Talk:Lotro-Wiki Contributors' Corner/Archive May09

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PageNaming Policy

I think its about time for some policies (spelling?)... I already mentioned it on Talk:Main Page under topic "new page for contributors", but I'll do it here again to start a discussion rolling...

...for example the regions... if a region has an elven name, do we name page by this name? or do we use translation that is also used from time to time in game and in books?

• one example for it would be Ered Luin and Blue Mountains... but its not so easy since game itself isn't consistent and uses not Hithaeglir but Misty Mountains for another region... what do we do about it?
• 'til now i just added a redirect for another name, since someone could look for it by this name, and in that case would be redirected to the other page...

--Xander 05:51, 4 April 2007 (PDT)

When in doubt always use the name defined in the game and do a redirect. If it gets to confusing then create a page that describes the different names and point to the "main article". --Hinney 20:29, 4 April 2007 (PDT)

I believe that they used Ered Luin/Misty Mountains because those living in the Misty Mountains aren't normally elves and therefore might not use the name Hithaeglir.::

--heeroyui85

Wiki Theme

We really need a "Middle Earthy" type theme on this wiki to make it stand out a bit more. The default themes just don't have alot of flare to them. Anyone have any experience with Wiki Themes? If not, I could take a stab at it. --Hamma 06:13, 4 April 2007 (PDT)

Agreed, and we also need to work on some other design aspects like color friendly templates for monster skills for example, these black tables do not look really nice with current default theme of LotRO-Wiki --Xander 14:22, 4 April 2007 (PDT)

A while back I had the default skin duplicated as "Lotro" skin. Feel free to change your default skin to "Lotro" and edit MediaWiki:Lotro.css (requires certain permissions, ask if you want to edit them). If you notice any quirks or competition between the other CSS's that get loaded into a page let me know. I was hoping to make a non-white theme for the wiki but never had the time. --Hinney 20:45, 4 April 2007 (PDT)

I brought up a test wiki site I am going to play around with it a bit in a non-live environment and let you guys know. I will provide a link to it when I am done playing around. --Hamma 06:34, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

Well I played around with it a little bit (Very little) came up with this. It's still very much a work in progress and I am still toying with it. One thing I have learned is Wiki Styles are a pain.. I also have some ideas for a Logo. --Hamma 09:59, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

I updated the lotro.css with your theme Hamma, feel free to play with it here --Lotroadmin 23:02, 19 April 2007 (PDT)

Interwiki links?

Can we get some other wiki's added via admin magic so that we can reference their pages wiki style? If that has happened, where do I find a list of stuff we can refer to interwikily?

Also a wiki editing for dummies type of thing would be great for me.

--YuriPup 06:38, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

I don't know of any interwiki content yet, I haven't noticed any yet. I'm not sure what we would interlink as most of the game content is as new as this wiki.

Editing for dummies, Click on the Help link on the left --Hinney 07:58, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

I could see it useful for citing references on the Story and Character background externally. --Hamma 08:15, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

I have personally linked to Wikipedia already (for Pipeweed). Almost anything lore based will have been beaten to death on other wiki and we don't have to reinvent their work or re-create their drama. I would think there are going to be very few entries (besides quests and mechanics, that don't cite external works.--YuriPup 08:26, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

Glossary?

What about a glossary? MMOGspeak can be neigh impenetrable for a new player. I think it should also appear on the main page but I don't have a good suggestion as to what category (Guides?). --YuriPup 12:12, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

Sure Guides should do it, for the starters a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG_terms_and_acronyms might help... before we have set up something of our own... --Xander 12:46, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

Check out Category:Game Terms--Hinney 14:39, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

Compare what we have to let's say to what wowwiki has (i used it a lot while i played wow): Game Terms, Glossary, Acronyms and Abbreviations... --Xander 14:56, 5 April 2007 (PDT)

Graphics on the LotRO-Wiki

Do we have anyone gifted or talented to create a few graphics for us? --Xander 09:55, 7 April 2007 (PDT)

On the same note, just wanted to let you know that i've changed {{Infobox Item}} to use GIFs since PNGs seem to have some kind of problem with transparity... old JPG and PNG money icons may be deleted... --Xander 15:54, 7 April 2007 (PDT)

GIF files are huge, i don't think lotroadmin would like us using that file format. What problems are you seeing with PNG files? GIF=bad, PNG=good --Hinney 19:46, 7 April 2007 (PDT)

GIFs I uploaded weren't bigger than PNGs we had... and those PNGs didnt like transparent colors...

Don't know what happened since I checked it a few days ago on three various browsers and two different pcs, but now they seem to be OK, and i swear i didn't smoke any pipeweed...

