"Wanted pages" on the Doom Wiki

Quote

WantedPages report: 4,089 - down 356 from the last issue.

 

This has been mentioned repeatedly, so I made a thread. What follows is mostly my opinion, but if anyone wants to pitch in and help, I hope I can save you some confusion and redundant effort.

 

First, for clarity, this is a machine-generated document with no human input. (You don't submit topics for approval on the wiki; you can just start a page, even without an account.) Like any automatic list, it can be immensely labor-saving, but you also have to think a bit before bum-rushing it; the database server has no common sense. :>

 

Things that people should do

 

1. Newfangled Doom gameplay/universe

Examples: Kinetic mine; Automap; Argent Breach; Demon Destruction
 

2. Person articles (modern)

Examples: Getsu Fune; joe-ilya; gaspe; Looper

Mappers have been near the top lately, owing to the flood of megawad writeups (two links per person per slot). In fairness, the caveat for WADs also applies: there is no standing agreement that everyone on every high-profile release is automatically notable. OTOH someone might map only occasionally, yet deserve an article for other community contributions (port developer, musician, stream/podcast host, ...).
 

3. WADs and mods (overview pages)

Examples: RTC-3057; Skulldash; Blade of Agony; Rip It, Tear It, Smash It!; Strife: Absolute Order

 

If you include links to individual maps, please ensure the names are exactly right (including capitalization) so that XymphBot can detect them easily.
 

Things that people should do, but only if they have tons of patience and access to offline sources

 

4. Person articles (historical)

Examples: Haggay Niv; Daniel Lindgren; Phoebus; Rand Phares

 

Crowdsourcing is most important here. Primary material is almost gone (old forums, Usenet, personal websites) and even Quasar is not an expert across all time periods and community divisions, so we can only proceed by pooling everyone's memory. COMPET-N runners are an especially tough case, some having numerous links (one per record) yet a largely private existence due to the more competitive atmosphere back then.

 

5. General community history/expanded universe

Examples: doom2.net; Totally Unauthorized Guide to Doom II; cdrom.com

 

6. Technical history

Examples: RMB; LMPC; AmigaDoom; GetWAD; Savegame slots 5 and 6 corrupt other files

 

This is separate because the research is highly specialized. You often have to read through code to understand what's going on, documentation and context being quite sparse after all these years. Some knowledge of 1990s network architecture (yikes) is occasionally helpful as well.

 

Things that people should probably not do

 

I say "probably" because this is an all-volunteer project. No one, including moderators, should tell you not to do something if it improves the site and you enjoy it.

 

You can even create map pages if you strongly desire them; the bot operator is also a volunteer, and as awesome as he is, he doesn't have unlimited resources for us. Be warned however that it requires punishing attention to detail, a bargeload of time, and that you can feel satisfied by the act of pasting and saving all by itself (because you normally get no feedback whatsoever, especially on older maps). I thought I had those things, and I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
 

Anyway.

 

7. WADs and mods (individual maps)

 

These appear to be non-vanilla formats that XymphBot can't handle yet. It is gradually learning to do so. While I never wish to take Xymph's hard work for granted, we have seen that once tested, the bot can process maps with incredible accuracy, even more so than previous editors who used scripts. Development is intentionally a slow, careful process because we want to avoid ever dragooning humans into a large cleanup (which is extremely demoralizing, as Wikipedia editors can tell you).

 

All that said, heavily scripted mods may be an exception. It's hard to imagine any bot able to parse arbitrary control structures across all known executable versions! Please feel free to expand Community Is Falling 3 or Urban Brawl, for example.

8. Names linked once from a talk page or noticeboard

 

IME these are almost always brainstorming and speculation, not serious to-dos. A few turn out to be important, but at first glance it's difficult to tell the blue goo from the gray, especially with historical topics. I don't think it harms us to leave them on the list pending a more complete discussion thread.

 

The exception to this and #9 is a page that once existed, but was deleted. It is so difficult to delete anything that you can assume it was complete garbage, and shouldn't be linked. (Even then it makes me anxious, because I'm editing other people's signed posts.)

 

9. Non-mainspace pages

 

Linking to hypothetical discussions seems like overkill to me, but it's true that newbies have difficulty finding them, and sometimes don't even realize that a template or image can have a talk page. MediaWiki has open bugs to filter maintenance lists by namespace, like the search feature does, which would avoid all this clutter.

 

10. Typos and sabotage

 

Some are obvious, yes, but some are actually a bit tricky without experience of MediaWiki's infrastructure -- it's easy to accidentally replace one typo with another. Unless you know what you're doing, please spare yourself the stress. I personally have yet to see blatant vandalism in the link list itself (per the IRC conversation), so I guess the last round was already cleaned up by the time I returned. Yay!

Edited August 19, 2018 by Xeriphas1994 : better example

I'd like to add that the total fell below 4000 yesterday for the first time in...well I don't know. At least 2 years. It had reached 5200 when I made my first pass of cleaning it up.

