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The main wiki issue, as I see it.

 
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PotatoHandle  





Joined: 21 Mar 2007
Posts: 352
Location: Canberra, Australia.

PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 7:04 am    Post subject: The main wiki issue, as I see it. Reply with quote

TLDR: An automated pathing program for the newer games to provide paths to the wiki will give people a reason to visit, who will subsequently add the more trivial data. You cannot expect 250-odd people to path out 50,000 charts.

Hey fellas, in my line of work I've seen many a problem like the one you're having with the wiki at the moment, so I thought I'd throw in my one and a half australian cents about what I see as the major issue. And FYI, I don't path and I don't take the game too seriously anymore, so if any info here is old or out of date, then I apologise, but here we go anyways.

Make it useful, before you make it comprehensive.
Your target audience while you're building a wiki is the other people who are building it with you. Most of the pages available currently just contain information that everyone at SH already knows. Galloping, alt-strumming, what expert is, etc.

The best way make the wiki more useful is to get all the paths for each song up on the site as quickly as possible. With tens (Hundreds?) of thousands of paths, I'd say the only reasonable method is to get an automated system to do it.

Let's say you have 250 active users and 50,000 paths across all diffculties/games/instruments. With these figures, you'll need everyone on scorehero to post 200 paths each to get the pathing database complete.

I'm no programmer and I imagine it's not an easy task, but automated optimal chart pathing has been done before, why can't it be done again? Make a donation-drive for a programmer(s) to step up and work on it for some extra cash if needs be. There's some incredible professional talent at SH, we've all seen it before, we've just got to get them out of the woodwork.

Automated pathing will also allieviate the issue of having people contributing incorrect paths. IIRC, Rock Band has a uniform charting system, the most songs and the largest playerbase as far as SH is concerned, so it is the obvious choice to begin with.

Once people are going to visit paths of each song, they will no doubt start posting strategies for the harder solos, general song info, and techniques, once a technique becomes common in a wiki over multiple songs it'll get a page, etc.

I know JCirri said about some big new overhaul which is going to fix everything, so this speel of mine might all be for naught, but I thought it'd get people thinking.
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Latest Achievement: B.Y.O.B. (RB2) Xguitar FC! Vid here.
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In the Canberra area? PM me and we'll try and organise a get-together for a few games.

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footballtom3685  





Joined: 16 Sep 2007
Posts: 2478
Location: Bay Area, CA

PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 7:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree, it's silly to think every path (or even 75% of paths) could be made, uploaded, and optimized without a program. As you said, it's been done before and it certainly could be done again.

Personally I know some java now, enough to be able to make a program to do this (probably), but there are 2 main challenges from my standpoint:
1. Figuring out the algorithm for an optimized path
I'm sure if this was known many others could easily make a program as well.
2. How to get the data in a readable form other than an image.
I can't make a program that takes the chart from an image, and I sure as hell wouldn't be able to output an image with the path.

Anyway, I guess I'd like to offer my assistance to anyone who wants to try this. There are way more qualified people out there but if anyone wants to try this I'd be happy to help.
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Cyberwaste  





Joined: 30 Sep 2007
Posts: 2500
Location: Port Macquarie, the fine... planet of Australia. Chippy-chip-CHURRAH!

PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 8:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's my Spud.

I heard of the many path optimisers floating around and I hear they get results, but I'm not so sure about things such as GHWT vocals where you can activate mid phrase and not have a obvious indication on how you are doing on each phrase... But I don't play it often.
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machchunk  





Joined: 28 Oct 2006
Posts: 3829
Location: Pasco, WA

PostPosted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 3:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The main issue is it's not MediaWiki.

What the hell were they thinking, using a format that pretty much no one uses? I would at least try to keep it up if it was MediaWiki, because I know how to write articles with it.
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Sully  





Joined: 12 Nov 2006
Posts: 4570
Location: Tampa, FL

PostPosted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 4:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

machchunk wrote:
The main issue is it's not MediaWiki.


JCirri wrote:
In terms of the wiki software choice, there were some concrete reasons for selecting WikkaWiki over MediaWiki that make a lot of our dynamic functionality possible (see post here for details), but it's definitely less familiar in appearance and (to a lesser extent) in use to many people. The wiki code formatting between both is actually remarkably similar, and this page explains everything you should ever need to do: FormattingRules
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GuitarGeek08  





Joined: 19 Jan 2008
Posts: 3213

PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 3:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I believe the main issue with the wiki is that it is difficult to find what you are looking for, especially given the fact that it has no search function
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Xpertlefty13 quoting me in his Acc Thread wrote:
Honestly, thank you

This is the first real, well thought-out explanation I've seen
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PieGuy  





Joined: 01 Mar 2007
Posts: 2836
Location: Long Island, NY

PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 3:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

GuitarGeek08 wrote:
I believe the main issue with the wiki is that it is difficult to find what you are looking for, especially given the fact that it has no search function
Yes there is. At the bottom of every page:

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JizzleWright  





Joined: 15 Jul 2008
Posts: 205
Location: UK

PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 4:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think we can point out falws in the Wiki until the cows come home but that won't really get us anywhere, I think this is just one of those things that will eventually die out.

As Potato said the Wiki just contains stuff which everybody here already knows, I suppose we could find some non-Guitar Hero players and ask them what they want to know but most of the obvious stuff has already been added, and non GH players won't really care that much.

As to what kind of Wiki they used, i've never really edited a wikki but it doesn't look that different.

