Oolite Bulletins

Eh. Now you see it. Redirects seem to be the simplest solution to me. Like redirecting this thread back to the Alphabetical Ship List.

Sorry I feel a little bit dense--how would redirects help us here?

Smivs wrote:

maik wrote:

How about keeping all the prose on the main page and moving the info boxes to the stub pages? Does that make sense?

Not really, to be honest. To me it seems sensible to have all the information about the OXP on the OXP's page. It is clearly desirable that the ships feature in the ship list and I've achieved that with the stub pages.
If the info boxes go on the stub pages it would then make sense to include all the details of the ships in them for completeness, but then we're getting into redundancy and duplication as I insist that the OXP's page has all relevent information about the OXP on it. The 'stub page' material would therefore be a duplicate of what is already on the OXP's own page.
Any change to one of my OXPs already involves a great deal of work and effort. Updates are needed to the readme, the entry on Smivsonline, the OXP table and the OXP's wiki page. I really don't need to add to that 'burden'.

That approach does not scale so well if you add more ships to an OXP. Also, it is not like you need to update the same information on multiple pages (unless you were thinking about maintaining the info boxes twice, which I would not recommend).

In fact, having the background story and OXP data on one page and the technical ship data on separate pages seems quite sensible to me. But that might just be me.

OK, I changed the stub pages to redirects (well, back to a redirect in the Boa's case) and this stops them showing on the Oolite ships page, so redirect's aren't the amswer I'm afraid.
Maik, I don't like the idea of having info spread over lots of pages for one OXP. What do you see as the purpose/benefit of having the info box on the ship page as opposed to the OXP's page?

How about an info box like the OXP list? so You would could have a separate line for each ship and a ship could then have multiple entries for one page. Like it is now!

Smivs wrote:

Maik, I don't like the idea of having info spread over lots of pages for one OXP.

I think that depends on the OXP, and is very much a necessity for many-if-not-most OXPs.

Anarchies.oxp, for instance, is well spread over many pages. There is [wiki]Anarchies_OXP[/wiki], which is about the OXP as such, and is pretty much a copy of its readMe in Wiki form. And then there are separate pages for some of the more notable ships and stations from it, whose purpose it is to give more information about these details of the OXP. There's also some Anarchies.oxp-related stuff on info-pages, like the [wiki]Powers_and_Organisations[/wiki] page (which also contains information about a multitude of other OXPs).

Another example: [wiki]Galactic_Navy_OXP[/wiki] is not just an OXP with a single page. Its very existence resulted in a major re-write of the info page about the [wiki]Galactic_Navy[/wiki], with repercussions even to the [wiki]GalCop[/wiki] page. This means that even people who don't have (and don't want) the OXP installed and just browse the Wiki for educational purposes, will find its very specific take on how GalCop's navy might work as the only (and therefore highly authoritative and semi-canonical) information on GalCop's military arm. On the other hand, presenting only the "vanilla" approach on the Wiki's info pages, and confining any information that cannot be derived from the core game to its OXP page would create another set of problems, namely an inconsistency within the Wiki.

But I digress. Back to topic: having information spread about many pages is simply how an encyclopedia works. On pretty much any conceivable subject you can get a multitude of lemmata, and each lemma equals one page. How many OXPs are out there that contain only one single thing, or influence only one single detail of the game, without any repercussions whatsoever on anything else? OXPs of this type could be confined to one single page, but I guess their number is pretty close to zero.

Fatleaf wrote:

But on a personal thought I would prefer it if you could use the words - Unknown- and - Classified- for some of the stats over leaving them blank.

I just made two changes to accomodate this: Warnings (the yellow attention sign) are not shown anymore if a value has the wrong type, e.g. if a property is numeric but you give a text such as "Classified". This means as a wiki author you have more freedom but also need to be more careful if you want to take advantage of the semantic markup.

The other change is in the Energy Recharge Rate template which takes the number you give it and rates it according to the ranges that Commander McLane provided: you can now also give it a non-numeric value like "Classified" and it will just display that without trying to parse it.

So the Green Gecko page now looks like before using the semantic infobox template with all the classifieds, unknowns, N/As etc.

I have been through the ships starting with A now, it actually goes quite quickly. While working on these I have been making modifications to the templates to accomodate for more special values.

