Plans for The Transport Tycoon Wiki

[orudge]

Hello all,

I had a little talk with Patchman yesterday, and I've had an idea to create a new site, tt-wiki.net, which would be a sister site to the forums. The site would, imaginatively enough, be known as "The Transport Tycoon Wiki". As the name suggests, the intention is it'll be a wiki all about Transport Tycoon, TTDPatch, the forums, and so on. The plan is that the TTDPatch wiki will be used as a base, but will be upgraded and restructured to make it easier for everyone to use. The TT-Forums wiki and the Locomotion Depot wiki would be merged in, too, to create a dedicated resource. (The OpenTTD wiki will likely remain independent, although if people from OpenTTD think a unified wiki might be a good idea, now is the time to speak up!)

Unlike the present TTDPatch wiki, the new site will integrate with the user database on the forum, and the idea is that we can build up a useful resource with all kinds of guides related to the games, NewGRF development, and so on.

From a technical point of view, I've had a think, and I think the best thing to do would probably be to convert the existing TTDPatch wiki to MediaWiki. While Tiki is a technically more advanced piece of Wiki software, it isn't as well-known or well-used these days, and most people are probably much more familiar with MediaWiki. I've already performed a test conversion, and while there will need to be some manual adjustment of formatting, etc, on pages, mostly the process is pretty smooth. I'd likely leave the old wiki open in a read-only mode while the new wiki is brought up-to-scratch, to ensure people can still find what they want in the mean time.

I'd be very interested to hear people's thoughts on this project. I do think it has the potential to become a truly useful resource for the game and the community as a whole.

Cheers,

[Born Acorn]

It's a great idea. The MediaWiki software is a lot more mainstream and known by the vast majority via Wikipedia.

[CommanderZ]

How would that compare to the existing (and already quite extensive) OTTD Wiki? I guess there would be huge overlap.

[orudge]

Well, this would be a more general wiki for the whole community - the OpenTTD wiki is about OpenTTD specifically. The new wiki would incorporate all the content from the TTDPatch wiki, the TT-Forums wiki and the Locomotion Depot wiki, so it would include things like the complete NFO reference, the TTDPatch manual, as well as community information such as details of the IRC channel, TT meets, and whatever else anyone chooses to include.

In theory, arguably the best solution would be if the OpenTTD wiki were to become a part of this as well, and then there'd be one unified wiki for everything drawing on all the content contributed to each one, reducing potential duplication. I'm certainly not against that, but it would probably require a bit more planning and consideration, and a certain amount of reorganisation would be necessary to clearly delineate between articles specific to OpenTTD, TTDPatch and so on. That, and integrating the user database from the OpenTTD wiki into the forums database would likely be a fair bit more work (there are relatively few users on the TTDPatch wiki, so it's simple enough).

[Illegal_Alien]

The idea sounds good, but one thing, how do you keep the wiki clean from having some weird edits? (like complete removel/replacement by a spambot.) Are you assigning "Wikimoderators"? (Raises hand to do Locomotion part.) As some of them have this kind of problems, and are you gonna make certain templates to keep everything inline? A lot of questions from my part sorry about that.

I know Locomotion is a bit of a weird member of the family, but the "Transport Tycoon Wiki" doesnt sound like it has something of Locomotion; thus people are gonna ask where it is. Not that i care but maybe a bit better name could be appropriate?

[Dante123]

sounds like a good idea.
in that case i think its wise to also include some room or special place for tutorials like for coding/drawing grfs

[orudge]

The idea sounds good, but one thing, how do you keep the wiki clean from having some weird edits? (like complete removel/replacement by a spambot.)

You'll need to be registered on the forums to be able to edit the wiki. We may introduce other anti-spam mechanisms if they prove to be necessary.

Are you assigning "Wikimoderators"?

That would be the intention - likely the forum moderators to begin with (with their consent), and otherwise, people who are contributing to the wiki and keeping it in order are likely to receive appropriate permissions there.

are you gonna make certain templates to keep everything inline?

Hopefully that's something that we as a whole can work on, yes.

I know Locomotion is a bit of a weird member of the family, but the "Transport Tycoon Wiki" doesnt sound like it has something of Locomotion; thus people are gonna ask where it is. Not that i care but maybe a bit better name could be appropriate?

Well, the same would apply to the "Transport Tycoon Forums". I can't really think of a more suitable name, to be honest.

in that case i think its wise to also include some room or special place for tutorials like for coding/drawing grfs

Yep, that's fine - people just have to write them.

[Hyronymus]

Why not go for a portal approach that also merges GRFcrawler/Bananas in it?

[orudge]

Well, that's not particularly practical, due to the nature of those services being very different from a wiki. And merging GRFCrawler and Bananas isn't necessarily practical either, due to GRFCrawler merely being a collection of links, where as Bananas directly serving content (which requires the consent of the licence holder - hence there being many things in GRFCrawler that aren't in Bananas).

[Yexo]

A single login between openttd.org and tt-forums.net / tt-wiki would already go a long way towards integrating the openttd wiki also. If you just have to login once it'll become much easier to create inter-wiki links and edit pages in both wikis.

The newgrf specs on the ttdpatch wiki are currently the official reference. Currently that works fine, but this might in part be because you have to create a different account to edit it. When merging that wiki it'll become much easier to change the newgrf specs, leading to even more discussions what is the right interpretation of the spec.

[Hyronymus]

OK, forget about Bananas then. But GRFcrawler "merely a collection of links" isn't quite realistic. And you share that view as you made it borrow the user's forum login details for authentication . It's already a part of the forum (that despite many requests still hasn't got a link in the forum's topright menu ).

