So, as has been discussed on this Talk Page, it might be nice to use this forum here, for a change. For me personally, it'd make things a lot easier, but I have closer ties with the actual MTG Salvation main site than I suspect most of you do, so it shouldn't be up to me. I do think this is a more convenient place to talk and discuss, however. But the only way discussion will take place here is if someone initiates it, so I'm trying to do that now.
So, regarding the Front Page. We can do better, and we should.
Should we, for example, talk about what we find appropriate for the Magic news section? I see, for example, that the high-profile suspensions of judges (and the later reversals of most of these) have been included there. I think this is good, but it brings the question of what we should actually include here. Some definites:
The announcement of a new set/product
The release of a new set/product
New banned/suspension list updates
Outcome of Pro Tours, Worlds, and World Magic Cups
Hall of Fame election results
Potentials:
Tournament structure changes (FNMs can feature any format, the introduction of the PPTQ/RPTQ system, that sort of thing)
High-profile/controversial bans of DCI memberships
Those all sound like excellent topics for news coverage. I think the Main Page will stay protected, so I'm inclined to suggest one or more feeder pages where non-admins can propose news entries, so that admins aren't solely responsible for staying on top of things.
In the same vein, we might consider implementing a (probably less sophisticated) version of Wikipedia's process for proposing featured articles - and use the featured article criteria as a goal when editing.
Finally, one thing I'd really love to see on the front page is a set of links to portal pages. We've got plenty of content and we're getting better at crosslinking it with navboxes, but we don't have any sort of stand-alone Table of Contents-type pages. I started roughing out a hierarchy of topics that I think could use this sort of treatment in my user space, and I'm just going to link that here, rather than try to force its formatting onto the forums and take up space.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to switch to two featured articles.
Since the spoiler season starts with an event. The next set and the event itself would be featured articles. Once the event is over the set usually is released an stays interesting, however then the Bans/Unbans announcements and related to this the format mostly affected.
In other word instead of having the releases side bar, let have two featured articles:
1. The current set of interest
2. What else is going on right now.
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Perhaps it would be a good idea to switch to two featured articles.
Since the spoiler season starts with an event. The next set and the event itself would be featured articles. Once the event is over the set usually is released an stays interesting, however then the Bans/Unbans announcements and related to this the format mostly affected.
In other word instead of having the releases side bar, let have two featured articles:
1. The current set of interest
2. What else is going on right now.
This could work. I tend to write fairly detailed articles about each Pro Tour event, and this could serve as a secondary featured article from, say, the Monday immediately after the Pro Tour, until a week or two after the event.
I have no idea. This, I suspect, is primarily Magic Mage's work. A couple of them seem to be primarily concerned with local ongoings on this site, which, while interesting to those who care about it, is in my opinion not appropriate news material for the MTGS Wiki. I feel like all of the links you linked to can be safely archived away, and links to them from the front page can be removed.
Oh my god, look at all the wiki people I've never met before. Nice to meet you all, although I see your names in the wiki.
I've got no problem updating the front page, but between all my other duties I don't think I have much time to devote to keeping it updated. Generally I just keep an eye on lore sections.
Second what Sene said about those templates; I think we can safely archive them away.
As to the front page, I think it's a great idea to try and improve it. Seconding Corv's proposals of introducing featured article criteria and setting up links to the portal pages. With the featured article criteria, that will go a long way to giving us rotating content for the front page as we can select new featured articles at set intervals. I think also adding rotating news highlight will help making the front page better as well, because we'll have a constant stream of fresh content.
I can get to work building portals, but I'd like to get some feedback on my proposed list first (you are more than welcome to edit that user page). I think I hit most of the big stuff, but if there's anything else that deserves top-level mention, we should accommodate that in our planning. I haven't actually taken a look, but is our category tagging consistent enough that we can trust the sizes of categories as a guide?
I'm not sold on having two featured articles yet, because I don't think we have a lot of articles that meet that standard. I think we should try to measure that first, and then decide on number and rotation schedule.
