deleting those lists. As of 2/24/23 I'm done. I left the list alone for those pages where there were no bad links. I also deleted all the redirect pages and fixed all the typos, leaving us with 679 useful pages and less than 250 total bad links. I'll keep working on the list, but mostly I'll go back to adding content and organizing it. -ZM)

Duplicate pages

There are several subjects which are covered more than once by similar pages. I'd like to combine them.

We do NOT need five different lists of authors. One is enough at Library
We DO need all the various lists of stories, by title, by date published, by size, etc, etc, etc. Those have value.
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. They don't have a military: no guard, no fleet.

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]], but a new category doesn't really exist until you click on it and type something in the text box.
And, to see any of these codes like this 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 target page but now when you click on it again in the target page you are on that page in "edit" mode. From there, you can delete it.

Templates

SgtStoner had taken the time to add a HUGE section on 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

(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))

Wiki Maintenance

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