Valve Developer Community talk:Moderator elections

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And now in more detail

Who are all those people who refuse to see the majority of candidates as moderators? Why did anyone other than you offer ideas for improvement and express negative opinions at the right moments when something was wrong? Where have you been before?

Now let's talk about something else. What is a normal wiki for you? One person gave an example with prop_static, a page that my contribution barely touched, and which is INCREDIBLY disgusting in its visuals. How do you even read this crap? Do you like it when a bunch of gray text exists on your screen?

I may change this message later. I don't have enough time to write a proper question yet. --THE OWL (talk) 15:09, 17 Jun 2024

We expressed our concerns when you started doing things like editing protected pages, but you ignored us. --SlimekPL (talk) 15:13, 17 Jun 2024

I didn’t listen, so what happened to these pages? These pages are no longer protected. You gave a bad example. --THE OWL (talk) 15:42, 17 Jun 2024

Arguing about the quality of specific edits is pointless, you clearly have no intention of listening to people's complaints. You clearly see this site as your own personal pet project given the thing about wanting FTP (just ridiculous). Just because you make a lot of edits doesn't necessarily mean you're improving the quality of this wiki, frankly I'm baffled when I try to use this site and see the mess of templates on every page. Spamming changes doesn't make you a good candidate for a moderator. Find another hobby! --Fingerprince (talk) 15:22, 17 Jun 2024

IS it really that hard to believe that there are other users out there who don't like the current state of the VDC? MOST of which is a direct result of you and this "team_34"s so called contributions? Many of us find it near impossible to edit even basic pages to add information for the games we work on due to the clusterbutt that currently exists. --Haaselh0ff (talk) 15:23, 17 Jun 2024

Templates are a good thing but when there are a lot of them with lots of links it becomes hard to read. And when you find a grammatical error you go to the edit page, you actually have to go to the multipage, then to the template that grammatical error is in and only then on the strings subpage find the needed string. --Mr. SystemError (talk) 15:33, 17 Jun 2024

As I have already clarified on the candidates page and on my page, Team_34 has nothing to do with this site. This team is my personal project and has nothing to do with this site. --Max34 (talk) 15:40, 17 Jun 2024

It has dawned on me that several accounts have been created by people solely to participate in this vote. I'm not really able to cross-check if someone is using sockpuppets, but some of them have obviously been on this wiki before; I'd heavily encourage well-established wiki members to participate in votes here and I'll probably go based off of what those people say rather than the several accounts created today that are only being used to participate in this vote. --PabloS (talk) 15:52, 17 Jun 2024

Most of these new accounts are users who are active in other communities, Vaya is an active Mapcore admin and moderator, Squidski is an active Source Engine Discord admin and moderator, Slimek is a mapper who has had multiple maps featured in CSGO, Angel is an active developer of Source 2 Viewer and does amazing work as a mapper as well, these users have newer accounts but are pillars of the community who have qualms about the current state of the VDC and the reason it's in such a state is because of these very users who are trying to prop themselves up as moderators of it. --Haaselh0ff (talk) 15:57, 17 Jun 2024

The VDC has been in a terrible state since at least early 2023, when THE OWL and other users practically took over the wiki --SlimekPL (talk) 16:00, 17 Jun 2024

I'll keep the votes. I'd encourage more users to run, though. --PabloS (talk) 16:05, 17 Jun 2024

Fair point Pablo, I was hesistant about voting anyway. I'm a Momentum Mod and Strata dev/licensee so quite active with Source work, but not an active contributor, I'll remove my vote. I do think it's fair however to voice that I think these guys are spamming crap changes and making one of them admin would probably lead to endless further drama. --Fingerprince (talk) 16:10, 17 Jun 2024

Give me 5 (or more) clearly described examples of the negative impact of our contributions on the wiki and I will tell you why this is not true or why I have been wanting to change this for a long time. We did too much work and the only examples were prop_static whose page didn't really change, or protected pages that we edited for the right reasons. I'll be changing a lot of things towards the end of 2024, too much, so a clear description of the problems will only benefit the wiki. But, don't suggest something like "I don't like the new stuff, I want to sit with a broken UI from 2010 and a clutter of plain gray text". And yes, a bunch of complicated templates is our mistake. This I will try to fix in the future, leaving only the most important. --THE OWL (talk) 17:28, 17 Jun 2024 (edited 17:37, 17 Jun 2024)

