Removal of all base lists

[thunderforce]

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Special:Contributions/The_Easter_Bunny removed every base list to redirect stuff to a Google spreadsheet. I think this is obviously bad (and reverted it immediately) but (especially since they are a CR) I fear there may be some pushback.

[Easter Bunny]

3 hours ago, thunderforce said:

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Special:Contributions/The_Easter_Bunny removed every base list to redirect stuff to a Google spreadsheet. I think this is obviously bad (and reverted it immediately) but (especially since they are a CR) I fear there may be some pushback.

Hello Thunderforce. Thank you so much for taking the time to guide me here. And apologies to all for the scare of the base list removals today. 

CR Dacy and I have been wondering who has more or less taken the responsibility of maintaining the base lists on the wiki? They are not accurate. And unfortunately grow more inaccurate each day. The information listed on the HC Wiki was/is fed from a separate Google Doc that has become pretty severely corrupted and compromised by player misuse. Player bases have been deleted and base codes and owners have been removed or changed. 

Instead of regurgitating stale information from a corrupted and outdated source our hope was to link directly to a Google Doc where the base information is refreshed and updated daily, often multiple times. We've received 60+ updates/new entries since Tuesday.

The goal with this directory is a single comprehensive list (we've compiled bases from numerous directories and posts) as well as accuracy. To that end, the directory cannot just be edited by anyone. That was a source for data corruption in the last directories. Submissions / updates can be submitted via a Google Form which then is uploaded to a master source. The main directory will be a reflection of this protected data.

Now, again, posting directly to that would be ideal for us, because we only have to update the doc and then the wiki, which refers back to it, will always be current. However, I intend to discuss, so I would like to know how would prefer this data stays maintained?

- EB

Edited February 9 by Easter Bunny

[thunderforce]

I'm not sure what you mean by a "scare".

 

Any page on the wiki is maintained by the contributors to the wiki. You are at liberty to correct the information on the wiki and I encourage you to do it. Personally I would suggest not allowing Google to snoop on information about bases (or anything), but you do you; if you want to add a link to the Google document and other wiki contributors don't object, be my guest.

 

I would prefer that information on the wiki is maintained by contributors to the wiki by mutual consensus.

[thunderforce]

I wonder also if you could elaborate on how "the information listed on the HC Wiki" (by which I think you mean the _unofficial_ HC wiki) "was/is fed from a separate Google Doc that has become pretty severely corrupted and compromised by player misuse"? I try to stay reasonably aware of recent edits and as far as I remember people mostly just add bases, not "corrupt and compromise" listings.

 

Having reviewed the edit history on https://homecoming.wiki/w/index.php?title=Excelsior_Base_List&action=history I can see little reason to believe there's been a bulk upload of any kind, although I could be wrong.

Edited February 9 by thunderforce

[Easter Bunny]

The total amount of bases listed on the " _unofficial_ HC wiki" is 250. The total amount of bases listed on our directory is 580. 

There are literal hundreds of bases that are on both versions. In the " _unofficial_ HC wiki" I have personal bases I made that I did not submit to the wiki. I submitted them on the Google Doc. CR Dacy has bases on the wiki that she did not input there. Mitsiyan has bases on the wiki he did not input. I could absolutely go on, but that seems unnecessary.
That speaks to me that there was an upload from the Google Doc to the wiki.

But my concern is for the community, It is not helpful for anyone to have two diverse locations to input bases. I am seeking to condense them into one clear source. And the one that I am maintaining at the moment, is The Community Base Directory google doc.

Edited February 9 by Easter Bunny

[Aalya]

Hey there! I think what @Easter Bunnyis referring to is the Everlasting Yellow Pages. As far as anyone can tell, no specific person or group is maintaining it. If you follow the link right now, you will see a notification from Google itself that the file has been corrupted and contains links that may be harmful to your computer. This notification has been up and a problem for months. Someone also shuffled up all the categories, search terms, etc on the yellow pages to the point that it is basically unusable. 

 

Statistically, the majority of base builders who want to list their bases publicly are on Everlasting. Therefore this is a huge problem.

 

In addition, lots of people have been victims of malicious deletion and editing of listings. I personally have had all of my bases specifically deleted from the Yellow Pages more than once in a targeted attack. The yellow pages are so vulnerable that anyone could go in there right now and delete the entire document.

