GalCiv II WIKI is up

*BUMP*
This would solve a lot of problems if people look at it and contribute.. perhaps it should be stickied?

is it okay if we take information directly out of the game to add to the wiki? Say description for the races and such

This should definitely be stickified or brought to attention somehow.

Sticky please! And this should be linked to from the site. I know wikis are scary since they are outside of corporate control, and no company wants to appear to officially sponsor the content, this resource is critical for the community, perhaps even more critical than the limited communication that even the best companies can provide.

The GalCiv Wiki is hosted on Wikicities, which is a company set up by the same people who founded Wikipedia. The wikis on Wikicities are community-owned, so although right now I'm the only person with admin access, once we get a few strong contributors I intend to delegate admin power to them so that they can handle the day-to-day running of the site.

You can certainly take factual information such as initial race statistics. As for detailed descriptions of (say) races and technologies, that would be Brad's call. Putting it on the wiki would mean releasing it under the GFDL.

I also think more traffic will help. Perhaps we can arrange that once we have a solid base set up.

I would make one strong suggestion. Please use the standard wiki text and background colors! It not only looks ugly but can be hard to read for people with some forms of color blindness, which is a lot more prevalent that you might think.

Sticky please! And this should be linked to from the site. I know wikis are scary since they are outside of corporate control, and no company wants to appear to officially sponsor the content, this resource is critical for the community, perhaps even more critical than the limited communication that even the best companies can provide.

Well, frogboy DID started the post.

I just wonder how much info we can pull from the game.

You can use the information that would be reasonably regarded as "fair use". Thus, short descriptions of races. technology quotations, etc. If there is a long source of information online (such as an article on the history of the Arnor) it would probably be more appropriate to link to it instead.

roscoe: I was trying to match the colour scheme of the other GalCiv websites. It seems quite likely that there will be a lot of screenshots and the like that are in dark colours as well, and my worry is that they will not show up as nicely on a white website.

I ran the current site through a colour blindness filter and it seemed to do OK. The three kinds of link could be distinguished through brightness levels. Of course, it may not be a perfect simulation - are you colourblind yourself? If so, what parts are hard to see?

As for it being ugly . . . well, if you have any suggestions to improve that, they are welcome. I was just trying to get it to "working" yesterday. Things like nebula backgrounds and the like are perfectly possible, they just require CSS tweaks. You can even test them yourself by going to User:yourname/monobook.css and adding in the appropriate rules. If you find something good I'd be willing to try merging it into the main site style.

About the color scheme. I also think I like the default wikipedia scheme better too. Black background with light text is really easy on the eyes, but when color backgrounds (like the red and blue and green) come into play it doesn't look very good to me. If it were all black with a continuous text color then I think it would be a lot better, and I think the best looking would be the wikipedia format. I posted in the technology discussion, get in there and help me out because I think that would be really handy to have a tech tree on a wiki.

Sorry for being blunt but that is one butt ugly main page! Those colors are bad. Take a look at the Guild Wars main page in contrast:

http://www.guildwiki.org/wiki/

Main page looks better !

OK. You got your wish. It would be nice to customize it a bit more, though.

(and yes, a few colours need cleaning up, will work on them in a few hours)

I've made a few . . . changes to the front page. Hope you like.

Wiki's are cool. Can't wait to check it out

"I ran the current site through a colour blindness filter and it seemed to do OK. The three kinds of link could be distinguished through brightness levels. Of course, it may not be a perfect simulation - are you colourblind yourself? If so, what parts are hard to see?"

First of all, kudos for you for having used the filter! That's very thoughful.

No, I'm not colorblind but I work with someone who is and he has told me that it is hard to differenciate colored text on a black background. I have become sensitized to the issue after having to listen to some of our developers bitch about having to make "concessions for a few people". I wanted to wring their necks.

I have what might be considered the opposite problem, I cannot tell if colors "go together". My wife assures me that knowing what color goes with what is a normal human trait and that I am difficient in this regard. I think it is "nuture, not nature" and she just uses this to make me change clothes before we go out. I get even by wearing one blue and one black sock and waiting till we get home to tell her .

I've made a few . . . changes to the front page. Hope you like.

Much better!

Wiki is so craptacular.

87 articles and counting! Of course, none of them are perfect (most of them are a long way from perfect), but it's getting to the point where it might actually be useful.

If you're reading this, feel free to pile on with your own contributions.

Just registered. I'll have something to do at work tommorow!

-Dewwar

i could be wrong.. but it seems like a talk page is treated as an article?

Talk pages are not exactly like articles, although the way you interact with both is the same. You have to "Edit" either. The biggest difference between the two is that you usually sign your comments on talk pages (with ~~~~), and it's considered VERY bad form to modify what people have said on a talk page (you can add your own comments, just don't modify theirs). On the other hand you don't sign your work in articles, and any part of an article is fair game for modification (addition, modification deletion). Feel free to join on in!

Generally the only time you need to modify other people's talk is to reformat it to clarify discussions - and that's rarely necessary (it's primarily an issue on Wikipedia because their talk pages get sooooo long). Articles are edited mercilessly.

Progress on the wiki has been pretty hectic - there's now over 160 pages, and yesterday we had 4,000 visitors drop by. Not bad for a week-old site! Many thanks to (in no particular order) Steelviper, Manny, Raijen, MxM, WanderingPhysicist, DarthKryo, ConsumedCrustacean and Siel for their recent contributions, as well as anyone else who's dropped by to edit a page or few.

It'd be nice to see more strategic discussion on there, though, given that that was part of the objective of the wiki. Anyone feel like hashing out the finer merits of Lasers vs Mass drivers or the like?

The wiki should be improved in some fields.There is only definitions about loyalty,courage and soldiering, but how game is affected from loyalty is not yet explained.Courage and soldiering effects on advantage factor also aren't yet explained.Please explain these on wiki at least we have some informations about these abilities.

The wiki should be improved in some fields.There is only definitions about loyalty,courage and soldiering, but how game is affected from loyalty is not yet explained.Courage and soldiering effects on advantage factor also aren't yet explained.Please explain these on wiki at least we have some informations about these abilities.

You know, anyone can modify the thing. Nice little edit button on the top of every page. You could even go to the talk pages and add these suggestions to them

Me, I'm still on a temporary hiatus.