You can do all that without being a moderator. You don't need to wait for this election to start fixing things (that were broken as part of this ongoing UI revolution). The rest was already explained. You're using a strawman argument when appealing to "I dont' like new stuff" mentality. This isn't the reason why. The negative impact that you caused is very broadly spread across the wiki, cherry-picking 5 examples won't cover it. It's the clown makeup colourful categories, it's taking up all the extra space with extra borders and rounded corners and tabs, it's all the extra icons, the shaders classification, the fluff that spreads everywhere. I implore you to NOT "change a lot of things" if you're not going to change your approach. Cvoxalury (talk) 10:55, 17 June 2024 (PDT)

Pablo - I've mainly just been a lurker. I saw the vote and wanted to try to ensure that this vital resource wasn't further ruined by a small group of users. I don't think a wiki should double up as a quasi-social media site. It runs terribly now to the point where more and more people are put off using it. People using the site as a resource should get a vote too, no?

OWL - don't take these votes to heart but most people just want to be able to use (and update) VDC as a quick resource. you are destroying that with your changes, so please stop. --Vaya Mapcore (talk) 17:48, 17 Jun 2024

Why don't you write about the specific problems of certain pages?! I'm not going to get out of my own way if the speech never moves from "Well, people don't want something there, you need to stop".

First I will finalize the templates and the social part, then I will take care of the articles, after that I will switch to files and technical pages. It's a goal I'll reach in an already predetermined way if, instead of offering suggestions for improvement, you just suggest I stop. --THE OWL (talk) 17:57, 17 Jun 2024 (edited 18:04, 17 Jun 2024)

You do need to stop, because it's not some few specific problems. It starts with step one, the MAIN PAGE. It faces us on every major page for topics ranging from tools to shader parameters. You're abusing your ability to make a ton of edits in the same pushy, argumentative, non-listening manner, that people don't have time or energy to oppose on every turn, then a few months later you have this body of work people didn't ask for, and proclaim that you're not going to stop. You're not helping both with these edits and unwillingness to back up. Cvoxalury (talk) 11:02, 17 June 2024 (PDT)

And if you think there's a predetermined way to get what you want, well, we'll just keep reverting. Cvoxalury (talk) 11:06, 17 June 2024 (PDT)

The problem is the changes you've been making to the wiki since circa February 2023 aka all of the bloated and completely unnecessary templates --SlimekPL (talk) 17:59, 17 Jun 2024

Also you mentioned a social part, this wiki does not need a social part, it is a developer wiki for a reason. --Angel (talk) 18:18, 17 Jun 2024

All of the entity pages have become very bloated over time, full of random colors. If an entity has a lot of bugs / warnings. It should have its own subpage or an section, no layering ontop of layering. If you look at official wikipedia you don't see any visual mess, it's structured and disciplined. We need to keep the information short, structured and readable. I am against anyone doing edits to posts/templates in the last 2 years. --Darnias (talk) 18:18, 17 Jun 2024

Hi: just a general reminder for people to attempt to be at least sort of civil. I'm fine with and can understand what has been said by others, but I'd rather not have users start valiantly attacking each other. Thanks. --PabloS (talk) 18:24, 17 Jun 2024

As for the users voting: I'm of the understanding now that some of the people replying are affiliated with the community in some way, which I'm fine with. Your votes will be counted, folks, don't worry. --PabloS (talk) 18:26, 17 Jun 2024

If "THE OWL" editing this to move all the arguments from under the votes to the talk page as we speak isn't showing what we've all been arguing for, I dont know what will. This behavior exemplifies perfectly why we have voted no. --Angel (talk) 18:34, 17 Jun 2024

I'm sure everyone is aware why we suddenly banded up to voice our opinion on certain users. Editing/deleting stuff on a TALK page is definition of power tripping, this should be civil discussion, nobody other than actual admins have rights to delete/move stuff. Just so you can doesn't mean you should. --Darnias (talk) 18:46, 17 Jun 2024

Could someone tell me why is there a big commotion about this?

