Improving the wiki

[Nosslak]

Today I wanted to fix a problem with my plaguemask and as it was a long time ago since I used DR I wanted to consult the wiki for advice. Yet again I realized that it's nearly impossible to find anything there. If I want to find something I need to know the exact title of the page (I tried searching for model list and the model wishlist page didn't pop up on the first page of results) or I better pray that it's accessible from one of the pages linked from here:

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

I wanted the A-Z guide for DR today and if I hadn't known where to find the link for it (under quick installation guide) I would probably not have found it. I remember that Serpentine wrote a page with some useful tips for DR as well but it doesn't seem to be linked from the DR page and I don't know the exact title for it either so that's gone forever for me (if I don't want to search through my 35+ page thread for the link).

 

I'm just asking if someone could go through the wiki and link all/most of the articles from one of the subpages of the wikis start page. I know it'll be a tedious job but I think it'll help people out enough that it'd be worth it.

 

I was just wandering if anyone could try to improve/maintain the wiki better? For this kind of work you don't need any programming/modeling/mapping experience so anyone should be able to do it.

[demagogue]

Sounds like covert volunteering to me.

 

I wouldn't say "anyone" because you don't want to open it to outright spamming by the unscrupulous. But I think it might a good idea to lower the bar to who can edit, like anyone that has a good posting record on the forums of more than like 200 posts or something... people that might want to contribute to TDM but not know how (that's not your case obviously, but I imagine people like that). Cleaning up the wiki is something that's always welcome.

 

There should be a difference, though, between making indexes and pages of links, which anyone can do, and pages with content, which might need to be vetted. Maybe there are individual pages we could lower the bar for editing like the index pages.

[Serpentine]

Ummm, it's usually easiest to use the Category of pages to find stuff.

 

See : http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Special:Categories

 

I'll have a go at helping tidy up, tho if greebo spots this : can you give me some more power? there are some dead/orphan pages that could do with a bit of pruning I'm sure - as well as renaming.

[stumpy]

I tryed to find information about surftype's last week, 6 months ago you used to be able to type in surftype in the search and it would list the surftype page, but it looks as thou someones been fiddling with the search and it didn't list anything about surftype's in the search, kept listing the page about making textures, and not stuff about materials. In the end i opened up material files in the tdm pk4's files and just try and find the surftype I wanted.

Edited October 8, 2011 by stumpy

[Tels]

I tryed to find information about surftype's last week, 6 months ago you used to be able to type in surftype in the search and it would list the surftype page, but it looks as thou someones been fiddling with the search and it didn't list anything about surftype's in the search, kept listing the page about making textures, and not stuff about materials. In the end i opened up material files in the tdm pk4's files and just try and find the surftype I wanted.

 

This smells like the search table in the database got corrupted, I'll ping modetwo and see if he can rebuild it. The search is one of the weaker points of MediaWiki, but it shouldn't be that bad