In search of rare species (wiki developers and contributors)

Great. We'll set up a forum section 'behind the scenes' so we don't bother people with too much wiki chit chat. ;)

 

It's not ready for that, and probably never really will be 100% due to a scope a little different from entropedia.

Due to the phase of changes EP wiki is just in it's probably the worst moment for entropedia to falter, but I guess entropedia will be back very soon, looks like an issue that one should be able to solve within a couple of hours.

Next upgrade for EP wiki is scheduled for this weekend.

If there's anything really badly needed that potentially could be done quick and dirty just call.

 

Alrighty, private forum is done and we'll start the first content orientated project this week (improvements to creature documentation).

 

*bump*

First project will be the reorganization of creature pages. One specific thing that creature pages are lacking are mapping capabilities for documenting spawns. If you have experience in the area and/or are interested please reveal yourself, if you know someone please point him to this thread.

 

*bump*

First results of the mapping initiative: http://www.entropiaplanets.com/wiki/EntropiaPlanets_Wiki:Mapping

Same map with same data can be available in a forum post (on any forum) or completely separate on a website (any website): http://www.entropiaplanets.com/maps/arkadia.html (or as google version, although we try to avoid Google: http://www.entropiaplanets.com/maps/arkadia/map.html)

All data of EP wiki is available via an web API so people can also just use the data on their own maps or whatever.

After upgrading some server components the next major update will bring a modern notification system.

And still looking for more people interested in collaboratively working on wiki improvements, see post #1.

 

Both Google and Leaflet as well as the 3rd considered option Open Layers support markers by default. I'd prefer to get rid of evil google since all they want is people's data for selling it to advertisers, but the open source option are just about to implement major channges: OpenLayers version 3 is in beta and Leaflets next version might even be the milestone 1.0 version. So the current status is: waiting.

Since all those mapping tools originally are supposed to handle real-world maps the biggest difficulty is to implement a custom coordinates system with a flat projection. When that works adding data would be done in various forms, so you would simply add the coords to a TP on a TP page or to a creature spawn on a spawns page and they would appear automatically on the map with custom markers. Drawing stuff directly on the map would be neat but we noobs are already struggling to get basic things done, while the wiki platform is probably the best possible base for all kind of fancy features it would need someone with a little bit of coding experience to implement them, which partially is what this thread is about ;)

Keeping the properly licensed data separate from the map is also great for other external sites/apps/whatever to build their own features based on the data, which already works fine with the existing API, which by the way doesn't only allow to pull data but also to add data and edit existing data. So if someone would come up with a great mobile app to edit location data or maybe with an in-game tracking app to add data that would be perfectly possible.

To sum it up, we do what we can with the little knowledge we have, and hope people with greater coding skills realize that a mediawiki based platform is the best solution to build fancy features for the EU community, instead of going the though, expensive, insecure, old-fashioned, way of re-inventing the wheel and building something from scratch that can't be greater, more transparent, better maintained and more sustainable than what a large active open source community builds since more than 10 years by now and that is used by ten-thousands of websites, among them the biggest and most popular in the world, and also by large companies and even the NATO, that way doesn't make much sense, does it?