Instead of getting rid of all the Miasmon articles, it would be more beneficial if we keep the content but store them in a project page outside of the mainspace, under the "Figverse:" space instead. That way, it will be easier and quicker for us to add information if the game releases because we'll have rough drafts to start with. Before anyone protests, this does not break the "unreleased works must have no more than one article each" rule because it won't be in the mainspace.

About Template:Alert, would it be possible to add an optional parameter that can give details and reasonings? For example, the stub template should be able to say "It should be expanded by...doing such and such" or something similar.

Sorry, I've been offline for a few days.

I'm not seeing anything in need of changes there. One thing I thought of though; we need some kind of template or mockup for the list of references.

Well, they're all definitely levels, but not all of them are definitely locations. Since it seems kind of awkward to split them between the two category trees, I think we should have them all as levels.

Looks good! Very useful!

Seconded. Could you see about adding this, DK?

...Wait, what?

I stopped updating those pages because I was under the impression that they were going to be deleted. As far as I'm aware, nothing has been decided otherwise. You seem to be jumping the gun on TheFifteenthMember's suggestion there, DarthKitty. If we can just discuss it for a bit, I'd like to argue against keeping the monster pages.

The Figverse space is part of the mainspace, so putting the articles there wouldn't stop us from breaking the rules. Additionally, as we've talked about a lot while deciding what to do about unreleased games, we have very little information about these and what we do have is highly likely to be inaccurate when compared to the actual game, assuming that it is in fact ever released. The chances of these articles being useful when we add game information is very slim.

Provided we decide against keeping the extra pages, I'd be happy to do this.

Apparently, you can't create custom namespaces with Wikia yet another sign of MediaWiki's superiority so there's no designated place for project pages and notes. Regardless, a simple list of Miasmon monsters will still be an immense help later on. Instead of going out in a crazy edit flurry to add all sorts of random, newly-obtained tidbits of information, we'll have a easy, structured and methodical way of working down the list. At the very least, it'll give us a few good trivia points if a monster is cut from the game or a radical change takes place.

If you guys disagree and the articles are still destined for elimination, can I have some time to make a list on my own userspace?

I don't think adding details/reasons directly to the template is a good idea. It will make the template more obtrusive, and more likely to break layouts. Collapsing the reasons will make the template expand horizontally for even short sentences. Instead, I added the detail parameter.

The detail parameter accepts any pagename (a link without brackets) and turns it into a link. You can use it to link to a more detailed explanation. This will make it easier for people to discuss broken or ugly pages, and how to fix them.

I also got rid of the broken variation, since it seemed obvious. (This page is broken! Please fix it.) If a page is broken, someone will probably fix it quickly. If they can't fix it, they'll ask someone else for help. A violation would just get in the way.

Finally, I reworded most of the variations. I think they're more useful now. What about you guys?

EDIT: if the changes don't show up, try clicking on this link.

That we do!

Then what would be the point of Category:Figverse?

I was fixing up the monster pages to demonstrate how little content Miasmon has. I didn't want to be accused of cheating, or deliberately half-assing, so I asked you to clean up my clean up.

...Yeah, I didn't think it through. At all. XD

Um, no. MediaWiki is an open-source, PHP-based engine for building wikis. There are a few other engines, but MediaWiki is the most popular. MediaWiki is used by Wikipedia, every wiki hosted by Wikia, and many independant wikis, including everything in both the NIWA and SEIWA.

Wikia is a Wiki hosting service, or wiki farm. Wiki farms host and manage wikis—paying for bandwidth and taking care of most technical issues. Wikia is a corporation, so money is their primary goal. That said, I don't think Wikia is completely evil: a lot of people who work there want to help, and there are a lot of volunteers and ordinary people involved.

Because Wikia handles most of the technical stuff, people are able to make their own wiki very easily. Unfortunately, that also means administrators can't just change something important. We have to work with the system, and that means asking Wikia staff to change things for us. Things like custom namespaces.

Yes, Wikia does allow up to three custom namespaces. Of course, we would have to discuss them first, which is a problem because I don't think we need custom namespaces. At least, not right now, and certainly not for this. Creating a custom namespace just for a few outdated, contentless pages would be like dropping a nuclear bomb to deal with an ant infestation in your studio apartment: complete overkill.

Pseudolonewolf changes his plans frequently, so there's no guarantee that he'll release Miasmon, or that anything will stay the same. There's no guarantee that we know everything, either; if everything about Miasmon was public, then fewer people would want to play it.

I think we'll have to deal with a "crazy edit flurry" regardless, especially if there are more than three people; I don't think there is an "easy, structured and methodical way". Trivia is no concern either, since most of that information will remain available for the foreseeable future.

To say nothing of Da Rules...

A list of potential monsters might make it to the summary page, sans detail of course. (It's not like there's a ton of detail anyway.) It would be easy to maintain, and could collapse to make scrolling easier. Look, here's what the code would be:

<div class='mw-collapsible mw-collapsed'>
* Monster
* Another monster
* Some monster
</div>

Anyway, the Miasmon category is nice and clean right now, so I'm willing to leave it alone for a week or two.