Okay so I am not part of any groups or teams that work with source, nor have I kept up with whats going on this wiki for a while, as I only come online once a while to edit my pages, or to document something, but I was just wondering why are so many people really dissatisfied with this wiki, like ofcourse I understand the fact that its quite hard to readnow, which is also my fault as I was the one who turned the "Third Party Source Tools" into a christmas tree, but still I just wanna know why people are dissatisfied. --Toligon (talk) 19:51, 17 Jun 2024

I would like to know this as well. Many users decide to speak up now about this, why not speak up earlier? If you had quarrels with how this wiki was turning out, you could have created an account months ago to speak up. Seems very odd to me. --Equalizer5118 (talk) 20:14, 17 Jun 2024

I would want to know too. Suddenly when there's an election, they speak up, "why not speak up earlier?" -Equalizer5118, i agree with Equalizer5118, i don't know where and when did those things happen, mostly its about templates which i haven't payed attention to them. --N0one (talk) 20:32, 17 Jun 2024

Except this WAS spoken about. People DID speak up before, myself included, when the main page went through a redesign many didn't want (and it was kind of-half resisted). This hasn't happened for the most part before, because the changes were incremental, and even though annoying, most of just chose to just look up what we came for, wave off the annoyances, and carry on. It was happening for too long and too broadly and quietly to try and grasp at it when it was the time. Plus, I'm sure many people just kind of take for granted that "oh, on valve wiki a design changed, well it probably came from above, shrug then". Now when the topic of moderators came up, this is a very imporant and, dare I say, dangerously empowered position to be in - as moderators can block people. Block opponents, I mean. Now that I noticed that we're not alone (and I was surprised to see how many red votes were about the same topic, which I shared), I saw it as a good time to bring up these things and maybe hope something changes finally. Cvoxalury (talk) 13:41, 17 June 2024 (PDT)

The topic has been brewing in discord based communities for some time now. I don't think most (myself included) know how to exactly raise issues about the VDC. Where do we bring up conversations like this exactly? Other than per page discussions :P --Ozxybox (talk) 20:21, 17 Jun 2024

I'm just speaking up now before problems are made worse here. If you look through the talk history with some of the users voted down you'll notice they have been told before and it was ignored. Trying to keep a wiki on track is a war of attrition when you have multiple users trying to turn it into facebook-lite so a lot of people have noped out of attempts to keep this place course-correct. I would rather this RESOURCE wasn't completely taken over by these users, so I signed up and have been voting accordingly. I still believe this wiki is beyond saving at this time but hey, I think my opinion also matters here. Maybe with a couple votes we can make this place a little more usable. --Vaya Mapcore (talk) 20:23, 17 Jun 2024

Yes, like where exactly are you supposed to bring up these issues if you had a hiatus from updating the VDC and then came back to find a mess of template pages that you need to navigate. I think there are some things that look very nice and are super helpful so I tried to design, for instance, the level design page of the Counter-Strike 2 section to match the HLA section but to edit that page I can't simply hit the EDIT button like a sane person would, I have to hit the Pencil icon of the language page selected. And then after editing that page I can't just save the page and expect it to update, I have to purge the page because page itself doesn't get updated immediately with the template changes I assume. It's just a weird amount of extra work and it just all seems to silly to me. I may not know a lot of the issues other people have but that's just some of my experience with all this. I think a simplification of things is in order, this is a developer wiki, not a social media platform. I edit pages to add information that would be helpful to someone who may be in my shoes in the future just like someone else did before me for Source 1 mapping and I just want it to be easier to do. --Haaselh0ff (talk) 20:44, 17 Jun 2024

Template Lasagna?

Hi there, and sorry if this is irrelevant to the discussion. I've noticed that a lot of voting centralizes on the core problem of the VDC slowly getting converted into a confusing lasagna of templates. Some of the most active editors at the moment are quite fond of the layering, as it allows them to do more. For me at least, I'm clueless about how the templates work and find it difficult to find where content is when content is connected via multiple layers of subpages. Small templates that contribute to making a page richer or templates that make pages look more consistent are great though! I just really quite dislike being completely lost in many many layers of subpages...

Does the VDC have a contribution guideline? I'm not sure where it is if there is one. Would it be reasonable to get a vote to add a guideline against making lasagna pages? I think it would resolve a fair number of the discussions and comments more directly than voting on people who are for or against the lasagna. Not sure if this is the right way to ask about this! --Ozxybox (talk) 20:07, 17 Jun 2024 (UTC)

There's an overview of templates at Help:templates, but it's not in the greatest shape. I can explain any you don't understand how to use.

