User talk:UDID

Discuss project below

That was fast.

Welcome by Bob Moncrief omitted.

For your keenness, you are hereby drafted to review project UDID. UDID (talk) 04:08, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Not sure what you need me to review! Your project (while seemingly beyond massive) is pretty straightforward. One question — are you another user taking on a side project? No need to reveal your identity if you don't want :) Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 04:10, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Format, presentation, scope, et cetera. Once the basics are nailed down, populating this with data should be fairly straightforward (think webcrawler/wikibot), and it should be pretty simple to extend the format if desired. Notably, plan is for people to be able to submit record for character (e.g. images, *witness records, &c) and have them be publicly visible – think a wiki-style Rogue's Gallery, but open to all manner of records and (hopefully) not subject to the same fate.

As to your question, that would be a reasonable assumption. :) UDID (talk) 04:35, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Hmm. The formatting etc. seems reasonable. Might be sensible to (at least for now) focus on active characters. But a bot should be able to add the basic profile information without too much difficulty. Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 10:56, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Too hard to know who's active. Could be determined programmatically, but would be several orders of magnitude more difficult than just scraping the entirety of the visible profiles and adding them to the wiki.

Would you mind if we moved this discussion to my talk page? Strikes me having this easily visible would remove the necessity of going over it again. UDID (talk) 11:21, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Feel free! That was about it for my comments for now. I'll make sure to put further ones on your talk page as they come up. ^_^ Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 11:42, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

How?

Hi,

Interesting project to say the least, how do you plan on going about this? PB&J 06:59, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you! See discussion (above), but basically webcrawler/wikibot, which is why I'm soliciting suggestions for formatting, etc. (Should probably use templates to easily format this all, for starters.) UDID (talk) 11:25, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Templates would be the easiest yes, although I'm curious to hear how you'll handle the general structure: one giant list is not something most browsers would like, nor would it be very useful. Alphabetical? Numerical based on character ID? Etc. PB&J 11:28, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I assumed there wouldn't be a master list, just a navigable set of subpages. E.g. if you wanted character #1989226, you'd go to User:UDID/1989226. Bob Moncrief ^EBD•W! 11:44, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

That is indeed the plan, although as character names are unique, a by-name cross-reference is also planned (e.g. User:UDID/N/Bub). The wiki search tool will mean we'll have full-text search available, and that plus substring page title searching should make it the equal or superior of any profile search tool yet.

Getting the exact data/page structure right is going to be an important part of this project. Already wondering what the best way to do this is— sub-subpages, like DangerReport? That would have the advantage of allowing people to reformat the data as they like without being tied to a specific presentation format. Disadvantage: lots of tiny pages, large amount of edits, lots of moving parts. As am already planning to use automation, possibly better to save that for a future version 2, and focus on getting a workable version 1 up and running— that way, if I disappear at least there'll be something for people to go on with. UDID (talk) 12:12, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I'd definitely go the DangerReport route right from the start. It lets you create a page that contains JUST the facts about the person's profile (must-haves: last updated, ID, name, join date, and class; nice-to-haves: XP, group, real name + link, status, number of deaths, description, skills (boolean value for each)) in a highly-structured format. We can set up a basic template for how those can be displayed in a reasonable way right from the start, while also leaving the option open to others to display them in different ways.

Each of those pages (which would likely use the player's UDID for the page name) would then be included in a second page (i.e. like the location pages) that displays the template and has a space for unstructured content. This second page would likely be named after the player's character, and it'd be where anything not directly related to the profile would go, such as screenshots, dumbwits, comments, etc., that way we'd have a clean separation between NPOV facts and everything that may not be, which should help make it easier to deal with people who try to vandalize the various pages.

Also, despite it being in your userspace, I expect that this will be treated as a space where people can freely update the data with more recent information, just like the DangerReports? Except that unlike the DRs, which are treated as NPOV, they'll also be able to add some POV stuff like using it as a Rogue's Gallery? If so, I'd suggest putting the rules for how your userspace are going to work in writing on your userpage, that way we (sysops) have a way to deal with questions when they arise and you're not around to say whether someone's edit conforms to what you allow. Because I suspect that something like this is sure to be controversial at some point. —Aichon— 15:13, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

I really should have looked at your userpage and example first, since I see now that you've already done some of the things I suggested. >_< —Aichon— 15:20, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Ha! No problem; if nothing else, it's nice to know someone else is thinking along the same lines and reaching conclusions that are not too dissimilar. :) All right, you've convinced me – agree about taking the DangerReport route, if only because trying to figure out how to do what I wanted without it was giving me a headache. Rules/methods for annotations are still pending, but I'm thinking clever templating is probably the way t go with that.

(It has just occurred to me that this project could almost be considered an attempt to re-implement the "new" Rogues Gallery in wiki. Amusing.) UDID (talk) 10:45, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

How fast do you think you can get it all done, if you get the format right? Bob and me discussed this shortly over IRC, since there are about 2.5m unique characters ingame. Letting the wiki-bot add them all in one go will probably crash the wiki, if a lot of template calls are included it will without a doubt crash the wiki. Spreading it out over x number of sessions seems like the way to go, but I have no idea what the wiki can handle in volume and traffic. PB&J 14:38, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Good question. Without a doubt the fastest method would be simply to dump the (HTML) contents of the ~2.5M character profiles and then upload that directly to the wiki. Of course, that would be of severely limited use, so I'm thinking I'll preprocess the profiles and add only the relevant information. In the current format, it would be roughly the same amount of edits; much less data, but probably the same impact on the server. If we go with templates à la DangerReport, I wouldn't really care to estimate based on what little is known about server performance — which is why I intend to utilise an API-compliant wikibot, test it before putting it to use on more than one page at a time, and make short test runs while monitoring server load so I know what sort of edit rate is sustainable. Arranging to have an admin on-hand to block the bot if necessary could also be a worthwhile precaution.

Bear in mind we have only a concept at this point. Might be able to get started on (non-wiki) coding this weekend, might not. It would help if we could figure out at least an approximation of an data/template structure with which to make this data as usefully accessible as possible. :) UDID (talk) 10:45, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

mein gott

Would we have to protect all these?--Rosslessness ^{; the shambling custodian of UD's past...} 19:43, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Surely not. I'd envision them ideally being initially populated via bot, then updated afterwards by any user interested in keeping them up to date. They'd be a prime target for vandalism, I'd imagine, but they wouldn't need protection. —Aichon— 21:27, 28 July 2016 (UTC)