Update: I forgot to mention that the Treasure Chests page is now up-to-date with Winter Holiday Treasure and new formatting.
Hello everyone!
Happy 2016! It has been an eventful year, and it's hard to believe it's passed us already. Let's kick off the year with a bang!
(Just a small note that the wiki's birthday is on the 20th, so make sure you don't miss it.)
If this is your first time reading one of these posts, welcome! These "weekly recaps" are something new we're trying this year. Every Saturday/Sunday of this year (depending on your time zone and where you live), a post not unlike this will appear in your notifications. They're designed for you to get the skinny on all of the occurences on the wiki since the last post, which will lead to better communication between wiki staff and the readers and writers. They'll also include polls and questions for you to answer, in order to support the larger role community input will play this year. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how the weekly recaps should be written, or if you would like a hand in writing them yourself, please let me know!
With that, let's get technical.
Shoutouts
Want to get recognized for your hard work across the wiki? It's easy! As long as you've put in a great deal of effort into editing pages or anything else that you think would benefit the site, we'll most likely notice and you'll get featured below. If you feel like you or someone else should be featured but don't see them here, please let me know in the Suggestions board and I'll make sure you appear in the list. Conversely, if you don't want to be featured, also inform me and I'll tend to it.
- Treyruffy has been zipping around the wiki, keeping pages up-to-date and adding images; this includes work on minigames, Treasure Shards, and Parties. Thanks!
- LeafGaming in Wikia is making a plethora of edits to various minigame pages, fixing redundancy and making them shine a bit better. This user has apparently also been with us since December 29th, 2014 in the form of an anonymous contributor, but has created an account only yesterday. Your dedication is much appreciated!
- We have Rydogge10 to thank for a new Game Command and the Treasure Party Bomb page. Thank you!
What needs doing
This section is new to this week's post. If you couldn't tell by the name already, the bullets below highlight areas of focus on the wiki, and will grow or shrink depending on new problems that are encountered. If the list gets big enough I might just move it over to a new page.
- Leave your feedback about the draft Minigame Infobox.
- Create new pages for the new Cosmetics.
- Add tips to the Super Paintball, Type Wars, and Gladiators pages.
- Leave a suggestion in the new Suggestions board.
- Straighten out the confusion with the YouTube ranks regarding their views per video and different premium ranks given to players at certain stages.
- Update the Clans page (looking at you, Legends and Titans).
- Add information on experience points earned to the minigame pages.
- Add some videos of playthroughs of minigames to minigame pages by those with any of the YouTube tags and/or a fairly prominent YouTuber.
News
Technical
Minigame Infobox template
I began converting the Minigame Infobox template into a portable infobox; the current version can be found here. This is to help ensure that readers on a mobile device are treated to a wiki experience that matches that of a desktop, and to support our mobile compatability mission of 2016. The template name also might be renamed to something else, but it's too early to tell. Once we've determined that the template is fit for deployment, the old infobox will be replaced with the new one. The Game Command Infobox will then get the same portability treatment.
Not only will the new template be fit for mobile as well as traditional computers, it will also be easier to use. Take a look at the current Minigame Infobox page and you'll quickly notice that the parameters used in the infobox are far more complex than they need to be. They use title style capitalization and there are almost no, if any, abbreviations. This might be fine if one were to use the VisualEditor to insert the template and edit its fields, but some of us prefer to do this using source code. While you could very well copy the documentation from the template page and insert it into the code, it would be far easier if the parameters themselves were simple and succinct. The point of parameters is not to be grammatically precise but to make it simple for the user to get the information across. Besides, the average reader isn't going to care about the source code that comprises the page.
The situation is quite the opposite in the new template; take a look and see for yourself. Abbreviations are almost never not used and there's a distinct absence of capital letters. Pagename becomes pname, Image Caption becomes cap, and all of the date parameters (Alpha Release Date, Beta Release Date, Official Release Date, and Date of Removal) are consolidated into one simple dates parameter. In addition to this, some parameters will be getting the boot while others will be introduced. Of course, the problem with such upheaval in style is that all of the Minigame Infoboxes on minigame pages will undoubtedly be disfigured, since they haven't been updated yet. I'm working on a solution to the problem, part of which involves keeping unpublished versions of all of the minigame pages with the updated infobox syntax handy, so all it would require is a simple copy-and-paste after the new infobox becomes live.
