OniGalore:Current events

WIKI WORK IS FUN!
ENOUGH FOR A JOKE OR TWO THEN IT GETS BORING

If you're not familiar with wikis, see OniGalore:About. If you're not confident about editing a wiki, see Help:Editing.

Here are some ongoing projects, and ideas for projects, on the wiki. Whatever in this list looks interesting to you, feel free to tackle it, even if you only have a little time here and there. However, if you are leaving a project half-done until you can resume it, please note that under the item in this list.

Thanks for whatever you can do to contribute.

General wiki work

• Look at the list of flagged articles and see if there's anything you can help out with. There are a number of articles which need to be updated or finished.
• Just browse Special:Wantedpages, and pick an interesting topic to write about!
• Categorize our images of the different enemy classes and characters into the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Factions and Category:Characters. The classes that still need pictures to be categorized under them are the Syndicate's Strikers, Elite Strikers, and Tankers, and the TCTF's Cops, Troopers, SWAT Troopers, Black Ops and SWAT Black Ops, and under the WCG category we need to tag pictures of Mercenary Snipers, Thugs, Civilians, Scientists, and Security Guards.
• Images hosted on other domains should be localized (uploaded to this wiki, and the external links changed to point to our local copies) to protect against the external sites going down. As a secondary priority we should also copy over images that are currently hosted on other subdomains of oni2.net; though these are less likely to go away, there is no way for the subdomain owner to know whether their images are being linked to if they suddenly get the urge to do some spring cleaning on their account.

External link review

Help us fight against link rot by correcting bad links that have been found by our automated script.
The report on bad links is found HERE and is currently refreshed daily at 9:00 am ET.

How to fix bad links

• In most cases, fixing an "NG" link will mean finding the desired web page in the Internet Archive and linking to that archived page instead. In some cases, an "NG" link will not be recoverable and should be surrounded in nowiki tags like this to prevent it from showing up in future reports.
• A link marked as "RD" is redirecting us to a new page. The new page should be evaluated, and if it has the content we intended to link to then we should update the link to point to the new location.
• A link marked as "IW" is an external link that could be an interwiki link. Interwiki links are shorter and more resistant to rot. The suggested interwiki link markup will be given in the report. For Wikipedia, you can add a language code in order to link to a page in a specific language, e.g. [[wikipedia:de:Test]].
• A link marked as "EI" is an external link to a page on our own wiki that could simply be an intrawiki link.
  • Sometimes an "external internal" may seem to be necessary; for instance you may wish to link to a specific version of a page, which used to require putting the full URL, like this. In fact, there's no need to link to any page at all, as the "id" of an edit, like the one you see in that sample URL, is unique wiki-wide. All you need to do is plug the edit ID into the Permalink page like this, and you're done (you'll notice that the preceding link says "Special:Permalink" in the wikitext, but "Permalink" is actually a shortcut for "PermanentLink", so that's how it shows up for the reader).
  • Sometimes you need to link to a diff between two revisions of a page, or between two different pages. In this case you plug the old and new revision numbers into the "Special:Diff" page like this (no need for page IDs, as explained above).
• Some links simply have to be written the way that they are, and some return error codes but actually work fine. These links can be listed in the exceptions file in order to hide them in future reports. Contact Iritscen to have new exceptions added to this list.

Background

While MediaWiki makes it easy to find bad links to pages on our own wiki, marking them in red and providing tools like Wantedpages, there is no automatic check of external links. MediaWiki compiles all these links into a table, but it does not ping the URLs to see if they give any response. The most you are allowed to do is search through the links table, and even that isn't implemented well. Over the years, many links on our wiki have gone dead as the Web has changed and various file hosts have gone out of business.

So Iritscen has implemented an automated solution that will help us catch these problems more easily; a human hand will still be needed to fix the problems. Here's how it works: every day, a script written by Alloc dumps the wiki's external links table to this location. Iritscen's Validate External Links script then walks through the table and looks for URLs that return problematic codes like 404. It will also detect other problems in the future. The script and related files are found here.

Coming features

• It seems that many external links no longer display the content that they were intended to display. In many cases, web sites are silently redirecting the user to their main page without using the appropriate code that indicates the content was not found. Only visual inspections of the pages can catch these issues. Once we have dealt with the low-hanging fruit of pages that return "NG" codes, the screenshot feature in the script will be activated, which will allow us to easily confirm if the "OK" links (and snapshots from the Internet Archive) are actually loading the intended page.

PlayStation 2 port

The community has always tended to overlook the PlayStation 2 port of the game, for fairly obvious reasons -- it doesn't play as well, and it's impractical to mod a disc-based console game. Nevertheless, we ought to have a page like PS2 Oni vs. PC Oni, modeled on Windows Oni vs. Mac Oni, which explains the differences in PS2 Oni from Win/Mac Oni. We should also devote at least a tiny amount of research to the contents of the game data. Might some unexpected resources be in there? First we need to know how to read the game data. Based on a cursory examination, resources were moved around and re-packed, but one would expect that the basic binary format of the tags has not changed. Thus, it would be nice to have a page like OBD:PS2 that gives at least a high-level view of the binary data (e.g., how the .dat files are now packed).

Cancelled sequel

If you have some hacking skills, please look at Talk:Oni 2 (Angel Studios) and OBD:Oni2AS to see if you can answer any outstanding questions or contribute new information.

Improving the documentation

Modding introduction

Modding Oni has a number of notes on it about parts that need to be filled in.

BSL tutorials

The revamp of the BSL docs that was planned here is on hold because the system we were using is too rickety and hacked together. The proper approach to interlinked pages that read from the same central pool of data is the Semantic MediaWiki extension, so we'll focus on implementing that at some point in the future. --Iritscen (talk) 20:01, 18 March 2020 (CET)

XML tutorials

See the category for articles that need finishing.

Oni 2 and beyond...

Some fans use the wiki to write sequels, prequels, interquels (what may have happened to Konoko in the time gaps between the original chapters, e.g., between Chapter 12 and Chapter 13) or even paraquels (e.g., what was happening on the Syndicate side during Oni?). You can then list your work HERE. Just be aware of the rights issues attendant with posting fan fics here. Also, plagiarism is not nice, but "Oni 2" can still be influenced by anime/cyberpunk/other references. See HERE to review the influences so far, elaborate on them some more, or point out new ones.