User:KockaAdmiralac/TODO

So this is a page for ideas of how I think the wiki should be organized, based on its current state. '''These are just suggestions. I apologize if they sound rude.'''

Article standardization
Article standardization is, from my experience, the key of building wiki's articles. If a wiki's articles have no standard, articles will look messy because users would be adding information to them without any real organization and on their own accord, and readers definitely wouldn't like to be supplied with randomly structured information. Additionally, standardization of articles can obviously point out which things need to be worked on. If information is lacking somewhere on a standardized wiki, users can know exactly where and which type of information is lacking.

So far, these are articles on the wiki:

There's of them, without redirects. From the look of it, they can be divided into three categories:
 * Character pages (21)
 * Alula
 * Calamus
 * Cedric
 * George
 * Kip
 * Lamplighter
 * Ling
 * Magpie
 * Maize
 * Niko
 * Penguin
 * Prophetbot
 * Proto
 * Rachis
 * Roomba
 * Rowbot
 * Rue
 * Silver
 * The Author
 * The Player
 * The World Machine
 * Location pages (9)
 * Barrens
 * Glen
 * Old World
 * Refuge
 * Ruins
 * Start point
 * Starting Area
 * The Tower
 * The World
 * Dev pages (3)
 * Eliza Velasquez
 * GIRakaCheezer
 * Nightmargin
 * Other pages (12)
 * Endings
 * Items
 * Phosphor
 * Secret Ram Club?
 * Solstice
 * Soundtrack
 * Steam Achievements
 * Stronk Niko (Character Template)
 * The Sun
 * Visions
 * OneShot
 * OneShot Wikia

Character pages
So far, they are all pretty much following the character template, which includes: Firstly, I'm not sure if the idea of having a tabber as a separator for the main section and gallery section is good. My suggestion is to rather put the galleries on character subpages and put a template on the top of character articles that serves as a navigation between the character information page and character gallery. Something similar to how Danganronpa Wiki does it.
 * A tabber between the main section and gallery section.
 * An infobox on the top of the main section.
 * Introduction, Background, Personality and Trivia sections.
 * 1) Tabber doesn't have the appropriate styling that matches the wiki's theme (yet?)
 * 2) Tabber puts a weird border around the article
 * 3) Galleries don't seem to have lazyloading (at least not the current ones), so users that only want to view information about a character will also have to load the whole gallery for that character and that may slow down page loading.
 * 4) Most importantly, tabber isn't editable through the VisualEditor. Yes, VisualEditor sucks, but the fact is that new wiki editors have VisualEditor as a default editor initially and don't know about other editors, so there's a big chance editors would be like "how do I edit this".

Infobox galleries on character pages are also pretty cluttered. For example, on the Niko article, the infobox gallery is extremely cluttered, users can't even see the image captions. Niko has a ton of sprites and faces and infoboxes are used for quick information about the article's subject, so putting them all in the infobox isn't really needed. Several other approaches to unclutter the infobox can be taken:
 * Images in the infobox could be split into section for faces and section for sprites. That wouldn't really help in the case of Niko article since there's only one face and other images are sprites.
 * Only faces and sprites that are the best representatives of the character's look should be left in the infobox and others should be moved to the gallery. In case of Niko article, those would be their face, their character sprite without the lightbulb and its original counterpart.

The fact that the Trivia section on Niko's page is 40.4% longer in bytes than the rest of the main section (excluding the infobox) makes me think sectioning should be remade to allow more non-trivia information about the character, but I guess this isn't a huge concern yet (and that pages probably shouldn't be judged by bytes).

Location pages
Location pages seem to be a TODO from what I can read on the TODO list. From what I can see on Barrens page, it is planned that every sublocation gets its own page, which seems a little bit irrational to me when most sublocations don't have too much to be said about them, so I think the location pages should have sections for sublocations instead of having sublocations on separate pages, and then create redirects that point to these sections (similarily how we did it on Cave Story Wiki, I suppose?) That would make Refuge page pretty damn huge in source but I don't think that will be a too big problem if we separate some important sublocations (such as Library?) into their own pages.

I suppose the location pages should have map screenshots from RMXP for each of the sublocations in a gallery below the page (or on a separate page if there's too many, but plz no tabbers). Should those be 1:1? I also suppose there should be screenshots of certain rooms. Should those be Niko-less? The point of location screenshots is to show locations, not to show the player's state and everything.

