Lexicanum Announcements - Fall 2018

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to make a few announcements on what is going on with Lexicanum.

We are currently starting a refresh of the main wikis to make them more accessible for mobile users, and visually appealing for desktop users.

We will be doing some optimizations to the mobile template to make reading pages faster and easier on phones.
We will be doing some template color and font adjustments to make pages easier to read on both desktop and mobile.
We will be doing some template optimizations to speed up loadtimes, particularly on mobile.

Admin Assistance Please

Where we need assistance is on the foreign language wikis. The primary issue with Lexcanum's 12 year old templates is they come from a time well before smartphones, and are designed for desktop widescreens. We need all major pages on the French/German wikis altered to be single column. This will make these popular pages render correctly for people on phones. This mainly affects the frontpage and portal pages of each wiki. We have already modified the frontpage and portal pages of the english wikis to be single column.

We would ask that any admins who can read and access the foreign language wikis, please help modify those pages. In general this is just removing the wikiscript in pages that defines multiple columns, and then modifying tables to be narrower if they still don't fit on an average smartphone. You can easily test any page by modifying it's formatting via desktop, while monitoring it it on your phone.

New Wikis?

We are currently discussing cloning the english Warhammer Fantasy-Age of Sigmar wiki, and letting admins/contributors begins to move them in different firections so there is a dedicated Warhammer Fantasy and Age of Sigmar wiki. This however would be best done AFTER all the modifications are complete, so we are not duplicating work. We will return to this issue when the visual updates are done.

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Originally Posted by Bigred

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to make a few announcements on what is going on with Lexicanum.

We are currently starting a refresh of the main wikis to make them more accessible for mobile users, and visually appealing for desktop users.

We will be doing some optimizations to the mobile template to make reading pages faster and easier on phones.
We will be doing some template color and font adjustments to make pages easier to read on both desktop and mobile.
We will be doing some template optimizations to speed up loadtimes, particularly on mobile.

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This is a excellent thing to do, as I've often felt that mobile is a bit slower to load than it should. The only one that leaves me slightly concerned is the last one, because it might lead to shifting the content section from the right of the screen to the left. Wikia-style gives me headaches from prolonged use, while wikipedia style(which the lexicanum currently has) doesn't.

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Admin Assistance Please

Where we need assistance is on the foreign language wikis. The primary issue with Lexcanum's 12 year old templates is they come from a time well before smartphones, and are designed for desktop widescreens. We need all major pages on the French/German wikis altered to be single column. This will make these popular pages render correctly for people on phones. This mainly affects the frontpage and portal pages of each wiki. We have already modified the frontpage and portal pages of the english wikis to be single column.

We would ask that any admins who can read and access the foreign language wikis, please help modify those pages. In general this is just removing the wikiscript in pages that defines multiple columns, and then modifying tables to be narrower if they still don't fit on an average smartphone. You can easily test any page by modifying it's formatting via desktop, while monitoring it it on your phone.

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I don't know much about this but I'm ready to help with what I can. Could you provide an example in the fantasy Lexicanum so I can easily identify what I should be looking for?

On other languages I known the fantasy lexicanum for french is pretty much dead but the german ones have a pretty active community.

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New Wikis?

We are currently discussing cloning the english Warhammer Fantasy-Age of Sigmar wiki, and letting admins/contributors begins to move them in different firections so there is a dedicated Warhammer Fantasy and Age of Sigmar wiki. This however would be best done AFTER all the modifications are complete, so we are not duplicating work. We will return to this issue when the visual updates are done.

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I don't know if cloning the wiki to Age of Sigmar is actually more trouble than it's worth. Most age of sigmar articles can be found in a few categories(a list of which I compiled a while ago), with like 90% of it being the four Grand Alliance categories. It might be easier to just import those categories and the fix the little problems, rather than cloning both and then deleting two halfs of the clone. The only real hard part with importing vs cloning is that images are not as easy to import as content articles, through most of them can also be found in a select number of categories. Either way we can decide this later when we get to it.

BTW do we repost the bugs in the lexianum here?

If I understand correctly the most changes will be going from "700px" and so on to something like "50%" and reducing the "colspan" on tables ?
Do we have to do picture changes also, because the are often inserted with fixed pixel-sizes ?

I can have a look on pages in wh40k-de I'm surfing on or edit, but it will be painful to control all 16.431 pages one after another.

Regard

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Originally Posted by AlphaRonin

If I understand correctly the most changes will be going from "700px" and so on to something like "50%" and reducing the "colspan" on tables ?
Do we have to do picture changes also, because the are often inserted with fixed pixel-sizes ?

