User talk:DrAtomic/dec2008

This is an archive of my talk page of december 2008.

Player Character Templates

Hia DrAtomic! As a good wiki-user, can you provide us nublets a template for player characters? similar to player corporation that you can display your face (ingame picture) your specialization, your SP amount, your prev. corporations, motto, etc etc?--Kuolematon 14:55, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Here jah go Template:Character (won't work untill it's approved by ISD, I allready included it in your page), i'll create an extended one that includes history later. DrAtomic 23:55, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Also I didnt include SP since it's dynamic, could include a link to ineve but the template system currently doesnt allow optional content.DrAtomic 00:40, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks man! I was kinda O_o when I refreshed my wiki-page this morning. Now I hate ISD for marking my page to require cleanup. First they marked it as a stub. They simply cannot make up their mind ;). Anyway, you could do ineve link same way you did corp webpage in corp information?--Kuolematon 06:28, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Hahaha, the good news is require cleanup is a promotion from stub (stub mains not enough content, cleanup... well depends they should have dropped you a talk somewhere explaining it.

The main reason I didnt include a website to it is that it's more common then not to not have your character on ineve unless you are selling. But there is a solution; |name=[http://ineve.net/skills/character.php?charID=MTUwODYzNzk5 Dr Caymus] will make your charactername clickable and link to your ineve website, i.e.: Dr Caymus.

DrAtomic 10:35, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks man but I really dislike that my page now needs cleaning up because I added "too much information" ?? Btw, ineve.net stops working with API once you get banned. My API there hasn't worked for months :P--Kuolematon 11:42, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Banned? Lol, guess I dont want to know. You can remove the cleanup yourself by removing {{cleanup}}, however I would cleanup some of the autolinks that make no sense by adding <nowiki><nowiki> around the incorrect links. See the HERO code how I did it. DrAtomic 11:47, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, friend did some naughty stuff and they traced my CC.. anyway I don't see any "no sense" links there. All information linked is actually EVE related stuff but still doesn't have their wiki pages up. I do know that my english is very poor and thats why ISD hates me ;). Oh btw how can you make citations or links to sources for verifying something? I tried

but it didn't work.--Kuolematon 11:58, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

References

Oh btw how can you make citations or links to sources for verifying something? I tried but it didn't work.--Kuolematon 11:58, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Sadly that template isn't included it depends on the Template:Reflist which requires parser functions.

<ref>[http://www.eveonline.com "bla bla"], eve-online.com</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

doesn't seem to work. DrAtomic 12:30, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

References based on the url tag do seem to work:

text[http://www.eveonline.com] outputs text[1].

Good to know, thanks. I will update my pages according this info :)--Kuolematon 07:38, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Player Corporation Templates

Hi,

In order to keep things standardised would you mind keeping to Template:Player Corporation? I've noted the lack of an alliance field or list and created Template:Alliance History which can be used as an add-on to the existing template. Keeping down on duplicate or similar templates will lead to better standardisation and a better experience for those trying to find information using Evelopedia. If you think there should be something added to the template, do so in the main template or at least keep to the standard style for templates rather than using odd styles (The grey style was the topic of some discussion on IRC where it was decided to be deprecated in favour of the already existing template colours). Personalisation should be kept to an absolute minimum on informational templates. --Ix Forres 21:01, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I would mind actually for 3 primary reasons: 1. the overal look and style and the lack of the images in front of it make it more eve standard and more clean and 2. Template:Alliance History is broken so cant really see what you are trying to do and 3. getting your corp logo in is nice. Dont change the pages using the template unless the exact same info is returned (last time my corp page was totally wrecked and i lost heaps of content, spend hours redoing it). DrAtomic 00:46, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

