Doom Wiki:Central Processing/2009


 * For the current discussion page, see Central Processing.

Map Walkthrough Template.
I guess, it would make create a map walkthrough more comfortable, if we had a template for it. This way users would have an easy way to make a walkthrough without copy and pasting too much stuff from other walkthroughs, over and over again. Plus, this could define a kind of standard for walkthroughs. Maybe we need to discuss, what should be included in the template, cause not every point is needed. For example, my walkthroughs for The Lost Episodes of Doom don't use stuff like speedruns, for i have not found any of this. On the other hand, i added one point trivia for the second map E1M2: Fusion Power Plant (The Lost Episodes of Doom), to fill in some additional information about the map.--Cybdmn 15:52, 18 January 2009 (UTC)


 * You mean this? :>   For an example of how the various sections can be used in an article, see E1M4: Command Control.    Ryan W 20:51, 18 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, thank you. I haven't found that, so i used another walkthrough (i think it was e1m1) as a base for mine.--Cybdmn 09:51, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Names
As i told at another page here, i think we should use complete names of persons throughout the whole wiki. To give an example: Here the creators are called Chris Klie (Christen David Klie) and Bob Carter (Robert Kiana Carter). I think the usage of complete names would made the wiki more consistent, otherwise we sure need much redirections.--Cybdmn 07:58, 20 January 2009 (UTC)


 * No objections on typesetting grounds (and redirects don't affect the performance of the site one way or the other; Wikipedia has had megabytes of discussions about that). The only tricky case might be when a person contributes to the Doom community using a handle, doesn't want their real name publicized, but then someone discovers it.  Perhaps some of our web forum veterans can comment on how that is typically handled.    Ryan W 21:19, 20 January 2009 (UTC)


 * The privacy is a good point, and it should always be handled with care, no doubt about it. I can remember a case at our games database, where a developer from the old amiga days contacted the webmaster to ask for removing his name, cause it seemed to be a stopper for his further career. Such cases are really delicate. Who knows, if a certain community member want to stay anonymous? And, it is a well known fact, that a information in the internet is not easy to pull back, not in times of the internet archives and the google cache. Maybe real names should just be used, if the name is already widely known, for the user spread it itself. But that problem wasn't really what i meant. I told more about consistency, and for the example i used, these names can be read on the mentioned book.--Cybdmn 00:50, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

DOOM 1 @ 2 ARMY MEN mod n or WAD ideas
This is a request for any doom wad n mod makers to help me make a old school ARMY MEN conversion using the DOOM engine. I have the idea written down n all the game information is also written n ready to go. I need help wit this for 2 reasons. 1 is that i don't have a computer n nor do i have that ability to do it my self, I would also like if someone can teach me how to make wads n mods for DOOM. Any one in IL. or IN would b preferable. This game will b the 1st game in my future company called Neo3DO. This is a attempt to bring back the former glory of the earlier 3DO games. NOTE this will be a promotional game only. We r using IDs software n thus we cant sell it for personal profit. If u r interested please contact me by email at Tomek507@Yahoo.com.
 * This isn't an appropriate place to advertise your project. I suggest you join the Doomworld forums and look for help there. To be honest though, unless you already have something to show it's unlikely that anyone will be interested in contributing to such a project. Fraggle 12:25, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

2008 traffic report
Now that we are well rooted in the year 2009, it's time to take a look at our first annual past year traffic report. These statistics are based on traffic counted by Google Analytics from January 1, 2008 all the way up to December 31 of the same year.

All in all the site had 813 372 visits by 548 224 visitors. The clearly highest peak in traffic occured from January 23 to January 28. During this time segment the wiki had more than 6 000 visits a day, the absolute highest peak occuring on January 26 when the site had 9 136 visits (more than 4 times than on an average day). Otherwise the traffic was pretty steady all year round, with on average around 2228 visits a day.

The top 20 pages with the most pageviews were Entryway (with 298 702 pageviews), Monster and the Monsters redirect page (with a combined total of 261 331 pageviews), Doom 3 (120 979), Doom II (82 274), Doom (77 478), Doom 4 (75 339), Cyberdemon (58 046), Heretic (48 073), Hell Knight (Doom 3) (44 988), Cacodemon (42 407), Knee-Deep in the Dead (40 036), Cyberdemon (Doom 3) (38 013), Sabaoth (34 107), Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (33 833), Demon (Doom 3) (33 237), Doom RPG (31 698), Mancubus (Doom 3) (31 405), Arch-Vile (Doom 3) (30 834) and Thy Flesh Consumed (30 809).

On average users spent 6 minutes 48 seconds on the site, visiting 8.90 pages on average.

