Reorganizing and cross-connecting articles in the wiki

[Loctav]

Hey!

We have debated in the recent days that the decreased interest in the osu!wiki might find its origin in its rather unorganized shape and presentation. While the wiki itself certainly lacks core functions (such as proper image embedding, etc.), I believe that we could improve the wiki by a tenfold when we treat it less like a stockpile of copy-pasted ancient forum posts.

A wiki thrives and lives from having each article be intertwined with each other. It lives from the idea that you can go to an article you find or look up and you can follow down the rabbit hole of information by clicking every important term and be sent to a new article that tells you more about it.

Right now, majority of the articles are orphans or the information is scattered across various articles while making it incredibly hard to find specific information (because it is buried within miles long guides or articles or because it doesn't exist)

The aim here is to reorganize all present information and add missing information by following the simple logic of most wikis that use articles to define individual terms and explain more on-top of it. (e.g. you don't find a guide "How to visit Japan" on Wikipedia. You have an article about "Japan")

There are many articles present already that do exactly that (such as the mascot article or some hit object articles), but they lack integration into other articles via cross-linking.

Ideally, every obscure osu! word (e.g. Hitsound, Hit Circle, Beatmap, osu!lazer, Kiai Time) present in any article should be clickable on its first mention and should lead to an article or a sub header of a larger article that defines this word and explains more in-depth what's the matter with it.

For that purpose, I have created a google doc that lists a whole lot of terms that require stubs to be created, barebone articles that can be linked to when found on existent ones. They (almost) all should be separate articles for each and contain a basic definition of each. Later on, we can add more explanations, depth and visual appeal to each of them. For some terms, we can consider grouping them up into bigger articles (e.g. Sliderhead doesn't need an own article. We only need Slider).

While building these stubs, they need to cross link each stub by referring to each other from the very beginning.

You can find my aforementioned list of terms here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sYphJvwxAU0av_dQVwdqYgRC3UqW6cv-TZSl2pX34oE/edit#gid=0

[Loctav]

The list is nowhere near complete. It's a whole bunch of stuff I came up with by just browsing existing articles such the RC and the website itself. We can expand the list as we go, but we need a starting point somewhere.

[Endaris]

As discussed in #osu-wiki, part of the goal for this issue should be to largely or completely remove the need for the Glossary page by adding stubs for its elements and removing them accordingly. This should be used in addition to the already existent list of terms.

We need support for a stub-tag from osu-web before this work can properly be started.

I think it would make sense to add a project for this as there are a lot of small pieces of work that we need to keep track of.
From my point of view this would run in 2 stages:

1. Getting the stubs up and cleaning up Glossary in the process.
2. Adding crosslinks for existing pages that aren't marked as outdated.

[cl8n]

I believe that we could improve the wiki by a tenfold when we treat it less like a stockpile of copy-pasted ancient forum posts.

an important distinction to make here is that nobody wants to treat it this way; there's such limited manpower around here that a very outdated/messy article will usually stay that way until there's some reasonable prompt to work on it. if you look at the open issues right now, most of them aren't generic "rewrite this" posts, they concern specific issues possibly spanning multiple articles or the whole wiki. it's also important to distinguish between "the wiki" and "the English wiki", because a major reason for the English wiki's slow development is that the English wiki is only a subset of what active contributors have had to work on over the last few years

I don't think there's any major problem with the current workflow, it's just hella slow cuz it's being carried by a single digit number of people. I like these ideas you're giving, but I'm also not very optimistic about them resulting in some kind of drastic improvement (ignoring the possible increased contribution from ppl helping out with this)

The aim here is to reorganize all present information [...]

so with the above in mind, this is a super unrealistic goal, assuming you want to complete it in any reasonable time frame. reorganizing information is one of the main things people have been doing here for years, as well as marking up what's horribly unorganized (see outdated and needs_cleanup). the beginning of this post seems like stating the obvious in context of all of that work.

anyway the actual suggestion+direction of this issue is good imo. just commenting on the beginning part 🏃

[Loctav]

so with the above in mind, this is a super unrealistic goal, assuming you want to complete it in any reasonable time frame. reorganizing information is one of the main things people have been doing here for years, as well as marking up what's horribly unorganized (see outdated and needs_cleanup). the beginning of this post seems like stating the obvious in context of all of that work.

Nothing is unrealistic, this is an idea that pursues a longterm goal with a clear direction, something that needed to be said to introduce people to the core idea and something that needed to be said so everyone is on the same page instead of everybody working towards some ominous goal without anybody really knowing what the result should actually look like.