I think there is no definate way of making the wiki popular maybe one day it will take off maybe not. One way to start would be to use this this (Which I couldn't get to work as when I click a number it just takes me to a blank page) or this (Which wouldn't even load )

One more thing can only mods edit the home page because ImaCarrot has been the featured user since February and GHM has been out a while now.
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footballtom3685  





Joined: 16 Sep 2007
Posts: 2478
Location: Bay Area, CA

PostPosted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 12:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

JizzleWright wrote:
I think there is no definate way of making the wiki popular maybe one day it will take off maybe not. One way to start would be to use this this (Which I couldn't get to work as when I click a number it just takes me to a blank page) or this (Which wouldn't even load )

One more thing can only mods edit the home page because ImaCarrot has been the featured user since February and GHM has been out a while now.
WantedPages is somewhat useful but most of the wanted pages on there are just common terms that have no place on the Scorehero wiki. The top wanted page is U.K. for instance. A U.K. page would make no sense on this wiki. I forget what orphaned pages actually are, but I think they were disabled for some reason or another, which is why they won't load for you.

As for the home page, it would be crazy to let anyone edit it. Maybe letting users fulfill some requirement (contribution points, pages edited, etc.) to edit it would work, but if they let anyone edit it it would be a big target for vandalism. Even as lightly used as the wiki currently is I'm sure plenty of people see its home page each day.

Back to the original post, I've written some code to automate the path adding process somewhat, although there's not much more I can do because most of the missing paths are not yet pathed, or if they are they are not organized on one page (as far as I know). I got 2000+ paths up, and I have a few hundred more I can get up pretty easily (unfortunately since different sites have paths I have to switch back and forth to cover everything and modify my code a bit before adding each game/difficulty.

At the time of my first post in this thread I was totally oblivious to the fact that SmugDuckling had written a RB/RB2 path optimizer, and I am now very interested in trying to modify his optimizer for GHWT/GHM/etc. It's probably way over my head at this point but I'm going to see what I can do.

Also, I'd love to be able to get paths from GHOT: Decades and Modern Hits, I tried myself a while back and ran into the same problems ajanata and tma did, who are much more knowledgeable than I am about the process. GH:SH still doesn't have charts either as far as I know, so getting those would be nice too.

If I did modify the optimizer for GHWT I will add something that automatically adds each path to the wiki once it's complete, to speed up the process further.

On the general topic of the wiki's main issue, I think another big problem is that it isn't integrated into the main site enough yet. The path links are certainly helpful, but it would be nice if the wiki could be used for more than just paths. The user pages were pretty successful, but maybe rivalries could be moved there in the future to promote more use. I think it's definitely a better platform for holding a rivalry and constantly updating the standings/songs/etc. than a post.
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JCirri  





Joined: 04 Feb 2006
Posts: 4576

PostPosted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 8:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thank you for taking the initiative and following through with the effort to automate path updates to the wiki from other sources.

Even though information isn't complete with shorthand notations and activation notes, turning the links green with optimal paths readily available and providing the starting point to add more is a huge, huge help.

I'd also like to note that I talked with him the other day before he ran the updates and he'd ran them in batches to ensure nothing would go wrong that couldn't be easily fixed. If anyone else wants to contribute similarly with an automated tool, please contact me first before trying it out live.

I agree with a big problem being lack of integration with the rest of the site. People are so accustomed to using the score pages and forums, that they'll default to those resources before thinking to use the wiki, even though the wiki may be better suited for the task. Also the known fact that it's less popular than the rest of the site, alone, is reason enough for some not to use it.

Unless driven from popular areas to the wiki directly (e.g. the path links), a majority aren't going to check there. I was really hoping to see the technique/song guides in TSG get put on the wiki where others could contribute and grow the knowledge available (as opposed to rewriting/duplicating some info in separate guides on the forums). Rivalries is another area well suited for wiki use as you mentioned.

But it seems that a free-for-all system managed fully by the community isn't going to generate the structure and visibility necessary to become usable and popular. There can certainly be miscellaneous pages in categories. For things like rivalries and guides, however, we probably need to devise some naming/formatting standards that may motivate people to use them more often without having to devise something on their own.

It's much easier to fill in the blanks than it is to come up with the blanks.
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ImaCarrot  





Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 2687

PostPosted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 1:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I guess I've been the featured user for awhile? Anyway, no one has been nominating other user pages since before my page was even put up there, so I think it is safe to say that as an experiment, the featured user... feature, has failed.

If anyone has any ideas as to what to use that space on the front page for, we're all ears. Currently I've set it to be a featured path area and I'll use it to show off a random path from a song that has a well filled out path page.

Its better than nothing and we'll have a large pool of pages to pull from so we shouldn't go any long stretch of time without updating; we just have to actually do it.

This is just me speaking here, haven't discussed with the rest of the staff, but I don't see any reason why we couldn't upgrade some select users with permissions to edit some of the more protected pages; namely the main page. Would help us in keeping up to date at least.

Again, let me know if you guys want to see something other than a featured path.
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DanSoup  





Joined: 22 Sep 2007
Posts: 857
Location: Sheffield, UK

PostPosted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 10:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Perhaps just a "featured page" would be alright, that way we would be able to have a rivalry, user, SP path or guide as the featured page.
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Cyberwaste  





Joined: 30 Sep 2007
Posts: 2500
Location: Port Macquarie, the fine... planet of Australia. Chippy-chip-CHURRAH!

PostPosted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 2:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

DanSoup wrote:
Perhaps just a "featured page" would be alright, that way we would be able to have a rivalry, user, SP path or guide as the featured page.

That seems like a sweet idea. It covers a lot of basses, and can change either weekly or daily when the wiki picks up more pace.
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psxfreak101 wrote:
But seriously I hate this country when it comes to my beloved hobby of presing buttons on a controller and making shit on my TV follow my every command.

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