I figured it would be a good idea to make a new thread regarding discussion of the new wiki.

To start out, I salvaged and copied over the function reference page from the old wiki (thank you, WayBackMachine!):
http://wiki.spheredev.org/Functions

Also started porting over my tutorial, though the subpages which contain the bulk of the content hadn't been cached so I have to manually restyle everything (will finish this later):
http://wiki.spheredev.org/DaVince_scripting_tutorial

I have about thirty old pages from the wiki, if it would help.

As far as I'm concerned, go ahead and put them on there.

Which articles? (Not like it matters much, all of them are useful.) Are they in HTML or wikisource? Might need to do some conversion there.

I want to amend a bit the editing procedure we'll use for Sphere's API on the wiki. I want functions to be tagged with the earliest possible version of Sphere in which they appeared and if they're deprecated in 1.6 and later. You can probably use extra categories for both, but let's be consistent throughout.

For pre-1.5, say its version is 1.1; 1.5 is 1.5, 1.6 is 1.6, and 1.7 (however alpha or beta it may still be) is 1.7. TurboSphere will be considered a version, and any functions marked as such will only consider the latest working version of TurboSphere until TS actually reaches at least Sphere 1.5 parity, then those after that will have TurboSphere version numbers.

Any wiki experts who have wiki accounts (I haven't done wiki+forum integration yet, and haven't yet decided if we'll have it this go around) feel free to make some templates, and remember we have ParserFunctions installed. For later articles, we'll eventually have MathML using MathJax and the same syntax highlighter Wikipedia uses.

I'm also taking suggestions for possible wiki extensions that may be useful!

Stickied as the official wiki thread.

I want to amend a bit the editing procedure we'll use for Sphere's API on the wiki. I want functions to be tagged with the earliest possible version of Sphere in which they appeared and if they're deprecated in 1.6 and later. You can probably use extra categories for both, but let's be consistent throughout.

For pre-1.5, say its version is 1.1; 1.5 is 1.5, 1.6 is 1.6, and 1.7 (however alpha or beta it may still be) is 1.7. TurboSphere will be considered a version, and any functions marked as such will only consider the latest working version of TurboSphere until TS actually reaches at least Sphere 1.5 parity, then those after that will have TurboSphere version numbers.

Good idea. What's going to be the standard way to do this? I'm thinking a bar at the top of the article reserved for indicating what version it was introduced in, and if it should still be used. Something like:

Code: [Select]

[ Introduced in 1.0 | Removed in 1.6 onward; do not use! ]

For the deprecation warning, definitely a template where you can pass as a variable the version number in which it was first deprecated and it will autogenerate the necessary category (should probably read "Deprecated in vX.Y" or something similarly simple) and autogenerate the warning box wherever it's placed (which means we should probably require its placement at the very top of the article in question, along with other similar warning boxes).

For the version, a template with your "Introduced in vX.Y" generated category should suffice and we can always edit it later as needed (with necessary redirections for category renames as well).

About the wiki, would it be kosher for me to post some TurboSphere pages there? I have a couple articles written but only included in the TurboSphere internal docs w/ the source, too (moving from Sphere to TurboSphere, Differences, Writing Plugins, etc.) as well.

As far as I'm concerned, go ahead and put them on there.

Which articles? (Not like it matters much, all of them are useful.) Are they in HTML or wikisource? Might need to do some conversion there.

They are HTML. Definitely going to need to do a little conversion work, but that's no big deal. Most of them are about surfaces and the map engine, although there is a little of everything. I do have three (I think) tutorials as well.

For pre-1.5, say its version is 1.1; 1.5 is 1.5, 1.6 is 1.6, and 1.7 (however alpha or beta it may still be) is 1.7. TurboSphere will be considered a version, and any functions marked as such will only consider the latest working version of TurboSphere until TS actually reaches at least Sphere 1.5 parity, then those after that will have TurboSphere version numbers.

This sounds good to me, I think. You're saying that functions will be marked both for Sphere and TurboSphere, but only marked with a version for Sphere, and not have a 'version  introduced' tag for TurboSphere, right?

Also, once TS 1.0 (which should be on par with 1.5, or so I'm planning) is released I'll be moving to the X.Y version numbers for TS, too.

My opinion: wait until 1.0 (or maybe 0.2!) and create the articles on your user page instead (Flying Jester/article name).

About the wiki, would it be kosher for me to post some TurboSphere pages there?

Do what DaVince suggested first and keep them localized to your user page until it's finalized; after that, I'm all for a TurboSphere wiki namespace (eg, TS-specific articles will be prefixed TurboSphere: with TS: being an alias to the namespace).

...

This sounds good to me, I think. You're saying that functions will be marked both for Sphere and TurboSphere, but only marked with a version for Sphere, and not have a 'version  introduced' tag for TurboSphere, right?

Also, once TS 1.0 (which should be on par with 1.5, or so I'm planning) is released I'll be moving to the X.Y version numbers for TS, too.

I'm saying if something is introduced in TurboSphere, whether it gets backported to vanilla Sphere or not, it should have a category/tag like "Introduced in TS vX.Y" or something but only once TS is on par w/1.5 (let's assume TS 1.0 will be this parity version). Anything TS introduced before 1.0 would say "Introduced in TS v1.0" because we wouldn't count TS introductions before that.

On a related note, I'd recommend that once TS 1.0 is out and 1.5 parity is obtained, the next goal should be 1.6 parity and then a version jump for TS to 1.6 to start matching the appropriate Sphere version from then on.

Wiki procedure update: when writing articles now, please put Sphere API in the namespace API and custom scripts in the namespace Script.

For example, my bezier curve script article is now located at http://wiki.spheredev.org/Script:Bézier_curves but there's a redirect from a namespace-less article because I wanted to.

So, for example, a Sphere function or object article would be called API:CreateColor instead of simply CreateColor; making the namespace-less version redirect is optional, but depending on wiki expansion the namespace-less article may become a disambiguation page instead of a full-on redirect.

Should Functions go into API:Functions with Functions just redirecting to that, then?

I'll begin adding in the function pages I salvaged from ye olde wiki. Should function pages have a TOC? Some of the ones I saved do and some don't.

On the topic of the wiki, some anti-spam control may already be in order...check the recent changes to see what I mean.

Should Functions go into API:Functions with Functions just redirecting to that, then?

Yes.

I'll begin adding in the function pages I salvaged from ye olde wiki. Should function pages have a TOC? Some of the ones I saved do and some don't.

On the topic of the wiki, some anti-spam control may already be in order...check the recent changes to see what I mean.

re TOC - normally I'd recommend a TOC, but most function pages are so light on content that it doesn't really need them. Explicitly __NOTOC__ them from now on, thanks.

re spam - I'm actually going to do that right now. Thanks for the heads up!

Ok, so the Check User extension to ban IPs works, but doesn't let be enter a range of IPs. Also, I choose to manually delete users once the IP's been banned. I may need to have someone become a wiki moderator ("bureaucrat" is the wiki term for it) to check wiki sign-ups for spam and to ban IPs in case I'm unable to do it at a given time.

Except for a couple, I have most of the anti-spam extensions Wikipedia does installed onto the wiki. There's one that allows plugins, but I haven't gone searching for them yet.