Project Overhaul Dolphin Wiki

[mbc07]

(11-10-2015, 11:35 AM)OatmealDome Wrote: Jhonn: Do you have some kind of grudge against this person...? Your reply to me seems overly hostile and rude towards wildgoosespeeder.

If you have time just go see recent wiki activity in the past few days. I'm done here.

[wildgoosespeeder]

(11-10-2015, 12:09 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Wildgoosespeeder has tried this before: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-wiki-suggestion

Also I think that your template idea looks weird. I don't like it.

That's a different idea. I didn't get very far with it. I abandoned it pretty much.

As for the template idea, yeah, it does look weird. I am very aware of that. I'm working with Kolano to fix that.

(11-10-2015, 12:18 PM)Jhonn Wrote:

(11-10-2015, 11:35 AM)OatmealDome Wrote: Jhonn: Do you have some kind of grudge against this person...? Your reply to me seems overly hostile and rude towards wildgoosespeeder.

If you have time just go see recent wiki activity in the past few days. I'm done here.

I haven't given you any reason for you to be that way. I have been following rules very well and being respectful towards other Wiki users on talk pages. Your statements on the Wiki on the other hand...I wish I was getting better from you. I know you are capable. You helped me identify why Super Paper Mario was acting up on me on my talk page.

[KHg8m3r]

I think instead of changing everything so radically, just educate people on how to edit the Wiki. Like a page saying how things work and how to edit.

[StripTheSoul]

(11-10-2015, 05:17 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: I think instead of changing everything so radically, just educate people on how to edit the Wiki. Like a page saying how things work and how to edit.

That's a good idea. Lots of people have never edited a wiki in their life. 

In regard to what I said before I actually meant that back then it would have made more sense because Dolphin was still full of issues and pretty much every game had this or that problem. 

At this point I'm not sure all this is necessary. 

All that sai, I  do appreciate your efforts, even if, maybe, there won't be something coming out of it, eventually. 

[JosJuice]

(11-10-2015, 09:24 AM)wildgoosespeeder Wrote:

(11-10-2015, 07:21 AM)JosJuice Wrote: I don't know enough about the wiki to comment on this as a whole, but looking at the example pages you put up, I see a problem: The templates for each issue will prompt the user to create an issue report if there isn't one, even for things that would be obviously invalid if someone were to submit them to the issue tracker, such as EFB2RAM being needed. (The template is also weirdly positioned, making the first line of text very short.)

MaJoR also noted that. To quote my rebuttal on Template talk:RatingProblemFix:

Quote:I think it's because the awareness of such an issue being sought is not explicitly expressed. I find the duplicate issues stemming from the lack of first reports not being in the Wiki in the first place. I find that a duplicate report is better than not having a known report at all. The Bug Tracker admins have flagged issues as duplicate in the past. This just means to me that the situation will sort itself out eventually if my system were implemented. Then it will be encouraged to replace duplicate reports with first reports (that is something I can't tell MediaWiki to flag because it is too complicated). Recently, it seems that Lucario fixed the URL to search first when clicked in my template. As for templates, I find that the templates are not categorized correctly. Two categories should be templates that are of use to Dolphin Wiki contributors and templates that should be ignored by regular users (and maybe protected from any edits).

I don't see how that is a response to my question. What you and MaJoR were talking about there is about the risk of duplicate issues being created. I agree with MaJoR in that it would create more maintenance work for us on the bug tracker, but what I was talking about has nothing to do with duplicates. My concern is that some of the issues that are listed on wiki pages (like EFB2RAM being required) aren't Dolphin bugs at all but rather problems with the user's configuration. Such issues are good to list on the wiki but are completely inappropriate for the bug tracker. Your system is designed so a wiki issue that does not have a bug report counts as incomplete (i.e. shows the "Create/find bug report" message and makes the page show up in Category:Pages with missing bug reports). This incompleteness can only be resolved if a bug report exists, but bug reports for this kind of issues are invalid and will not be accepted on the bug tracker. If your system succeeds in making people create more bug reports (I don't know if it will or not), this is going to lead to users cluttering the bug tracker up with useless issues for no good reason. The wiki needs to take into account that some issues simply aren't meant to have bug reports.

I don't understand the point of assigning ratings to issues on the wiki, by the way. Users can already read the text and understand how serious "the game crashes" is in comparison to "the reflections on Termina Bay are a bit off". In fact, reading the text can even be better because it lets the user decide how serious the issue is to them instead of having an arbitrary scale of seriousness. I'm not saying the idea is completely worthless, but the advantages seem to be much smaller than the maintenance cost that's needed.

