User talk:Morgaine

[Feel free to add comments. I may reorganize them if the page becomes difficult to navigate.]

Game Feedback

There is no game feedback on the wiki for GW2. They have the official forums for that. I would suggest you tag the page you made to be deleted, since there will never be any developer review of it. At least, you need to move it into your userspace, as there is no Feedback namespace here, and never will be. -- Wyn talk 09:02, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

• Oh, I didn't know that, interesting. Yes, I'll have to move it into my userspace. Did ArenaNet actually state that there will be no wiki feedback, or did you mean that there is no such thing at present? Morgaine 09:13, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
• Embarrassingly, since the day of launch I've been telling players who were having difficulties of one type or another to come to the Feedback section of the GW2 wiki and let developers know ... not realizing that there was no such thing for GW2. Very unfortunate. :-( Morgaine 09:16, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Anet has stated that all game feedback should be done on the forums, or if it's a bug, reported via the in-game reporting system. The Feedback system on GWW was set up only because Anet had no official outlet (like the forums) for Guild Wars. -- Wyn talk 09:29, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

How unfortunate, because forums are generally totally ill-suited for detailed and well considered description of issues and suggestions. Hopefully Anet's forum has some extra facilities to handle feedback better than a normal forum. I'll check it out when I get time. Morgaine 09:37, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

• Right, I've put my Feedback skeleton into my personal wiki namespace, now I need to undo what I added into Feedback namespace. Morgaine 09:38, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

I haven't yet discovered how to tag a page for deletion, but I have removed all text from [[Feedback:User/Morgaine]] as a stopgap for now. Continuing to look through wiki help info. Morgaine 09:53, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Someone's tagged it for deletion for me, I'm guessing that was you Wyn, many thanks! :-) Morgaine 10:15, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

• Actually, I've discovered that use of the forum for dev suggestions feedback is only temporary, as this clear post indicates. I'm not surprised at this. The forum format is really pretty useless for detailed presentation of ideas, and clearly they've realized that themselves already. Morgaine 10:33, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Edits to "Victory or Death"

Re:http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Victory_or_Death&diff=551187&oldid=551160

Are you saying that that bug has been fixed? if so in the future turn the bug into a normal note (remove the bug template) and say it was fixed with a patch (if you know which patch and what date then link to it.)- Zesbeer 22:23, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

I added the note while standing in the Fort Trinity instance described on that page. At that time, the bug was (obviously) unfixed, or I wouldn't have written it up. Since it's not possible to discover whether the bug is fixed or not without passing another character through Arah story mode, I won't be able to check again for a while. That was my 8th profession passing through Arah, so in one sense I've "finished" all the professions, which reduces the incentive to repeat. Of course, it probably won't get fixed at all unless the bug is reported by someone to Anet, unless they monitor the wiki's Bug category. Such an inconsequential bug doesn't deserve any priority though. It only needs fixing for tidiness and completeness. Morgaine 22:26, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

ok no problem then from what you wrote I thought it had gotten fixed and you were changing the bug tag to say that it had.- Zesbeer 22:53, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

What probably confused you was the fact that I made two edits, the first adding the Bug note, and the second adding another sentence with extra info. On a quick read, it's possible for the latter to be misinterpreted. I'll add a few words to make it clearer. Morgaine 23:41, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Achievements and structuring and stuff

Hey! Welcome (back) to the wiki! You mentioned problems with stuff on Talk:Escape from Lion's Arch/Daily achievements and I'd prefer addressing it here. The {{achievement table row}} has a function for linking to a specific page for an achievement if needed. Then we can use the {{achievement box}} template to link back to the achievement on the achievement page. See Hunt the Dragon! for an example of this working. There hasn't been much consensus on using this as you can always put the information below the achievement table. The problem with Daily achievements is that we don't create individual pages for any of the daily achievements. The daily achievement subpages are organized as a subpage of the release page, hence Escape from Lion's Arch/Daily achievements. However, these pages do use the {{achievement table row}} template. So Ishmael was using the format we use on the Daily page to annotate the achievements. Now the daily page has had some changes recently to format, but you can see the prior approach in the difference.

I'll point out some of the problems since you were complaining about the whole approach we are using! We are putting Escape from Lion's Arch/Daily achievements as a subpage of the release instead of on the Daily page. This subverts the {{achievement table header}} and {{achievement table row}} as the page name is used for Property:Has achievement category so you get stuff like these subobjects. It's not even setting the property to the correct category. We could do BASEPAGENAME, but these pages aren't even subpages of Daily. Poke was the one that started these pages because he was the only one that started documenting daily achievements.