On the grey style, well it's the eve style so hmm jeah. I dunno I like it, it's non disruptive, and very readable. DrAtomic 00:47, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Apologies if I seem somewhat brusque, but it's been talked on and agreed about many times. You do know you can retrieve old versions of pages by hitting the 'History' link and clicking on a date? Losing content is impossible on MediaWiki without sysop intervention. Corporate logos are something that are being discussed with CCP right now to get support for a corp logo generator server enabled (like http://clg.eve-metrics.com). The point of using a template is that it is information and consistent, and having variations of templates defeats the whole purpose of such templates. Style-wise this was again discussed and decided to be kept coloured rather than EVE-style because it stands out more than the EVE style, again because it is a consistent informational box. Template:Alliance History works fine for me- if you've got a problem drop it in the relevant talk page and we can see about fixing it. I will be migrating all pages using the Extended template to the original template and migrating any content that was in the template to within the body text until we get ParserFunctions enabled- as soon as those are in we can have it all in one template without any issues. Hopefully all these debates and little annoyances will be a temporary thing when CCP return this MediaWiki to a usable state instead of their currently configured catastrophe :) --Ix Forres 00:56, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Apologies accepted, we're all trying to do the same thing here, thats also why I created the Style2 (someone was using a table for it), I didnt want to interfere with your work. Please don't touch the content pages using the templates for now, I'd say we get ISD involved into the discussion (I was actually investigating on how to get the backgrounds working ISD uses for their colored boxes). On the ID thing I understand that it would be great but the content should end up on the CCP servers instead of with a third party. The main issue is that people are trying to create content now and that you are creating templates using stuff that doesnt work (parser functions and the id thing), thats why I resorted to the <br> solution. Forcing those templates on people now will only stimulate them into using tables more. Parser functions are much needed though since people have different tastes as to what they want displayed into their info boxes. For now I have removed the rfiod tags (no idea what it stands for but it broke the templates). I'm not a big fan of forcing people to use anything tbh, templates are there to make editors life easier, but at the very least if a certain template becomes the holy grail and standard then it should have everything people want and be fully functional first BEFORE enforcing anything. DrAtomic 01:12, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Have a look at User:DrAtomic/Sandbox and see what a big mess it becomes not to mention the huge gap in the middle it creates and compare that to HERO, in all honesty which one would you use? DrAtomic 01:23, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Dropping back up to top level to continue discussion. In all honesty I can't see anything wrong with the Alliance History template- you may have been looking at an old version which ended up in the middle of the page, but that's now fixed and I've prodded ISD to approve it (I think it got missed on the queue). --Ix Forres 13:38, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Did you have a look at User:DrAtomic/Sandbox? I just resaved it to make sure all the latest versions of the templates were being used. Please have a look at that and you'll see the issues with it. DrAtomic 14:18, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes- the only issues (Your templates being in the middle of the page) are from your two templates lacking a 'clear:both' CSS style. --Ix Forres 18:20, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Ow come one... you can do better then that... there are at least 3 issues with your templates (thx on the clear:both pointer). If you cant spot them i'm done discussing. DrAtomic 20:53, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

1. title header is not in the middle like the corp one is, 2. multiple alliances don't align good, 3. wikicode isn't parsed in the first entry (it's a copy paste of the example provided by you on the how to use page, 4. a gap exists between corp and alliance. DrAtomic 10:48, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree with you that a standard template should have everything fully functional, but standardisation must come ahead of people's preferences. We can't wait a month till PF are enabled, then spend two months going around and changing everyone to using the same template. I'm sure you can understand where I'm coming from on that. --Ix Forres 13:38, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Standardisation and basing it off stuff that may or may not be implemented is not logical and conflicts imho. But if you insist on standardising I'd say drop the Corporation Template in favor for Style2 and the Extended one since those 2 actually work now and can later be merged into one as soon as parser functions are active plus they resemble the eve look and feel and are not distracting the viewer from the content (the images in the other one pull a user to focus on the infobox rather then content where it should be the other way around, the info box should be a tool to get all info at a glance when looking for it. DrAtomic 14:18, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

This, again, was discussed in IRC a while back- the templates are intentionally not blended into the EVE look/feel as much as they could be so that they stand out. I've already said I'll tweak the colours a little to get the more EVEey, but the icons are staying as they're a quick visual reference which other templates lack, and give a consistent visual indicator for some factors common across templates. --Ix Forres 18:20, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

At the very least make your extended template fully identical to the standard template in terms of the parameters it takes where they are shared, and add any parameters the extended template is not using but the standard template is- ie, you should be able to change {{ExtendedTemplate to {{StandardTemplate and have everything still work perfectly. From that position it will be easier (though not as easy as not having this in the first place) to switch to a standard template when/if PF are enabled. --Ix Forres 13:38, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Agreed on the parameter sharing, i'll have a look into that tonight if I have time. DrAtomic 14:18, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. At least this way we can switch pages without spending half an hour on each one. If you could stick to Template:Player Corporation for any new corps you create for now that'd be great, as again that'll limit the work needed later. --Ix Forres 18:20, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I find it hilarious that this discussion is starting up again. I dropped my original template (afaik the basis for this one) as I didn't feel like getting into an argument with people that stick to their POV and refuse to see another POV - Yes, guilty as charged :). I still prefer the grey template a LOT more than the 'standard' one (even with the new toned down color scheme). I agree with DrAtomic's view that the icons are distracting instead of providing 'a quick visual reference' and/or 'a consistent visual indicator'. The icons are not in line (style-wise) with the other EVE icons used in the game and on the eve-online.com site and are in general a bit too generic in my opinion. The whole discussion is a moot point anyways. Of the 10 or so pages I randomly looked at in the Player Corporations category only 3 were using the template made by Ix Forres, 2 were using the template made by DrAtomic and the rest were not using a template at all. Talk about standardization... --Ryushe 22:09, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Aaaaaah so that happened to your template, he tried to get mine deleted too but i caught it on time. I wanted to use yours but couldnt find it anymore so I ended up stealing your colorscheme (for it's resemblance to the eve style) and the table I allready was using, once I'd done it someone asked how i did it and I thought may as well create a template out of it.