PS one more thing lets not start disscussion on PNGs vs GIFs =) I'm with you there GIFs are evil... --Xander 03:11, 8 April 2007 (PDT)

I know GIF's are evil. How do we feel about jpg? I guess most of my contributions are in that format. Should we try and keep everything to PNG-only? --Blakborn 14:31, 10 April 2007 (PDT)

JPGs are fine, there are lots of cons on GIFs from various angles (requires licensing, color depth, animations, etc)... For me.. if i post a screen shot it will always be the jpg but if i crop something then it will most likely be a png file.. but that's just me. I do know that lotroadmin is concerned about bandwidth so any large files posted might get resized. --Hinney 15:00, 10 April 2007 (PDT)

Happy Easter

Happy Easter to Christians among us! Everyone else enjoy Weekend =) --Xander 03:01, 8 April 2007 (PDT)

Monster Play section

Just wanted to let you know that all of the initial monster skills & traits supposed to be in the wiki.
There are some more minor things that i would like to add this week (if i get to it): a few dev diaries and things from the manual... Afterwards this section would need some beautification... And i wouldn't mind if someone with fresh eyes could go through the section and tell if something does not function or is wrong or funny, whatever =) --Xander 00:08, 10 April 2007 (PDT)

new web host

I've moved the lotro-wiki.com to a new web hosting company as i've noticed some downtime over the past few weeks. Please leave me a message if you see any additional issues. Also I believe this new web hosting site will be faster, so please confirm or deny that. :) --Lotroadmin 01:07, 12 April 2007 (EDT)

It seems faster most of the time to me... but it also seems that some pagenames got corrupted, those with uncommon symbols like ú or û for example, we will have to be rename/move those i guess --Xander 01:13, 18 April 2007 (PDT)

"Michael Chu's blog provides a good solution for people migrating their MySQL databases and finding that special characters (like smart quotes) get mangled. He presents two practical solutions to migrating the database properly." [[1]] Banaticus 23:59, 6 May 2007 (PDT)

--Xander 09:20, 7 May 2007 (PDT)

Player Character Template

hi everyone, name is Mike, go by Ealdor. As you may have noticed I have added a Player_Characters template system. Check out Example:Player_Character or Ealdor for an example. This will work very well for people to put bios on there characters. Im still working out some of the rough spots as it was designed for a Style sheet.

Also as a note, I know it is hard to control all the time but one of the ads was for EQ2 gold *frown* Is there a stand on this?

Thanks. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ealdor (talk · contr).

If there are any gold selling adds just post the URL (try not to click on it) on my talk page and I can see about getting them removed. --Lotroadmin 12:01, 15 April 2007 (PDT)

Back to subect, we need to come up with some way to categorize all the players pages, template does a good deal already but all those categories need to be further categorized =) I started already making all of them as subcategories of Category:Player Characters, but kinship & server categories need another way of doing it, probably something simple like another subcategory only for kinships and only for servers, I just cant come up with suitable name... --Xander 01:11, 18 April 2007 (PDT)

Hello, can I make a suggestion that you add eye colour to the character profile Also, how do you find a link there with having it bookmarked, so from the main page? --Chris 15:01, 19 April 2007 (PDT)

I played a bit more with Mike's template: changed the header and further adapted it so that some fields lead to inclusion of categories only if they are filled with info... this should help us get rid of subcategories like Members, No Kinship Members and so on... may need some further work in including most common things that are written in kinship field, otherwise just leaving field blank does the magic... result is for now at {{pcbeta}}... --Xander 09:16, 7 May 2007 (PDT)
PS: You can test it on the talk page, note the empty kinship field and absence of any nonsensical subcategory for it =) --Xander 09:20, 7 May 2007 (PDT)

One more thing that seems odd to me is that many people write name of their char with {{ }} around it, making a name to template and thus breaking the page a bit, since there's no such template... why would someone do that? how can we prevent it? 'til now i just looked at every new char to correct it and create new subcategories... --Xander 09:16, 7 May 2007 (PDT)

Instances?

Just a thought. Tonight my wife and I where out working on our deeds and there was an instance we could not get into. It got me thinking that we do not have a Instance page to list them yet. Any ideas on arranging and organizing?

Instances DancesInTrees 23:56, 18 April 2007 (PDT)

No Idea, really, since there are so many quests that have instanced areas, which you can't enter unless you have the Quest for them...

