NSWiki:Village pump

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This is a place to talk about anything NSwiki related. If the discussion is more appropriate on some other page, move it there. For example, if it is a question and answer that others may find useful move it to user questions.

Suggestion Box

Category Creation

The following Primary Categories are now available on the Main Page:

In addition to that, any nation that has multiple nation-specific pages should have a Factbook (Category:Factbooks) so we don't have a bunch of unknown, uncategorized pages floating around the wiki. If most of your NS or NSwiki activity is based around a region (BookCrossing, Projekt Myra) or an alliance (CACE, GDODAD), make that your factbook instead.

There are also another half dozen minor categories available in Category:Roleplaying, some of which may be superfluous or convertable to something more general (Currency → Economics ?). I'm thinking we shouldn't be adding any more primary categories (or for that matter, secondary) without discussing them here first. I'd also like see it become official NSwiki policy.

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? → Fris Θtalk 18:01, 29 Oct 2004 (GMT)

I'd like to see a voluntary limitation on the use of Categories. The way I see it, almost anything related to your nation/region/alliance is fair game for a factbook, but the broader categories don't enjoy the same freedom. For instance, if you have a history of Wars outside of NS roleplay, they can go in your factbook, but not in Category:Wars. Even though you roleplayed every bit of your history, none of it should be added to Category:Roleplaying. Those ... ummm ... Master Topics should be reserved for things that have a general relationship to the topic, and appeal to a wide variety of players and readers. If two nations rp a war on IRC or via offsite forums, that particular war could justifiably be placed in both player's factbooks, but shouldn't be added to Wars. Other categories like Sports roleplaying, might have a smaller but intense population ... but I still don't want to see every nation that participates in Sport RP added to the category.

The thing about categories is that we already have nearly two hundred of them, and the Factbooks are intermingled with the General Interest categories. If we start creating new Cats for every subdivision possible in this quasi-fictional world, no one will ever be able to keep up with them. As the sysop self-appointed to categorizing all the lost articles, I appeal to you - please limit your categories, and don't add unnecessary categories to your articles. Thanks. → Fris Θtalk

What about Category:History? If I create an article about an historical event, should I put Category:History down the bottom as well as Category:Pantocratoria? --Pantocratoria 10:49, 6 Dec 2004 (GMT)

Virtually everything in the wiki is a historical document of some sort. I'd leave Category:History alone except for articles that collect all the historical information in one page ... "A Short History of Pantocratoria", that sort of thing. Most people put that on their main nation page, but for some it's an elaborate series. I'd say, "one page => Category:History" , "Several pages => National factbook". I wouldn't use both. → Fris Θtalk 21:01, 6 Dec 2004 (GMT)

Character Subcategories?

Should Category:Characters be subdivided? It seems to be getting distressingly large. I'd suggest adding subcategories for specific types of characters. (Gods, AIs, immortals, nonhumans of particular species, et cetera.) --Khrrck 03:51, 4 Jan 2005 (GMT)

I don't know about Gods and immortals, but I could potentially see separating out the historic (non-playing characters) from the actively roleplayed characters. The chief problem is that we have tied Category:Characters to the standard character template, Infobox_Character. If we start recategorizing, we're going to have to create a bunch of new templates and/or alter a ton of individual pages.

I don't see as much of a problem from a "distressingly large" category as Khrrck seems to. Greater subcategorization might make sense in Wikipedia where people are likely to seek out related topics, but here I think readers are more prone to follow links within articles than to seek enlightenment by reading an entire category. It's confusing enough for new users as it is - adding new infoboxes or requiring every new contributor to understand a complicated categorization strategy strikes me as a lot more work for relatively little benefit. → Fris Θtalk 04:48, 4 Jan 2005 (GMT)

I think that Category:Sports characters is an example of what a good Category:Characters sub-category is about. Sports characters are very, very rarely RPd outside of Sporting threads, and they are easily lost within the all-encompassing uber-Cat of Characters. There are also enough of them to warrant a sub-category (58 at the last count), are there actually enough articles on individual Gods, AIs and such to make such a sub-cat worthwhile? - Starblaydia 12:43, 3 Jun 2005 (GMT)

NGO Category

We have Category:Corporations for our for-profit organizations, Category:Agencies for our intra-governmental organizations, but we don't really have anything for non-government, non-profit groups like Trade Unions and such. While there isn't much need for one at the moment, it was suggested that a new category might be helpful towards inspiring the creation of those sorts of articles. → Fris Θtalk 14:31, 23 Dec 2004 (GMT)

UN commitees subcategory?