While I love the discussion about "old guard" and stuff on Talk:Escape from Lion's Arch/Daily achievements, the guy who designed the achievement templates and shit was me. I started contributing on this wiki and have no relations from users on Guildwarswiki. Thanks to you taking a chance to complain about "revert wars", "access usability ball", and "basic information structuring" instead of discussing how to improve the page. You will forgive me if my impression of people who contributed to first wiki come to the gw2wiki are pretentious assholes who look for any chance to complain about how terrible the wiki is.

But hey, now you have personal knowledge on how daily achievements are haphazardly structured and what's wrong with them instead of it being hearsay. I'd love to discuss any other misgivings you have. That is, if you want to discuss stuff instead of complaining about the wiki being weaker and less informative.-Relyk ~ talk < 06:36, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

That's great feedback, thanks Relyk! I'm not going to be able to address much of what you said above just now, owing to it being the end of the day and some other things needing to be done, but I'll start it off. (I'll have to research the templates some other time, and I probably won't understand them initially because templating is one part of MediaWiki which I've barely touched. But I can say a few things quickly, one about heady principles and the other completely pragmatic:

• As a matter of principle, I don't believe that there can be much disagreement on factual / logical / technical matters at all, simply because they are not subjective, and hence once understood, they cannot fail to be accepted by a rational person. So, if reasoned discourse is allowed to play out and everyone honestly plays the factual / logical game instead of ego-tripping on their own religiously held preferences, everyone can be a winner through arriving at a joint objective understanding. This is in stark contrast to every other game, which inevitably results in winners and losers. What does this mean in terms of wiki? It means that I believe that when we focus on some specific detail of wiki design, we should all be able to agree (after analysis) on what has merit in informational or usability terms and what has not. I'm an engineer, and this is how things are worked out in engineering --- almost no ego tripping, just factual analysis resulting in a jointly held view. There generally can't be any strong disagreement, because the facts and the logical reasoning are not matters of opinion. Although this is sometimes countered with "But people are human, not machines", it's not a valid excuse in rational discourse. To err is human, and we need to try not to err just as much when designing a wiki as when we are designing a space shuttle.

• As a highly pragmatic factual observation (I won't justify that it is a fact here, but it can be done I think), the GW1 wiki was far more effective in terms of information structure and hence in its usability than the GW2 wiki is today. That is an extremely important and valuable data point for us now, because it means that we don't need to aim for some abstract theoretical goal of perfection in order to do a good job for GW2. We can simply use the GW1 wiki as a general reference model and disallow or remedy any regressions of access functionality that may have appeared in GW2 wiki versus the older one. That's a pearl beyond price, as it gives us a very clear game plan for progress with known success ahead.

I accept that strong adherence to engineering methodology as I outlined above is hard to promote on a community wiki, but the approach can be described in a much more approachable way simply as cooperative analysis followed by making commonsense choices. Anyone can do that without needing to be a professional engineer! The main obstacle is people who consider that criticism of their design implies criticism of their person or of heir competence, when it certainly is not. That's a hard nut to crack, because offense is sometimes taken despite not being given, when the M.O. of neutral analysis and highlighting of faults is not understood.

So, how does the above relate to what you wrote? Despite the problems I've had in the distant past with Ish (mainly because he can't seem to do neutral analysis and immediately goes into personal attack mode instead), most contributors don't have that problem and seem open to analysis of functionality and neutral criticism of wiki faults. So, I don't think that all hope is lost for the GW2 wiki. Indeed, the fact that you quite happily criticize your own early templating work suggests you understand the engineering M.O. just fine. :-) Everything we do can be improved, and we are happy when we do improve it, not in angst because our previous efforts had a few imperfections. As I wrote above about principles, everybody can be a winner after each cycle of improvement, with the right mindset.

Finally to something specific in your reply, the templating. Although my understanding is only partial, it sounded to me like "we have the technology" already, but just aren't using it fully. Well, that can be remedied! And no doubt the templates can be improved further if necessary --- where there's a will there's always a way. Any approach that preserves web addressibility is fine by me, as my main interest is in the data graph being effective more than in matters of presentation. Wiki users should be able to "drill down" from information they know towards progressively finer levels of detail that they don't know, without needing to use the search box. The GW1 wiki was excellent in that area, so we know it can be done.

Bye for now. I'll pick up the discussion again after looking at the links you provided. Thanks! :-) Morgaine (talk) 09:20, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Just out of interest, what were the key navigation aids/information structures on GWW that you liked so much? (damn I'm a srs old gww'er + I shouldn't be here) -Chieftain Alex 17:38, 28 February 2014 (UTC)