Moving Forward: Wiki Cleanup

[Tex]

As we discussed in the Kupowiki revival thread, one thing we’re sorely in need of is working on cleaning up the Kupopolis Wiki. We have a mixture of article styles, written over a lot of time. We’ve also got varying amounts of information. This is a big task, and I think revising every article is impossible (or at least may drive us batty before we accomplish it). However, having new standards in place, so we can have good profiles for new characters and edit as we go, is a good idea!

As such, we need to look at what we have and go from there. I’ll start with character profiles. We have two here, one by Aurora and one by Travis (though someone else might have made the format).

Sample 1: wiki.kupopolis.club/index.php?ti … n_Lysandir
Sample 2: wiki.kupopolis.club/index.php?ti … Palmerston

I think some combination of these would be good. A basics bar like Fabian’s has, giving height, weight, et cetera to the side (and in the rare cases we do art – or pay someone to – we can add an image at the top), and then a breakdown of their personality and life. I feel like some extra structure to Rhodes’s would be good. I can take a shot at a draft, but I wanted thoughts first, before I start on that.

We also need some categories on the wiki to be finalized; we have some that are outdated (the fascist movement died in Kupop, etc), so we may want to begin thinking of what gets categories.

[Scen]

It’s funny how you don’t remember stuff until you actually sit down to look at wiki articles you’ve not seen in years.

I think you’re spot-on Tex: the sidebar form for vital stats that Aurora used in Fabian’s CP (which, as I recall, was one of a series of special wiki tricks that we devised the last time there was a big push to fill out our wiki content) should be there for every CP we have.

The text broken into sections discussing the character’s history, personality and other things should also be there, but we should standardize how this is broken down (all the sections Trav has there could easily fit as sub-sections under a “History” section). Sections we might consider adding to the body-text of CPs could include: History, Personal Life, Current Events, and OOC Trivia/Author Notes.

[Scen]

I also, on reflection, think you may be right about how to proceed with revisions: maybe it’s okay to slack a little bit and let people revise their older CPs on the fly, while, going forward, we hold to a standard with any new or current CPs as we create new story content.

[Tex]

[quote=“Scen”]It’s funny how you don’t remember stuff until you actually sit down to look at wiki articles you’ve not seen in years.

I think you’re spot-on Tex: the sidebar form for vital stats that Aurora used in Fabian’s CP (which, as I recall, was one of a series of special wiki tricks that we devised the last time there was a big push to fill out our wiki content) should be there for every CP we have.

The text broken into sections discussing the character’s history, personality and other things should also be there, but we should standardize how this is broken down (all the sections Trav has there could easily fit as sub-sections under a “History” section). Sections we might consider adding to the body-text of CPs could include: History, Personal Life, Current Events, and OOC Trivia/Author Notes.[/quote]

I hear you! I like that. We might drop Current Events – looking ahead, Current Events could become awkward when profiles get outdated. We can add it to history. I like History, Personal Life, and OOC Trivia. Should we consider a section like… I dunno. “Capabilities?” It could cover everything from being an ace mecha pilot to magical powers to political authority. It feels like something people may want to know.

Also, yeah; I think that might be best. We should still hit some of the big CPs, like Hannibal should be up to date, though… I’ll wait til we get our planning done.

[Scen]

[quote=“Tex”]I hear you! I like that. We might drop Current Events – looking ahead, Current Events could become awkward when profiles get outdated. We can add it to history. I like History, Personal Life, and OOC Trivia. Should we consider a section like… I dunno. “Capabilities?” It could cover everything from being an ace mecha pilot to magical powers to political authority. It feels like something people may want to know.

Also, yeah; I think that might be best. We should still hit some of the big CPs, like Hannibal should be up to date, though… I’ll wait til we get our planning done.[/quote]

There is a box in the sidebar form called “Known Skills”; stuff like that sorta seems appropriate there, but we can also carve out a section of the body text for expounding upon it. E.g., box reads: “Scen knows magic,” body text clarifies: “Scen studied for years at the Georgethor Institute in Tasnicaport, but after more than a decade of study that culminated in his being kicked out by the dean of students, all he really knows how to do is make ice cubes feel guilty and conjure helicopters.”