[Rubidium]

You should consider a wiki that supports a multilingual setup. People will eventually ask for it, and if it isn't possible try all kinds of ways to "implement" it.

Merging OpenTTD's wiki with that new wiki would mean merging user accounts between openttd.org and tt-forums.net. I'm not sure how viable that is.

Given you want to become the ultimate Transport Tycoon (related games) wiki it will eventually get a lot of OpenTTD content as well, so in the end we'll just end up with two more or less duplicate wikis w.r.t. OpenTTD content. So from that point of view it's probably wise to merge the wikis. Even then would be a good thing to have a clear seperation between the different topics, i.e. Transport Tycoon, TTDPatch, OpenTTD, NewGRFs.

Possibly the NewGRF specification part of the wiki could be separated a bit more so making an archive with the whole specification would be quite easy, like is done with the tiki wiki. That way the NewGRF specification would be available offline as well.

I don't think Bananas has anything to do on the wiki, although a cross-link with GRFCrawler seems a nice thing to have. However, that would probably be just a simply template to use for NewGRF specific wiki pages and a field for a wiki link in the GRFCrawler entry.

[michael blunck]

The new wiki would incorporate all the content from the TTDPatch wiki, the TT-Forums wiki and the Locomotion Depot wiki, so it would include things like the complete NFO reference, the TTDPatch manual, as well as community information such as details of the IRC channel, TT meets, and whatever else anyone chooses to include.

Well, honestly, I fail to see a good reason for integrating that largely different stuff. What, e.g. is "the TT-Forums wiki"? Never heard of it. And I don´t think that "the Locomotion Depot wiki" would have large intersections with TTDPatch, or TTD at all.

I understand that you as a host have an interest in "integrating" the diverse representations, but I don´t think that this will guarantee a higher developed level for all its substituents in a quasi "automatic" way. "Large" isn´t always efficient.

The newgrf specs on the ttdpatch wiki are currently the official reference. Currently that works fine, but this might in part be because you have to create a different account to edit it. When merging that wiki it'll become much easier to change the newgrf specs, leading to even more discussions what is the right interpretation of the spec.

I strongly second this apprehension. After Dalestans retirement I´ve been the only person in charge for it and, despite it´s relatively "anonymity", there´s constant spamming. I fear, that after integration into a much larger and much more known "portal", this significant resource could be too easily being damaged.

regards
Michael

[Hyronymus]

I strongly second this apprehension. After Dalestans retirement I´ve been the only person in charge for it and, despite it´s relatively "anonymity", there´s constant spamming. I fear, that after integration into a much larger and much more known "portal", this significant resource could be too easily being damaged.

regards
Michael

I understand you don't look forward to constant rolling back of changes made on the Wiki. But that is how a Wiki works: people with a valid account can edit stuff. I do think with a more integrated approach as Owen describes it is essential to think about a dediacted moderating team for the Wiki too.

And for as far as possible one can perhaps limit the powers of people that register on the forum: put them in a usergroup:
- without automatic rights to contribute to OpenTTD stuff (webtranslator, devzone etc)
- without automatic rights to contribute to the Wiki

Instead, people need to apply for the membergroups that have these rights (and accept the ToA that we can conjure for those usergroups).

[frosch]

I would welcome porting the NewGRF wiki to a MediaWiki.
I do not understand how orudge concludes TikiWiki would be more advanced, I only hit limitations.

(Like table cells not being able to span multiple columns (even applies to up to date version, last time I checked), painful uploading of images, totally broken history function, and various other things. Though some of the issues might be caused by a very restrictive configuration, like no easy way to revert changes, a dedicated table of contents which only moderators may edit, ...)

Wrt. merging the OTTD wiki: I think it is in your own interest, if you only do that if you support translations
(Hint: Take a look at "recent changes" and try figuring out what really changed.)

[Lord Aro]

Wrt. merging the OTTD wiki: I think it is in your own interest, if you only do that if you support translations
(Hint: Take a look at "recent changes" and try figuring out what really changed.)

Agreed.

On the subject of the NewGRF wiki: Perhaps those pages can be protected, so only admins/moderators (or even just 'advanced users', with e.g. 100 edits or people who have been given special permission by admins)

[JGR]

This is an interesting idea...

However I'm curious about how often the various wikis are actually used at present.

I'm also not aware of this "TT-forums wiki".
The only ones I know about are the TTDPatch and OpenTTD wikis.

The TTDPatch wiki is somewhat incomplete with respect to the "recent" changes to TTDPatch. I know that I for one didn't bother to document on there half the new features I added... Though whether this is still relevant with usage as it currently is, is another matter.

As for the NewGRF manual, the casual user does need to edit that and it would not be especially difficult to restrict access to a user group.

[Roman]

You should consider a wiki that supports a multilingual setup. People will eventually ask for it, and if it isn't possible try all kinds of ways to "implement" it.

I think it is in your own interest, if you only do that if you support translations

I agree with this. Owen, there have been discussions in the German-speaking community about a German (OTTD) wiki being desirable, and there seems to be a number of people interested in contributing content/translations. Many users/players aren't exactly comfortable in English, or even don't understand a word of it. It is exactly the newbies/youngsters who will probably profit the most from a wiki, so why not provide it in a language they understand. I'm sure this holds for many other languages as well. I think the whole joint-TT-wiki project makes sense only if it's multilingual in the first place.

[Zephyris]

I would just like to add my support for the migration and merge of the wikis... This should really help make people more aware that all this content is available and the mediawiki formatting should promote more people to help keep it up to date.

[WWTBAM]

I like the idea aswell. I have noticed some of the pages on the OpenTTD wiki still apply to TTD(P) including some of the ratings docs. I don't know of any other docs on those subjects so I end up reading the OpenTTD wiki for TTD(P) info.