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)

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)