Well the current unturned wiki could add 4.0 content in the site, but not really sure due to slander that has been going around being dead or inactive, or the fact that people don’t like Wikia website itself
The real question is that would a new wiki need to be made for the new version (If it came)? The pros would be that people would be more confident as a wiki contributor and no negative thoughts on the wikia would be present in the site, problem is that you gotta add in new formats to work in and plan who manages it
Yes, by ‘new wiki’ I mean a different place other than Wikia
If the dev has planned it already, I guess I can discard this post
Here’s a poll for you guys to answer
Create a new wiki for version 4.0? (Not immediately but in the future)
Why not, since it won’t be any time soon we have a lot of time to think about that kind of things giving suggestions. Something with the same base as the current one or something like a SDG wiki ?
I voted “Yes.” Not too sure where to take the reasoning for it though.
SDG wiki was spoken of in the past, but dunno. I know that Deathismad and I, to some extent, dislike using Wikia / “Fandom Powered by Wikia” at times because of a lot of the limitations it has in place, but eh. There’s stuff in development that will hopefully improve it, such as when Discussions is fully published.
A main problem with a new wiki is that it really won’t have a lot of traffic going for it already, and no matter what it will require human maintenance. The upsides and other downsides should be pretty self-explanatory / assumable.
One of my personal big issues worth mentioning with Fandom Powered by Wikia is the mobile site. The mobile site (and app) are garbage in my opinion. Like most mobile-variants of websites, it just isn’t that great.
They do have some systems in place to help with with, via template categories and a special infobox markup that appears differently on the mobile site than on the desktop site, but the functionality is awful.
Some template categories will result in the template being 100% hidden.
The infobox markup they have appears terribly ugly on desktop, and terribly ugly on mobile.
It’s also incredibly difficult to showcase any decent amount of information on the infobox, and requires much custom .js- and .css- dependent code to allow for more complex infoboxes.
Resizing content to fit while still being legible is about as functional as Unturned’s resolution scaling.
Discussions
While it will be better when eventually fully completed and ready to be used on all wikias new and old, it has no actual integration with the actual wiki. It’s entirely separate, and just adds an extra step to doing basic Forum things.
Also wikicode is nonexistent. You have to link a blog now to showcase stuff like that.
Dysfunctional Tools
Watchlist is pretty useless.
Fandom Powered by Wikia refuses to add stickies, which makes a FAQ in the Forum pretty annoying to consider.
Visual editor has zero compatibility with notable and default extensions, such as tabber and tabview. It also just doesn’t work with templates, and still requires usage of Source Mode to do basically anything besides text.
It’s meant as a way to help get inexperienced people into editing, but doesn’t teach them anything about Source Mode and doesn’t really let them do anything on most high-WAM wikias besides messing the article up when it imports additional random HTML strings at alongside the actual text at the very top or very bottom of an article.
Tabbers have poor cross-integration, despite being well-used and tremendously useful in many circumstances.
Tabview and Tabber both exist with their own useful functions, but zero integrity. Why does there have to be two separate things?
Categories are super difficult to manage large-scale. I spent at least 3 hours with Deathismad just moving articles to new categories.
There is no default tool to move multiple articles at once, and it doesn’t let you rename categories. I had to use a plugin that had to be capped at 50 at a time per ToS.
In my opinion one of the big benefits on a new wiki (I could host for you on wiki.smartlydressedgames) would be your having complete creative freedom. Right now the wiki has all those ads and links to other wikis.
It’s personally becoming increasingly tempting to think about at the moment with FANDOM’s current “initiatives.” Although FANDOM’s wiki setup looks glorious and user-friendly for the most part still, I feel that the editor side of the spectrum has been disregarded a lot lately.
They’re hoping to scrap Source Mode wikitext editing in favor of a more-or-less updated Visual Mode editor.
The forums feature is still in the works of being replaced with “Discussions,” which I would say is like a Twitter–meets–Forums social media more than anything else.
They create features that don’t function with MediaWiki, despite that being the base of FANDOM wikis.
And as of recently, updates hoping to improve image loading speeds has done the opposite causing many articles on the Unturned wiki to indefinitely be stuck loading images, videos, tabs, siderails, and the comment section.
They’ve assured people that a fix of some sort is coming out this upcoming Tuesday, but it sucks to have to purposefully break the wiki’s templates as a the only temporary workaround for this.
Hopefully the new wiki would have more contributors and less people pitying on it saying “Wow wikia is unfinished lets not even use it” instead of helping out. That’s what has been bothering with me this whole time
I think it’d be easier to get it up to a respectable standard of “official” this way. Blank slate wiki for a blank slate game. I wasn’t around for all of the Unturned wiki’s stuff going on during the Classic —> Unturned 3 transition on the wiki, but the history/archives for articles always makes it seem a bit confusing.
I would love to be able to have new information published to the wiki just as a new content patch launches, and then go head-on straight into manual editing and improvements. If the main purpose of the wiki was for Unturned 4.x, then Unturned 3 content could easily just be ported automatically based on .dat file values, too, without slowing down info. on the latest stuff.
And with it being easier to have high-quality content off the get-go, it’ll appear respectable enough to all the other people to get consistent editors (that’s a heart exclamation mark???)
I think as long as the wiki focused on cutting down as many pages as possible (do we really need a separate page for every magazine and iron sight in the game?) and launched with a dedicated team it could work; otherwise I sadly think we’d see something similar to what we have at the moment.
Making a new wiki, from an old one, really only works if you have a group of editors ready as soon as the wiki goes up. I know what it’s like to make a new, much better looking wiki, and then have no one able to edit it so it kind of just fades away.
(that’s a heart exclamation mark???)