MD Wikia - Announcements

[Chewett]

My announcements project is currently stopped while im working on other more tedius MD projects, but i wondered if MD would give some feedback.

If you dont know, i also run the [url="http://magicduel.wikia.com"]Wikia page[/url] and have been recently attacking it with edits again.

The original idea was to put them on the wikia, i have some wookie magic to do this, this would mean they are easily searchable and such.

But, since there are so many announcements, and so few wiki pages (around 300) it would mean that the majority of the wiki would be announcements. And the Random button would actually nearly always take you to an announcement.

Do you think this matters? Would you like announcements to be easily searchable, in categories and have a summary by them, including infomation such as stating if such announcements are now obselete?

Please comment and vote

(the poll is a tad stupid, comments are more helpful to me. Thanks!)

[Soothing Sands]

I accidentally clicked null vote, so here is what I was thinking-

As it is, ctr-f will let you find just about anything you're looking for when it comes to specific announcements. They are mostly readable, a few might be too long. The real use of the wiki would be to tag them in a way, or put them in groups of similar content. For example, all heads contest announcements, all creature ones, all trial ones, ect. Overall, if it's going to take up too much space, I wouldn't do it. Not enough usefulness.

[Chewett]

It can be done easily, and the only long thing will be the tagging, which iv already done most of it, and can "probably" use my wookie magic to tag the nesscary announcements.

The only thing is that its going to be 2000+ pages on the wiki, random page button will prettymuch always go to an announcement.

But, it will mean we can more easily link to announcements, and have some sort of "summary" text, to make it clear what its actually saying (since some are quite cryptic)

[Zyrxae]

The greatest value in this would probably be the tagging feature, enabling players to quickly find if a particular announcement is obsolete or still in effect. It seems that enough grief has come from such issues that that feature alone would outweigh any downside with the 'random article' button.

[Grido]

Out of interest, how many people would assist in categorising and summarising the 2254 announcements that there are at this point? Other than Chewett, Burns, Nava, and Myself, that is.

cos that'd be work...

already spoke to you about it, would prefer random button not to be biased so much, but otherwise like it

[Mya Celestia]

[color=#008080][font=lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif]If you're not in a hurry, I'd be willing to help sort.[/font][/color]

[color=#008080][font=lucida sans unicode,lucida grande,sans-serif]Not to ask a dumb question, but you wouldn't include the announcements like "All spell counters have been recharged" would you?[/font][/color]

[Chewett]

The idea is we upload all announcements for completeness, but if people feel we should only upload a fraction of them, then we shall

[Pipstickz]

I'd suggest putting the full thing either here (in a stickied topic) or the archives, whichever works best

Then for the wiki, we could take each category of announcement (that is your project, yes?) and make a page for it, for example, the heads announcements page could include the start date, end date and winners for each contest. Is that sort of thing plausible with your categories?

[Chewett]

Currently iv catagorized most of them, and summarized a chunk of them, those that needed it.

[Maebius]

My gut reaction is that a number of "important" announcements would be nice to include, but besides the sniggly details of "what is important" I don't think they all need to be listed on hte Wikia. The game itself shows them all, and Searching the ViewAll" works fine for my uses. Plus, as mentioned, a good portion of them would be repetative such as "spell counters recharged / Shared tools reset" which I think might clog up things unnecessarily, if they were included in random-page searches.

[Liberty4life]

cant ya make some articles excluded from that random button?

[Chewett]

not without excluding them from search as well

[Jubaris]

You can avoid announcement spam if you base the random feature on tags, so, let's say you have 3000 articles in announcement tag, 200 in alliances, 20 in people, the random feature would pick one of those tags (randomly ) and then it would pick out a random article from that tag archive.

[Chewett]

Currently i see no way to edit how random article works. It works by selecting one content page. And currenty all pages in the default namespace are content. Meaning that i cannot edit it. By requesting a custom namespace that is not content, it removes it from search.

Im not writing some magic software, the wiki uses the mediawiki format and therefore i cannot edit much of it.

[Kaya]

I would post repeating announcements only once, with perhaps the starting and ending date of when they were published and the interval at which they are posted.

Perhaps you can post them on a different wiki? (not sure if that's allowed or if it's easily possible to link between them)

[Grido]

We're not having multiple Wikia's.

I'd also say to have every announcement, inc repeating ones, so that they are continuous and there are no missing numbers. A player when searching the announcements may believe there to be some missing accidentally should there be missing numbers.

Repeating ones should be in categories together though, which will be done.

[Chewett]

I was considering a different wiki.

However i have reached a solution.

I asked for a new namespace to be created. This means it wont interfere with Random. But it also means it wont appear in the default search. So to search announcements you will need to search specifically for "announcements"

I shall start uploading them when i get some free time, to format all the data

more infomation will be posted once we have started work on this project