Factorio Forums

Is the wiki supposed to be about the current stable version or the current experimental version? It seems that currently most pages are correct for the stable version but a few have been modified for the experimental version.

There are infinitely more people playing the game and lurking in the forum than people who contribute to the wiki. And the game changes a LOT with each major update, even within a major update there are some important changes from time to time. As a consequence, the wiki is almost always outdated. The few people who work on it can't keep up, but I'm sure things will get better when development is finished (and it will be when it will be ).
Or if more contributors find in themselves the will to help,; it's the most efficient way to get an up-to-date wiki.

The wiki is currently being updated to the experimental version. All recipes and technology costs have already been updated. This means that only the text on the pages still needs to be updated. Further info about this topic can be found on the Editor noticeboard which is linked in the announcement topic of this subforum and on the sidebar of the wiki itself.

There is a ton of outdated information on the wiki, especially in the prototypes section. If I am not misinterpreting the API, then prototypes like https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype/EntityWithHealth don't even exist anymore.
I would suggest to redirect to the API documentation because keeping all that information updated in the wiki is impossible and unnecessary when it has its own place. I have partly already done that for this page: https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype/technology-modifier
It confused me that there were many things not or wrongly mentioned and it took quite some time to find the API page which you can actually depend on. A simple redirect towards the corresponding API Page would make much more sense, especially since pages like these are mainly for mod developers.

Xerus wrote:There is a ton of outdated information on the wiki, especially in the prototypes section. If I am not misinterpreting the API, then prototypes like https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype/EntityWithHealth don't even exist anymore.
I would suggest to redirect to the API documentation because keeping all that information updated in the wiki is impossible and unnecessary when it has its own place. I have partly already done that for this page: https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype/technology-modifier
It confused me that there were many things not or wrongly mentioned and it took quite some time to find the API page which you can actually depend on. A simple redirect towards the corresponding API Page would make much more sense, especially since pages like these are mainly for mod developers.

You are misinterpreting the api. First of all: The lua-api website does not document prototypes. This is why the section on prototypes on the wiki still exists. The types section is partially about things that are also documented on the lua-api website types section, but deleting those duplicate pages would not make much sense imo, since the amount of info on them is relatively small and should not change. If you do find pages within those sections that are not small and all their information can be found on the lua-api website, please mark those pages with the deletion template and give the lua-api page that has the information in the deletion reason. I can then delete the page and change all links that used to go to it to go to the lua api documentation.

Now to the prototypes tree structure: The most up to date prototype inheritance structure can be found here. It was generated by Rseding about 3 weeks ago and is based on version 0.15. I updated the tree structure on https://wiki.factorio.com/Prototype_definitions about a week ago to reflect the updated data. The structrue on Data.raw is also up to date, though it is automatically generated (the type hierachy on the repo is based on the tree images and was updated by me, about a week ago.)

PS: Yes, that section of the wiki is outdated. Most of it hasn't been edited since 2014, so I didn't really count it in the post.

The poor wiki writers.
They must think of every new update as writing the same book over and over again.
Must be incredibly boring.

olafthecat wrote:The poor wiki writers.
They must think of every new update as writing the same book over and over again.
Must be incredibly boring.

Less things than you think change each update. And lots of the changes are just small edits.

Jap2.0 wrote:

olafthecat wrote:The poor wiki writers.
They must think of every new update as writing the same book over and over again.
Must be incredibly boring.

Less things than you think change each update. And lots of the changes are just small edits.

You have no idea what you are talking about lol

Jap2.0 wrote:

olafthecat wrote:The poor wiki writers.
They must think of every new update as writing the same book over and over again.
Must be incredibly boring.

Less things than you think change each update. And lots of the changes are just small edits.

More things than you think change each update

Koub wrote:

Jap2.0 wrote:

olafthecat wrote:The poor wiki writers.
They must think of every new update as writing the same book over and over again.
Must be incredibly boring.

Less things than you think change each update. And lots of the changes are just small edits.

More things than you think change each update

I'm not saying that only a few things change each update, only that they don't need to rewrite the entire wiki each update .

Jap2.0 wrote:

Koub wrote:

Jap2.0 wrote:

olafthecat wrote:The poor wiki writers.
They must think of every new update as writing the same book over and over again.
Must be incredibly boring.

Less things than you think change each update. And lots of the changes are just small edits.

More things than you think change each update

I'm not saying that only a few things change each update, only that they don't need to rewrite the entire wiki each update .

We still need to change nearly every page. I can promise you that every item and research page has changed due to version 0.15. Most other game related pages that are in English have also seen changes due to 0.15. And that doesnt even mention that we have to add pages for new features.

Oh and nobody said that we need to rewrite it every update. Just that it feels like doing the same thing over and over again which is definitely true. This update you calculate those values, the next update you calculate them again.

I was wondering if the generation of the pages could not be automated for everything that is in the definitions (the items, the recipes, the science, ...) After all, once you read all the lua files in the data folder, you know everything you need about how to build the ingame objects, their stats, everything.
Something that would parse the lua files, and generate HTML code for everything that's described in the lua files.

Koub wrote:I was wondering if the generation of the pages could not be automated for everything that is in the definitions (the items, the recipes, the science, ...) After all, once you read all the lua files in the data folder, you know everything you need about how to build the ingame objects, their stats, everything.
Something that would parse the lua files, and generate HTML code for everything that's described in the lua files.

Already happened 5 months ago :D https://wiki.factorio.com/User:BilkaBot

How factorian
At least it saves from the tedium of manually doing all the most basic stuff

Wow, you guys are active.
I have changed my mind, it's more like editing a book until it is perfect, then writing a sequel and editing it all over again.
Also, I did not know you had a coded twin

Semi-on-topic, so I'll post this here rather than start a new thread, but I just notice that the tech tree and list of technologies from https://wiki.factorio.com/Technologies (which is linked from the main page) is out of date. Looks like it is still for 0.14. Thanks in advance for anyone who updates it.

Zavian wrote:Semi-on-topic, so I'll post this here rather than start a new thread, but I just notice that the tech tree and list of technologies from https://wiki.factorio.com/Technologies (which is linked from the main page) is out of date. Looks like it is still for 0.14. Thanks in advance for anyone who updates it.

That's a known issue :/ The devs have not made a big tech tree image for 0.15, although it was asked for multiple times. Because of this someone is working on making a tech tree using an external tool, but that takes time. I think I'm going to update the list though, there is no reason to not at least have that up to date.

Yeah. It was mainly the list that I noticed. The tree isn't very usable for me for viewing anyway. (What you really want from a techtree is something large enough to be readable, and with each individual tech being clickable, and taking you to the appropriate page. But I'm not sure how you could build that with a wiki's limited subset of html).

Thanks for working on the wiki.

Zavian wrote: (What you really want from a techtree is something large enough to be readable, and with each individual tech being clickable, and taking you to the appropriate page. But I'm not sure how you could build that with a wiki's limited subset of html).

We can make that, and we are planning to, probably also using the external tool to generate the linking syntax. That's another reason why it's taking so long though :/

You can see the desired linking in action on this extremely outdated page: https://wiki.factorio.com/Research/it