What could make working on the wiki more appealing?

loboguild

I occasionally browse to the wiki and I gotta admit: It's dead. @two30 probably was the one guy managing the wiki and looks like he or she left shoes nobody could fill. There are some updates, but probably most of the stuff is outdated or not even there. Especially for an "official" source the state of the wiki is a hot mess. So my question to the community is: How could you change that?

Here are my two cents:

• The tools are lackluster. Back in the day I actually added some items on the wiki, but soon stopped because creating tooltips is just completely dull. It's as much an issue with the Curse engine as it is with Cryptic. Why the devs can't manage to implement a simple API that hands out tooltips for a given item is beyond me. The code is already there from the abandoned Gateway, just do it please... Then Curse, or somebody, could code a simple replace to make them work on the wiki. At this point there's no incentive to add items and tooltips, especially since they are largely available elsewhere for free.
• PWE's support for the wiki is just not existent. The community engagement around here is pathetic anyway, and the wiki is a good example. There have been some halfhearted efforts to run giveaways or contests involving the wiki, but it never quite worked out. How about handing out minor ZEN for a new submitted and approved page? Or, you know, something.
• Bring a tooltip engine to the forum. Ok so this is a tricky one. There is a superb tooltip engine that we can't use around here, but it might make more sense to link items to the wiki and redirect the traffic there anyway. If guys want to link items, and can't find them, it's a great incentive to add them and have the tooltip available. Not sure Curse offers such a feature, but even if not it's not a lot of coding work for a skilled Javascript guy I would assume.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

loboguild

Well, can't say the lack of comments in this thread indicate you're wrong

Seems like there's either that one guy that puts effort into something or nothing is happening at all. Might even be hard to blame PWE since they might have realized as well that it's a project bound to fail.

katamaster81899

I just spent an hour trying to update just the http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Control_Wizard/Epic_Gear

The wiki needs so much loving right now, it's unreal. If they were to reward... an enchanted key or 50 zen for every significant page update, or group of tooltip updates... that'd be pretty nice....

nitocris83

Wikis are insanely time consuming and maintaining them is a rough endeavor, especially for MMOs, which is why they are traditionally a community project (if you look at other MMOs, their wikis are not officially affiliated with the Developers/Publishers). That being said, if there's anything I can do to help update/maintain the wiki without it impacting our internal resources too much, we can discuss that.

loboguild

Thanks for stopping by @nitocris83

Again: The most reasonable and actually huge step forward would be an api call or page to retrieve items, their info (icons, categories, flags, classes, etc etc) and their tooltips. Guys are already parsing the tooltips without any help, which is a huge amount of work considering that you need to built every item from scratch.

The "semi-professionals" copy tooltips and item information from the game's memory, which I believe might even be against the ToS. To get the item icons you need to manually unpack the game files, which again is against the ToS. The only program that can reliably get item definitions and item information is a bot tool (no kidding!). Conclusion:

Currently anybody who wants to achieve something item/tooltip related on the wiki and elsewhere in reasonable time actually puts their account in danger.

That's effing insane and one of the very annoying issues that the shutdown of the Gateway has brought.​​

beckylunatic

nameexpired said:

I do not expect players from Xbox and PS4 to care as much for the wiki as PC players do as it needs a change of medium to go to the wiki.

Console players are actually massively disappointed the wiki isn't better because they'd like to USE it as a resource, but they're not willing to populate or correct it either. They're just peeved the info they want isn't on it.

tripsofthrymr

There is already a facility in the game client to export certain information (/ExportGuildMemberList filename.csv).

A similar command to export tooltips would provide an API without building anything fundamentally new, e.g. /ExportTooltip ItemOrPowerName could export a graphic of the tooltip and a text/CSV/XML file with related information.

It's probably only worth putting the dev hours in to do that if coupled with a meaningful program to encourage people to re-engage with the Wiki.

katamaster81899

After spending a mere few hours updating, editing, and creating pages in my spare time, I've already made it to be the #1 contributor in the past 30 days. There is NOBODY adding anything at the moment - practically everything from the last module is missing. I don't know how to datamine tooltips and upload them and all that stuff, so anyone who knows how... pretty please?

katamaster81899

I've been pondering how to get continued interest and participation in updating the wiki - and I had an idea.

What if, every month, the #1 wiki contributor got a legendary mount of their choosing?

Maybe the two or three runner ups could get a epic mount of their choosing?

Make it into a contest, with in-game rewards that make updating the wiki worth the investment in time.

@nitocris83​​

nameexpired

How would you measure the # 1 contributor?
# lines? # of characters typed? # of pages touched? # of edits?

They try to do measure stuff like this with LOC (lones of code) for programmers. Boy were the dev's happy for a few years!
Then a smart person came and measured "bugs fixed" for bonus calculation. More happy years!

katamaster81899

nameexpired said:

How would you measure the # 1 contributor?
# lines? # of characters typed? # of pages touched? # of edits?

They try to do measure stuff like this with LOC (lones of code) for programmers. Boy were the dev's happy for a few years!
Then a smart person came and measured "bugs fixed" for bonus calculation. More happy years!

I would just use the current wiki leaderboard that already exists? Is it 100% accurate and representative? No. But it exists, and it works.