Perhaps we schould have a section for Quest Instances and a separate one for, those like Barrows and Agamaur --Xander 00:31, 19 April 2007 (PDT)

Learning the Wiki Systems

Hello, I have always wanted to be a a more than spelling and grammer checker for a wiki site, and I always start up games late, but now that I have caught this game since aphla and am done with school, I would like to take a stab at learning how do do all this.

So were is the best place to start leanring all about Wiki?

--Chris 14:59, 19 April 2007 (PDT)

Welcome to the wiki. Since you were able to add this note you know enough to start helping add to the site. The wiki markup language is very easy to use. One bit of advice I'll give is to alway use the Show Preview button when you've made changes, that way you can easily see if your changes didn't work as planned.

If you are making major changes to a page (such as layout), it is usually good to use the discussion link for that page to propose what you have in mind. That way other people can see what the change looks like and discuss any ideas they have. But sometimes you just have to go ahead and make the change, similar to what happened with the List of Worlds, which looks much better than it did.

Two sources of info are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext_examples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet

--Skeeve 17:25, 19 April 2007 (PDT)

Thanks, I bookmarked those they should come in handy, are there more advanced tutorials as well?

--Baraphor 21:45, 19 April 2007 (PDT)

Also checkout Help:Contents page for more info about editing. --Lotroadmin 23:03, 19 April 2007 (PDT)

Trophies Cross Ref

Just a note and ask for help. Kinmate asked me about how we know what professions go with what trophies. I said hmm, we need a wiki page for that. SO. Ill start compiling a table which people can use as a cross reference for this. --Ealdor 14:15, 21 April 2007 (PDT)

Infobox NPC

An Infobox appropriate for named NPCs has been created at Template:Infobox NPC. Banaticus 14:40, 23 April 2007 (PDT)

like i commented on talk page for this template, there is misunderstanding as to what npc is, or for the use of this template...

and one more thing is that this template uses other non-existing template. --Xander 01:19, 24 April 2007 (PDT)

If you want to reply on the template talk page, then that's the proper place to reply. Don't split a discussion into two parts. :) Banaticus 19:07, 26 April 2007 (PDT)

I didn't split it, you did... just wanted to warn that on basis of your description & example template didn't do what it was intended to, since some things were mixed up bad, you shouldn't really announce unfinisched things =P --Xander 22:22, 26 April 2007 (PDT)

Format templates, images

Perhaps I've missed them, but we need format templates on how things should be structured, such as how quest rewards should be structured, etc. Should we give a picture and the item name like in game or what? Perhaps a template for each item could be creatd when the item is created, something like {item|#} that would make: [picture]#[item link] We also need a great deal of commonplace item pictures, such as Lard. Banaticus 19:45, 26 April 2007 (PDT)

Check out Help:Contents for details on templates.

Items: Template:Infobox Item

Quests: Template:Infobox Quest -- Several people have commented that this template doesn't play to well with quests that have multiple steps. So i might recommend that a alternate template be created to help maintain key quest details such that we can better categorize the quests. Those quest details should be: name, level, reward, region, npc, link to quest talk page. Maybe this could just be a banner across the page like the following:

{{Infobox Quest Banner
| name        = {{PAGENAME}}
| level       = 99
| reward      = {{worth|g=1000|s=99|c=01|dp=23400}}
| region      = Bree-land
| monster     =
| quest-giver = 
|}}

--Hinney 23:01, 26 April 2007 (PDT)

I'll discuss that quest template on its talk page. Banaticus 09:16, 27 April 2007 (PDT)

of skill, item and class infoboxes

how about making all of the float on the right side of page, that way if there's any additional info other than infobox itself it is displayed on the page parallel to infobox...

see Captain's Valour for example... i would suggest removing class infobox from such pages at all or replace it with another text only at the bottom of the page... reducing it as much as possible... in this case perhaps one-liner: "Captain: Skills, Traits, Accomplishments..." or even put this one-liner at the top and add at the bottom bigger one with all the captain traits...

What do you think? --Xander 11:34, 30 April 2007 (PDT)

i think three one liners at the bottom would be fine. In the case of Captain's Valour you would have a one-liner for captain:skills, traits, accomplishments, one-liner for class traits:Bu,Ca,Ch,Gu,Hu,Lm,Mi and finally a one liner for all the captain trait's. Kinda like what you did for the regions, right? Sounds like a lot of work but i think it would be worth it to enhance navigation. --Hinney 19:35, 30 April 2007 (PDT)

ok. i'll start working on it --Xander 00:50, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

Template:Captain

here are "alpha" versions, they definatly need some variance in color and style, any suggestions? --Xander 02:03, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

played with colours a bit... --Xander 09:34, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

I think they look good. I would recommend making the {{captain}} to {{class|captain}} so that we can use the same template for all the classes and even the main class pages.