You don't need to justify or defend the people working on this so far, they did amazing work and we all know that. We all know why all these things happen. But since this issue introduces a proposed full new direction of how the wiki should be organized and all the strings attached to this scheme (as the already discussed categorization of articles), these words were necessary to put everything proposed here into a perspective.

it's also important to distinguish between "the wiki" and "the English wiki", because a major reason for the English wiki's slow development is that the English wiki is only a subset of what active contributors have had to work on over the last few years

so this needs to change as well. It should and cannot be that various degree of information is available on an article depending on what language version you are looking at. The content you look at in English should be the same as when you look at it in German. The main language of this wiki should or could be English. And yes, there sure can be exceptions from this rule (such as Chinese tournaments not really needing an English article), but I would still push forward to have AT LEAST an English article for every present article of any language (simply because English is the "world language" and despite all the languages spoken in this community, the majority can agree to communicate in English when they are unable to find another shared language). Having every content available in English makes sure that this community stays whole-inclusive and that everyone is aware of everything or can find out more about e.g. tournaments that happen in China exclusively.

[Loctav]

During processing through articles, I have encountered a few things we need to settle, especially regarding article stubs that are created from information available across multiple articles or that eventually lead to splitting up existing articles:

1.) How do we handle the transition phase? E.g. we create an article about Accuracy, a topic that is covered by the Glossary. Do we remove this term from the glossary or do we wait until all stubs are created until the Glossary is deemed unnecessary and can be removed as whole?

2.) There are a bunch of articles that already exist and contain information that can either stay there or needs to be split apart. (e.g. https://osu.ppy.sh/help/wiki/Game_Modes/osu!mania, see Scoring, Hitobjects). Following the example here, do we split up the article? Do we make a whole article about scoring and include the osu!mania scoring there and then refer to the scoring article on the osu!mania article? In this example, I feel like the article tries to cover way too many topics at once (scoring, grading, beatmapping, hitobjects), so I feel like while the main game mode article should mention all these things, they should all redirect to an own article about each of these huge sub topics.

3.) Shall we list existing articles that dont need to be split apart or reworked somewhere so that we can cross-link them to the new stubs?

4.) How do we handle cross-linking with the stubs that are now being created but obviously can not contain all cross-links already? Shall we make all the stubs first and then revisit all stubs once "finished" and then start adding more cross-links to it?

[cl8n]

defining a direction is great, but you have to realise there are so many important problems to fix on this wiki that have nothing to do with this kind of plan (do you really need a "clear direction" to see that the main page sucks, or that the contribution guides are barely helpful, or that pretty much all beatmapping-related pages have problems preventing them from being useful, etc.). the general tone here seems too optimistic, as in yes this is a good idea, but helping the wiki in literally any meaningful way is also a good idea... not to mention it obviously overlaps everything that's already happening considering you're going to run into a lot of rewriting like this too

I'm not trying to justify/defend current contributions either, I feel like I have to inform you because you're making a lot of false claims about how this process has worked for as long as I can remember. for example your suggestion about how to handle content parity between translations is exactly how it works currently and seems to ignore that this method does still take a lot of time and effort to maintain

[cl8n]

my opinion abuot the 4 questions

1. keep Glossary for now, but don't make any new references to it. if you start removing stuff from Glossary you have to also be mindful of fixing every existing reference and that just seems like a pain if you want to focus on writing new stuff
2. these larger articles have some use as hubs for a lot of info, but yeah I agree each main topic should be its own article and the "hub" should be only containing shorter descriptions and links to other pages for further reading. however I think Guides are an exception because containing everything in one place for a guide is sometimes useful. depends on the case i guess
3. ye
4. add TODO html comments so we can revisit later. combined with the marking of stubs, it's easy to search for these in the future

[Endaris]

We're not quite at that point yet but I believe it does make sense for cross-linking (especially nested pages) to always cross-link against a sensible redirection instead of the hierarchy, e.g. [OWC 2016](/wiki/owc2016) instead of [OWC 2016](/wiki/Tournaments/OWC/2016).
That way we don't have to fix cross-links in case we change parts of the hierarchy or competely get rid of the subpagination in the future.
As sensible redirections should be added for most nested pages anyway, potentially adding this to the ASC seems to be a good idea in my opinion.
Any thoughts on this?