What we might have enough of is list content. We certainly have no shortage of that, though I know some editors have been tabulating the lists instead. We might try a featured list article in addition to a single featured article, and we could create several additional lists by splitting many of our large lists from their parent articles (e.g. move Mirrodin_(plane)#Locations_on_Mirrodin to Mirrodin_(plane)/Locations_on_Mirrodin).
For us to have a Metagame section, I think that requires us to have someone who wants to update that stuff (i.e. popular deck archetypes from various Standard eras, relevant Legacy and Modern decks, etc.), and I don't know if we currently do. It's a thing that I could have done if there were 30 hours in a day, but there aren't, so it doesn't end up high enough on my list of priorities.
Under the Events section, however, I feel like it could be a good idea to get an extra tab simply saying "Professional Play". Something like this:
We already have some sparse metagame coverage, especially for notorious past archetypes. At a minimum, do we not have articles for Aggro, Control, Tempo, etc? Even if those are very broad, they're still archetypes, and frankly they're probably more notable than any given Standard season's variation on R/G ramp or such.
We already have some sparse metagame coverage, especially for notorious past archetypes. At a minimum, do we not have articles for Aggro, Control, Tempo, etc? Even if those are very broad, they're still archetypes, and frankly they're probably more notable than any given Standard season's variation on R/G ramp or such.
We do have those, but I don't know if I'd call those archetypes; I think I'd call those classes. I.e. aggro is a class; red deck wins is an archetype.
But yes, we have some old articles about archetypes in the past. It's just that if we were to include a prominent link to this list, it'd be very nice if it could've been somewhat up to date.
I can get to work building portals, but I'd like to get some feedback on my proposed list first (you are more than welcome to edit that user page).
I hit it and made some recommendations. I don't think the Timeline is particularly useful anymore, but I know people like it. It's just something that's really hard to keep accurately updated when nothing since Time Spiral has a firm date attached to it and Wizards Creative uses Decades, Centuries and Millenia almost interchangeably.
I think the main benefit to the timeline is simply keeping the order of events as we hop between planes and Uncharted Realms feeds us flashbacks. That, and knowing where a given event stands relative to something like the Phyrexian Invasion or the Mending. Precision where we can find it is nice, but it's a fraught matter, as tends to be the case in fictive universes.
I would just like point you attention to ProtonZero.
He did upload a bunch of symbols mana, chaos, etc. in svg format. SVG is the gold standard for wiki use, because it is an easy to use vector graphic format. Wikipedia has a nice article about this if you want to know more. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics)
However out header WUBRG line still uses the png files. I would opt for an update there. So we can retire the old graphics.
(Yes, I know we recently switched them out and deleting is a lot of work. But this is probably the last time. :P)
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I'm open to all suggestions. Change is good, as long as it will be supported in the long term.
This is especially from importance with featured articles: we've had those in the past but there were never enough editors to make a concerted effort. At the moment, we have a dedicated group working on the form of the wiki, but we are low on lore-wise editors.
I feel like most of us lean pretty heavily towards rules coverage, which is about what I'd expect from a group that volunteers to compile esoteric information into hierarchical structures...
But we've also got Sene covering pro play, and solid coverage of current events and new info. Finding someone with a collection of novels willing to do a deep dive and make a pass over the relevant articles would be neat, but I don't consider it too urgent, especially with how willing Wizards is to simply obsolete that knowledge going forward.
Can we just kill "Announcements and current events" already? The only think I feel like we have to move to somewhere else on the main page is the link to this forum right here; could that be added to "Using MTGS Wiki"?
Meanwhile, I'm starting to add news items that I listed in the OP (including the "potentials") to the front page Magic news. I also want to set up a news archive for all the phased-out news stories. This archive would not include the older news stories that Tuamir linked to above, as I feel like those aren't really what we're going to cover in the Magic news section going forward (i.e. those were primarily concerned about local MTG Salvation/MTGS Wiki happenings).
Can we just kill "Announcements and current events" already? The only think I feel like we have to move to somewhere else on the main page is the link to this forum right here; could that be added to "Using MTGS Wiki"?
