Dwarf Fortress Wiki:Versions

This is a proposal for a new method of organizing information on the wiki in light of the upcoming release of Dwarf Fortress 2010. It is completely up for discussion and all input is welcome. Feel free to make changes to this directly if you think you have a great idea. If you have a suggestion you think might be questionable or if you disagree with a portion of the proposal that has already been suggested, please bring it up on the talk page to get the input of every editor until we can hopefully reach a consensus on the best way of approaching the recent change, and all future upkeep of the wiki to avoid obsolete information.

Goal

The goal of this effort is to effectively yet subtely mark articles according to how up-to-date they currently are. Ultimately there are two goals:

• Allow users to know an article is up to date
• If an article isn't up to date, allow a user to know exactly how out of date it currently is.
• Allow editors to easily find articles which are out of date and improve them.

This is not intended to:

• Remove all information about older versions. These items can be moved to the end of the articles and labeled with the Version template or something similar.

Comment: In the past, 100% of legacy info was deleted as undesirable. No comments about "in past verions", no "until recently it worked like this..." - if it wasn't up-to-date, it was confusing, and dumped. If we go with another wiki - regardless if we use this engine or another one - we can leave this here for as a "mostly(?) complete" d40 manual and move forward with DF2010 separately, copy/pasting if appropriate, but without losing any of this. (Otoh, if d40 is going the way of the 2-Dimensional version etc, maybe this will all be pointless to save, or save for very long.)--Albedo 09:42, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Proposed Approach

Per topic

Each feature or idea that could fill a topic will have at least two articles associated with it.

• The main subject article, which redirects to a particular "version" of that article. ex. Weapons
• A version of the article referring to a version of the game based on a different "namespace", ex. DF2010:Weapons, 40d:Weapons

Version articles

We could utilize an approach based off of creative use of templates and categories. We can have a template that we place on all relevant version articles which marks how up to date the article is, for example:

{{Version}}
Article information

This will place a small box in the top-right corner of the article which will give information to the user that this article is either up to date, or how out of date it currently is. The template will read in the namespace of the article and use that to determine if this article is the most up to date version. It will also place an article into a category based off of how obsolete or not the information currently is.

One version will be considered "current", and articles in that namespace with the version template will be placed into a category marking it as such, all other articles will be put into a category marking them as Obsolete, and also placing them into a category based off of their version (from the article namespace).

In this way when a new version comes out, a small change can be made to the template which will mark many articles "obsolete", and will provide in them a link to the location of the most up to date version. Editors can comb through these articles over time and fill in the new articles with relevant information.

This ensures that random articles don't lay dormant without being updated for many versions, and also that this can be done with minimal effort.

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It is likely that the above description will require some tweaking over time so feel free to make any changes you think might be useful or bring up any comments on the talk page.