Any volunteers to help? The resulting http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Dynami ... t_(Oolite) doesn't look half bad

maik wrote:

Any volunteers to help? The resulting http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Dynami ... t_(Oolite) doesn't look half bad

Its looking good maik. What help do you need?

Just finished with 'B', this gives me an average of ~2 minutes per ship page. The average is distorted by the [wiki]BoyRacer [/wiki] entry which contained 3 ships that extracted out to their own pages, so it shouldn't be much more than a minute per page.

Pleb wrote:

maik wrote:

Any volunteers to help? The resulting http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Dynami ... t_(Oolite) doesn't look half bad

Its looking good maik. What help do you need?

Going throught the ship pages from http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Category:Oolite_ships and following the below instructions:

• Change the template name from "Infobox ShipStats Oolite" to "Semantic Infobox ShipStats Oolite"
• Insert parameters

  Code: Select all

  |width = m
  |height= m
  |length = m

  under the dimension parameter and copy the values (1st is width, 2nd is height, 3rd is length) from dimension, keeping the unit "m" intact, e.g. |width = 5.2m.
• If there is an energy rate parameter, remove the rating (like 'good') and just leave the number (e.g. 3.5)
• Check the remaining parameters if they have units (TC for capacities, LM for speeds, Cr for costs) and if they use period and comma correctly (the period separates decimals from the number, the comma is optional as a thousands separator)
• Check parameters like milshields if they say something else than 'Yes' for confirmation (e.g. 'Available'). They need to say 'Yes'. Other values like 'Unknown', 'Classified' etc. can remain.
• Check parameters like number of missile slots if they say 'None' instead of '0'. It should be a number if it is known.

I just finished all under 'A' and 'B' and will need to do some actual work now, so if you want to continue with the ships from 'C' then there will be no conflict.

maik wrote:

Any volunteers to help? The resulting http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Dynami ... t_(Oolite) doesn't look half bad

Nice. Simplifies a lot of list maintenance. Also makes it a bit easier to spot typos in the Wiki data by comparing ships (there's a couple in the Adder II, for instance, though I don't know what the correct values would be).

A few possible improvements:
- the standard/OXP column doesn't appear to be correct for most of the entries. A lot of the OXP ships link to the OXP page in the "OXP" box in their existing template, which seems to be causing problems.
- given how small a metre is in Oolite, the table should probably be rounding the sizes (and especially the volumes) to the nearest int (and given the volumes are bounding box rather than model volumes, quite possibly the volumes should be rounded off quite a bit more than that). Semantic MediaWiki doesn't seem to support rounding directly, but there is a NumberFormat extension available.

cim wrote:

- the standard/OXP column doesn't appear to be correct for most of the entries. A lot of the OXP ships link to the OXP page in the "OXP" box in their existing template, which seems to be causing problems.
- given how small a metre is in Oolite, the table should probably be rounding the sizes (and especially the volumes) to the nearest int (and given the volumes are bounding box rather than model volumes, quite possibly the volumes should be rounded off quite a bit more than that). Semantic MediaWiki doesn't seem to support rounding directly, but there is a NumberFormat extension available.

Good points. I actually query if a ship page is in category "Oolite expansion packs" to determine the value for the Standard/OXP column. In retrospect, I realize this only works for pages where OXP and ship are on the same page. I'll query the parameter in the shipbox template instead to make this accurate.

Regarding the volumes: I agree, rounding makes sense. I already rounded the values for the Aurora, they had millimeter accuracy which is probably a bit too much for a ship of that size

Both points are on my mental to-do list now, thanks.

I noticed the Balrog is first on the list because of its ' in the name. Should they be deleted so it can be displayed properly in alphabeticl order in the list?

Just so as there is no doubling of work I am now going to start on 'D' just in case you have already started on 'c'.

Smivs wrote:

OK, I changed the stub pages to redirects (well, back to a redirect in the Boa's case) and this stops them showing on the Oolite ships page, so redirect's aren't the amswer I'm afraid.
Maik, I don't like the idea of having info spread over lots of pages for one OXP. What do you see as the purpose/benefit of having the info box on the ship page as opposed to the OXP's page?

Just throwing idea's about!

How about the way the Dragon does it? With multiple entries in the box. It works with the new way and shows up on the Dynamic list without any problems. Like I said just throwing ideas about!!!