[wildgoosespeeder]

(11-10-2015, 05:17 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: I think instead of changing everything so radically, just educate people on how to edit the Wiki. Like a page saying how things work and how to edit.

A page like that already exists but it isn't very well-followed and it is kind of hard to find. The template should reinforce the conventions on the game page you are viewing instead of a page elsewhere on the wiki.
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Project:Wiki_Conventions

Ideally, the banner (appearance subject to change) should look like this:
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=RatingProblemFix/sandbox#Testing_Found_Bug_Report_and_Revision_Fix

(11-10-2015, 11:45 PM)JosJuice Wrote: I don't see how that is a response to my question. What you and MaJoR were talking about there is about the risk of duplicate issues being created. I agree with MaJoR in that it would create more maintenance work for us on the bug tracker, but what I was talking about has nothing to do with duplicates. My concern is that some of the issues that are listed on wiki pages (like EFB2RAM being required) aren't Dolphin bugs at all but rather problems with the user's configuration. Such issues are good to list on the wiki but are completely inappropriate for the bug tracker. Your system is designed so a wiki issue that does not have a bug report counts as incomplete (i.e. shows the "Create/find bug report" message and makes the page show up in Categoryages with missing bug reports). This incompleteness can only be resolved if a bug report exists, but bug reports for this kind of issues are invalid and will not be accepted on the bug tracker. If your system succeeds in making people create more bug reports (I don't know if it will or not), this is going to lead to users cluttering the bug tracker up with useless issues for no good reason. The wiki needs to take into account that some issues simply aren't meant to have bug reports.

I'm sure that you hate getting duplicate reports. Trying to reduce that while at the same time keeping track of already known bug reports. Test it yourself by looking at the following page. Click the link that will take you to the bug tracker (remove "/sandbox" as if this were deployed on the real page, it wouldn't be there):
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Super_Smash_Bros._Brawl/sandbox

The impression that I am getting so far is that the ultimate goal of Dolphin will run all games on default settings in the most optimal way possible without accuracy loss and without deviation from default settings that impact performance. Revision 4.0-7664 fixes the need to use EFB2RAM for F-Zero GX as EFB2Texture is a more optimized mode (I read the blog about garbage collecting GPU RAM). Also Game Boy Player has a report because of missing accessory support:
https://dolp.in/i2163

(11-10-2015, 11:45 PM)JosJuice Wrote: I don't understand the point of assigning ratings to issues on the wiki, by the way. Users can already read the text and understand how serious "the game crashes" is in comparison to "the reflections on Termina Bay are a bit off". In fact, reading the text can even be better because it lets the user decide how serious the issue is to them instead of having an arbitrary scale of seriousness. I'm not saying the idea is completely worthless, but the advantages seem to be much smaller than the maintenance cost that's needed.

Instead of reading text only, colors are an easier to understand and more direct way to assess how problematic the issue is and conveys how deviating from the highest accuracy settings would impact your ability to play the game. I'm trying to adopt a scheme similar to the 5-star system to rate overall compatibility games have with Dolphin but for each individual problem instead. As for maintenance, the idea is to reduce it by flagging when something is missing. Initial deployment will have to go through so many edits on existing populated problems sections but that is just getting it up-to-date. The Wiki doesn't seem to have a way to tell if something is missing. I'm trying to balance the maintenance issues out so that way maintenance is useful instead of dreaded. I am also trying to correct years of increasing trouble to keep things up-to-date.

[Kolano]

(11-10-2015, 11:45 PM)JosJuice Wrote: My concern is that some of the issues that are listed on wiki pages (like EFB2RAM being required) aren't Dolphin bugs at all but rather problems with the user's configuration. Such issues are good to list on the wiki but are completely inappropriate for the bug tracker. Your system is designed so a wiki issue that does not have a bug report counts as incomplete (i.e. shows the "Create/find bug report" message and makes the page show up in Categoryages with missing bug reports). This incompleteness can only be resolved if a bug report exists, but bug reports for this kind of issues are invalid and will not be accepted on the bug tracker.

