Oolite Bulletins

OjnoTheRed has been working hard on prettifying the wiki OXP page. Unfortunately, the structure of the page is fundamentally wrong; it works against the wiki structure rather than with it. In particular, to add, remove or modify the list, one must modify both the “List of known OXPs” section and relevant parts of the “OXPs by Category” section, and keep all the sections in order. I’m good at that sort of fiddly thing, and I have got it wrong several times today.

My suggestion is to completely remove the “OXPs by Category” section. Instead, classification should be done using wiki categories, like the existing categories Ship OXPs, Mission OXPs, Station OXPs, Demo OXPs. A category should be created for each of the current “ OXPs by Category” sections. This is the easy part. The laborious (but not very difficult) part is to make a wiki page for each OXP. It doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to provide the title, the author (if known) and a summary (if available) as well as a download link and the right wiki category tags. An infobox template would be helpful. For OXPs containing a single ship, if there’s already a page about the ship on the wiki (see Category:Oolite Ships) that page could be converted into an OXP page. Because of the sheer quantity of OXPs, and the fact that not all the creators are around, a community effort would be needed.

The point of the exercise is that the category pages maintain themselves, listing up-to-date information in alphabetical order. This would leave only the one master list on the OXP page to be maintained by hand.

Thoughts? Volunteers?

I've PMed Wombat and Murgh about uploading a tweaked version of Thargoid Wars and Military that have Eric's mission clash prevention code in them, so I'll vol. to do a Wiki Entry Page for those two. I like the look of the new OXP page, but I can see A's point about having a Wiki Page for the OXP. Oolite is very much on the move ATM to updating of OXPs is necessary. With the Assassins OXP I did a wiki page with a download link, as then when I update it I only have to change the Assassins page, rather than hunting the wiki for links direct to the download file, which I have to change one at a time. Having a wiki page link to each OXP would make updating and maintance a lot easier.

I think that's a good approach. There should be one master list that doesn't need updating every time one of the OXPs gets an update.

My original idea was to give newer players (like me!) the chance to see a bit about the OXP and what it does when downloading it. Some of the OXPs have superb documentation, such as Black Monks and Commies. Others have absolutely none. Then I got carried away a bit. I hope you like the shade of blue I picked for alternate lines in the table.

We could reduce it to one table with two columns, the left hand side being the existing download list, and the right hand being links to one OXP Wiki page per OXP, per what Ahruman has said.

I'm more than happy to do the grunt work on this. If someone does an infobox, I'll start creating pages with that infobox based on the documentation that already exists, and others can come in and fill in details that aren't apparent to me (such as creation date, known bugs, and author).

sounds sweet. i know that in my search for oxp's i think i found oosat2 first, then oosat1, then the wiki, then the forums-where i finally found v1.69. ^^

a master list, easier maintainence, and a (relatively) central source for things oolite sounds awesome to me. =D

Made a start adding some descriptions to the table. Perhaps ultimatley, the seperate list of OXPs my catagory could be dispensed with. Suggest doing the table in alphabical order (as now) but sub-divided into Missions, Dockable Objects, Equipment and ships. I like the idea of having one table where you can see at a glance the links to all OXPs and a short description of what they do. The links then give more info.

LittleBear wrote:

Suggest doing the table in alphabical order (as now) but sub-divided into Missions, Dockable Objects, Equipment and ships.

This breaks down for OXPs that have more than one type of content, though.

I keep mine seperated by

Activities/Missions (Lovecats, Assassins, Longway, etc.)
Atmosphere (Lave, Diso, sunskimmers, ringpod, genship, cargo_wrecks)
Equipment (nuke, ore processor, halsis, custom sounds)
Ships (impcourier, xships, freaky thargoid)
Stations (torus, hoopy)

That breaks down for some things (atmosphere and stations collide, as do missions, stations and ships), but I can live with it on my own system. I think putting dockable objects together (stations and stuff like the behemoth) might be best.

The advantage of categories on the Wiki is that you can assign an OXP to several categories at once. I see no reason why that would break down anything. It is just the manual clustering on a page that is hard to do.

While I really like what OjnoTheRed has done (including colours), it might be best to keep one master list with some descriptive stuff, and have autogenerated categories to subdivide them With a limited number of categories, that also makes it easier to check if the master list is still accurate.

My 2 cents,
Oscar

BTW, I once understood that most of the work of any library doesn't go into to getting or displaying books, but rather into making them findable. I think most people here remember the internet before Google..

So do not be discouraged if this is a difficult thing to get right.

ovvldc wrote:

The advantage of categories on the Wiki is that you can assign an OXP to several categories at once. I see no reason why that would break down anything.

Doing it that way doesn’t break anything, which is my entire point. :-)

Hhhm. Could we maybe do both? Keep the table in alphabetical order. But replace the direct download links with a Wiki page (which has the relevant catagories added) and the download link is given on each OXP Wiki page?

For what it's worth, I like the alphabetical list and the category list, and think you should keep both.

Great work being done here.

Nobody is suggesting that there shouldn’t be a category listing, merely that the wiki software’s ability to generate category listings should be used. It won’t look the same, but it will be accurate.

I've put a couple of examples (very rough!) in the Wiki sandbox of what could help do both. We keep the table with download links, but it now has a link to an OXP information page, and keeps LittleBear's great notes.

A link to the proposed table can be found in the Wiki Sandbox (the SandboxOXPTable link down the bottom) and the proposed mock-up for a standardised OXP information page can be found the Wiki page named SandboxOXPInfoPage. Sorry, BB wouldn't let me post links as this is only my fourth post! Totally understand about the spamming, though.

I've put these up as proposals to start a discussion. If we carefully assign categories to each OXP page, this solves categorisation neatly, and we can then remove the "by categories" list.

I want to stress these pages are a very rough mock-up and I'm just moving this discussion along. As soon as there's some reasonable consensus about this as a course of action, I'm happy to start creating OXP Information pages. I just need some pointers regarding sub-categories and categories.

What I propose we do is edit the table line-by-line and leave each OXP entry as-is until all OXPs have their own information page - putting in the OXP page in the "Other Information" column for now.

Some of the stuff on SandboxOXPInfoPage should probably be in an infobox template, similar to Template:Infobox ShipStats Oolite.

I’ve started taking all articles that just describe one ship out of Category:Oolite, after making sure they’re in Category:Oolite Ships. This will eliminate much of the clutter in Category:Oolite (reducing it by about 3/4), as well as ensuring that Category:Oolite Ships actually contains all the ship articles.

I’m also removing Category:Ship OXPs from articles about ships unless the OXP only provides one ship. The intention is that Category:Ship OXPs should only list OXPs, not ships.

I’ve added an {{Oolite-ship-stub}} template for ship pages which contain very little information. Pages containing {{Oolite-ship-stub}} are automatically added to Category:Oolite Ships and Category:Oolite ship stubs. Note that pages with {{Infobox ShipStats Oolite}} are also automatically added to Category:Oolite Ships.

The overall idea is that pages should generally not appear in a category and a subcategory of that category. (Exception: pages describing a single-ship OXP will be in both Category:Oolite Ships and Category:Ship OXPs, which is a subcategory of Oolite Ships as well as Category:Oolite expansion packs.

Edit: I’ve also done the equivalents with Category:Oolite stations and Category:Station OXPs.