Saturday 16 August 2008

PCG Wiki To Do List

With the exception of this first paragraph, this post is a verbatim copy of the current to do list from the PCG Wiki. For those of you who are interested in helping out with the wiki, you'll also be interested in reading the examples page, which was the number one requested poll item. At the moment, of course, it's more of a how to page, but any feedback on how to improve this would be much appreciated.

Ongoing actions and maintenance

There is always an need to update the news items with anything procedurally related. Try to keep each news item to a brief sentence, starting with a single word linking to the external link that describes it, such as Interview with x or Preview of y. Replace x and y with the relevant link within the pcgwiki. Then, once there are more than about 10 items on the page, archive off the older news items to the more news page, which is intended as a reverse chronological list of all news items that have ever appeared on the wiki.

Any upcoming events should be added to the calendar, and have a separate event page created. To create an event page, Add a new page starting with event: and use the event template to describe the event. Any other important recurring dates, such as the release date for a historically significant PCG game, should have a day page created, starting with day: followed by the month space numeric date, such as 'day: august 8'. This will make the day appear in the Anniversary list at the bottom of the events page. To get access to the Google calendar, email andrewdoull@gmail.com.

The pcgwiki has yet to have a problem with spam, but feel free to check the recent changes and see if all the edits are valid.

To do list

The biggest to do list for the pcgwiki is to add and expand existing entries, particularly the games, software and code pages, particularly by adding code examples to the code pages for other people to follow. If you are not an adept coder, you could simply update an existing game entry to include additional information from wikipedia. Follow the examples to understand how to set up and edit the info boxes.

To discuss any items in the to do list below,

The following items are low-hanging fruit:

  • Add the remaining games from the TIG Source Procedural Content Generation Competition. You'll want to go through the list of all 60 games including downloads.
  • Expand on existing game entries by including more information in the info box and description fields. Have a look at the linked wikipedia entry for ideas.
  • Expand on existing code entries by including more information in the info box and providing code examples. Have a look at the linked wikipedia entry for ideas.
  • Expand on existing software by including more information in the info box. In particular, since many of these can be downloaded and played with, writing a review would be ideal.
  • Start creating person entries.

The following items require more work and understanding of the wiki design:

  • Many of the top menu entries are place holders pending a feature request allowing the module backlinks page to only list some backlinks.
  • Investigate the use of categories instead of backlinks to automatically populate pages.
  • Consider splitting the article and links pages up.

You'll also want to have a look at the bugs and quirks page for more issues.

2 comments:

Soyweiser said...

Currently it is very hard to see which links exist and which don't. Constantly going back after hitting a "The page does not (yet) exist" page is not really good usability.

And I miss the link to the roguelike development wiki and the rgrd group (which also contains a few articles on pcg, but not much. But they could be interesting).

Andrew Doull said...

Unfortunately, the non-existent links is the way wikidot does things - I don't think I can change this, but I'll check the configuration.