Unreal Wiki talk:MediaWiki conversion

Many thanks for this much-needed page. At the risk of suggesting what's already in progress, I do have a further concern. While the problems that we face are easily grasped, the solution seems a little... missing.

As far as I can gather, we're to move into the common area content that's been shelved, fitting said content into an unfinished structure that Wormbo has tucked away in his secret underground lair somewhere, all the while dodging the fact that the old content is licensed in a fashion completely irreconcilable with the new site.

This is marginally better than the migration strategy to date, which seems to have been 'turn everything on it's end, tinker with it in our WalledGarden and explain what happened later'.

I can't grasp how a course so contrary to wiki itself (as well as any progress that, given a better strategy, might have been going on right now) could have seemed like a good idea. Our most valuable resource is standing agape, scratching its collective head. For a site built on the idea that content is the result of the common user's effort, this is a most unfortunate "plan".

I don't mean to make trouble, but rather to illustrate what a counter-intuitive task we've before us. Please understand that I would like nothing better than to get to work. All I need is a signpost that says "start here". Where is it? —Graphik 06:03, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

The only "structure" so far is the category system, which is still very incomplete so far. I only really worked on a way to make class browsing easier. The main page, some general guideline pages in the project namespace and a few help pages are also there, but those should probably be considered as a suggested layout. I didn't expect Haarg to switch over to the MediaWiki version that quickly and for me the final switch happened at an unfortunate time. My online time during the week is quite limited and on weekends I don't really have enough time to compensate for that. The new wiki definitely needs a lot of work, especially in the field of guidelines and topic structure.

I can only really speak for the UnrealScript part, but people have been complaining about the lack of tutorials as opposed to reference information. Also, the old Unreal Wiki did not separate the different games and engine versions too well. Often links point to pages about different UnrealEd versions and people wondered why stuff didn't work when they tried to do it.

Your "start here" signpost probably the Project:Task list, which is also linked from the Project:Community Portal. I guess "establish a good topic structure" is the first thing we should be working on, though I have to admit I don't know enough about the parts not related to coding to actually come up with something useful there. That's why I concentrated on the programming part.

On a side note: I'm working on a new class wikifier with pretty neat output, so we should soon have at least the complete set of class pages for UT, UT200x and UT3, maybe also for the UE2 Runtime. I'm still wondering about what to do for UT2003 vs UT2004 as there would be a lot of duplication, but suggestions are welcome. -Wormbo 07:17, 16 April 2008 (UTC)