Overhaul Discussion

We're using this page to discuss an overhaul to the wiki, reorganizing the sections and using WikiNames and Categories.

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Contents

  1. Overhaul Discussion
    1. New Front Page
      1. New Front Page Discussion
    2. SubPages
    3. Categories
      1. Polycount Wiki Categories
      2. Categories Discussion
    4. Glossary
      1. Glossary Discussion

New Front Page

We used to have a sketch here of what the main page table would look like. Now the actual main page table is more accurate, so it has been included here:

New Front Page Discussion

--Carlos Montero

--Eric Chadwick

--Carlos Montero

--Eric Chadwick

I've been starting with the "leaf" pages like CurvatureMap:

  1. Rename it into WikiName format.

  2. Add a redirect to the old page. (just discovered the need for this, need to revisit past edits)

  3. Edit the renamed page to remove the breadcrumbs, and to add the categories at the bottom.

  4. Create the Category page (see the #Categories section below).

For example see CategoryTexturing. -- EricChadwick 2010-07-06 13:08:14

SubPages

SubPages might seem like a good way to organize things, but you can't link to the subpage directly with a plain WikiName link. For example:

So let's avoid using SubPages.

Categories

Categories are used to add structure to the wiki and to provide navigation links at the bottom of each page.

Polycount Wiki Categories

The wiki is organized into a tree-like structure, using categories:

Categories Discussion

My ideas on more organization. I think every Art Discipline Category could have the same 3 sub-categories to help seperate the information held within. Those are Theory, Technique, and Reference. I think pretty much anything can fit into these three categories, and having them be consistent across the disciplines is a good organizational strategy. 

 . Art Disciplines
  . CategoryCharacter
   . CharacterTheory
    . CharacterDesign
   . CharacterTechnique
    . CharacterModeling
    . CharacterTexturing
    . CharacterTextureCoordinates
   . CharacterReference
  . CategoryEnvironment
   . EnvironmentTheory
   . EnvironmentTechnique
    . EnvironmentLighting
    . EnvironmentModeling
    . EnvironmentTexturing
    . EnvironmentTextureCoordinates
   . EnvironmentReference

I would understand concerns towards building too deep of a hierarchy, and I share those concerns. However, I think this could be a good organizational strategy for each Discipline Category by listing fullsearches for these three initial sub-categories directly on the Discipline's main Category page (kind of like CategoryTexturing is now). -- Carlos Montero

Sounds good. A couple questions/concerns:

  1. The category mechanism may require the prefix Category in order to actually work with FullSearch. It doesn't! See EnvironmentTheory, I used it as a category on the WikiSandBox page and it works fine without the Category- prefix. I wonder though if we should use it anyway, just to keep things kosher? Might be some other Category-specific feature we're unaware of at this time. Would it be a PITA to use the prefix?

  2. My idea for using categories to organize a tree was that each leaf page would contain all its parents' categories. For example, an article about designing a mechanical character would include these three categories at the bottom: CategoryCharacter, CharacterTheory, and CharacterDesign. There really is no "tree" in any sense except our imaginations, there's only whether a page is in certain categories or not, but I think this kind of strategy might be helpful.

  3. We should illuminate the tiered structure somewhere on the wiki. Where? Perhaps we should have one format for users (navigational help on the home page?) and another format for editors (to help with editing uniformity, maybe in the Polycount-specific help page WikiFormatting?).

  4. Please use @ SIG @ (without the spaces) at the end of each comment. This will add dates to our comments. At some point we should have a sub-forum for the wiki, but for now this is all we have.

-- EricChadwick 2010-07-16 21:59:47

  1. I'm alright with using the Category prefix, I just felt like some of them were getting ridiculously long (CategoryEnvironmentTextureCoordinates), haha.

  2. I'm understanding your idea for category use a lot more now. It's not a specific tiered hierarchy, but more like a system of tags. This makes a lot of sense, let's go with it.

-- CarlosMontero 2010-07-17 05:25:46

CategoryTheory and CategoryTechnique are starting to seem like pointless extra clicks to me. I'm adding the categories now so I can move the 2DTutorials content. Let's just use CategoryDesign instead of Theory (what else is going to be there?). And CategoryTechnique seems overkill since I can't see there being more than 10 categories in each discipline, for example: 

 . CategoryEnvironment
  . CategoryEnvironmentDesign (includes modularity, workflow)
  . CategoryEnvironmentFoliage
  . CategoryEnvironmentLighting
  . CategoryEnvironmentModeling (includes sculpting)
  . CategoryEnvironmentSkies
  . CategoryEnvironmentTexturing (includes texture coordinates)

The flatter the better.

I see we have CategoryReferenceLibrary under the Information heading, so maybe we don't need specific reference sub-categories for each discipline. We could just have page names like ReferenceCharacter, ReferenceConcept, ReferenceEnvironment, all within the category CategoryReferenceLibrary.

-- EricChadwick 2010-07-17 17:03:04

Glossary

Adam is interested in revamping the old glossary that we put on Polycount back in 2001 or so, the idea is we could add links in our pages to standard definitions.

Some of the Glossary is wrong, so we should move them into the wiki piecemeal, updating them as we go.

Every Glossary page should be in CategoryGlossary.

Glossary Discussion

  1. Inclusions... Not sure I understand your idea for using inclusions for glossary terms. I hate having a page broken up by random glossary tables here and there, it's just clutter in the way of the main article. If I want to learn more about a term I'll click thru to its page. I would love to have a rollover floater for terms, but I don't think we have that level of control.

  2. Format... I think we should not reuse the old glossary 3-cell format. I feel it's a waste of space, doesn't match the wiki world. I think it's better to have a heading, then a paragraph, then include the images on the same page. The old glossary links to a separate page to store all the images, simply to keep the main page cleaner. But a wiki is a totally different layout scheme, so we should take advantage of this.

  3. Let's avoid spaces in page names. I updated the WikiFormatting page to make this clearer (hopefully!).

-- EricChadwick 2010-07-16 15:38:30

I agree on all counts. I didn't put a lot of thought into the glossary, just went with trying to match the old one, but you are right that a more "wiki style" format makes sense. -- CarlosMontero 2010-07-17 05:16:20

I have started migrating some glossary pages over. As of now they are verbatim, which I understand is not desirable. However my intention with this is to get some of them ported over, then update them once they're here. I don't necessarily have the knowledge to update these as I go, but I can do the grunt work of getting them over here. Basically, this is a step #1, which obviously must be built upon. Thoughts? --BrandonPhoenix 2012-05-21 07:11:30

OK, thanks for this. If you could, please standardize the warning on pages that are out of date. I made a warning message that can be easily included on a page. Just add this code at the top: 

<<Include(OutOfDate)>>

For example, I added it to the TextureBlending page. -- EricChadwick 2010-08-10 19:40:22

OverhaulDiscussion (last edited 2011-01-05 15:18:10 by EricChadwick)