Speaking of things to delete, can I get rid of Vulpin Adventure stuff now?

Doubleposting since this thread is dead.

Anyway, I've started Template:Text, and I'd really appreciate some feedback on it.

First off, both templates look great. Can't think of anything to criticize about them.

Well, both the high-level concepts (deities, elements, alternate planes) and high-level locations (star systems, planets, even down to continents).

So Nusku-Girru Binary System, Belfan and Gonoroth would all be in Category:Figverse, but Goznor would be in Category:Games.

Yeah, definitely. I'll add that when I make the page.

Go right ahead. Wipe it.

In newer news, I made a mockup for Deliverance premade weapons, which I know DarthKitty saw because there's now a better one. My thinking here is that while we agreed we don't want individual pages for the constructed weapons, we also don't want to clutter up the nice page templates with information on the weapons listed there, and we also also don't want to make people have to run around to four different pages and apply a system of arcane rules just to figure out how much they can sell that weapon drop for.

I'm envisioning something similar for spells. I might argue for splitting this into ally and enemy spells, though, as those would be 64 and 74 spells long respectively as opposed to the whopping 126 spells on a combined page.

I'm going to skip the references mockup for now, since I have basically no idea where to go with that. But we do also need a status effects mockup. Any arguments for/against splitting those into separate pages?

I made the list but using the code Darth provided above, the collapsible box is colourless (or white) so it's hard to know it's there unless you see the "Expand". What shall we do with the Miasmon images for the time being? They'll likely be needed in the future (or overwritten with better quality, in-game ones).

Also, I never suggested that we create a customspace solely for project pages. But I do think we need somewhere where we can host community pages, projects and events which brings us onto the next conversation topic...

Trailing partially-answered questions from every preceeding topic, we plow into Community Involvement.

To be honest, I'm not sure how well this is going to work out. Flash games have a small fanbase compared to most things that end up with wikis, and a highly irregular episodic influx of new content. I have personally witnessed the death and utter abandonment of a flash game wiki, and I just stood there posting interminable content in the desperate and futile hope of staving off the inevitable, without a clue of how to improve things.

But I'm not going to just bring horror stories here. I admin over on Sonny Wiki, where in spite of my ancient, broken and poorly-coded templates, and a near-total lack of new information to be added, the wiki still maintains an active userbase and very frequent edits. It's almost... Wait. No new content, old, broken, badly-made, but still really active despite all expectations... The wiki is a zombie. How appropriate.

So basically, attracting a community is really vital to the future of the wiki, and it's definitely possible, but I haven't the slightest idea what we can do about it.

I'm still a little confused about the distinction between the two categories. For instance, SMECOF2005X has our oh-so-heroic protagonist flying between different planets, each of which is a level. Each of those planets has a level page (e.g. Lingonite (SMECOF)) and a planet page (e.g. Lingonite). Should they be merged, or should other locations be split into multiple pages like that?

Having multiple pages for the same location would probably be confusing, especially to new users. We could make navigation easier with suites, but I'm still not sure if we have enough information to make that worthwhile. However, it would make categorization a cinch.

Meanwhile, having a single page for each location might be confusing, if we don't do it right. On top of that, categorization becomes arbitrary; we'd be back to asking, "What is this page most about, a location or a level?"

I think we have enough information to split Status Effects into individual pages, although... what about Status Effects that span multiple games? For instance, should we have multiple pages about Poison (MARDEK, Deliverance, Beast Signer, etc.), or only one?

Firecrow volunteered to write a summary page about Miasmon. We can't keep other pages about Miasmon, since it hasn't been officially released yet. We also can't keep images about Miasmon unless they're used on the summary page, because then they wouldn't be used at all.

Before you ask, I don't think it's a good idea to cram 144 Miasmon-related images onto one summary page. I know you don't like getting rid of information, but this is necessary if we want to follow our own Content Policy.

We already have two places for that:

• The forums
• Our Project namespace, Figverse Wiki

There are four steps to building a community, as far as I know.

First, you need interest. A lot of people want to know about Final Fantasy, or Marvel, or Yu-Gi-Oh!, so there's interest in those subjects. Many people think Flash games aren't "real" games, so there isn't much interest in them. That puts us at a disadvantage from the get-go. :<

Second, you need content. The first time somebody visits a wiki, they're looking for information. People aren't looking to join a community, that's our goal. No amount of features or tricks can replace good information. We have some information, but we need more.

Third, you need structure. People are impatient, so if information is confusing or difficult to find, they won't stick around. It's up to us to make things fast and easy. In my opinion, this is our most important goal right now. Everything else needs to take a backseat until our wiki is clean, organized, and easy-to-navigate.

Finally, you need features. Unless we give people a reason to come back, they will leave after they find what they want. Things like Forums, Chat, Arenas, and Featured Content can bring people back regularly. We have a few features right now, but we could use some more. However, features are hard to implement without good content and structure.

Ah, yes, I forgot about SMECOF. It... complicates things, to be honest.