As for why there's so much discussion around it, it's a complicated issue and it's hard to find a balance between streamlining information and being easy to edit. A good example is {{this is a}} and {{multipage}}. Using them together removes a lot of redundancy in explaining what a command, variable, point entity, etc. is, because the basic information is automatically translated into many different languages. On the other hand, it's just another template that makes pages more complicated. While this alone is not a significant issue, the number of templates that are currently on pages makes it difficult to edit. I think more discussions about keeping and documenting specific templates would be helpful. --Pee (talk) 20:44, 17 Jun 2024 (UTC)

For the dear administrator

Don't you notice how these people are against everything in general? Even the user page, which can be ANYTHING! Surely that's an opinion worth hearing so vehemently, even removing useful templates? I can see how people just want to see the Wikipedia of those years here, and it's not called fighting for all that's good, it's just a simple attempt to ban something they didn't want to deal with.

Also, I see people with slow internet speeds. What kind of speed is that? I'm sitting in the woods right now, far from the city, but I can still load any page VERY easily and VERY quickly. This is not the time to have slow internet speeds. I'm not saying no one thought about reducing page load times, but no one thought there was a person with a 1 byte load speed.

I'll finish my work, but will now have to take the time to delete my contribution so I can update everything with completed versions in the future (note templates and other will be reverted to their original state, and I will remove other templates completely until better times). If no one discusses changes in my sandbox (I'll continue working in July), then those people are fine with it. --User:THE OWL 5:31, 18 Jun 2024 (UTC)

Trying to shame people for their internet speed and acting like that's the problem is extremely childish and just plain rude. Please do better. For reference, my internet speeds are 5gig up and down and the VDC was extremely sluggish and near impossible to load at times this morning

So you're going to hide a bunch of changes behind a random sandbox page that barely anyone is going to see and then when no one is able to find it you're going to mass push those? That sounds just silly. If so many people are so against this system you're trying to force upon them maybe it's a good sign that it shouldn't be done. I understand it's hard to see time and effort go to waste but thus is the life of editing wikis at times. -Haaselh0ff (talk) 23:27, 17 June 2024 (PDT)

I can already see how good the solutions you are proposing and how knowledgeable you are about the state of this wiki (I'm generalizing because you do it too). Even the addition of Metacritic was attributed to us, although it has existed here for years. I already wrote everything on the Vaya's Mapcore talk page.

Finally, I’ll say that my discussion page will be noticed, believe me. --THE OWL 6:37, 18 Jun 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry you feel this way, I wish you the best but given the state of things and the denial of your mod position I'm not really sure what power you'll have to commit these changes that you seem to be threateningly talking about. Please do not jump to malice so quickly in responses, some of us aren't quite as angry as others about the given state of things but when you just start screaming at whoever tries to talk to you it makes you look very childish. -Haaselh0ff (talk) 23:55, 17 June 2024 (PDT)

I don't see dialog in the absence of answers to questions. I asked for examples, only a few are given, and they are terrible (like the presence of Metacritic in the wiki, which was added long before us, but for some reason we are to blame for its presence). As a matter of fact, I'm not going to continue the discussion. You don't want to see something? Pay attention to clearly described feedback, without "It makes the wiki worse just because I think so". --THE OWL 7:27, 18 Jun 2024 (UTC)

You dont' see dialogue because you're running away from dialogue. You didn't answer to me once. Here you're answering to Haaselh0ff in pure denial mode. What you're showing is that you're simply going to ignore criticism and hide behind "la-la-la, they don't want change, la-la-la, if you don't reply very shortly on this one page I'm not linking, then I won". It will take time to undo your damage to the wiki, but it will be done eventually. Cvoxalury (talk) 01:19, 18 June 2024 (PDT)

Let's talk about you. You gave an example with shader parameters. Specifically, what's the problem? You said a less fuzzy abstraction and it didn't do much for me. Your "la-la-la, there are too many problems to single out a few" confirms this. I have no problem describing a bunch of problems in our solutions, which is why I don't want to immediately include my new ideas just yet, because there's a lot to solve, including what you seem to be trying to refer to in your messages.

I'm gone until the end of June. I hope you get your broken paradise back in that time. I need it myself as well. --THE OWL 9:28, 18 Jun 2024 (UTC)

QED, repeating the same points and ignoring the opponents. I'm going to completely halt communications with you as you proved it's beyond pointless. This isn't the page for it anyway. Cvoxalury (talk) 02:31, 18 June 2024 (PDT)

Reading trough all this and then going to Vaya's talk page and reading the messages there from "THE OWL" at this point this is starting to feel more like harrasment against people that were vocal about him and voted no, than a constructive conversation. Angel (talk) 07:07, 18 June 2024 (PDT)

(response) Sorry that I've taken a bit to respond to this; I've been swarmed with cleanup work and Valve contracting work.