Last count I did 9 corps were using the extended template and 1 corp the basic grey one (i created the basic one for that corp) versus 18 corps using the no logo one. Then again I dont go around including it myself and it's hard to find if you dont know about the Category:Templates, he deleted all references to it's existance.

Maybe it all boils down to us having to say we all discussed and agreed on IRC the grey style was the way to go. Evelopedia the inventor of wiki pvp... :/ DrAtomic 00:41, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I prefer the grey templates. Grey is a more boring colour, but its in line with the eve-o website and the colour stylings of this wiki as well. I'm not against using colours and icons, but the grey templates make it much easier to see the information right away. The lack of images in the coloured templates makes a lot of pages bland, especially when some people have spent a lot of time making really pretty corporation and alliance logos that apparently they shouldn't be using because someone has decided that their template is the official standard, when its not, it was just the first one, and it includes a feature that might never be enabled. At least with the grey templates we can see nice graphics right now :) --Adrielle Firewalker 22:45, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Tyvm for your support Adrielle, I was definitaly up for some encouragement. DrAtomic 00:31, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

I hope you like the present. :) DrAtomic 11:36, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

TY very much. That's where I wanted the picture to begin with ^_^ --Adrielle Firewalker 11:58, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

\o/ DrAtomic 12:32, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

---

My intention here was never to start an edit war. My intention is purely to open up discussion on the topics covered by this template. In my opinion it is useless to try and include anything other than the absolute basics until we have ParserFunctions.

In response to messages like "he deleted all references to it's existance."... I work by the policy of 'assume good faith'. I don't assume you're going around trying to sabotage templates for personal gain. I don't assume you're making templates with hugely overcomplex sets of parameters just so you can have them on your corp's own page. Hell, it's a viewpoint I could take. But I don't. I assume you're trying to better this wiki, and for that to be the case I assume you're willing to discuss and debate rather than flame and troll.

What is needed here is an ISD decision, or a decision made by people before edits are made. The turquoise templates were created by me as placeholders, not as final templates, but they evolved to being solid templates people were using. The new templates were developed by one person, pasted in by one person, and with little discussion beforehand. I'm sure you can see where I'm coming from here. The ID-number-scheme makes complete sense even if CCP did not enable external images. By indexing internal images by IDs, it makes life simpler for both administrators and editors alike to reference corporation logos and alliance logos without having to search for a hopefully-consistently-named logo image. Simply using [[Image:{{{id}}}.png]] would have sufficed. Heck, saving your image from a corporation logo server or character logo server would give you that filename right away, thus making life easier for page authors. Using a name makes life much more complex for all involved in my opinion.

There are other technical issues with the templates (The 'pretty skin' adds 10 kilobytes per page and cripples parsing of the template on the IGB), there's plenty of room for improvement, and if the famfamfam public-domain icons were a problem then we could have discussed other icons such as the EVE icon sets for inclusion in the template. They're available in 16x16, so why not use them? We can discuss this sort of thing like civilised people or we can make broadly sweeping accusations and bicker like children. Personally, I'd like to have a grown-up, civilised chat. --Ix Forres 04:39, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Look I vote for grey, the other template is hideous, I started using Dr, Atomic, and so far i see the majority using any templates is using Dr. Atomic. Please stick to that, return Template:Player Corporation or I will, the community votes for the grey it blends in, the community right now is a select few that actually made templates, corps, player sheet and commenting. The few have voted...Please return it to Dr.atomics style and lets standardize it...right now its seems YOU are dead set on your template and want to fight DR.Atomic because people are using his instead of yours. Please take your ball and go home, there are many other areas to contribute in. kalanosh 08:36, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

The restyle and redesign are discussed on Template_talk:Player_Alliance and Template_talk:Player_Corporation. The discussions held here were included in the proposal for change, since no objections to the style changes were made on the related pages they were put through.

That said, I've read through all discussion held on the topic and was only able to find 2 people in favor of using the turquoise style but plenty of people in favor of using the grey/eve online style with plenty reverting to using manual tables over the turquois style. It's pretty clear that the community voted gery over turquois style. Kalanosh his repsonse sums it up.

