OniGalore:Current events
| WIKI WORK IS FUN! |
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| 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.
These are only suggestions, although some are more obviously needed than others. 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.
- Most of the classes also have no articles about them, such as Elite Striker, Mercenary Sniper, TCTF Trooper, TCTF SWAT Trooper, TCTF Black Ops, TCTF SWAT Black Ops, Scientist, Civilian, and Security Guard. These should be modeled on the existing articles in the Factions category, like Fury and TCTF Cop.
External link review
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 I am implementing 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 MW's external links table to this location. I will regularly be running a script which walks through the table and looks for URLs that return NG codes like 404. It will also detect other problems (details to come). Reports generated by the script will be uploaded to (URL to come) for any editors to read and act upon.
- 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.
- This still leaves the sometimes tedious process of finding a valid Archive link yourself. We might be able to learn some tricks from Wikipedia's InternetArchiveBot. Though it would need to be heavily adapted in order to actually function on our wiki, it knows how to automatically replace dead URLs with snapshots from the Archive that come from the actual time period that the URL was added. Going back in time like that prevents a later snapshot from being pulled which might just be a 404 page. IABot is able to "date" URLs because the MediaWiki API can return the revision where some given text content was added to a page.
- In some cases, an NG link will not be recoverable and should be surrounded in nowiki tags like this to remove it from the external links table, so that it stops showing up in the reports.
- One other issue the script will highlight is "external internal links", which occur when someone puts the full URL to another page on this same wiki, like [http://wiki.oni2.net/OniGalore:Current events this] instead of [[OniGalore:Current events|this]].
- 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 Special:Permalink page, like this, and you're done.
- Sometimes you need to link to a diff between two versions of a page. As of our current version of MW, there is no "wikified" way to express this -- though it was added in v1.23. So in this case, you really do need to use the syntax which I used above under the "nowiki" point to show a sample edit.
- 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.
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).
Improving the documentation
Modding introduction
Modding Oni has a number of notes on it about parts that need to be filled in.
BSL tutorial(s)
A project to document the built-in BSL commands is underway. This will replace the BSL:Functions and BSL:Variables pages with a more organized and natural system:
- A single, master list of all functions and variables at BSL:List of built-in commands ("BSL:List" is a shortcut that redirects there). No longer will we have to browse two pages at once when we're trying to find a command but don't remember if it's a variable or function. The list is sortable by name, group, kind (function or variable), and platform availability, but does not contain any other info on the commands. It's just intended as a quick reference. You can click the group name for any command to go to the grouped page that discusses it in the context of related commands.
- Grouped pages which discuss all the functions/variables related to a certain task. This is where the detailed coverage of commands will be found. See BSL:AI activity for an example.
- Each command will also have its own page, so typing in the name of that command, e.g. "ai2_active", in the Go/Search box will take you to a page that allows you to either edit the basic information about that command or to visit its group's page.
The master list, the grouped pages, and the individual command pages are all dynamically interlinked (the system is explained here). When I am done porting all commands to the new templates and creating all the grouped pages, BSL:List will automatically be completed, and the BSL:Functions and BSL:Variables pages will be replaced by messages that direct the reader to BSL:List and to the instructions for using functions/variables on BSL:Manual.
I regret that the complex nature of the documentation system probably makes it feel difficult to contribute to, but it actually isn't as complicated as it seems, so if you would like to contribute, just let me know about any questions you have. --Iritscen (talk) 23:59, 11 May 2017 (CEST)
- Progress report: 40/504 commands, 7/38 groups done.
XML tutorial(s)
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.