Top 10 countries by the amount of visits were United States with 373 385 hits (45.91% of all visits), United Kingdom with 71 775 hits (8.82%), Canada with 46 434 hits (5.71%), Australia with 31 152 hits (3,83%), Germany with 24 969 hits (3.07%), Finland with 19,967 hits (2.45%), Brazil with 14 988 hits (1.84%), Poland with 14 500 hits (1.78%), France with 14 099 hits (1.73%) and Netherlands with 13 747 hits (1.69%). Of these countries, Finland clearly stood out in the average usage statistics, with most pages/visit (11.41), the highest avg. time spent on site (8 minutes 38 seconds) and with the most loyal visitors. Finland also strongly dominates in amount of visits adjusted per population. Among the few countries that gathered zero hits were Turkmenistan, North Korea and around 10 African countries.

62.41% of the traffic came through search engines, 18.99% via referring sites and 16.87% was direct traffic. Top traffic sources were Google (55.01% of traffic), direct site access (16.87%), the English Wikipedia (8.02%), Yahoo (5.38%), and Doomworld (1.85%).

In addition to these Google Analytics provides a shitload of all sorts of detailed stats, so if you have any further statistics questions, feel free to ask. -- Janizdreg 00:04, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki welcomebot
This account has recently begun making postings to IP talk pages, and signing them with our admins' names. I don't know what the other admins think, but I took the liberty of turning it off for now, partly because I already post quite enough repetitive things with my own keyboard, but mostly because the message seems more confusing than helpful: it contains no links to our existing help resources (as in the first paragraph of Entryway), congratulates people for vandalism or vanity postings, and of course inherits all the usual issues with dynamic IPs.

What do other admins think? Will anyone volunteer to be the "contact person" for this bot (as it says in the documentation)? If so, what do you think should be linked from the welcome post? Even if no one responds here, I'll try to draft a more robust welcome post within the next few days. Ryan W 20:33, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi! I saw this discussion, and I'm dropping by to see if I can help... I'm the staff person who's working on the welcome tool. There's a lot of customization that you can do with this, so hopefully I can help you make it work the way you want it to.


 * You can customize the default message to match your existing welcome template, with links to the help pages and everything. Pretty soon, you'll be able to turn off different pieces of it -- you can set it to just leave messages for logged-in users and not anons, if you want. As an alternative, you could also change the anon message so that it doesn't thank people -- just encourages folks to log in. So far, we've seen a lot of people logging in as a result of getting the welcome message -- having the message left so quickly catches them before their IP changes.


 * So -- we're trying to build in all the customization folks need, so that it works the way the community needs to work. Let me know if I can help! -- Danny (talk ) 20:47, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * My action was not meant to contradict any of these statements (I've misplaced the link to your original announcement, but I did read it). Customization is an extremely slow procedure with this wiki's level of activity, however, and the tool could easily have made 2,000 edits before we updated any of the messages.  Given that scale, I thought it was best to err, temporarily, on the side of human-vetted welcoming.    Ryan W 21:19, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, absolutely! I agree, that was the best thing while you're figuring it out. I'm just going around and making sure folks on the active wikis know how to do the customization, since we're adding more parts, and it's getting kind of complicated. :)


 * So we actually just released the new changes -- now wikis are able to enable the user page, the anon welcome and the log-in message separately. (You use MediaWiki:Welcome-enabled for that.) You can also set the bot flag, if you want the edits flagged as bot edits, to take them out of Recent changes. We'll post info on the new settings on User:Wikia later today. So that's all available now, and you can use 'em whenever you like. -- Danny (talk ) 21:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Policy discussion link
A proposed PWAD notability guideline is currently being debated here. Ryan W 23:09, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

questions
why do you have to give information (such as email adresses) to create a new wiki?


 * Probably you should ask this at the Central Wikia, which is where new wikis are created. I would guess that, if nothing else, they want at least one person to contact if a wiki looks abandoned (as the vast majority eventually are).    Ryan W 12:21, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Best place to upload new WADs
I really like this site, but the few I've come across that deal in wads seem a little sketchy. Is there a repository of Doom wads that has some dignity and history? Thanks -- Chris.


 * Your best bet is the idgames archive, which is essentially the biggest, oldest and most popular WAD archive today. -- Janizdreg 23:59, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Doom 3 level statistics
Do we want a list of the items and weapons found in each level? If so, would anybody care to make a mock-up so that I have a format to follow? —Shidou 09:39, 23 June 2009 (UTC) I just remembered that the developers created a set of items for users who use the  command, so that they don't start with just a pistol. Should I exclude those? —Shidou 11:54, 23 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That type of information is definitely accepted and useful according to our policy (as you can see if you take a look at the classic Doom level articles), so feel free to add it to the Doom 3 articles if you wish. The gear you get at the start of a map when cheat-warping would also be a useful addition if you ask me.


 * Most likely you'll have to build the framework for such information yourself, as it seems there aren't enough active users interested about Doom 3 to find someone to do it for you. Although maybe you could use the classic Doom tables as a basis to make your job a tad easier? -- Janizdreg 00:57, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Blog posts policy
Now that we have received our first blog posts, it would probably be wise to write up a new policy for blog posting. Of course it is also possible to disable the blog system, but personally I'd like to see whether this new feature will add some refreshing informal interaction to this wiki.