I can have a look on pages in wh40k-de I'm surfing on or edit, but it will be painful to control all 16.431 pages one after another.

Regard

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There is not much we can do about the thousands of individual topic pages, but most of the multi-column items are on the portal pages. If you take a look at the faction portal pages on the english 40K wiki, you can see how we modified them to be single column.

In general moving from fixed pixel widths to percantages will give better results on mobile. Fixed widths for images are usually ok as they are small, but moving to percentages is better for things like large tables, message boxes.

In 2018, the internet is moving past the 50% mobile mark and desktop usage will only get smaller over time. While desktop will always look better and is the only real method for creating wiki content, we have to start to make the sites at least somewhat friendly on phones, or users will go to other wikis that are mobile optimized.

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Originally Posted by Ashendant

I don't know much about this but I'm ready to help with what I can. Could you provide an example in the fantasy Lexicanum so I can easily identify what I should be looking for?

I don't know if cloning the wiki to Age of Sigmar is actually more trouble than it's worth. Most age of sigmar articles can be found in a few categories(a list of which I compiled a while ago), with like 90% of it being the four Grand Alliance categories. It might be easier to just import those categories and the fix the little problems, rather than cloning both and then deleting two halfs of the clone. The only real hard part with importing vs cloning is that images are not as easy to import as content articles, through most of them can also be found in a select number of categories. Either way we can decide this later when we get to it.

BTW do we repost the bugs in the lexianum here?

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Actually I just took a look at the English WHFB wiki and it's pretty good regarding single column. The main issues are on the 40K side of things which have a ton of multi-column and fixed width templates.

So regarding a new Age of Sigmar Wiki, are you saying you would prefer an all new empty one and you would pull AoS content over into it - instead of a clone of the current one?

This forum is staying put for the Lex admins, so it will still be used.

-L

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Originally Posted by Bigred

Actually I just took a look at the English WHFB wiki and it's pretty good regarding single column. The main issues are on the 40K side of things which have a ton of multi-column and fixed width templates.

So regarding a new Age of Sigmar Wiki, are you saying you would prefer an all new empty one and you would pull AoS content over into it - instead of a clone of the current one?

This forum is staying put for the Lex admins, so it will still be used.

-L

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I think it would be preferable to have an empty AoS lexicanum to export-import than a clone of the current fantasy Lexicanum.

There are a lot of problems on both sides that makes it preferable to do that way. The most notorious problem is that it's easier to delete the AoS side of the lexi from the fantasy Lexi, than it is to do that plus deleting the FB side of the lexi from an AoS lexi. Mostly because while AoS side has easily identifiable categories the FB side does not, which mean that identifying FB articles is harder than AoS.

The only real issue is that importing and exporting images is not as easy using the tools I have as a bureacrat. A few months ago I talked with a guy on discord about this issue and he told me there was a tool for it, so I will try to talk with him again. If you have better internal tools for doing this then that could also work. Every other issue I should be capable of solving myself.

All I really need to start is the AoS Lexi set-up and an account with the rights set so I can export and accept new account requests. Outside of certain issues I should be able to do most of the work myself. The sooner I can start the sooner I can finish it.

I'm going to be a bit annoying and mention this bug again, but if I'm going to go ahead and delete a huge amount of articles I need the bug on the categories section of the Lexi fixed. It would be extremely helpful to have this feature working properly when deleting as it makes identifying articles that need to be deleted a lot easier.[URL="http://whfb.lexicanum.com/wiki/Special:Categories"]http://whfb.lexicanum.com/wiki/Special:Categories[/URL]

OK, thanks Ashendant.

We are in the middle of doing template updates for both desktop and mobile. Once we wrap that up, next up is a fresh AoS wiki. Once we get there, let me know if you have any specific tools you need.

-L

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Originally Posted by Bigred

OK, thanks Ashendant.

We are in the middle of doing template updates for both desktop and mobile. Once we wrap that up, next up is a fresh AoS wiki. Once we get there, let me know if you have any specific tools you need.

-L

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Thanks. I will eagerly await that time. Meanwhile I will give the tools I was shown a closer look.

One of our users, Morbus Iff, has found me a solution to the problems with transferring images from one lexi to the other as well as help with some mass edits that need to be done. That should be everything we need to get started.

With that in mind how is everything else going? When can we expect the work to be done so that when we can start working on the new Age of Sigmar Lexicanum?