For colors, should we just consider using the same look and feel as the categories? Otherwise the colors are great. --Hinney 09:40, 9 May 2007 (PDT)

How to add new Quests?

Hello, i have two new quest that aren't on the wiki yet, but u don't know how to add new quests, so maybe some of the administrators can help me, one is a Class Quest for LoreMaster called "A Well-Ordered Mind" and the other is a Shire quest called "Confront The Old Took".

I will wait for some replies or/and instructions, thank you all for the help :D --Locusito 20:04, 30 April 2007 (PDT)

I've created a new page to help define how you should enter in a new quest. Help:Quests --Hinney 20:28, 30 April 2007 (PDT)

Links to other sites

Hi, I am new here and hope to help a little. I really like what is being done on this wiki.

I have a question about links to external sites, is there some page for that? Or is a better way to ask the owner of the content if you can place it on the wiki? There are some sites with information about locations of unique drops that would be really handy information. --Pomg 05:18, 2 May 2007 (PDT)

Welcome! There is a page Fansites which was once linked to from the Main Page (or from one of the suggested ones)... you could add the websites there and we'll see to adding it to the frontpage...

and asking the site-owners (or just letting them know) is always a good idea ;-) --Xander 05:27, 2 May 2007 (PDT)

To ;loc or not to ;loc

Typing ;loc in-game will give the current coordinates of the character in a readable format like 15.5 N 37.2 W. While I can see this being very helpful information for quest and accomplishment locations, is this too much information to be given players in this wiki? Or should we start gathering and adding this information?

edit: OK, so I'm a doofus and missed the Landmark coordinates page. I vote we add more loc info into quests as possible.

--CaptainMidnight 14:22, 3 May 2007 (PDT)

Yup go for it. Maybe we can do a mini location template like Xander did for the money template:worth --Hinney 09:36, 9 May 2007 (PDT)

LOTRO Wikis goal

Greetings :) first off, I was very very happy, when I found out, that there is a WIKI dedicated just to LOTRO. Good job, guys and gals! /wave Because I am kind of sick, that some peeps in certain forums just ask the same questions over and over again, compile "stickies" where a WIKI is so much better suited really.

one of the questions pondering me is though, that what do we want to achieve with that WIKI here. reason why I ask is, that

• a WIKI really shines in some areas (like guides, FAQ's, linklists etc.).
• a WIKI has some disadvantages compared to a database though.

Where I am coming from (and excuse my english, am no native english speaker), is that there are already quite a few other sites out there (like allakhazam with bestiary and items DB, or lotro-crafting.com for tradeskills). I have the feeling, that this wiki should NOT (and probably is not capable of)

• listing every quest (maybe the most important ones, yes)
• listing every item
• listing every NPC/Mob

quite a few stubs here already, so starting with flattening the wiki might be a good idea, as well as starting to use templates (i.e. for easier navigation) Please do not take this post as disrespect, far from it. I want this wiki to be an excellent source, for both vets as well as noobs.

--Kajolus 05:39, 9 May 2007 (PDT)

No disrespect taken, it's always good to discuss the wiki especially if an improvement to the wiki is the outcome.

I think a wiki is a great place to have the quests and items as you can easily update the text and as you mentioned provide a guide and FAQs and link the required mats etc. Now currently where the wiki lacks is with displaying a map with the little dots to find a certain mob that you need to go kill 20 times. The wiki has the power to solve that as well, just no one yet has implemented a solution, but then again a /tloc is just fine for me. The nice thing is each quest page has a talk page that everyone can agree on the best guide/spoiler for the quest and attempt to provide only the most useful information on the quest page. If you noticed we requested that the items and quests have their own wiki namespace so you can focus searches and the wiki category system should also help finding that unique quest or item.

What do you mean by flattening the wiki? It's pretty flat as we have tons of links on the main page and I know a few have talked about adding more hierarchy to the wiki to make the main page not look so busy.

For navigation there's of course the categories to follow, but you are right we need more navigational templates. There are a few navigational templates in use and a few more being developed but I think currently we have more data entry folks than we do maintainers and we don't have enough time to keep up. --Hinney 09:33, 9 May 2007 (PDT)

Fixing Weapons Infobox

I can't figure out how to change this but the weapons infobox indicates that a hunter gets the crossbow skill at 20. As a hunter I can tell you that we don't get that skill until 30.

Can anyone confirm/deny this? So hunters and guardians both get crossbow skill at level 30? Skeeve 08:00, 9 May 2007 (PDT)