토론:Wiki Discussion

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Xbox package system

I was directed to this page to bring up concerns about the WoT XBOX wiki. As it stands the current format is a mirror image of the PC wiki. The first issue I believe that needs to be addressed is the fact that the Xbox uses a package system and not a module system. Also the game does not show radios even though they are used to calculate a tanks recon range. Strange I know. If the package system can be addressed I can give a lot more feedback. --xXMansini2069Xx:xbox (talk) 18:19, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, I've raised the issue with the other wiki staff and WG folks to see if the package system can be reflected on the wiki. This will require extensive rework with our current API usage though, so I don't know when it will come. --Haswell:na (talk) 21:21, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Any progress? --xXMansini2069Xx:xbox (talk) 00:02, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Nothing much, but WG is aware of the issue and we are trying to find suitable solutions. I don't have an ETA right now, but it's being worked on. --Haswell:na (talk) 00:09, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

I see some changes in the WoT XBOX section. Does this mean a solution to the package system is close at hand?--xX_GolfTee_Xx:xbox (talk) 15:22, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Provisional Pro/Con Limits

I disregard the new policy. The idea of a Wiki is that it is usually unmoderated and that users take charge. There are definitely many tanks, that can have 6, 7 or more pros or cons. I reviewed "my" tanks and I feel sorry, that a lot of helpful pros/cons have been deleted. Please rethink this limit, thx. --warfair4:eu (talk) 15:29, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Let's have a discussion on the merits then, shall we.

In regards to the idea that a wiki should be minimally moderated and user-driven: of course, I agree.

I would love to see a more active wiki where there are too many edits in a day for the admin staff to keep up, essentially requiring that players patrol other players. This is ideal to me. That being said however even then it is the requirement for the admin staff to make larger policy decisions that are agreed to improve, rather than detract, the experience both for players and admins. This particular one is a reflection of one such larger issues, and I will explain how it fits my vision for an improved wiki experience.

In the 6 months or so that have transpired since my beginning work as an admin on this wiki, I have spent quite a lot of time going through recent changes and making edits and reversions that I felt were required by the style guide and by my interpretation of a proper page for each tank as I looked over it. This work has been subjective, I will acknowledge, but the correctness of my previous work is not what is in discussion here.

In the vast majority of edits or reversions I have made to player edits, these changes have centered around shortening or removing bullets in the pro/con section. This is symptomatic of the disproportionate focus on the pro/con section in edits firstly, but also a tendency to attempt espousing every single characteristic of each tank within the section in question. This is, of course, a fundamental misinterpretation of the purpose of pro/con by many users of this site. Pro/con is a summary; a highlight section, if you will. Exhaustive detail (and even then, within reason should be the goal) is reserved not for pro/con but for performance, and information pertaining to module setups and grinds other than the top are the demesne of the research section. Between that and an observed tendency to insert excessive detail, or give detail in such a way that what should be one quick summary bullet point becomes two or more more detailed bullets, it is my opinion that the pro/con section has been traditionally abused by its users over the past months since the reopening of the wiki. This is not due to a lack of goodwill on the part of the editors, rather quite the contrary it stems from good intentions, but these same intentions have been ill-harnessed due to a lack of willingness to spread attention to all sections of a tank page within the page content and instead treat one in particular as an end-all for all attentions.

Policing this tendency has cost me a lot of time, and it is actually with the goal of reducing the amount of moderation this wiki requires rather than a wish to restrict the freedoms of editors that I have implemented this bullet restriction. I shall explain my reasoning.

Firstly, I should make clear that at present, no bullets have been deleted from any page as a result of this change. In point of fact, the only operational effect of this change is to simply limit the number of bullets that are displayed; the page contents themselves are not touched. These additional bullets are retained in the page source, and will remain available for players wishing to view the page source, or if it is ultimately decided that this limit is not required they will become visible on the page again.

But beyond that, restricting the number of displayed bullets reduces the patrol workload of administrators. By capping the maximum amount of displayed content, it is no longer necessary to remove bullets from pro/cons because an excessive number of bullets are displayed, thus reducing the number of cases in which admin edits are required.

Now granted, 5 bullets for each section is provisional and can be subject to change based on feedback. But, at least in my opinion, what really would be written, that requires more than 5 per?

