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Wiki Mantainance

Questions about the FlightGear organisation, website, wiki etc.

Wiki Mantainance

Postby Ignis » Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:25 pm

Hello all,
Just realized how many things in FG Wiki are out to date. :roll:
For example:
    Screenshots are a decade old
    Phrases like "You cannot have a version even a week old." from 2012 :o
etc.

First of all I would like to ask you all to write the pages as if it was a time capsule (ex: Write "You must have the version X.xx" instead of "You cannot have a version even one week old"

Second of all, if you can please help me edit the out to date pages. And send a link to them as a reply to this post.

Thank you once again,
Ignis
Ps. Sorry for the language, as I am not an English native speaker :)
EDIT: Did you know that there is a #wiki channel on IRC? see: https://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_IRC_channel
Last edited by Ignis on Thu Feb 18, 2021 10:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Ignis » Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:29 pm

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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Delta5142 » Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:44 pm

Yes, I've also realized that many of the wiki pages are extremely out of date, nearly a decade old. They really need updating, not only for it to be easier for Flightgear users, but for people outside of the Flightgear community to have a better view and impression of this open source sim.

Regards,
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Ignis » Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:58 pm

Delta5142 wrote in Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:44 pm:Yes, I've also realized that many of the wiki pages are extremely out of date, nearly a decade old. They really need updating, not only for it to be easier for Flightgear users, but for people outside of the Flightgear community to have a better view and impression of this open source sim.

Regards,
Delta5142

I am very satisfied that somebody answered my post so quickly.
Thank you :lol:
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby merspieler » Tue Feb 16, 2021 11:08 pm

Welcome to the forum...

The issue with the wiki is, those who know best (the developers) are usually busy in their rare spare time developing rather than documenting stuff.

Those who don't develop, might lack knowledge of some details so they may or may not be able to accurately document things for the developers.

In addition there are very few people actually motivated to update decade old wiki articles.

Due to this, some articles consists mostly out of quotes from the mailing list.

So every helping hand is very welcome.
Thank you very much for doing this.
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Johan G » Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:39 pm

There is a lot to be said about the wiki and I think you are partially correct. Though while a lot have changed a lot or have even been deprecated, there is still a lot of articles nobody have touched in a decade that still are just as relevant today.

There are many reasons to why some articles are that outdated, some of them mentioned above, but in addition there is also a couple of seemingly unrelated things in regard to the structure of the wiki. Not too rarely it is not all that easy to know what to search for and for those cases pages that are related need to be linked too each other, for example through categories, navigation boxes, or links to related pages. [1] There is also quite an overlap between articles in particular about some subjects, and many pages are missing a good, descriptive lead section that in one or a few short paragraphs summarizes what a page is about. All this makes it more complicated both to find what you are looking for and to keep articles up to date, and is something I find very frustrating.
____
[1] See Special:LonelyPages, that list orphaned pages, pages without links to them, and Special:UncategorizedPages pages without a category.
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Hooray » Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:45 pm

The points are very valid - however, many of these issues could be easily remedied by installing a few more extensions - unfortunately, our requests to install such extensions have rarely been handled so far ...

Speaking in general, being able to customize articles using placeholders and variables would really go a long way.
For instance, being able to make certain pages/paragraphs specific to a configurable variable (version number, operating system, linux distro etc)

That way, we could easily provide a wizard-based interface, where people would select their filter criteria and only get to see what's relevant to them.

With more and more distinct "modes" (ALS vs. Rembrandt, Basic Weather vs. Advanced Weather, Compositor vs non-compositor, CompositeViewer etc) it would really make sense to allow people to configure such things - and we could easily use some heuristics to exclude/customize certain paragraphs accordingly.

Also, there are other developments (aircraft vs vessels vs spacecraft) that could be more easily supported that way
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby tom_nl » Wed Feb 17, 2021 8:20 pm

I've just done a major update on FGpanel https://wiki.flightgear.org/FGPanel

Any comments or suggestions (or edits) welcome.

Tom
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Ignis » Wed Feb 17, 2021 9:08 pm

Thank you, so much.
"If we're together we can do this, if not, then not"
Last edited by Johan G on Wed Feb 17, 2021 9:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Please do not quote the entire preceding post.
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Johan G » Wed Feb 17, 2021 9:42 pm

tom_nl wrote in Wed Feb 17, 2021 8:20 pm:Any comments or suggestions (or edits) welcome.

Did some cleanup/copyediting and added some templates used when linking to the main repositories (See diff, in essence what I changed).
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby tom_nl » Thu Feb 18, 2021 9:17 am

Thanks Johan - that looks a lot better. it's the first time i've contributed to a wiki article (though I do a lot of technical writing at work).

I've ideas where I can contribute to other articles, so i'll try to write some more contributions.

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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Hooray » Thu Feb 18, 2021 12:40 pm

A fairly simple way to get starte is helping update/proof-read/translate and format existing articles, or even just adding relevant screen shots/youtube videos
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
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Re: Wiki Mantainance

Postby Ignis » Thu Feb 18, 2021 10:49 pm

Hooray wrote in Wed Feb 17, 2021 7:45 pm:The points are very valid - however, many of these issues could be easily remedied by installing a few more extensions - unfortunately, our requests to install such extensions have rarely been handled so far ...

Who confirms the extensions?
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