[Aalya]

Thank you for all that you have done so far with this wiki. I can tell that you have put a lot of time and effort into it. I quickly skimmed through and some major errors immediately jumped out at me with just a cursory glance:

Oasis's builder is listed as (unknown) but the box next to it has the name of the builder.

 

Joker's Wild has been closed for close to a year now if my memory of the timeline is correct.

 

This is a clear and obvious error. The first listing is the correct one for that code.

[thunderforce]

43 minutes ago, Easter Bunny said:

There are literal hundreds of bases that our on both versions. In the " _unofficial_ HC wiki" I have personal bases I made that i did not submit to the wiki. I submitted them on the Google Doc. CR Dacy has bases on the wiki that she did not input there. AalyaSenai has bases on the wiki she did not input. Mitsiyan. BBBadger. I could absolutely go on, but that seems unnecessary.
That speaks to me that there was an upload from the Google Doc to the wiki.

I don't see why. It seems more likely that individual wiki editors have added entries for bases they happened to find useful. In particular, as already mentioned, there is nothing in the edit history on the wiki to suggest a bulk upload. I can find edits that add two or three bases at most.

 

Quote

But my concern is for the community, It is not helpful for anyone to have two diverse locations to input bases. I am seeking to condense them into one clear source

Then feel free to persuade the wiki editors that all base information should be kept off the wiki.

[thunderforce]

51 minutes ago, Aalya said:

Hey there! I think what @Easter Bunnyis referring to is the Everlasting Yellow Pages. As far as anyone can tell, no specific person or group is maintaining it.

That's unfortunate, but I don't see any reason to suppose the Wiki "was/is fed from a separate Google Doc that has become pretty severely corrupted and compromised by player misuse", although it is helpful that you have identified the supposed document.

36 minutes ago, Aalya said:

Thank you for all that you have done so far with this wiki. I can tell that you have put a lot of time and effort into it. I quickly skimmed through and some major errors immediately jumped out at me with just a cursory glance:

Well, I certainly haven't, and more generally we are standing on the shoulders of the Paragon Wiki from live. I encourage you to register an account and fix these errors.

[Aalya]

9 minutes ago, thunderforce said:

Well, I certainly haven't, and more generally we are standing on the shoulders of the Paragon Wiki from live. I encourage you to register an account and fix these errors.

It is clearly VERY important to you that this old wiki is maintained and accurate. It is not important to me. I am just giving you the information that you can use to fix and maintain what is so important to you. You're welcome for the information. I hope it helps you with the upkeep of your project! 🙂

[thunderforce]

I'm not sure it's that old - it is the newest wiki for Homecoming - but if it's not that important to you I suggest you might usefully delete your contributions to this thread (in the club for discussing improvements to the wiki) and leave the club which you seem to have joined for the specific purpose of commenting on this subject.

Edited February 9 by thunderforce

[Dacy]

23 minutes ago, thunderforce said:

I wonder also if you could elaborate on how "the information listed on the HC Wiki" (by which I think you mean the _unofficial_ HC wiki) "was/is fed from a separate Google Doc that has become pretty severely corrupted and compromised by player misuse"? I try to stay reasonably aware of recent edits and as far as I remember people mostly just add bases, not "corrupt and compromise" listings.

I wonder that you do not seem to realize that the source of the base information in the wiki is from a Google document that is open to player editing? Now, I do not know who is transferring that information to wiki, I have been trying to find out, but most base owners did not even know there WAS a wiki for bases; I only discovered it myself recently.

 

Which, it's possible that the wiki, because the players did not know of it, is more accurate in reflecting bases as they were listed if they were immediately transferred; what we do know is, that after Easter Bunny meticulously combed through all information on bases that were listed, there were quite a few discrepancies. I know of people whose bases have been deleted or altered from the google doc. If people did know of the wiki, it could have been altered; does anyone go out and check to verify if the base listed matches the information given? The wiki, however, has no way of knowing which of these bases have changed codes, been abandoned, or are now physically there but inactive. The categories were never adequate to the bases that are out there; we have tried to give better and more inclusive descriptive tags, which are able to be used for sorting to find particular bases of a particular design or style.