Dev pages
There are three dev pages so far and they seem to be quite short (compared to pages on other wikis whose subject is this broad, that is). I'm guessing there's nothing much to be said about the devs, so should those pages be merged into one page about all devs?

Other pages

 * Stronk Niko (Character Template) should probably be moved to somewhere like Template:Character preload, because then it can be preloaded and won't be indexed by search engines or seen by people that don't want to edit the wiki.
 * Steam Achievements is pretty short and links to a Google Doc that explains how to obtain the achievements. Can't the page at least explain a little how are the achievements obtained and then put the Google Doc in the external links section? Because currently it looks pretty unprofessional.
 * Solstice page is pretty short. Should it be merged with Endings?
 * Visions and Secret Ram Club are completely empty. Delete until something is decided to be done about them?
 * Main page should be redesigned to have better navigation between content.

Other stuff

 * Navboxes should be added into pages for easier navigation.

Categorization
Categorization is also a key part in creating a wiki, because it allows earlier navigation between pages, and separates some parts of the wiki. Let's say a user wanted to contribute to pages specifically related to robots. Where do we point them? Category:Robots, of course (provided it exists). If a user wanted to fix uploaded screenshots not to include Niko, they could be pointed to Category:Screenshots/Category:Screenshot files. Etc.

Root of the wiki's categories is Category:Browse. Two main categories are Category:Content, for actual articles/categories containing articles, and Category:Organization, for all the stuff used in the articles (templates, files) and wiki-specific content (blog posts, policies). here's a nice blog on Community Central explaining category trees.

Content categorization

 * Characters
 * Characters by race (humans, robots)
 * Characters by gender/sex(?) (male, female)
 * Also categorize characters by the location they appear in (Category:Barrens, Category:Glen, Category:Refuge)
 * Locations
 * Barrens go to Category:Barrens, Glen goes to Category:Glen and Refuge goes to Category:Refuge
 * Categorize important sublocations under their categories of their locations
 * Other pages (such as The Tower or Old World) get directly categorized in Category:Locations
 * (Plot?) Mechanics
 * I guess pages such as Phosphor or The Sun go here
 * Other, more important, pages (such as Soundtrack or Items) go to Category:Content directly.

Organization categorization

 * Templates
 * Infobox templates
 * Navbox templates
 * Utility templates? (templates used in other templates)
 * Article management templates (WIP, stub, delete)
 * General templates (USERNAME, T, DiscordIntegrator)
 * Site maintenance
 * Pages marked for deletion
 * Stubs/WIP pages
 * Faulty images
 * Community
 * Blog posts
 * Policies
 * Wiki staff

Autocategorization
Autocategorization is pretty neat. It's when categories get automatically added to an article based on what you passed as parameters into the template, instead of having to categorize pages with. What does that accomplish? I suggest we implement autocategorization into our infoboxes and other similar templates.
 * You fill in the information and add categories all in one.
 * When you rename a category, you wouldn't have to recategorize pages with a bot.

File organization
File organization isn't a too important part of the wiki organization, but organizing them would be pretty neat.

Now, I'm talking about an organization similar to how we have it on Undertale Wiki, where all file pages consist of the Fileinfo template. In the template are passed as parameters:
 * Description
 * Types ( for screenshots,   for audio files, etc.), and the template determines the file's categories based on them (see autocategorization section above)
 * License type ( for CC-BY-SA,   when the file is from OneShot's game files, etc.), and the template determines which text to show based on them
 * Author
 * Source

Template organization
Templates should be organized into categories as noted in the categorization section above. They should also have documentation pages that are constructed similarily to file pages (as an example, see our template documentation template on UTW). Additionally:
 * If we apply above changes to file page structure, we won't need the image licensing templates.
 * If we create templates like  that can be put onto administrator pages to categorize them under Category:Administrators and similar stuff we could link people to that category to see active admins instead of having three templates for that (NUMBEROFADMINS, ACTIVEADMINS1 and ACTIVEADMINS2)
 * Uh, we could replace small with, right? There's no need to increase the parser node count to put a tag that already exists.

Other

 * Wiki navigation needs to be updated to be more useful for navigation
 * I'm pretty much against blog posts on a wiki.
 * Wikia introduced them at about the same time as other "social" extensions that are now getting deprecated (such as Achievements or Forum) so they are likely to get deprecated in future
 * Nobody uses them
 * A wiki isn't a blogging site
 * wtf why is the scrollbar so thin