The factorio wiki

Anything related to the content on our wiki (https://wiki.factorio.com/)

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Monchoman45
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The factorio wiki

Post by Monchoman45 »

I bought this game a week or two ago and it's been great, especially for an alpha release. There were a few things I wanted to know more about, though, so I googled and figured I'd find a wiki - and I did.

Surprise! It's dead.

Damn. Well, that's why wikis are editable.

Perusing through maintenance reports and various lists, it's clear that the wiki isn't actually in that bad of shape. There's a lot of spam - but mopping up spam is pretty easy. No templates, but copying stock templates as needed is pretty easy too. The images were a bit disorganized, but they're all icons or screenshots, so tagging and sorting didn't take too long. There's more than one language on the same wiki, but sorting and/or moving those shouldn't be too hard. The only real problems are a lack of management extensions, and there's only one admin (anyone know Kovarex?), but those aren't hard to fix for anyone with access to the server (like Kovarex). With a couple of infoboxes and anything resembling a plan, this could easily be a great reference.

There's a lot of information missing. Even basic stuff - there's no page for assemblers. One of Wikipedia's principle policies is be bold and do it yourself - anyone who knows anything about Factorio (hint: if you're reading this) probably has something they can add to the wiki. Even if you don't know everything, just knowing something is enough - put it somewhere, and even if it's not where it should be, someone will figure out where it should go and put it there. It's a very "just do things and it'll work out eventually" kind of thing.

Toward that end, I highly encourage anyone and everyone to do add something. Pick a random item off the top of your head and search for it. If it doesn't have a page, you can give it one with basic information. Or try hitting the random page button and improving what you find (although you'll probably get a lot of spam). Technical information like how much health something has, how much time it takes to build it, or general information like best practices for building it with an assembler. Seriously, any information is better than no information. If you have any trouble with page formatting, Wikipedia's help page for editing should cover everything well, and Wikia has one really easy to follow reference. Or, maybe you see a spambot create some spam page - you can just stick {{delete|spam}} at the top, which will mark it for deletion (it'll show up in Category:Candidates for deletion). Protip: removing all the text in it isn't deleting it - the page will still exist, it'll just be empty.

Toward a broader goal of "anything resembling a plan", I want to throw out a few suggestions for anyone who can do anything about them.

First, to whoever Kovarex is:
  • Install ConfirmEdit and SimpleAntiSpam. These are two simple extensions that should cut down on the spam flood that has slowly built up. The gibberish accounts created every couple minutes should have a harder time solving a captcha, and SimpleAntiSpam will block out spambots that fill in every form (which, apparently, is quite common). If this ends up not being enough, there are always more anti spam extensions to protect from more specific things.
  • Install CheckUser. CheckUser is great for finding spam and/or vandalism accounts operating out of the same or similar IP addresses, and for other things like finding sockpuppets.
  • Reenable anonymous edits. With decent spam protection and a good accountability system, anon edits should be mostly productive. Arguably the most important rule on a wiki is to only prevent people from editing something if you absolutely have to.
  • Get index.php out of the url. It's true that it'll probably kill every link to the wiki that currently exists, but there aren't a whole lot of those and it's better for SEO in the long run (worst case, we create the article index.php with a short message about how to find what they were looking for, and google will fix it in a month or so), and index.php is kind of ugly in there anyway. If you're running Apache (and I guess chances are good that you are), this page is specifically for Apache.
  • The server is a little slow. I have literally no idea why that would be, but if you can think of anything that would help there's probably a way to get it done.
  • I tagged roughly 250 pages for deletion - mostly spam, leftover redirects, and duplicate images. You don't have to delete all of them manually (bots are great, nuke is great too), but it would be great if they were deleted.
  • I also tagged every icon to be moved. Normalized, consistent image names are great for a bunch of reasons, but in this particular case, it'll make it easy for Template:Icon to reference images. For whatever reason, MediaWiki thinks that only admins should be able to move files (and I've yet to meet someone who knows why), so it would be nice if you could move those (or give the filemove right to registered users (or autoconfirmed?)). Mass moves are more complicated than mass deletes, but there are bots for that.
And to everyone:
  • Something should be done about all the non-english pages. It's good that there are players in more than one language, but it's difficult to spot check a page you can't read, and user rights can get complicated - plus, everyone's interface is in english unless they create an account and change their preferences. Wikipedia uses subdomains (thus different databases) and interlanguage links to organize multilingual content, but if that's not an option, using subpages like Minecraft wiki (I wish I had a better link for that) or creating a category for each language would be helpful.
  • There are a lot of screenshots with old graphics. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's all of them (except like 3 that only have transport belts in them). They're not really complicated (like this one), so if you know how to crop and maybe draw arrows, it would be great if you could update one (or more), or even add some screenshots for important things that aren't there yet. As above, anything is good. If you do update one, please edit the File: page for it and remove '{{outdated image}}', which is what makes the red box on the page.
If anyone has any ideas (about anything), I'll try to collect them here. If you have any questions about anything, I can answer those here too. Here's hoping the wiki can be a great reference for anyone who wants to know about Factorio!