[Loctav]

I agree with Endaris. While I still don't agree with nesting articles into subfolders, this seems to be the best compromise, if people keep insisting that we need to do the nesting. (Keep in mind that we also should talk about categories for articles in the future, too - so using the subfolders as single-category-per-article substitutes remains mildly wrong to me - but this goes into a different issue)

[cl8n]

we enforce the opposite right now, logic being it's pointless to give users first-party links to pages that will redirect them again

That way we don't have to fix cross-links

we do this already and it takes 10 seconds tops (find+sed are our friends, and most editors have batch find&replace features). if you allow redirects like this, articles become more difficult to check because you have to also reference redirect.yaml entries every time you see a new link, and from what I can tell that cancels out the only real benefit that you had mentioned

fwiw as part of #3110 I'm fixing broken links, so the whole wiki will be in a good state as of that being merged

[Pennek]

potential stubs i've come across: hit window, friends/followers/mutual, osu!pixels, icons (used and deprecated), badge, combos

[Pennek]

So, going back to those questions:

How do we go about listing existing articles that dont need to be split apart or reworked so that we can cross-link them to the new stubs?

Would be nice with some closure on it, since im currently cross-linking against articles that might be removed in the near future. it seems like a lot of unnecessary work from my POV

[Pennek]

Would some kind of tag work, or even be necessary?

[Pennek]

Additionally, to what degree do we want to detail things outside the actual game, like osu!web? Currently there is very little info even on big systems like Forums and Beatmap Discussions.

Are we aiming to explain EVERYTHING in the osu! domain (unrealistic but okay goal) or are we going for something more modest?

If it's the former, I'll try looking through the current wiki and other osu! content to flesh out a fully fledged list of topics in the next couple of days

[cl8n]

im currently cross-linking against articles that might be removed in the near future. it seems like a lot of unnecessary work from my POV

this isn't unnecessary, it's good to get more links in and it's easy to change or redirect them later. so my answer to your next question is no, i don't think you need a "tag" or anything

Are we aiming to explain EVERYTHING in the osu! domain

sure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

what would you say is missing from the wiki about these things? I can't imagine an article about the forums would be much more than "this is what a forum is, osu! has one, you can find it [here]" (which would be fine, i just feel like im missing ur point)

[Pennek]

In the case of something like the forums thats all that might be necessary but for other things like leaderboards, mod v2, beatmap info page, user profiles, modding history, etc with their own custom UI, explaining what each element does in an article would be good is what im getting at

Even for pages which are selfexplanatory we at the very least need to make sure theyre linked to

[cl8n]

sounds fine to me, just make sure you don't try to over-explain things that are simple

[Pennek]

more stubs before i forget: Tournament lingo such as brackets, mappools, freemod, tiebreaker, referees, mappoolers, etc.

[penguin2233]

did you want us to write new articles or just create empty stubs for now?

[Pennek]

Stubs are articles with the bare minimum of info for a subject to be put on the wiki. They're made to be usable as references and built upon later. You can create full-blown articles for them if you want to, but it's not needed at the moment.

[Pennek]

more stubs: timing resets, timing points, converts, specifics (im pretty sure slang for rhe opposite of a converted map eg. a map made for catch/mania/taiko).

music theory stuff: syncopation, downbeat, upbeat, phrase/measure, hypermeasure

need some confirmation on the above slang @JBHyperion if you would :3

[cl8n]

verto's been at work making videos about osu! jargon, lots of potentially missing stuff from wiki here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIOsNK1JPcg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rjB5GxsxGg

[MilkyIQ]

"pUpdater" and "osume" are only mentioned in one or two articles, and have no stubs. Along with some other stub-less terms:

Note: some of these terms don't really need to be stubs persay, but rather some sort of section inside a larger article.

• slider ball
• slider tick
• local score (and local high score)
• cursor trail
• song wheel
• bookmark
• ranking system
• finger control
• farming (and DT farming)
• timing section
• non-active circle dimming
• section ranking
• background colour scripting
• XNAv2 (and XNA1.1)
• user panel
• automatic error submission system
• ranking screen
• multi-part sliders
• beatmap tags
• slider endpoint
• OpenGL
• osu!direct
• weightage system
• comboset
• sliderbreak
• denden
• judgement bar

They're basically just all of the stub-less terms that I found while cleaning up HOO and reviewing pr for stubs

[cl8n]

gold mine of random knowledge that can go somewhere eventually™ https://twitter.com/clayton3666350/status/1274599514737831936