A short summary of the pros/cons is probably going to focus on these:

• Armor
• Mobility
• Penetration
• Damage and DPM
• Notable soft stats, in one to two bullets

And really, that's about it. About 5, maybe 6 bullets in total. Now, seeing as you're unlikely to have everything be a pro or everything be a con at once, by extension that means that really, there shouldn't even be that many bullets in either pros or cons at a given time. There's a lot of bullet points on a lot of pages beyond that, but think about it for a moment: most of those are normally details on, say, weakspots or breakdowns of sub-items falling into one of the above categories, that really should have been relegated to performance in the first place rather than pros/cons.

So, with the limiter in place, it falls on the players to be aware that they do not have a blank canvas with which to paint a full description of a tank within pros/cons, and thus act accordingly. Because they must act within the restrictions, they are required to self-patrol their own additions to the pro/con section, and when too many bullets are added they war against themselves for space until the more relevant content is the only one to remain. This is actually a better atmosphere for a more player-centric wiki, in which I or any other wiki admin is no longer obligated to do the same work visibly, but rather by simply having the wiki code itself do this invisibly.

This is my reasoning for having the limit installed. I'm still undecided what the final number of bullets should be, though, and I am still open to input as to why or why not the limiter ought to be there in the first place, but I hope this helps you understand my reasoning.

ForcestormX:na (talk) 18:09, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Let me first thank you for your (quite) lengthy answer... I totally understand the reasons behind max 5 bullet points rule. I don´t want to argue against what you said. And also I´m not a friend of 10-bullet-lists. Still, there are circumstances, where more than 5 bullet points might be appropriate. Not everyone is reading and comprehending the performance section. Yes, its their fault. Still, if the pro/con list should work light a highlight section, then some aspects need to be included, which distinguish these tanks from others! Just to mention the really really bad camo values of the japanese top tier tanks... this is nothing you can see from the data given, just derived from the (of course subjective) experience of the players. Anyway, I don´t think, there will be much of a discussion here due to the lack of user participation... --warfair4:eu (talk) 10:03, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Well, let's see if 5 per fails to make it clear how unique Japanese top tier tanks are. To have comparison material, I'll pull the STB-1 page's pro/cons. They are thusly:

|InTheGame_pros=

• Fastest reload on a L7 cannon
• Great gun depression
• Tough turret
• Reasonably mobile
• Good camouflage values
• Above average view range (410m)
• Very small silhouette, comparable to soviet mediums

|InTheGame_cons=

• One of the worst overall dispersion values in its class and poor aim time for a medium at this tier
• Gun mantlet gets weak towards the center
• Poor overall hull armor, relies more on slope than thickness.
• Receives frequent module damage due to crammed space and poor armor

Now, in order to evaluate the 5-point limit, let's re-examine the criteria we will use to examine the tank:

• Armor
• Mobility
• Penetration
• Damage and DPM
• Notable soft stats, in one to two bullets

Examining the STB, we should have nothing in pros for armor or damage (arguably, penetration isn't anything special either with it being comparable to literally everything else in X (tier X pens are pretty normalized with each other anymore), and mobility is just average among the tier X meds if a bit on the quick side), but we should have pros mentioning the DPM (which occupies the same line as damage) and gun depression (a soft stat). Here, camo is listed as a strong point and since I didn't double-check that I'll just assume that's true. On the other side, in cons we shouldn't see pen, damage/DPM, or mobility listed (again yeah the acceleration is a bit sluggish but really it's not that bad). We could list armor (although for its class, who cares really) as a con, but really the main cons are soft stats like accuracy and dispersion/aim time together.

Using this as a guide, we arrive at:

|InTheGame_pros=

• Very high sustained damage output
• Excellent gun depression
• High camouflage factor and low silhouette

|InTheGame_cons=

• Poor accuracy
• Large dispersion

And suddenly, we have a full summary of pros/cons for the STB-1. With two bullets dedicated to soft stats in both pros and cons, we easily slide in under the 5 limit (by 2 and 3 respectively) in both sections. Now, if we had included the more marginal pros/cons highlighted earlier, then we get:

|InTheGame_pros=

• Very high sustained damage output
• Excellent gun depression
• High camouflage factor and low silhouette
• Good speed retention
• Very high penetration

|InTheGame_cons=

• Poor accuracy
• Large dispersion
• Thin armor
• Sluggish acceleration and hill climb

And even with an expanded pros/cons, we still arrive at 5 and 4, respectively... which is within the limit. And both times we can easily squeeze in the camo. And it makes sense, really. There are 5 categories of bullets I listed at the beginning of the analysis, and this means that each one can be covered in 5 bullets in total. The reasoning why should be obvious - when not all 4 of the first 4 categories are a pro or a con at once, there's room to expand out the listings of soft stats into those open bullet points. If all 4 were in pros or cons at once, then there's enough issues that the soft stats wouldn't be such a big deal in comparison and it drops to a one-point summary.

