User:Voxel

Ambitious guy who just started to clean up this place a bit, to let it rise again. ;)

Description of my cleanup

Short: I will make this wiki that is based on wikimedia, wikimedia conform.

I contribute to different wikimedia projects, like wikipedia since many years, so I am pretty familiar with it.

This wiki should match the Best Practice principles of the Wikipedia. In every wiki made with the media wiki software, it should always be the same way how to do things.

All the following explained changes I will make, are not fully done yet and it will take some time to get them done.

Oh and do not be afraid, I wont delete any content, except the outaded content (for example I deleted a sentence in one article that recommends downloading mods from Minetest Bower), also spam, adds, etc. if there is any.

Restructuring pages

I've found many pages that do not fit to the wiki standards (look at the page source of a wikipedia page to compare).

An example of a restructured article be me (nearly no new or modified content): Article:Mods

The subpage of a subpage of a...

I decided to merge the subpages of articles into their main article, cause the most of these subpages containing nearly no content and it is just a waste of ressources on both sides, server and client.

Also it is a mess to find all these pages without using the links in the main article linking to them (and I already saw examples where not all subpages of an article were linked in the main article...) or the page information link and after that the sublink for subpages (most wikimedia software users do not even know that these exist...).

I will make some exceptions for large tutorials like robots and stuff like that, cause else the main article would be bloated.

I will set links to these these subpages in the main articles.

An example how that looks like for the page Simple Mobs:

The old one was a subpage of the page Mods, with even more subpages for every (!) single mob in that mod: Mods/Simple Mobs(Old)

Now it is stil a subpage of the page Mods, but I merged all the subpages for every single mob into the main article Mods/Simple Mobs(New)

By the way it is not my fault, that this article isn't complete and up to date.

Inconsistent, redundant and unclear categories

Further I noticed, that the categories are inconsistent and some of them are redundant (same topic different categories).

I decide to bring logic into these, like it is done in the wikipedia (correct and logical tree structures) and I will create some new categories and put a delete template in some others, after I moved their subcategories.

Also the sorting of categories below an article should be from specific to general.

So for that example page Simple mobs it must be like that:

[[Category:Mobs mods]]
[[Category:Mods]]
[[Category:Languages pages]]

Categories bounded to templates

In the context of this, it is important, that the template {{Languages}} mostly find at the top of an article, needs to be replaced with or edited to {{Languages|nocat=1}}, cause the first one contains the category [[Category:Languages_pages]], (see here for details: Template:Languages) wich is then the first listed category in the order of categories at the bottom.

Also import is to add the [[Category:Languages_pages]] manually.

Categories should never be bound to templates anyway, except for important ones like delete, or need maintanence or similiar things.

Translations

Pages / Articles

Further the translation pages are subpages, maybe we can not do it like it is at wikipedia (a real language menu), I don't know.

If not, then we should move all language specific subpages to their own main pages, the actual state isn't wiki conform and annoying.

For example, I can have the page "Examplepage" in German then it will be called "Examplepage/de", that's the pagetitle then, but that title is not german, it should have the name "Beispielseite".

Also people started such subpages with the translated title like that:

= '''Beispielseite''' =

that's ugly and against the wiki syntax rules.

For that we need to have a new type of that language template if possible.

It is already possible to link a page inside that template, individual for each site you put that template:

{{Languages|Pagelink|nocat=1}}

but we need to have multiple links there, for all available languages.

I don't know if that is possible, but it would solve that pagetitle issue.

Understandable Categories

But there's another issue related to the categories again: people who can not read english, do not understand the categorie links at the bottom of the articles.

Best would be, that we have an english article about education purpose for example, with the "Category:Education" and the same article as subpage in french for example, with the "Catégorie:Éducation" template in it. But that doesn't work, the french word Catégory isn't registered the same way as it is in english, it will always create a page and not a new category, same for any other languages of course.

So we need a workarround.

For now I just let the language specific category in the translated pages (or put them there if not existent, cause many articles miss them) and I create a new structure for the language specific categories, for every language that is present in this wiki, with at least one page.

But before I give an example how this will look like, I need to say, that the root category needs a new name and I recommend [[Category:Minetest_Wiki]].

Why this name? Because it is multilingual, when you visit a webpage called minetest.net you probably know what the word minetest means and it is called all the same in every language and even understandable if not written in the letters of other languages. That counts even more for the word Wiki

I already created that category: Category:Minetest_Wiki, that contains nothing at the moment, because all categories needs to moved from the actual root category to the new one.

As everyone can see it contains that "switch language" banner at the top and that's because, every language will have it's own root category and own subcategories.

At the moment just the german root category exists Category:Minetest_Wiki/de and some subcategories there.

Issue: no matter what I tried, I can not linking back from the german root category to the english one *sigh* (this wiki drives me mad...).

Restructuring base work

However, here's an example for the structure of the translated pages:

Category:Translated_Pages contains subcategories for all available languages named in their specific language (at the moment only for german, spanish, russian and japanese, to just show different kinds of letters and yes I know russian and japanese are not correct sorted in at that page, but that's something that can not be fixed and also yes I know, at the moment these are redundant because the old ones in english language are still there, but I need to move all their categories first before deleting them).

After I put all the non-english pages in their correct subcategory (would be nice if the admin could do that with the "wikimedia magic something tool", cause I know that moving multiple subsites to other mainsites is possible), I will start to apply the new category structure for them. Ok in real I already do that synchron, cause I need an overview over the whole thing here.

Let the "rest" of the community participate

I would welcome anyone who like to help me with these things, cause it is a lot of work!

When most of the basic work is done, I will post in the different language subforums of forum.minetest.net and ask people to help with that stuff (I can not speak and read all these languages for example).

Also I will create a main topic, to tell the the wiki was cleaned up and that people should consider to partizipate and contribute in it.

Further Ideas

We could "hire" modtesters, and let them editing the mod articles for example, or people who take photos of texture packs or scenes from games.

Notes

This text will probably gets updates, if this happens, I will mention this at the top, so people can check the History tab.

Where you can also find me

You can find me in the following places:
Minetest ContentDB
Minetest Forum
notabug.org
gitlab (I use this only to report issues)
github (I use this only to report issues)