I like your thinking about standardising logo naming with the IDs but doubt it's practical use at this stage (128x128 vs. 256x256 for instance) as well as lack of ease of use with no return from a user standpoint of view. Ideally the CCP image server would be linked to the wiki with us being able to call images by the CCP naming convention instead of having to upload them ourselves.

I'm all for a civilized discussion on the topic but it needs to come from two sides, in this particualr case you called for parameter and style standardization which I followed through on, then you go and revert the style of the corp template without using the talk page of that template at all, that YARR even approved it is beyond me. Both corp and alliance have detailed point by point improvement lists on their talk pages that were achieved with the grey style implementation, the character template was broken and didnt even display anything when I restyled it so I didnt bother discussing it there (figured a working template beats a non working one everyday).

All credit goes to you for starting the alliance/corp/character templates, but as wiki is a community project changes will happen to them unless/untill they are being made official pages, I really have trouble understanding your dedication to the turquoise style as it's clear that the community likes the eve style better. Then content wise ordering was an issue as it didnt reflect how people digest corp/alliance/character info as well as the majority wanting additional content fields added. DrAtomic 15:34, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Creating Blank Pages

Hi again,

Can I ask your reason for all the blank pages that you are creating and marking as stubs?

Thanks, ISD Erilus Nex 16:23, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi, offcourse, the reason is that they are being linked from Kuolematon (Character) which was marked as needing cleanup due to extensive linking to non-existant pages. Since those pages are linked and the content that should go into them is unknown to me, I created them as stubs (request for content), that way they are added to the content needed overview and can be filled by people that have the content knowledge to fill them. This is normal wiki procedure as far as I am aware.

If you rather not have people create stubs then maybe we should remove the stub template and don't mark pages for needing cleanup based on links to non-existant articles. But it would be wierd to do so imho. Cheers, DrAtomic 16:39, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

I spoke to ISD Elumiel about the intent behind marking the page as a Stub, her intent was to let the community update the page to remove or correct the red links (ie, if the page exists but is incorrectly linked in the page, or if it doesn't exist removing the links from the page) rather than creating 10's of empty pages. By all means if you have content for the pages that were linked and want to create them that's great, other wise it was only the brackets that needed removed from the page.

Our intent isn't to annoy you or undo player's hard work but to keep the amount of stub pages on the EVElopedia to a minimum. The only alternative we have to not marking pages as stubs, etc, is to edit them ourselves, which would quickly become time consuming. ISD Erilus Nex 17:02, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

I honestly don't have an issue with disallowing stubs (or the empty ones I created being deleted), but normally the classifications are: stub = request for content (empty), incomplete = has some content but needs more to be a completed article, completed = completed page which can be rated for it's quality.

The issue you create with the autolinker and not using stub for empty pages and rating pages as require cleanup for having lots of non existant linked content is a huge chicken and egg thing.

Normally the wiki community guards the stub pages and tries to fill them to at least incomplete status.

I guess you could rate: wanted pages (link count to non existant pages), stubs (minimal content), incomplete, complete and do away with empty stubs that way but it should also be policy to not rate pages as require cleanup for having lots of non existant links than.

If I look on the Community Portal it shows that the definition of stubs and incomplete got mixed up (merged together).

It's fair and common on some wikis to require stubs to have at least one sentence.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on the subject, I dont have an issue with any of the policies apart from pages being rated require cleanup due to non existing links. DrAtomic 17:27, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Case Sensitivity

DrAtomic, it should be noted that the first letter of any page is not case sensitive. Thus Template:Move and Template:move are equivalent. I'm reverting the inaccurate comment on the Template:Move page. See MediaWiki's article on page names. EVElopedia uses the first letter case-insensitive option as does Wikipedia. --Mariokoli Mianana 19:24, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

I was under the same assumption however the template example doesn't work if you call the template with move instead of Move. Maybe template usage is the exception, I dunno. DrAtomic 19:45, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

{{move:dont move this is a test}} outputs Template:Move:dont move this is a test instead of the correct move box. DrAtomic 19:47, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

That's because you are using it incorrectly. The proper way to use the template is to put a pipe '|' in between the translocationg page and its arguments. {{move|dont move this is a test}}. Give it a preview on this page and you'll see the difference. The color ':' character is valid in page names, so that is requesting the use of the template Template:Move:dont move this is a test --Mariokoli Mianana

OMG, lol you are right. The sad thing is I didnt do this wrong once but like 5 times... Thx for the assist! DrAtomic 01:24, 21 December 2008 (UTC)