[ファブリス]

We now truly have a community Wiki at rtkwiki.koohii.com !

If you are registered on this forum, just make sure to be signed in the forum, and you can edit the wiki !


* Do use this thread to discuss anything related to the wiki, in addition to the Talk Pages. Remember the usernames on the forum will match any wiki edits therefore you'll always know who is who.

* Please discuss here before making important changes, especially the organisation of the pages and the homepage.

* Feel free to create your user page to take notes and links of your personal interests.

* My commitment to you is that the complete wiki database and MediaWiki installation will be handed out to the community if/when I am no longer interested in maintaining it. That is specifically for the wiki, not the forum. If you want to save valuable information, move it to the wiki!


F.A.Q.

Email & Notifications
By default accounts on the wiki are created with ONLY your username. When you setup your email in the wiki preferences, ignore the password field. The password is not necessary since the authentication is linked to your forum account (and requires to be signed in the forum as well).

Username with underscores
... will not be authenticated. Message me or post here with a request for a username change (we can just remove the underscore, or replaced it with something else).

Logging out on public networks
Just make sure to sign out from this forum, and further visits to the RtkWiki will be as a guest.

[ファブリス]

Next week I'll look into refreshing the theme a little bit. If you know a nice /modern theme that would fit fire away!

I mean to change the logo and identity to "koohii wiki", so maybe I'll add a little banner to make it more visible.

Thank you very much for your hard work, I really appreciate it! I guess now it's our turn to actually make good use of the wiki.

[ファブリス]

I've set the default skin to "Vector", and restored the monochrome backgrounds. I reckon it would be nice to have a "koohii theme" for the wiki, but without a full blown theme, the standard Wikimedia skin looks better in my opinion. Also there used to be a custom background with kanji, but I don't know where it was.

I appreciate all the efforts, gdaxeman. Just for the theme I didn't really intend to make it look like the forum.

I don't know about this monochrome style in the wiki now — there's too much grey in it, a color I'm really not fond of... Wouldn't it be possible to replace it with some nicer ones? Anyway, I found the old header background on The Internet Archive in case you want to use it:

https://web.archive.org/web/201107131644...headbg.jpg

[ファブリス]

I can make a koohii themed skin eventually, but until then I prefer for the default theme to be used, and in general, also favor using the classes and ids defined in the standard skins. That way when I make a koohii skin, it will work (an exception with styles attributes mainly on the front page for the custom layout). Until then let's focus on content. If you really dislike it, I suggest copying some CSS from an earlier edit, and using Stylish and similar extensions.

I spent one week on the MediaWiki wrestling with the APIs and bad "authentication" plugins that didn't work properly, to integrate the forum accounts. So now I'm going to focus my efforts elsewhere until there is activity from more users.

I *can* of course install any required extensions and the like.

Thanks, Fabrice! I'm going to try and take some time this weekend to extract some valuable discussion comments into the Wiki.

ファブリス Wrote:I can make a koohii themed skin eventually, but until then I prefer for the default theme to be used, and in general, also favor using the classes and ids defined in the standard skins. That way when I make a koohii skin, it will work (an exception with styles attributes mainly on the front page for the custom layout). Until then let's focus on content.

Ok, no problem if it's for a good cause. To be honest, I had made those theme changes 'globally' in the hopes that maybe more users would use the wiki actively if it looked like part of the forum and not like part of Wikipedia, that it would feel homier and be more inviting for them to add in there things that are not allowed on Wikipedia (especially things such as using the forum as a source, posting howtos, and creating lists of links to resources), but since that didn't happened... It was a crapshoot that didn't bring results.

By the way, there are some remainings of the tentative styling in the Common.css, which can be seen in pages such as these:

http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/Tests (in the table [.wikitable, a custom class based on Wikipedia's])
http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/Android_Applications (in the Contents box [#toc])
http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/Special:RecentChanges (in the odd lines [.mw-line-odd])

Since you didn't touch these parts when editing the CSS I don't know if you want them removed or not, so I'm just mentioning it here instead of deleting the corresponding rgb() lines.

[ファブリス]

I think an attractive wiki is definitely a plus. But let's face it I didn't do much for the wiki. The spam got really bad and I thought it was bad to have you keep blocking and undo-ing all those spam edits. When I implemented CAPTCHA I was surprised to find out it is next to useless. I mean, wow, you'd have thought a technology from Google actually did something? All this is a learning experience.

