User:Bg/thoughts

Thoughts on some areas for IFWiki updates

Based on the survey results from 2016, the following types of pages are high priority:

• Adding new competition pages: 68% of voters/25 votes
• Updating existing pages about craft and theory (examples: ifwiki.org/index.php/Theory) 58% of voters/21 votes
• Updating existing pages about authoring systems and interpreters: 47% of voters/17 votes
• Adding new pages about authoring systems and interpreters: 44% of voters/16 votes

So, I'm wondering, is there anything we can do about these types of pages to improve them or make them easier to update? Especially now that we might be able to add extensions to ifwiki?

Craft and Theory

I find the Craft and Theory pages a little unintuitive.

• I wonder if the links at the top of the page that point to the different headings could be in a traditional wiki nav box instead, on the left side. As is, it's not immediately obvious to me that they link to headings on the same page.

• Also don't know if there's a better way to organize these theory topics (on separate pages, for example?). I can see the benefit of having all theory links on the same page, because there's some overlap between categories, and it makes it easier to avoid duplication, but I'm wondering if this could be improved somehow to make it easier to follow.

• Maybe we could at least come up with a system for organizing the links in each category (by date? by author?) and add dates to everything (and figure out a standard format of date to follow).

Interpreters

The interpreter page would benefit from an overhaul, as discussed elsewhere.

Authoring Systems

I wonder if there's anything we can do to improve authoring system pages.

• Some of these have an info box, which I think is a relatively new addition to ifwiki (for authoring tools, anyway) so many pages don't have them. Do we like the info box? Do we want to make it easier to edit, via a form?

• Do we also want a sorted, auto-updated-when-you-update-the-authoring-system-page list of authoring systems somewhere, so people can sort them by most recent release date, similar to what's been discussed for interpreters? Or we could have a list of authoring systems that are currently maintained? On the other hand, we could leave that to IFDB, as I think they have a suggestion about that.

• Maybe we could add a note to authoring system pages (or to the stubs?) clarifying that maintainers/creators are welcome to update their own authoring system page (and so are other people, but the point is that creators don't have to be shy just because it might seem like self-promotion.... but maybe they already know this?)

Competitions

• Do we want a form for competition pages?

• Do we want to grab that info from IFDB, or at least some of it? Once a comp is complete, the comp info doesn't change much, but it's subject to change (at least the order of entries) up until results are announced. So I don't know if it makes sense to always grab that information live, like we are talking about doing for game pages, but some of it could maybe be automated when the page is created, and again when the results are announced.