[Scen]

Okay, so… based on skimming through the Wiki, I think that one thing we could do is figure out what templates we need and what different kinds of articles would go to the wiki. More to the point: in a smaller-scaled, more character-focused story, what wiki articles would be most relevant to our purposes?

Character Profile- Obviously, and we’ve talked about this. The Fabian article linked above uses a sidebar template that is more than sufficient for our purposes. Supplemental to that, the body text for a CP would flow something like this:
(Introduction/overview text)
{character portrait?}
-History section- Summary of the character’s history, encompassing both backstory and events from story posts.
-Personal life- Discusses the character’s relationships with other characters, things of this nature.
-Special Skills/Abilities- Elaborates on information from the “Known Skills” box in the template.
-OOC Trivia- Like a mini notes post where the author offers interesting insights into the character from behind the scenes: who/what inspired the character? Who would play this character in the Kupopolis movie? etc.
-Tag Cloud- As Mike discussed, maybe this is where posts from the board would add links to the wiki article; as in, this character appears in posts A, B, C and E. Maybe, if this is possible with the level of automation Mike’s got in mind, there could be a little box at the bottom of the CP that reads something like: “Current/Last Known Location: GAHQ, Albrook,” or something like that.

Nation Profile- Even as we steer away from our bigger story assets, we should still keep them pretty well defined/maintained. I have a feeling that, after the smoke clears from , many of our current NPs are going to need a HUGE amount of revision. The utility of these NPs will be incredibly relevant as they factor into the backstory of our characters. From what I’m seeing, though, we never really created a sidebar template for nation profiles. That should change. The text flow (based on two NPs I pulled up for reference [Guardia and Tasnica; Travis and I usually followed a pretty standard format with our NPs and CPs, from as far back as the AOL boards]) should be as follows:
(Introduction/overview text)
{insert flag/map graphics here possibly}
-Land/Geography- Overview of the geography of the nation being profiled.
-Population- Overview of the people (races, ethnic groups, etc.) who make their homes in the nation.
-Religion- Overview of the major religions in the nation.
-Magic- Overview of any magical traditions practiced in the nation.
-Economy- Overview of the nation’s economy. (perhaps an optional section, as we move away from the minutiae of running big assets)
-Law/Government- Overview of the type of government the nation has.
-Politics- Overview of both the nation’s internal politics and its relations with other nations. (two sub-sections)
-Military- A brief overview of the nation’s military assets. (I thought about putting this section up for being cut, but there was a part of me that felt like this would be heresy in Kupopolis)
-Major Cities- This section should get the most attention, because it basically helps set up new settings and locales that the story can visit. We might even consider making these into links that go to their own articles, which can then get tagged by story posts.
-Characters- I actually had an interesting idea for this section… what if the boards, in all their automated space magic wonder, were able to figure out, based on the number of tags the character gets in story, which characters from each nation were the most prominent? Like, part of the “Characters” section would be the people you’d normally expect to be associated with this nation; for Tasnica, you’d see Rhodes and Kenny and Frank Yeats right at the top, but then further down you’d see some sort of box that kept a tally of Tasnican characters that appear in the main story. Maybe the top 5 or 6 characters by number of tags? I dunno, I was a thought I had.
-History- A summary of the nation’s history, both as backstory and as things happen as the story moves forward.

More later, for sure… touching on other profile categories and needed templates. But thoughts so far?

[Tex]

Those both sound solid to me, Matt. I think we might wanna add a few notes to discourage exact numbers – I remember that getting confusing/being wildly different from writer to writer – but the information’s all pretty important. That said: I also agree these need setting details before we can do updates to the nation profiles.