 

See, the format of the Wiki is based on the format of the original Google doc. Here are three examples from the Google doc, and their corresponding entries on the Wiki:

Google:

                                                                        
   Vel's Folly        Transit Hub    Storm Palace        @Vel Mori    A quick travel hub project                                                                            
  The STATION        Transit Hub    Pocket Dimension    STATION-18074    @Garbage Wizard    Official Transit hub of the Justice Division. A subway station themed base with all amenities and several pop culture references. /macro_image "Temporary_Warburg_MegaBuff" "Teleport: THE STATION" "em trainwhistle$$enterbasefrompasscode STATION-18074"     

 

The entries in the Wiki:

                                                                      

Note that the categories, the order of information, and the text of the descriptions all match. Note also that there are missing pieces of information: whomever transferred the information for the Station (it was not Garbage WIzard) did not choose to include the macro for it. And the code for Vel's Folly is missing; one of the compromised posts on the document.

 

So, we are sure that the format and the very information that is input into the Wiki is coming from the Google doc. Which, as mentioned, is corrupted and out of date. We have no idea who has been inputting information, because we can find no one who says they have, and most did not know that the wiki was even there, as I said.

 

Now, we have expanded the information about each base that doesn't rely on the description, for better searchability. The new format will not transfer into the old format very well. They are different. The current wiki entries are out of date and in many cases, inaccurate. Will you help us figure out how to get the wiki to be up to date and aligned with the Google sheet we're using to organize the information? I mean,  yeah, we hate that it's Google, but it was difficult to find anything else that was accessible and met the needs. Like with Wiki, we are careful with this information. Only editors may enter a base onto the master sheet. The copies that people see check themselves against the master so that nothing can be changed without our so say. Anyone who has an inaccurate listing can come to us to get it fixed (and we will investigate). We've tested base codes to see which are still valid. Here's an example of a listing, and the differences. Current wiki:

Here's what those listings look like in our directory:   (has slider, this is second half)   Powergirls:   Second part:   We are listing both the owner and the builder. As you can see here, sometimes it's different. (I had to use bases I knew of and that were inputted into both directories, but there are other situations where this applies). Many more tags for people who want to find a particular type of base. And a guest book for commentary. We will lose a lot of that information if the current format is kept. 3 minutes ago, thunderforce said: Then feel free to persuade the wiki editors that all base information should be kept off the wiki. Wow, You are coming off as someone who has no interest in information accuracy or truthfulness. When told something isn't right, your proposed solution is "just get rid of it"? Why moderate a wiki at all, if you have no interest in accuracy or truth? Why say in your signature that people should edit and you "need help", and then proceed to be just as nasty and unhelpful as I've seen anyone BE in this game? 1 minute ago, thunderforce said: Well, I certainly haven't, and more generally we are standing on the shoulders of the Paragon Wiki from live. I encourage you to register an account and fix these errors. SMH so dang hard. WHAT DO YOU THINK WE'VE TRIED TO DO. EB made an account. Put up a page fixing multiple errors. Got chewed out for not "discussing it" with some committee that is listed NOWHERE, we've been TRYING to find who's running this and it's really not easy to even find that information out...until you "break the rules", apparently. And THEN, are you helpful? No. Snarky, dismissive, condescending, rude, and very unhelpful.  You are anything BUT encouraging.  You've pretty well convinced me that it's pointless to talk to a snarky brick wall that has no interest in correcting a problem; we'll get nowhere here. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong on that. But that's the view from here. Last chance to show a different side of this little "club" you have going here.   Because honestly, despite my annoyance with your attitude, I'd -still- rather have a listing that was accurate, than to leave feeling like the whole system is a farce by committee, and likely untrustworthy. I'd -like- to be able to continue to recommend it. But that's up to you now.   -Dacy

[thunderforce]

There is no "committee"; the wiki is run by consensus of its editors.

14 minutes ago, Dacy said:

When told something isn't right, your proposed solution is "just get rid of it"?

Er, no - Easter Bunny removed all base information from the wiki (ie, getting rid of it). I reverted it and said that should only be done if the wiki editors agreed.

 

14 minutes ago, Dacy said:

EB made an account. Put up a page fixing multiple errors.

I'm afraid that is not true. They removed all base information from the wiki. They did not create a new page.