 

To expand on some of the stuff mentioned:

50 minutes ago, Xeriphas1994 said:

These appear to be non-vanilla formats that XymphBot can't handle yet.

Xymph maintains a list here of the WADs and mods that have been skipped, and it's not exclusive to ZDoom etc. so if anyone is looking to help and is familiar with any of the mods listed here, read the instructions on what you need to do.

By the way, you linked Skulldash in your examples of missing overview pages, but I've been slowly plugging away at a draft for the last month, and it's on the verge of being ready to be published, so no one needs to worry about that.

 

55 minutes ago, Xeriphas1994 said:

The exception to this and #9 is a page that once existed, but was deleted. It is so difficult to delete anything that you can assume it was complete garbage, and shouldn't be linked. (Even then it makes me anxious, because I'm editing other people's signed posts.)

 

This is something I was wondering about. We have a template for this, and it would make sense to use it for this, but I too am iffy about tampering with talk pages. Ironically, when it comes to deleted files, quite a few of them are from your messages! :)

I'm on it boss! 

Thanks for this outline.

 

On 8/19/2018 at 12:50 AM, Xeriphas1994 said:

3. WADs and mods (overview pages)

If you include links to individual maps, please ensure the names are exactly right (including capitalization) so that XymphBot can detect them easily.

Too much credit: XymphBot is not an autonomous AI and doesn't detect anything by itself. ;) Map lists on WAD overview pages are simply converted to a .ini file by a script.

 

The main reason to ensure names are correct (as originally assigned by the mapper, typos and all, as well as per guidelines) is to avoid an annoying manual repair sweep later: across WAD overview page, map page, navigation boxes, map view file page, and (sometimes) even the mapper's projects list.

 

On 8/19/2018 at 12:50 AM, Xeriphas1994 said:

5. General community history/expanded universe

Examples: doom2.net; Totally Unauthorized Guide to Doom II; cdrom.com

I don't think cdrom.com as such warrants an article -- Wikipedia already did that. Anything about Doom-related FTP archives is and can be covered in the idgames archive article.

 

On 8/19/2018 at 12:50 AM, Xeriphas1994 said:

Things that people should probably not do

You can even create map pages if you strongly desire them; the bot operator is also a volunteer, and as awesome as he is, he doesn't have unlimited resources for us. Be warned however that it requires punishing attention to detail, a bargeload of time, and that you can feel satisfied by the act of pasting and saving all by itself (because you normally get no feedback whatsoever, especially on older maps).

People are welcome to create articles for single-level WADs, but yeah, then it would help to use DMMPST to handle much of the detail. Linguica already did it once, so how hard can it be? :-)

 

Creating overview pages with map lists for multi-level WADs would be even more welcome, but then you can usually save yourself the effort of creating the individual map articles, because those are the main purpose XymphBot's scripts were developed for.

 

On 8/19/2018 at 12:50 AM, Xeriphas1994 said:

7. WADs and mods (individual maps)

These appear to be non-vanilla formats that XymphBot can't handle yet. It is gradually learning to do so.

Too much credit again: XymphBot scripts don't process WAD files directly, they invoke DMMPST for that. The only non-vanilla format it can't handle, as far as I'm aware, is UDMF.

 

As Eris pointed out, the main reason some WADs have been skipped is that they contain many custom thing definitions, and it's time-consuming to describe them on the WAD overview page and then compile a mapping list so that DMMPST can correctly generate Things tables for the WAD's maps. There are plenty examples how such mapping files should be formatted.

 

I don't want a person article for myself

6 hours ago, NuMetalManiak said:

I don't want a person article for myself

 

I've delinked all instances of your name, but as this is the second such request since this thread's creation, what's the reasoning behind it if you don't mind me asking?

Because the only information you really need is in my wiki user page and my life isn't really that important anyways

19 minutes ago, NuMetalManiak said:

Because the only information you really need is in my wiki user page and my life isn't really that important anyways

Don't think like that, I'll tell you from experience that it never goes well.

Just made the Demon Destruction page.

Feel free to improve.

It's "Destructible demons." Demon Destruction was a mini-game in Doom 2016. I've moved the page to its correct title and Demon Destruction now points elsewhere.

Edited August 22, 2018 by Eris Falling

Oops. Damn names are way too similar.

Thanks to @Xymph and @Eris Falling for patching my sloppy language. (Anyone who reads the bot threads on the wiki knows this isn't a new thing...) #7 says "appear" because I hadn't clicked every single link to check the WAD formats, so I suspected I might miss something. In the time it took me to post, Eris and others then added a mass of new DM content.

 

DM content makes me very happy, FWIW, because it's been the single biggest hole in the wiki since ever. Even red links are rare, which is why it's not a category above. Yes, I understand that actual DMing is more fun than researching and writing about it. :>

Xymph is totally correct about the custom things, and I do intend to help with them -- it seems wrong that the more creative a mapper was in the 1990s, the less likely the map is to have data! (I swear I understood all that frame table stuff at some point, even though I only used it to document id's contributions.)