[Scen]

In honor of Easter, and the themes of resurrection and revival that seem pretty damn applicable to the Kupopolis community of late, I spent the better part of this morning pulling a LOT of things out of my ass and putting them up on the Wiki as part of a character profile.

This is what Sahl Endeberg’s CP looks like, using the format we’ve talked about so far:
wiki.kupopolis.club/index.php?ti … l_Endeberg

Remember that, when everything is done and we’ve got the new Proper boards where we’ve been saying we’d like them, there’d be tags at the bottom of the page that correspond to the character’s appearances in posts.

[Tex]

I think it looks good, Matt. Couple little thoughts:

1. Should we change weight to “Body Type?” Weight’s kind of subjective and sometimes people aren’t good with numbers. We might communicate better information by saying whether they’re built, fat, a beanpole, etc.

2. I always thought the “Inspiration” field is a little weird and a little hard. Any objections to striking it? I’m not attached to throwing it out, but I thought I’d float the idea.

[Scen]

[quote=“Tex”]I think it looks good, Matt. Couple little thoughts:

1. Should we change weight to “Body Type?” Weight’s kind of subjective and sometimes people aren’t good with numbers. We might communicate better information by saying whether they’re built, fat, a beanpole, etc.

2. I always thought the “Inspiration” field is a little weird and a little hard. Any objections to striking it? I’m not attached to throwing it out, but I thought I’d float the idea.[/quote]

3. I’ll admit that, sometimes, I fudge this field. In fact, I’ve fudged it a lot, because I did a lot of CPs years ago during my “Quest to End the Red” (a reference to the fact that links that had no article appear red on the wiki). So, in principle I agree that a lot of people might be in favor of scrapping the “weight” box… but see below.

4. I’ll also admit that “Inspiration” sometimes feels forced, if the character doesn’t genuinely seem to have any inspirations that the author’s put thought into. But, also, see below…

•Striking Fields vs. Adding Fields:
My feeling on this overall is that, in a quick 'n dirty template like the stat box, more fields might be better than fewer fields. Now, obviously, this probably isn’t true all the time, unless someone feels very strongly that we need a “Favorite Color” and a “Cat/Dog Person” field. But in the case of these two specific boxes I think we have a situation where keeping the current boxes and adding a new, clarifying box might be helpful.
In the case of weight vs. body type, it’s true that some people might not be able to get a clear mental image of someone based on the number in pounds that we offer… but it might also be true that some people do get a good sense for the character from it. Why not accomodate both types of people by keeping the weight box, and adding a new “Body Type” box supplemental to it? This isn’t a terrible stretch, really: some people of a certain weight don’t look like other people of the same weight, and this might especially be true in a fantasy/sci fi story where certain people with a certain origin, power or race are more dense than the human norm.
Similarly, why not just keep “Inspiration” for those characters to whom it applies? I dimly recall that I might’ve left this blank on a CP or two… but even if that’s not true, so what? There are a number of characters I can think of (Rhodes, Celiose, Daumme) who had pretty relevant “Inspirations” that should get marked in on a box like this. For other characters (Kevin the Great, Shane Lile), that might not be quite as true. Or anything we’d care to know.
What do you think? I’m gonna add the “Body Type” box regardless, but what do you think about keeping the current boxes for the sake of acceptable surplus of information?

[Spoon]

[quote=“Tex”]I think it looks good, Matt. Couple little thoughts:

1. Should we change weight to “Body Type?” Weight’s kind of subjective and sometimes people aren’t good with numbers. We might communicate better information by saying whether they’re built, fat, a beanpole, etc. [/quote]

Build/Body Type would probably get the picture across clearer and more concisely.

[Tex]

What do you think? I’m gonna add the “Body Type” box regardless, but what do you think about keeping the current boxes for the sake of acceptable surplus of information?

I think that’s good! I want to float another idea, though, that hit me after I posted.

I think one thing that gets us is not all characters are made or used equally. Now, sometimes, these are failed mains – Rast Baron is one of mine – where we write a full CP but they never take off. But then there’s the minor characters; the people who, if this was a tabletop game, would be minor NPCs without even getting a full stat block.