The infobox might be looking a bit generic and bland right now, but don't worry about that just yet; I'm still working on getting the core features out the door. Once that's done I'll see to it getting a similar theme to the current Minigame Infobox.
Key template
I think I've finally fixed the key template. In case you didn't know, the Key template displays different keyboard keys in a psuedo-key graphic. The problem with this was that it would always cause line breaks whenever paired with bullets or tables, and that there was an unsightly space in front of it. After redoing the entire style of the button with <span> tags, porting over the template to my test wiki, and inspecting this wiki's CSS, the underlying problem was in fact a single space.
You heard me right. A few pixels of emptiness caused mayhem for the template. And to think I've been having problems since May of last year. Oh well. If you still experience problems with the template, don't hesitate to inform me. Or, if you're more knowledgeable about this than I am, feel free to fix the problem yourself.
Image text template
I created the image text template with the hopes of being able to represent Minecraft items with images alongside their names. I've reversed my decision, since it looks terrible on mobile, and using the template on every single item that we reference on the wiki would require uploading an enormous amount of images, which would be a waste of time. But if you guys would like to see the template used, vote in the poll below. Here are examples of the template being utilized.
Unknown and none templates
The unknown and none templates both designate a table cell with the values "Unknown" and "None", respectively; it only works when applied in source code. I've enlarged the text in the template for better mobile visibility.
Minigame Navbox template
The Minigame Navbox template has been updated by Treyruffy with the most recent icons of various minigames, as well as those that were removed.
Wiki logo
I've updated the logo yet again in celebration of the new year. Not much to say here.
Wiki badges
Some wiki badges relating to the number of article edits a user has have been renamed in order to accomodate the introduction of the Titan rank. Below are the full list of changes.
| Former name | New name | Unlock requirements |
|---|---|---|
| Team Deathmatch Teammate | Got Ultra! | Make 50 article edits. |
| Got Ultra! | Got Hero! | Make 100 article edits. |
| Got Hero! | Got Legend! | Make 250 article edits. |
| Got Legend! | Got Titan! | Make 500 article edits. Badge is awarded multiple times for each successive 500 article edits. |
Minigames
Along with the Type Wars and Gladiators pages, the Super Paintball page has been updated to today's standard for minigame pages. The only thing it needs right now (aside from information on experience points) is more tips. In the spirit of making content display better on mobile, I shortened the tables in the page by moving and removing unnecessary information. Next up would probably be the Christmas Chaos minigame.
Polls
Previous
Last week I asked you guys whether or not you would like sub-headings to be bolded by default in this thread. The results were pretty clear: 6 of you wanted to see it happen, with none opposed or in between and 1 who didn't mind or care.
Since last week's weekly recap was on a Sunday, its polls expire tomorrow, not today. I can't collect any results from it this time, but expect to hear back on the next recap. If you haven't voted yet, please do so! They can be found here.
Current
Image text template
For more information, see above.
<script>JSSnippetsStack.push({dependencies:["/extensions/wikia/AjaxPoll/css/AjaxPoll.scss","/extensions/wikia/AjaxPoll/js/AjaxPoll.js"],callback:function(json){AjaxPoll.init(json)},id:"AjaxPoll.init"})</script>Cosmetics pages
For more information, please consult wikipedia:Wikipedia:Naming conventions (plurals).
<script>JSSnippetsStack.push({dependencies:["/extensions/wikia/AjaxPoll/css/AjaxPoll.scss","/extensions/wikia/AjaxPoll/js/AjaxPoll.js"],callback:function(json){AjaxPoll.init(json)},id:"AjaxPoll.init"})</script>Have a suggestion for the recaps? Do you have any other thoughts? Make sure to leave them down below. While you do that, I'll be pondering the title of the next recap (because I've run out of freebee names at this point).
Cheers,
Amazorazer