My point is, I think 5 has a lot of flexure to cover most tanks as-is, and the main reason why it doesn't always is because there's a lot of marginal stuff mixed into the pro/cons sections as well as extra details that cause most of the clutter. If we stop listing weakspots and exhaustive breakdowns of the various subaspects of armor, mobility, and firepower, 5 should work 99% of the time.

Note though that this is just my opinion, although backed up with a lot of words. <_< ForcestormX:na (talk) 19:01, 7 November 2014 (UTC)

New Response Thread

(using sub-section to make separation more visible)

I am strongly against the limit to 5 bullets for pro and con sections.

• It is an arbitrary, unnecessary restriction addressing something that was not a problem.
  • Why make this change?
  • I have not seen a page with so many bullets that it was unintelligible or confusing.
• This restriction hides information about tanks.
  • This wiki is supposed to provide extended information on the tanks and other features in world of tanks.
  • People come to these wiki pages for exactly the type of information that will be hidden.
  • Removing information can hide the true performance of a tank. The wiki can then give a false impression making the information incorrect.
  • The limitation requires that the most important pros and cons be in the first five bullets.
    • Disagreement on which are the most important will lead to wiki-page churn. Members will edit and re-edit to high light their preferences.

Thanks for the opportunity to respond to the change. [[ PepperMill:na (talk) 17:30, 9 November 2014 (UTC) ]]

What I'd like to see, given the literal wall of text above you, is your making an effort to address whether any of your points are already answered above. I have not seen this effort. You're listing your objections, without certifying that you're actively participating in the conversation. I want to have a back-and-forth, but I also don't want to have to repeat things given the length of my first two posts. If you'd be so kind, I'd appreciate it. Because otherwise, your post kind of comes off as 'boo tyranny bad,' because I think those are the only bullets not covered to some extent earlier.ForcestormX:na (talk) 23:13, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

What to do about a messed up page?

I was browsing through to the M44 and noticed that the page is missing all the modules and in the side bar the tank is shows as the M5 (M41 HMC --- M5 --- M12). What should I do to raise issues that I can't fix myself? VeryRisky:eu

Do exactly what you just did, as it happens. Wiki discussion is built for things such as discussing wiki affairs, including admin-level broken page issues. Looks like this is a database issue so I'll pass the info along.ForcestormX:na (talk) 14:13, 12 November 2014

(UTC)This is a first for me, so hope it works. All QUITE confusing as to how to share/edit this Wiki info. Subject = incorrect US crew rank names. As a former E-6 "Staff Sargent" tank commander i can assure U these should be corrected. E-7 is labeled "Tech Sargent", maybe in the Air Force, but in Army it is "Sargent 1st Class", often called "platoon sargent" if he is. E-9 is labeled "First Sargent", TOTALLY wrong. Correct title = "Sargent Major"

That's a WG-level issue, and thus unlikely to change. ForcestormX:na (talk) 14:16, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

That said, are you looking for a way to note this on the crew page? ForcestormX:na (talk) 14:16, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Redirects

I have noticed that many of the pages have be renamed after the system name of the tank and many redirect pages removed so it can now be hard to find a tank using the search rather than navigating through the main menu. For example if you search "Fury" you will find the correct page is called "A104 M4A3E8A" and unless you are paying attention you many not notice it in the results.

Is the policy to remove reditect pages even if they help the search results overcome the problems from using the internal system names of tanks even when they are completely unhelpful (e.g. M3 Lee page is named M3 Grant, so when the UK Lend/Lease line comes up the search will be a mess).

VeryRisky:eu

Generally, it's our policy to leave redirects behind when moving thing around, but when they become double-redirects (a redirect leads to another redirect), we start culling them rather than fixing them. This does sometimes cause what you've experienced. If you see a situation where redirects are needed, feel free to either drop a line with the required redirect or make it.

I should note though that our search function isn't terribly robust and rather likes to link to the RU wiki, so it may be due to issues other than missing redirects.

In the case of Fury, the page was built on its current designation and it's probably necessary for some redirects to be built.ForcestormX:na (talk) 14:18, 12 November 2014 (UTC)