I think my perspective on this may be a bit different. If a game needs EFB2RAM be enabled and such is not pre-set by it's ini file, wouldn't we want a report on that so appropriate edits can be made to the games ini? There are a limited subset of problems on the Wiki we wouldn't want issue reports for, for instance bugs in games themselves that also occur on real hardware. We tend to list such on the wiki to avoid erroneous future reporting. We've recently started to transition those sorts of problems to a separate section from Problems, which should allow us to distinguish them and avoid encouraging issue creation for them.

[Kolano]

(11-10-2015, 12:53 PM)wildgoosespeeder Wrote:

(11-10-2015, 12:09 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Wildgoosespeeder has tried this before: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-wiki-suggestion

That's a different idea. I didn't get very far with it. I abandoned it pretty much.

This is part of the concern when you propose changes that will require editing nearly every page on the wiki. That proposal would have only required gaining editing ~20 or so pages, and you didn't follow through with it. It's another idea that likely wouldn't have gained consensus, since I don't think there is much benefit in indexing the contents of compilation discs (at least on the Dolphin Wiki), but none the less the ball was dropped well before you even presented a clear proposal.

[wildgoosespeeder]

(11-11-2015, 06:55 AM)Kolano Wrote: This is part of the concern when you propose changes that will require editing nearly every page on the wiki. That proposal would have only required gaining editing ~20 or so pages, and you didn't follow through with it. It's another idea that likely wouldn't have gained consensus, since I don't think there is much benefit in indexing the contents of compilation discs (at least on the Dolphin Wiki), but none the less the ball was dropped well before you even presented a clear proposal.

I found out that it would only matter to those who are very interested in compilation discs running in Dolphin, which are a minority. On the other hand, this problem rating template idea, this will impact the usability on all existing game pages that have populated problem sections and future games that don't have anything at all in their problem sections. My goal of the template is to increase usability of these pages as well as fixing your current maintenance issues by making it easier to keep track where a page is starting to go out-of-date by Wiki-ing more effectively.

[JosJuice]

(11-11-2015, 06:25 AM)wildgoosespeeder Wrote: The impression that I am getting so far is that the ultimate goal of Dolphin will run all games on default settings in the most optimal way possible without accuracy loss and without deviation into settings that impact performance.

That would be nice, but computers are not magic. Some games simply require things like EFB2RAM, period. It can't be fixed (other than getting rid of the more inaccurate options).

(11-11-2015, 06:25 AM)wildgoosespeeder Wrote: Revision 4.0-7664 fixes the need to use EFB2RAM for F-Zero GX as EFB2Texture is a more optimized mode (I read the blog about garbage collecting GPU RAM).

Yes, there are some EFB2Texture issues that are valid on the bug tracker, like the fix for palettes. Most aren't. I am not going to support the bug tracker being full of useless reports for the sake of possibly catching some rare valid issue that looks identical to the useless reports. Telling them apart requires debugging the game and knowing if Dolphin is doing something wrong, and I don't think any developer is going to bother doing that for a significant amount of issues that are likely to be irrelevant.

(11-11-2015, 06:25 AM)wildgoosespeeder Wrote: Also Game Boy Player has a report because of missing accessory support:
https://dolp.in/i2163

Okay. What does that have to do with anything?

(11-11-2015, 06:25 AM)wildgoosespeeder Wrote: Instead of reading text only, colors are an easier to understand and more direct way to assess how problematic the issue is and conveys how deviating from the highest accuracy settings would impact your ability to play the game.

So you want to provide a good overview of how seriously different settings affect the game, but the overview mentions nothing about which settings affect which issue or even which issues are affected by settings at all?

(11-11-2015, 06:25 AM)wildgoosespeeder Wrote: As for maintenance, the idea is to reduce it by flagging when something is missing.

That's nice, but it doesn't get rid of the need to actually do work, and there's still the problem that the templates will make things harder for first-time editors. It could be worth it if the system has enough advantages, but I don't think it does.

(11-11-2015, 06:25 AM)wildgoosespeeder Wrote: I am also trying to correct years of increasing trouble to keep things up-to-date.

I guess putting pages that lack bug report links or issue ratings in special categories might help with fixing the lack of bug report links and issue ratings, but in what way does that improve the wiki? The real problem is many games lack issues or have outdated issue descriptions, which only can be fixed by people actually going out of their way to test games and write about issues. If you want to have a template like on https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Schlag_den_Raab/sandbox that says "this is out of date" and puts the page in a category of outdated pages, then I guess that's cool. What I don't see the point of is the issue ratings.