Why not put a UN commitees [1] subcategory? I had edited several of them, then they could be categorizated in a sub-category, to be more readable in the UN one. Rufus T. Firefly 17:02, 16 Apr 2005 (GMT).

Corporation sector sub-category?

It is a good idea to divide corporations with original sector from the game? (IT, automobile manif, basket weaving...) Because now it is very difficult to find which are on a sector instead another... Rufus T. Firefly 17:02, 16 Apr 2005 (GMT)

While it might be useful to sub-divide the Corporations category, using the in-game sectors might not be a good idea—my nation has many major corporations that don’t fit into any of those categories (military organizations, which certainly don’t fit, news media, which might be considered Information Technology, package delivery and postal services, et cetera). Commerce Heights 20:37, 23 Apr 2005 (GMT)

Political subcategory for parties?

We have 58 parties, but I think that a division in different ideal subcategory could be useful, also in order to create international organization (like the Comintern and similar). What do you think about it? Rufus T. Firefly 07:50, 31 May 2005 (GMT)

Something like a Comintern would make a good subcategory, but only if it already exists on or around NS. Creating a subcategory with the intention of having political parties mentioned on the wiki join it is a little bit of cart-before-the-horse engineering, I think. - Starblaydia 12:03, 31 May 2005 (GMT)

Altering the Infobox for nations

Is there any way one can alter the Infobox (I hope I'm remembering the term correctly) that one uses to make one's nation's page? Specifically, any way to remove the links to the various so-called calculators? Trokenyan 01:18, 6 Jun 2005 (GMT)

I figured out how to add a blocker to this some time ago, but it was disabled again by changes to the MediaWiki software (Version 1.4 beta, as I recall). See NSwiki talk:Info boxes for details of how it used to work. If the authors figure out the fix to restore nested templates, I will gladly reinstate the 'blocker'. → Fris Θtalk 00:09, 7 Jun 2005 (GMT)

Complaint Department

Missing Factbook?

I had a fully completed factbook Pascifitonia. I came online today and it has been deleted and at the bottom of my countries page where the links were there was no factbook. Where is it? None of them lower than P exist.

Category listings only display 200 sub-categories at a time. Your factbook is on the second page of Category:Factbooks (click the "next 200 link" to access it). --Goobergunch|? 21:22, 21 May 2005 (GMT)

"Show preview" doesn't work

When I press the "Show preview" button after writing/editing, it downloads and shows the editing page/tab, not the page as it's going to be. Leaves me having to hit the "Save page" button, re-edit, etc. I'm on Win98, using Mozilla 1.7.5 behind Privoxy 3.0.3 and Tor 0.0.9.7 Trokenyan 06:31, 2 Jun 2005 (GMT)

Try scrolling up; the result of the "Show preview" button should be that the page as it's going to be appears above the editing page/tab. --Goobergunch|? 16:13, 3 Jun 2005 (GMT)

Ah ha!! That was the clue I needed to fix it. The default setting puts the "preview" at the bottom, lost in all the clutter of other "helpful" bits. As the "preview" does not, in fact, show you what the result will look like, but rather, shows the text formatted like the rest of the edit page, it's not obvious what has happened.

Changing to "show preview before edit box" separated the "preview," visually, from the rest of the edit page, thereby making it possible to spot it.

Why isn't the preview formatted like it will appear when one is done? BBS's manage to do this, and they are an older 'technology', AFAIK.Trokenyan 01:06, 6 Jun 2005 (GMT)