User:Bzc6p/Restructuring projects pages

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P R O P O S A L

for creating a new layout of pages listing projects on this wiki.

TLDR: check it out. user:bzc6p/Projects

UPDATE 2015-06-28: The proposal has been applied and made live. The links in the following point to the live pages now (through a redirect).

Initial draft

Currently there are several pages for listing different kinds of ArchiveTeam projects, some of them maybe almost forgotten. Not only keeping them up to date and complete, but finding them (by newcomers) is difficult.

What I suggest is having them on a single page that should be considered as a central point of projects.

I suggest that it should be Projects. (This and all following linked pages would, of course, be in the main namespace; now it links to my test subpages so that they can be reached from each other – in case the suggestion gets live, these links will be changed.)

The Projects Page

So all projects should appear on the Projects page. (Why not just linking from there? (1) then that page would be so empty, (2) not having to load other pages (more jumps) is, I think, comfortable.)

However, so that it doesn't grow too big alone, different kinds of projects could be listed on different pages, and they could be embedded into the Projects page.

For even more compactness, all the sections' content would be hidden in collapsed boxes, and they could be expanded individually, what the reader wants to see.

I tried to find some nice colors to distinguish the sections and make them colorful. I don't really care if anyone changes them, but please, don't choose a color that makes reading difficult.

The sections and the correspondent embedded pages should appear in the following order and with the following modifications:

Projects status

Meaning the already-existing Projets status template, with a little modification. On this new Project page, it would look ugly in a corner, so should be on top, but for that, changing its dimensions is necessary (not that tall, but wider) – no other changes though.

An information text

About the Projects page and how to use (i.e. edit) it. Contains links to Deathwatch and Alive... OR ARE THEY pages too.

Current Projects

Without any changes.

Warrior projects

I suggest removing the warrior projects table from the Warrior page (or, it can be embedded into there too, but should be on a separate page either way), creating a separate Warrior projects page. No modifications to the current format of that table, though, but changed the order of projects, newest on the top (it makes more sense).

Manual projects

Creating an own page for them, with a similar table to that of the warrior projects. Now the list of them is the same as that in the Current Projects, but may change in the future. (I've also added Valhalla to the manual projects, I think it fits in among the others.)

Small projects

Replacing Miscellaneous Projects, merging the two tables into one. Format based on the first table, removing Archive format and Details to save space, splitting Archive date to Started and Finished. (Date format in YYYY-MM-DD, so incomplete dates will also sort well. Applies to Manual projects, too.) Details can be given by using the with-desc template. Also changing the column order a bit.

Also mentioning here ArchiveBot, as many small projects are done by that. (Not all; my skepticism about ArchiveBot could make another essay but it's not the point now. At least I will put new lines into that table once in a while, maybe others too.)

Old projects

New page based on Archives, also added content from Projects listing smaller projects down the page. These two areas are pretty much intact nowadays, listing new projects is done elsewhere. However, I can't really merge them into any of the above tables, as they don't fit in there: not the same pieces of information were recorded, and we don't remember the missing ones, digging them out would be to difficult. So I suggest leaving them as-is, but linking them from Projects, as they were projects. I also created a Historical template to note the archaism.

The IRC Page

The page updated with the most delay is probably IRC. Project specific IRC channels are needlessly separated from projects. Also, the status is quite ridiculous: how can a channel be complete? As I can see, failed projects' channels have the Idle tag, although completed projects' channels are also idle.

I suggest not having a separate project IRC channel list. They should be removed from the old IRC page (planned new one here: IRC), and only general IRC information and list of general AT IRC channels should be left there.

However, I see there are some IRC channels that are related to projects not mentioned elsewhere, so just purging them would cause loss of historical content. However, listing those projects has the same obstacles that I've already described above with old projects. So I find it the best to create a subpage IRC/Old for them (or IRC/Archive ? but we use that word so many times...), cutting down the last column (status) and putting a Historical template on it, and link it from the IRC page, also from the Old projects. Also mentioning where the user can find the names of the project-specific channels. And that is: the Warrior projects and the Manual projects tables, right next to the project's name. Redundancy decreased. Necessary information available. (Also, channel names clickable by the IRC template.) (Status column removed also from the remaining general channels' list on the IRC page.)