So when CAPTCHA didn't work I closed the registrations. Manual registrations is an extra step that prevent the occasional impulse edit, which could turn into returning editors, and that was probably really bad for the wiki.

I wish I had thought of the forum authentication sooner, but it only made sense since the troll incident that got me into implementing much better spam prevention on the forum. So now it makes perfect sense, not only 99.99% of spam bots ever bother to reply to the custom question on the registration, they are checked against a third party spammer IP list. If any gets through nonetheless, I am now aware of a "user merge" extension that could definitely remove them.

For the remaining custom styles that's ok.. actually if you like you can keep a little bit of colour in the table heads similar to Guild Wars Wiki. And generalize that, based on existing classes in the wiki skin. When it's just table heads and other "heading" type elements, it will translate across other skins. Though I think the pastel colors on the front page work much better along with the monochromatic base than the yellowish ones. If I make a koohii skin the coloured table heads are likely to fit in with little changes.

[ファブリス]

Added a simple {{TOCright}} template to float TOCs by the side, so there is no big gap at the top of the page.

You can definitely add some colours in there, using a simple contrast on a monochromatic background. Here are some vibrant pastel colors that could work well, as an example. Feel free to experiment, I think any kind of light background colour in the table heads and optionally the TOCs, can add that touch of colour. If it's desaturated it's boring against the gray backgrounds, so saturated works better. This can make it attractive, and reminiscent of some Japanese websites (that seem to be fond of pastels). It should work if I make a koohii skin later, as you can see eg. the light green buttons on the forum, against the light cream background.

The new authentication scheme is very nice indeed, much better than creating accounts manually (once or twice I had requests on my email that I only saw weeks later...) Also, the color scheme you used for the tables and TOC is very pleasing, in my opinion much better-looking than the gray ones used on Wikipedia — that's why I say it's good to use some color, I find it makes the place more inviting.

As you asked, for now I'm going to focus on content; one of my primary interests is in organizing the wiki to make it easier to find stuff and to know where to place new content; the way it was/is it's a little overwhelming, with stuff going anywhere. I think I found a good way to reference the forum — an example can be seen in one page I created recently, the Japanese Subtitles one; it's still in its infancy but you can see/confirm there that people in this forum sure like to ask for places where to find subtitles, and that the suggested links are often the same, so it's good to have a single place to aggregate all the ones that are mentioned. That's one example in which the wiki can be very useful (but not the only one; later I may create some new types of pages to give some inspiration in case they work right.)

[ファブリス]

EDIT: made a template for links to the forum. For now it merely outputs the url with a preset "http://forum.koohii.com/" prefix. This ensures that if the domain changes down the line, or the forum software changes, all links can be changed at once through the template.

However as of writing, the link formatting gives me headaches so instead of doing

{{ForumLink|url|title}}

I had to use named parameters

{{ForumLink|url=viewtopic.php?id=xxxxx|title=The topic title}}

It isn't meant to save typing for now, just save edits in the long run. Later we can also, eg. add a little forum icon for these links, and whatnot, through the template.

Interesting, it seem like a great addition. Only one thing: wouldn't be possible to get away with the 'viewtopic.php?pid=' part and use only the ids and pids? Like, instead of:
{{ForumLink|url=viewtopic.php?id=xxxxx|title=The topic title}}

It would be:
{{ForumLink|id=xxxxx|title=The topic title}}

This way it would be cleaner and more future-proof, since another forum software could perhaps not have the .php extension, or the page not be called viewtopic, or the id/pid be called directly after a slash — if that happened, then there would be thousands of viewtopic.php?id= to replace around the wiki. I see some problems that could arise when implementing it this way, such as dealing with the difference between ids and pids, but for me it seems like a nice improvement that is worth doing. (I may do some experiments "forking" the template to see if it really works better and then discuss the final result to decide what standard to follow.)

ファブリス, I created two additional templates, ForumTopic and ForumPost, that I think work very nicely for maintaining the wiki pages — it's so much better and cleaner to add links this way that I can't believe I didn't know about it before! For testing purposes, I changed all the lengthy links in the Taking the JLPT page to use the new templates, and I also used your original one for linking to the forum. I think it's the best to have all three templates available for maximum flexibility. What do you think?

[ファブリス]

Sure more templates the better Another good use for them is when using small icons or images on many pages.