The main issue that I have here with the templates that you've created is that this isn't particularly meant to be a place for the kind of things you've been adding—this is a developer reference wiki, meant for people working with Valve and Valve-adjacent tools, not a huge community group wiki like Wikipedia or the Team Fortress 2 Wiki filled with stuff like "Wikichievements" and profile pictures and templates that nest templates that nest templates. Users don't need this much both because this is meant to be for referencing (I suppose docs would be the better descriptor) and these kinds of things take up server resources for something only like ~20 people use. I wouldn't have as much of an issue with your changes either, but your damage with Template:Message extended to modifying random talk pages from ~20 years ago to use the discussion format that you specifically wanted to use with what seemed to be no consensus whatsoever, and it got out of hand because you forced it to such a degree that people could only use that template or their message would immediately get changed to use it.

I'm fine with a community adding retention through certain things; I don't mind the User page template all too much. That being said, however, the amount of destruction to talk pages caused singlehandedly by you modifying them to use the specific standard that you felt like creating caused a lot of issues, both for me and for other members of this community. You've singlehandedly created a giant mess of templates nesting each other in loops that has made editing almost impossible.

Furthermore, contrary to what you believe, keeping pages in a way where anyone, regardless of their situation in relation to internet, is important. Personally, from my situation, I do tend to have issues with my internet as well, which is very much exacerbated by the kinds of unholy things done by the templates you've made.

I'm sorry that the elections didn't go the way that you wanted, but I'm not able to change much about it because the concerns being outlined by community members here are completely correct. Your work here has caused numerous issues in regards to upkeep which impact page load times and take up server resources, which is why I've began to undo some of this work. You are welcome to do whatever you'd like in regards to fixing any issues, but I'm not going to stop any decisions made by the newly-picked moderators based on how they feel about your actions on here. PabloS (talk) 12:49, 18 June 2024 (PDT)

It's okay. I didn't plan to win the election, otherwise I would have written everything in detail instead of playing around. Yeah, I didn't think there would be so much criticism, but it's for the best. It's not really me you should be talking to about the message template. I am its creator, that's true, but the main functionality was realized by Max34, so he is much more offended by its removal than I am (I don't really care, I can erase all my contributions right now if I have a good reason). I really believed in the convenience of our common solutions, because I was and am a person who didn't even know the meaning of the word MediaWiki before I started editing the VDC, but somehow I understood everything in an instant, didn't I? I thought this opinion was normal, and I was wrong.

I've been thinking for a while now that we've been focusing on all the wrong things. I guess I would make an analogy with modern game engines or open source programs, whose developers are constantly changing things a lot, adding a bunch of new stuff, but all the stuff that is actually needed is old, lying around for years without updates.

Now I can only ask not to delete the template of the discussion page. It is already useful at least for such pages as Administrators' noticeboard. Other than that, I will try to make something even more useful out of it in the future. --THE OWL 20:12, 18 Jun 2024 (UTC)

Without derailing too much I want to point out how weird this response is to read, going from trying to seem like you didn't want to win to begin with (why would you run in the ellections then?) to trying to throw other people under the bus to then going into a weird philosophical tangent? Only to end in saying that you will "try to make something even more useful out of it in the future" which based on your past and current work I can only interpret as worrisome.

Also just today you have gone back to filling this talk page with useless templates, like this new "response" template which only serves to litter the page and as visual noise. Angel (talk) 13:49, 18 June 2024 (PDT)

I thought the idea was good and made a very simple template. Not my idea, I just removed the HTML and tested it here, which is where it first appeared. If it's really bad, you can mark it as a candidate for deletion. --THE OWL 20:56, 18 Jun 2024 (UTC)

This "Undo what I edit if you dont like it" mentality is problematic, this is how we ended up here to begin with, because people will not always have the time and or energy to constantly undo things. Angel (talk) 14:06, 18 June 2024 (PDT)

Then write a detailed review on the template discussion page (well, or here) with all the objective facts against it. Do you have some problem with this or is this how you want to keep complaining about me, continuing to say something like "it creates visual noise, but I won't tell you why I think so"? I've posted many times that I don't take vague language, I'm interested in clear examples of the problem.