Further Persuading the Reader

Practical layout

When the status a project/website changes, you can access all the pages you need to modify from a single page, not having to go around the whole wiki. You can reach the list of the specific project category, the list of current projects, the Deathwatch, and also the project's own wiki page if any.

The only disadvantage is that embedded pages, unfortunately, have no direct edit links. To solve this, in every section there is a manually-created edit link to the correponding embedded page. The user is warned in the info text that he wouldn't return to the Projects page after editing, but sees the edited page. Just a little inconvenience.

More comprehensive list of AT endavours

Pretty much everything is listed on a single page, or just one click away. Projects page can now really become a central point of the wiki.

No information lost

I take care that the restructuring doesn't cause loss of information. In some cases, I even added otherwise-forgotten info to the tables.

The test pages are created as subpages of my userpage. However, if the Team likes my idea, they won't be moved but will be copied over the old content (if any), thus the old state of the pages can always be reached through the page history. (In case the Team changes their mind and wants to revert the changes, that's just a few clicks.) Also, not-any-more-used pages immediately redirect the user to the content's new home, so nobody gets lost.

Test, Feed Back and Contribute

Please

  • test the pages, start here: user:bzc6p/Projects
  • tell me if you (don't) like something or have suggestions, either on the talk page of this page, or on IRC
  • I don't even mind if the Team starts making modifications on these pages themselves. (Correcting minor, e.g. grammar or wording mistakes are very much welcome, thanks!) It's just a proposal, a suggestion from me, a base which we can customize.

However, I think that such a new structure (this or something similar to this) should be created, as the pages and the information on them are, at the moment, too far away from each other, not linked well enough.

What I've been working on recently with this project is to increase the integrity of the wiki. There are also other parts that would need some updating, but this one is one that we contact almost every day.

Hope you'll like my idea.

bzc6p (talk) 11:51, 11 June 2015 (EDT)

Update 1

Upon suggestions in #archiveteam, I removed the collapsible boxes from Projects, and also added a TOC. So that the TOC doesn't look weird, I added some second level section headings to Warrior projects. (That didn't have a section for the list itself but did have two for the status words.)

bzc6p (talk) 15:17, 11 June 2015 (EDT)

Update 2

I misunderstood a suggestion upon which I did most of Update 1: the collapsible boxes on Projects should stay. (Or not? Removing them would save us a few clicks, but the page would be so long and not that overseeable.) Reverted the changes on Warrior projects also (not necessary any more).

bzc6p (talk) 15:29, 12 June 2015 (EDT)

Update 3

Based on the June 17 suggestions in #archiveteam-bs, the following changes were made:

  • on the Warrior projects page, now the Active status is in bold instead of the "Archive Posted" (aaaaaaaaa)
  • on the Projects page:
    • Compacted the intro, some redundancy in describing the sections has been removed (garyrh), the intro is not collapsed anymore (garyrh) (what's more, it's not in a box anymore)
    • The only remained listing of sections now acts as a TOC (xmc)
    • Current Projects is now expanded by default (joepie91, SimpBrain, schbirid)

Other notes:

  • Unfortunately, I couldn't remove the section edit links, as __NOEDITSECTION__ doesn't work, apparently.
  • Having all the boxes expanded or getting rid of them completely would make the page still too long, I think (re schbirid, xmc(?)).
  • Asking users to document their own archiving efforts on their user pages would prevent one from finding saved websites by Ctrl+F-ing the Projects page – and if there were too many manual projects one day, we could find something out, it's not the case yet (re SimpBrain).
  • I thought of putting the appropriate edit link right next to the one-line description in the section, so that it could be edited without expanding the box. However, it would maybe distract uncompetent visitors from the Expand button they should use instead.

Still waiting for feedbacks. I'm convinceable.

bzc6p (talk) 15:51, 19 June 2015 (EDT)

Update 4

As the proposal has received generally positive feedback and no one did object, now I've made the proposed changes live. The contents of the proposed pages has been copied to the main namespace, the new pages have been created, some have been moved (Miscellaneous Projects should have been moved, but I forgot about it and could only make a redirect to Small projects afterwards. Archives has been moved to Early projects.) Redirects, references have been left.

Should you have any suggestions, be bold to edit, or at least, to tell!

I hope I could improve the wiki a bit with this new layout.

bzc6p (talk) 15:35, 28 June 2015 (EDT)
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