I can't see splitting the city pages into locations and levels. Take Template:Sandbox/DarthKitty/Goznor, for example. If we split a location page out of that, what would it have? The description and location, both very small sections, seem the only things that are really more Location than Level. And since Goznor isn't really all that important in the greater Astrostles galaxy, splitting off a few tiny sections into a separate page that is likely going to be always referenced at the same time as the original page doesn't seem to do anything but act as a slight hindrance to navigation.

Planets, on the other hand, are different. Lingonite in particular, but the other Draco system planets to a lesser extent, is relevant to the Astrostles galaxy. It is referenced in other games. It is very much setting, and there is a lot of information about it that is neither found in nor referencing SMECOF. So there's enough information to support a separate page, and enough relevance to call for it.

But, as you mentioned, this would mean we'd probably have to introduce suites. As we've already pretty much made the decision not to majorly incorporate them into the site's navigation, this provides a problem. We don't really want to incorporate them for such a minor usage...

Although...

This is just an idea, so let me know what you think, but we do already have something sort of superficially similar to suites on the wiki. Namely, the you may be looking for similar-page warnings. If we made a more obvious template for those, it could be a kind of 'pseudo-suite'. The pages wouldn't be grouped as subpages of the first one, and the primary method of navigation would still be from the individual game or universe pages, but it would allow us to link Location and Level pages together wherever both are necessary (As hinted previously, I don't think any games except SMECOF have enough non-level information on their levels to require a location page as well, so setting location pages as only used at the continent level or above [at least for now; this doesn't have to be a written rule] would sort that out nicely). As a bonus, this would also provide easy links between related concepts in different games, better tying the wiki together as a whole.

I have made a mockup for a single-game Poison article. There is more than enough information here to make an article (and I suspect that the shortest status effect articles are also the game-specific ones). There doesn't seem to be any justification for combining the games' status effects if we don't combine the items.

I think I have done this. It combines most of the basic information from the game's pages in an easy-to-read, single-page format. All it's missing is an Unfinished Game notice, which I left out because I wasn't sure if Template:Alert is ready to be rolled out yet. Check it out and let me know if it's missing anything obvious.

RE getting community:

Sounds like we have a clear plan here:

1. Get Structure
2: Get Content
C) Get Features
Finally, profit!

Our overt navigation relies on six main features: Categories, Navboxes, Disambiguations, the Main Page links, the Navigation Menu and Search. DK's done some excellent work on sorting out the Categories. I'm going to try to work on the Navboxes (content only, of course, since I'm not nearly competent enough to fix what isn't broken). I won't push this onto the wiki yet though, given the large number of redlinks that are going to be in this due to missing content.

The main page linkboxes are pretty important to get fixed. We're missing SMECOF, TRoY and Cultling Quest; also, some of the existing ones need work (and I don't like how the Raider series and Raider Zero are combined while the rest of the wiki and the games themselves present them as separate, unrelated stories happening to the same character).

As for the other three parts (Disambiguations, Navigation Menu and Search), these are all tied pretty closely to the next thing:

The Page Update Thingy

This not only ties into navigation as stated above (it includes fixing the Disambiguation pages, allows us to update the NavMenu as we add missing pages and pretty much makes Search not nearly as useless), but it's also pretty much the single fix for our Comprehensibility problem (the other half of structure) and serves as a handy springboard into updating and fixing Content. But to start this, we need to finalize both the mockups and the manuals.

For manuals: DK, you've been working really hard on this, and we've been sitting here nodding a lot. Can you give us some sort of status update? What exactly needs to be agreed on to finalize these?

For mockups, here's what we have currently:

• Navigation Lists (Enemies (MARDEK), Items (MARDEK), Quests (MARDEK))
• Detail Summary Lists (Weapons (Deliverance))
• Comparison Lists (Helmets/List)
• Enemies (Ghoul, Temperance)
• Levels (Goznor)
• Skills (Lightning Bolt, HP+10%)
• Characters (Mardek Innanu El-Enkidu)
• Items (YalortianAmulet (MARDEK), Potion (MARDEK))
• Quests (Slay the Mighty Dragon!)

These ones still need debate:

• Soundtracks (Soundtrack (MARDEK))

Never been discussed; I think it's good, but a link to the Archive music page (just the game page, not the individual song pages) at the bottom might be nice.

• Status Effects (Poison (MARDEK))

We're discussing it now!

• Disambiguations (Topaz)

We agreed this was BAD. We never replaced it.

I think we've concluded that games and transcripts can just use one of the existing articles as their template, and most articles in the Figverse and Developers trees will by necessity be on a case-by-case basis, and just stylistically based on the other stuff.

So what else DO we need?

Off the top of my head:

• References section
• Beasts and signers (should be just a minor modification of the existing Monsters mockups
• Something to replace the CBC Gameplay Elements list pages. Maybe similar to Deliverance Weapons?
• Statistics
• I... don't even know for SMECOF. Honestly, I don't like that game, it's been forever since I played it and I've never finished it. ...That is probably something I should get over with.

Blah. That is my epic path forward post. Questions? Comments? Unwarranted insults? Well-warranted insults? Non-sequiturs? (Just kidding, no non-sequiturs.)

PS: DK, you probably knew this, but your recent update to the Text template broke the hover feature for me.