What do you think of an abbreviated CP, for use for our minor characters? I’m thinking something like a sidebar with:

1. Name
2. Sex
3. Race
4. Age
5. Titles

And then an “Information” and “OOC Trivia” field for fuller commentary, instead of the Personal Life/History/etc stuff. The idea here is a short form to use so more characters get more CPs.

[Scen]

[quote=“Scen”]What do you think? I’m gonna add the “Body Type” box regardless, but what do you think about keeping the current boxes for the sake of acceptable surplus of information?

I think that’s good! I want to float another idea, though, that hit me after I posted.

I think one thing that gets us is not all characters are made or used equally. Now, sometimes, these are failed mains – Rast Baron is one of mine – where we write a full CP but they never take off. But then there’s the minor characters; the people who, if this was a tabletop game, would be minor NPCs without even getting a full stat block.

What do you think of an abbreviated CP, for use for our minor characters? I’m thinking something like a sidebar with:

1. Name
2. Sex
3. Race
4. Age
5. Titles

And then an “Information” and “OOC Trivia” field for fuller commentary, instead of the Personal Life/History/etc stuff. The idea here is a short form to use so more characters get more CPs.[/quote]

Well, the thing about that is that the differences between a major and a minor character aren’t always baked into the concept. Rather famously, Damien Gavalian wasn’t originally supposed to be a very big deal; he was just a name on a page for the CEO of Kuat. How many “names on a page” do you know who end up getting their own megapost? (topical: Sahl Endeberg was also just a name on a page when I wrote the first draft of the City of Kupopolis profile; he’s since expanded into kind of his own delusional universe from there and had his own [April Fool’s Day prank] spinoff story devoted to him)

For my part, I’d rather keep all characters, regardless of their status as main character or supporting cast, standard in their use of the same profile. To that end, any profile we design (acknowledging that the one currently in use is in use until or unless we think of something better) should be built to accomodate either type of character.

In my mind, entries in the sidebar or divisions of the body text can be omitted where necessary. So, if a Damien Gavalian were born as a minor character today, he’d have a plethora of empty entries in his CP, and maybe a sentence or two in his history. As he expands, he can grow more appropriately into a fully-realized CP.

To sum up: I prefer a standard form to the creation of a dichotomy between two different types of characters – even acknowledging that, as we tighten our focus in our future storytelling, each writer will probably end up using only a few characters at a time.

[Tex]

Yeah, I didn’t think of the unintentional classification problem. If we establish people can write as little or as much as they want, it should be fine.

[Scen]

I wonder if the standardization can sort of start to happen automatically as we move forward… like, if a character shows up in a post on the new board, and they’re tagged but there’s no post on the wiki yet, maybe the wiki knows to automatically generate an article with the character profile template already in it?

[Tex]

OOPS, belatedly: not sure, Matt, but I like that idea!

Also, since the post-White Cell content is moving nicely, I’m thinking I may begin taking a crack at profiles soon, and putting these ones into action. We’ll also need to start looking past these, and at things like hardware, dimension profiles, corporations, organizations, et cetera, I realize.

[Michael]

I wonder if the standardization can sort of start to happen automatically as we move forward… like, if a character shows up in a post on the new board, and they’re tagged but there’s no post on the wiki yet, maybe the wiki knows to automatically generate an article with the character profile template already in it?

Yeah, I was thinking if making an admin/user option of creating wiki object types with a default template creator. The template would just be placeholder bbcode level stuff that the user could delete if they wanted.

[Tex]

http://wiki.kupopolis.club/index.php?title=Esper_Union

Oh hey, look what I did. I need to do a write-up on the cities but we’ll save it for later, it’s getting late.

[Celiose]

Here’s a silly thought I had:

Should we do a separate thing for “Kupopolis Reborn” (like we did for Neo, Legends, et al) and archive the Proper wiki?

[Tex]

You know, that’s not a bad idea. We might wanna look at old stuff.