My suggestion for the basics of the blog policy would be the following:
 * The blog posts should be somehow related to the topics this wiki covers, the wiki itself or its users.
 * The posts don't have to be written in a neutral point of view and can include varying types of comments written from almost any type of perspective.
 * We could choose one general written netiquette used by some other (gaming) community and use that as the basis of our own. If we can find something suitable we can agree on, of course. The netiquette for blog posts could possibly include stuff such as "no personal attacks or racism", "respect other people's privacy" and so on.

What do you think? -- Janizdreg 01:43, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki welcomebot, revisited
As per the above thread I have made some changes to the system messages. See User:Wikia for a general explanation of what each entry does.

What I did:


 * Added "@sysop" to MediaWiki:Welcome-user. Staff members who edit here are usually in the middle of a huge cross-wiki project, or just reverting vandalism.  They probably don't want dozens of questions like this.
 * Added "bot:" to MediaWiki:Welcome-message-log.
 * Removed "page-user" from MediaWiki:Welcome-enabled. The vast majority of new users are gamers, so posting about themselves is already as natural as breathing.
 * Expanded MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user and MediaWiki:Welcome-message-anon to explain what a wiki is, and where useful informational pages can be found.

What I didn't do:


 * IIRC some admins believe that 99.8% of vandalism and spam comes from anon editors. If that's true, then "message-anon" should be removed from MediaWiki:Welcome-enabled as it creates more problems than it solves.
 * The account probably does not need a bot flag (2 new users in one day is a busy day by our standards).

IMHO the total edit rate on this wiki is nowhere near high enough to justify leaving welcome messages without bothering to check whether the newcomers are making good edits. If someone else wants to add their name to MediaWiki:Welcome-user and turn the thing back on, however, so be it. (The "most recent active" option should absolutely not be used because most admins, myself included, either are inactive or edit only intermittently.)

Opinions? Ideas? Flames?

Ryan W 02:39, September 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * I about share this anon's opinion on wikia welcomebots. I've often refrained from editing a page to fix some problem (deleting spam, correcting grammar or spelling, etc.) on various wikias I've browsed so as to avoid them. --Gez 11:53, September 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * In general I doubt it's worth it. The moment I looked at Monaco I just registered right there. (:P) Also, it seems generally known that it is usually best to register if you intend to do multiple edits, since you have a consistant name to be identified by. InsanityBringer 14:33, September 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * The moment I looked at Monaco I just registered right there. (:P) so as to have a profile in order to set the skin to monobook? If so, I understand. I can't stand the agonizingly slow AJAX mess that is Monaco, or the ways it tries to prevent you from seeing the actual wiki code on a page. --Gez 10:33, September 8, 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah just for that reason. It was slow, it barely worked for me (menus wouldn't always show up), it took forever just to shut off. Heck when trying to browse from school one time it had a habit of crashing my browser (A old version of safari on a old mac computer) InsanityBringer 01:57, September 14, 2009 (UTC)

Doom 3 and Strife minor character pages
This is something that has been bothering me for some time, and I hope this is the right place to discuss this. Anyways, recently there have been a lot of new pages covering all the various minor NPCs in Doom 3 and Strife. Wouldn't it be better if all of these were merged into one page for each game? Seeing as most of these character pages probably won't have anything more than a paragraph on them when they're finished, this would seem like the most logical way of doing things. Also, many of the pages don't even describe what game the character is from, leading to some confusion. Thoughts? EarthQuake 10:33, October 31, 2009 (UTC)


 * US$0.02: I would support this.  It was discussed years ago with regard to the Strife characters (example) but no consensus was reached.  IMHO the same logic could be applied to the many short pages about the Doom movie.    Ryan W 05:24, November 1, 2009 (UTC)


 * While I'm okay with characters being listed, throwaway characters generally don't need their own page. If they're major enough to appear in more than once level (whether by an in-game appearance, PDA, e-mail or order from a commanding officer to meet a given person two maps away), then they can have their own page.  Otherwise, the character's description should be contained within the level's description. --Sigma 7 23:56, November 3, 2009 (UTC)


 * On one hand, some of the articles are very short. But on the other hand, and for Strife in particular, there are only a fixed number of these characters. The usual overriding concern when merging articles like these together on wikis is when the number of articles would eventually become unmanageable. Some of Doom 3's characters are only mentioned in text, but Strife's characters all appear in the flesh, and virtually all of them have some purpose in the game. As far as Strife goes, I would personally prefer those articles to remain separate. Failing that, at least make sure that they can be independently linked to via having their own properly labeled sections in any combined article. --Quasar 15:44, November 18, 2009 (UTC)


 * The latter idea is straightforward to implement, as MediaWiki now allows redirects to point to sections, or even to anchors within an article. I personally favor combined articles because permastubs just look sloppy &mdash; there is no way that this would ever be a whole page in a commercial game guide or a Dungeons & Dragons book.  Also, for people reading on phones or PDAs, it halves the number of character articles they need to load (IME the ads cause a noticeable delay even on a T3 line).    Ryan W 22:03, November 18, 2009 (UTC)