 

Anyone can see https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Special:RecentChanges and https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Special:Contributions/The_Easter_Bunny and see that, other than https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/User:The_Easter_Bunny they have not "put up a page".

Edited February 9 by thunderforce

[Easter Bunny]

Congrats! A valiant armchair victory. You have bravely corrected us. We tremble at your feet.

 

Now, can we get back to the discussion portion of this discussion? I am happy to preserve your outdated base information if we must. Is linking to a Google doc a nonstarter? Or is there a chance of actually making progress here?

[Dacy]

Okay. My misunderstanding. They put up a link, correct? And took out the inaccurate information?

 

So, you say

5 minutes ago, thunderforce said:

Easter Bunny removed all base information from the wiki. I reverted it and said that should only be done if the wiki editors agreed.

on the one hand, and other than that, you say people should make an account and edit. Um? Confusion here.  Because nowhere does it say "Edit if the wiki editors agree" and HOW do we get the "wiki editors" to agree?? Nothing is very clear here. I have no idea who these editors are, how to contact them, or what information they need beyond "this is incorrect and we want to fix it with carefully researched data with controlled input access for veracity". Can we edit, or not? If not, it would be helpful to have something of this process for submission for approval listed somewhere.

 

-Dacy

 

[thunderforce]

3 minutes ago, Easter Bunny said:

Congrats! A valiant armchair victory. You have bravely corrected us. We tremble at your feet.

I don't speak for everyone, but I think it would be more useful if you didn't employ this sort of rhetorical nonsense.

[thunderforce]

9 minutes ago, Dacy said:

Because nowhere does it say "Edit if the wiki editors agree" and HOW do we get the "wiki editors" to agree?? Nothing is very clear here. I have no idea who these editors are, how to contact them, or what information they need beyond "this is incorrect and we want to fix it with carefully researched data with controlled input access for veracity". Can we edit, or not? If not, it would be helpful to have something of this process for submission for approval listed somewhere.

This club which you have joined is one place to seek agreement. Wiki talk pages are another. The "editors" are anyone who can edit the wiki, and you are welcome to be one; you can just sign up. I don't speak for everyone, but I am reasonably sure it would be fine to edit the list of bases on the wiki to make it more accurate. I am less sure it would be fine to delete it, and I personally would oppose such an idea.

[Dacy]

So. Yeah, we're wiki idiots who know next to nothing about anything except what we can see of what we know that's not accurate, and we want to change that. I understand and respect the fact that a Google doc link is not a wiki format, and not what people expect to find in a wiki entry about base listings.

 

Having said that, I also know that EB isn't keen on being responsible for updating a wiki and entering all of those bases in the new format, and we have no idea at this point how we'd DO a format for wiki.  (And responding to your last: EB is super frustrated at this point. I am too, but you came back more reasonable than I expected, so I'm still here.) If I can find someone to make some sort of script to input the values...hmm, but. Our page is much much wider than your format allows. I think we'd have to lose some information to put it into the Wiki...but anyway.  Can you show me the format for entering information into a format such as you have here, a table?

 

And EB is concerned about veracity. We don't want to have to monitor two different base codexes, with two different input points; can we make changing or adding to Wiki bases very limited?

 

Btw, I am an editor on the wiki. I've been updating base information, because most of it is from Live and has changed significantly.

 

So, two points here: we want to be able to control access so we can make sure things are correct and stay that way, and we need to know the format for inputting information into a table; are there scripts that can fill in a line of a table from a line of information that goes in the different columns? Or is it always entered information piece by piece?

 

-Dacy

 

[thunderforce]

You cannot, no, control access to a page. Any editor can edit any page; other editors can watch that page; some editors (like me) try to review recent changes and I like to think that by and large a decent job is done to correct the very occasional cases of vandalism or spam, and to copy edit additions.

 

In view of EB's cracks about me ("Congrats! A valiant armchair victory. You have bravely corrected us. We tremble at your feet.") I don't really want to engage further today,

[Dacy]

Very well; I understand you can get updates on wiki changes sent to a discord, that would be helpful. What about how information is entered to a table? Can multiple columns get information at once, are there commands to separate the information that goes into each column, or do you have to manually enter each cell's information?

 

What's the format to create a table? Or, where can I locate such information?