MF-
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Re: The factorio wiki

Post by MF- »

One note about the old images: It would be nice if they would be browseable somehow.
Right now there is an "old" and "new" graphics set.
I plan to lobby for them to be switchable, because the original have big contrast and could be useful for sight-impaired players (who - I guess - won't care about eye candy)

Monchoman45
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Re: The factorio wiki

Post by Monchoman45 »

MF- wrote:One note about the old images: It would be nice if they would be browseable somehow.
They sort of are. They're all in Category:Icons, but I've uploaded over all of them. The old images still exist in the file history (see File:Inserter.png#File_history for example), although actually getting them out of that is a little complicated.
MF- wrote:I plan to lobby for them to be switchable, because the original have big contrast and could be useful for sight-impaired players (who - I guess - won't care about eye candy)
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but I'm guessing that you mean that there should be a setting to switch between the old sprite and the new sprite. Unfortunately that isn't strictly feasible (it is actually possible with some "fun" ajax, but it wouldn't be smooth). By "contrast" I'm assuming you mean the background around the sprite - I created a template for icons that (will hopefully in the future) produce icons that look like they would in the game. It's even possible to make them light up when you hover your mouse over them like in the game, but that requires use of a CSS file. Using the transparent images instead of ones with backgrounds lets us build icons the same way the game does.

MF-
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Re: The factorio wiki

Post by MF- »

@"contrast"
No, I mean the contrast of the sprites in the game.
With the old sprites, inserters were way easier to tell apart. So were turrets (I haven't learned to tell those apart yet).

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Re: The factorio wiki

Post by ssilk »

Yes, mines for example. It's really hard to see the borders of mines, when placing and when placed. And I tried that already on 5 very different monitors. I mean it's ok in the night, but at day I think it must be seen clearly.

Many possibilities to enhance contrast. Some shadow and sun-reflexes. Light item vs. darker background...

I recommend also this thread: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=6&t=960
Cool suggestion: Eatable MOUSE-pointers.
Have you used the Advanced Search today?
Need help, question? FAQ - Wiki - Forum help
I still like small signatures...

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Re: The factorio wiki

Post by n9103 »

I'm happy to see someone take up the reins of the wiki, as it's needed a loving touch to craft it into a solid reference. :)

BTW, incase you haven't browsed much of the forum yet, you should know kovarex is part of the dev team behind factorio, along with slpwnd, kotasia and cube.
(kovarex is the most forum-active of the devs, followed by slpwnd.)
Colonel Failure wrote:You can lose your Ecologist Badge quite quickly once you get to the point of just being able to murder them willy-nilly without a second care in the world.

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Re: The factorio wiki

Post by kovarex »

I would like to welcome you here :)

I'm really glad that someone who knows how to operate the wiki appeared here. I would like to thank you for the effort.
I installed those mods you asked for and made you admin on the wiki as well.

I don't have much time to update the wiki now, I just update modding/scripting part of the wiki, so modders have some info, but I can help with smaller tasks, or answer questions about the game that would need to be clarified.

Monchoman45
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Re: The factorio wiki

Post by Monchoman45 »

Glad to help! I did a clean up of the pages I tagged for spam, and I'm working on a script that can successfully move all the pages I tagged for that.

CheckUser appears to be partially functional - the extension is loaded correctly (its hook functions are being run), but it's missing a database table, causing it to produce an internal database error whenever an action is performed. Extension:CheckUser mentions "navigate to the extensions/CheckUser folder and run php install.php", which appears to create two database tables. On the up side, the internal database error message is probably messing with the spambots who recreated their userpages (my mass delete bot had no idea what was going on). Unfortunately, it's also preventing blocks, and the deleted images seem to be confused. I'm going to hold off on trying other things until checkuser works again; I'm betting the confused image pages can be fixed by recreating the page and deleting them again, although I don't want to risk potentially causing some other problem by trying that (or other things) right now.

Good news though: the antispam extensions are working as planned, and the only spam now is from accounts that were created before the extensions were installed (which will be blocked once blocking is possible again).

FreeER: I would reply to your PM, but it told me I can't (I guess I haven't posted enough yet?) - {{delete|spam}} is our equivalent of {{qd|spam}}. {{qd}} I believe is a delete template for specific types of pages that fall under some policy on wikipedia, where there's a rule for everything, plus three more you don't know about. For us, a generic {{delete|why the page should be deleted}} will serve us just fine.

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