Yes, please do I think it is pretty much consensus that this thing adds nothing.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Drop your knees to the floor
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
So, regarding the Front Page. We can do better, and we should.
Should we, for example, talk about what we find appropriate for the Magic news section? I see, for example, that the high-profile suspensions of judges (and the later reversals of most of these) have been included there. I think this is good, but it brings the question of what we should actually include here. Some definites:
In the same vein, we might consider implementing a (probably less sophisticated) version of Wikipedia's process for proposing featured articles - and use the featured article criteria as a goal when editing.
Finally, one thing I'd really love to see on the front page is a set of links to portal pages. We've got plenty of content and we're getting better at crosslinking it with navboxes, but we don't have any sort of stand-alone Table of Contents-type pages. I started roughing out a hierarchy of topics that I think could use this sort of treatment in my user space, and I'm just going to link that here, rather than try to force its formatting onto the forums and take up space.
Please feel free to edit this page as appropriate with your suggestions.
Proposed hierarchy of topics
Since the spoiler season starts with an event. The next set and the event itself would be featured articles. Once the event is over the set usually is released an stays interesting, however then the Bans/Unbans announcements and related to this the format mostly affected.
In other word instead of having the releases side bar, let have two featured articles:
1. The current set of interest
2. What else is going on right now.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
I've got no problem updating the front page, but between all my other duties I don't think I have much time to devote to keeping it updated. Generally I just keep an eye on lore sections.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
As to the front page, I think it's a great idea to try and improve it. Seconding Corv's proposals of introducing featured article criteria and setting up links to the portal pages. With the featured article criteria, that will go a long way to giving us rotating content for the front page as we can select new featured articles at set intervals. I think also adding rotating news highlight will help making the front page better as well, because we'll have a constant stream of fresh content.
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I'm not sold on having two featured articles yet, because I don't think we have a lot of articles that meet that standard. I think we should try to measure that first, and then decide on number and rotation schedule.
What we might have enough of is list content. We certainly have no shortage of that, though I know some editors have been tabulating the lists instead. We might try a featured list article in addition to a single featured article, and we could create several additional lists by splitting many of our large lists from their parent articles (e.g. move Mirrodin_(plane)#Locations_on_Mirrodin to Mirrodin_(plane)/Locations_on_Mirrodin).
Under the Events section, however, I feel like it could be a good idea to get an extra tab simply saying "Professional Play". Something like this:
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
But yes, we have some old articles about archetypes in the past. It's just that if we were to include a prominent link to this list, it'd be very nice if it could've been somewhat up to date.
Anyway, I also edited your list a bit.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
He did upload a bunch of symbols mana, chaos, etc. in svg format. SVG is the gold standard for wiki use, because it is an easy to use vector graphic format. Wikipedia has a nice article about this if you want to know more. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics)
However out header WUBRG line still uses the png files. I would opt for an update there. So we can retire the old graphics.
(Yes, I know we recently switched them out and deleting is a lot of work. But this is probably the last time. :P)
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
This is especially from importance with featured articles: we've had those in the past but there were never enough editors to make a concerted effort. At the moment, we have a dedicated group working on the form of the wiki, but we are low on lore-wise editors.
I quote you on that for the record
But we've also got Sene covering pro play, and solid coverage of current events and new info. Finding someone with a collection of novels willing to do a deep dive and make a pass over the relevant articles would be neat, but I don't consider it too urgent, especially with how willing Wizards is to simply obsolete that knowledge going forward.
Meanwhile, I'm starting to add news items that I listed in the OP (including the "potentials") to the front page Magic news. I also want to set up a news archive for all the phased-out news stories. This archive would not include the older news stories that Tuamir linked to above, as I feel like those aren't really what we're going to cover in the Magic news section going forward (i.e. those were primarily concerned about local MTG Salvation/MTGS Wiki happenings).
Yes, please do I think it is pretty much consensus that this thing adds nothing.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
I have not added the forum link to the navigation menu yet, though. It's not an immediate necessity, and if we're redesigning the navigation anyway...