 

-Dacy

Edited February 9 by Dacy

[Dacy]

Also, how do I replace a picture file with an accurate one? (separate question)

 

Never mind, I figured that out.

 

-Dacy

Edited February 9 by Dacy

[AboveTheChemist]

6 hours ago, Dacy said:

Very well; I understand you can get updates on wiki changes sent to a discord, that would be helpful. What about how information is entered to a table? Can multiple columns get information at once, are there commands to separate the information that goes into each column, or do you have to manually enter each cell's information?

 

What's the format to create a table? Or, where can I locate such information?

 

Starting with your last question, I think this wiki help page might be useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table

 

It's Wikipedia but I think our wiki follows the same syntax rules. That being said, the beauty of the wiki is that you can get in there and play without without actually committing edits if you use the 'Show Preview' button. As helpful as the above link may or may not be, in my experience as someone who had never edited a wiki before it was just as helpful to enter page edit mode on a page and try different things and see how they turn out using the 'Show Preview' button until I got it right and felt comfortable actually committing my edits. 

 

Having read through most of this thread, I understand the concerns about trying to translate your Google doc into a wiki table, both from a duplication of effort point of view, and from a space point of view. The Google doc has a lot of columns and I am not sure offhand if trying to put that many columns on a wiki table will look the way that you would want it to look. One big table I maintain is the settitle listing table which I think pushes the limits for table width, if you need a basis of comparison to see if it would be worth trying to translate the format of the Google doc to the wiki.

 

In terms of duplication of effort, it is possible to script a tool to translate a Google doc into a wiki table, if that route is of interest. The initial version of my settitle table linked above was output from a Python script I wrote, and subsequent edits are output from a specially formatted cell in Excel. If I can do it in Excel then I am sure that a similar method could be devised for the Google doc.

 

With all that being said, and after having read over the thread, while I would prefer that the wiki base tables be maintained, I don't think I would have a ton of heartburn if the tables were replaced with a link to the Google doc. I certainly would not object to adding a link at the top of each wiki page that points to the Google doc as the most up-to-date source of base code info. That might actually encourage another wiki editor to bring the wiki pages up to date with the Google doc, if you and EB decide that trying to maintain both the Google doc and the wiki base listings is too much work.

[Doc_Scorpion]

8 hours ago, thunderforce said:

I don't speak for everyone, but I think it would be more useful if you didn't employ this sort of rhetorical nonsense.

If you don't speak for everyone, then why have you been consistently attempting to lay down policy and generally throwing your weight around?  The "rhetorical nonsense" is a direct response to you acting like you're running the place.

That being said, I'd kinda prefer the material be on the wiki because that's way more accessible than a Google Doc.  I do not have a heartache with heading the page with a link to the Google Doc specifying that it's source for the most up-to-date information.

[Easter Bunny]

I would like to apologize. That is not how I like to conduct myself and I am embarrassed for the way I acted and for how frustrated this whole thing made me. 

I am sorry. No one deserves that.

I am passionate about bases, and I can tell you all are passionate about the integrity of this wiki. Linking to a Google Doc is not the solution and I can appreciate that. My rationale for using a Google Doc was that it seems to be what the majority of base builders have clung to as their preferred method of upload. We have added another 38 bases since last night bringing our total to 618 bases.
But I also clearly see that there is a small but dedicated user base that only prefer uploading to the wiki and I do not wish to alienate anyone.

I am as-of-yet unsure how to best reflect our Google Doc data into the wiki, but is is now clear to me that we need to better monitor base wiki uploads so that the community as a whole can appreciate what is being uploaded here.

@thunderforce Again, I apologize. I don't need or want drama in my life and I can't imagine you do either. I will endeavor to act more reasonably.

- EB

[thunderforce]

Thank you, and I'm sorry that I'm so consistently abrasive. Let's not speak of it again.

 

I appreciate you only want to improve things (and I see Dacy is already cleaning out old info about base editing, which is excellent). I think Above The Chemist is suggesting a reasonable way to upload your information (but I think we have to be a bit careful that this doesn't remove functioning bases that happen not to be in your spreadsheet). I can see there's something faintly absurd about you maintaining a list of 600-odd bases while the Wiki jealously guards its list of a few dozen.

Edited February 9 by thunderforce