Here for me it does not create visual noise, on the contrary, it became more pleasant to read (and, YES, I may change my position later, it happens to all people, lol). So what now? Are you going to keep saying that I'm making things worse because you didn't like something there?

I suggest deleting my work because you're unwilling to explain why what you said is right, and I'm not going to keep asking everyone why they think that.

At this point, I'm going to stop responding to you (at least on this page). I have accepted the position expressed here (not without a fight, but I will no longer be implementing many of my ideas), and now I want to make things right. --THE OWL 21:21, 18 Jun 2024 (UTC)

Shutting off from criticism and going "I am going to stop listening to you now" is not very mature behavior, further more I am not sure how to explain in any clearer language that something creates visual noise, I feel like I've voiced my poinion clear enough. It is simply not needed and you don't need to retroactively add it to all the messages here, also Pablo removing the template just now further proves my point. Angel (talk) 14:30, 18 June 2024 (PDT)

Pablo put it all in a way I couldn't have done better myself. Between that and clear consensus shown from our side, we really don't need to keep up this argument any longer on this page meant for talk about moderator elections. Which are going quite well themselves, we've got 4 people already, so I don't have anything to add on that point either. I suggest we all go do something productive, like good editing. Cvoxalury (talk) 14:42, 18 June 2024 (PDT)

Regarding the recruitment of moderators from the community

As someone who has been using this wiki since the day it went live back in 2005, i'd just like to say that moderators have been needed for a long time. I've made my fair share of mistakes that needed moderator actions and I've seen a lot of it over the years from other people, but recruiting moderators from the community is a terrible idea. Moderators need to abide by strict rules, they need training and they need consequences for abuse of power. I don't see that happening if moderators are regular users.

I think some people don't get the point of this wiki. I've seen user pages turned into Myspace-like pages complete with status messages (there is a user contributions page to see if somebody's active), the entire wiki keeps getting reformatted, pages are starting to look like a coloring book and the main page is getting bloated with information that isn't needed (and is probably slowing down page load as well). Some users seem to spend all of their time rewriting existing pages, never adding any new information despite the need for it.

For example: over at TWHL people keep asking for help getting started with GoldSource engine modding; it'd be great to have a modernized tutorial for making maps with JACK we could point people to, but all we've got are decades old tutorials for Hammer. The VDC's GoldSource engine level design category page lacks a getting started page (there is one that redirects to said page though). Why haven't any of these active users written one by now?

No offense to anyone here, but i fully expect this to blow up in Valve's face and to result in the entire project being canned and replaced with paid moderators (or none at all) sooner or later. Solokiller (talk) 10:06, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

Well, of the five moderators that were elected at this point, they all seem like the kind to make reasonable calls. The very problematic 'colouring book' is being reverted right now (literally, as we speak). Game and software pages are being reverted from fancy steam-like to more orderly Wikipedia-like, like they were before (it'll look not right for some time because part of the damage done was to widely-featured templates, navboxes, etc), but that's the only way).

The moderators are really needed for several tasks: blocking people who deal damage; protecting pages from being damaged; deleting pages that deserve deletion (after confirming deletion nomination). Why can't that be done by regular users voted for by the community? If you've seen the election page you must see that the users that caused more troubles, were voted out.

The rest, when it has to do with getting the pages back in order, can be done by any autoconfirmed user. I intend to set right however much I can (fully sharing your dislike of what's happening to the pages) and I'm not trying to become a moderator, I don't need it.

Compared to a month ago we had simply no one to call upon to quickly stop vandals, I absolutely will take the new moderators.

As for user pages specifically - the wiki says it's alright to have them personalised with "whatever you want" so long as it's not offensive. I wouldn't hold that against users, but only what they were doing with articles.

Someone like you, in terms of experience, would be in a good position to compose such tutorials about Gldsrc. Just saying. Cvoxalury (talk) 11:05, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

I hope I'm wrong about this but we'll see. So far the moderator selections have been reasonable, but i don't know anyone here well enough to say one way or the other.

But I would recommend verifying that basic security is in place, like regular backups, multi-factor authentication to catch attackers trying to use moderator accounts to inflict damage and so on, because the worst case scenario is a moderator account being compromised. Valve employees probably already take any necessary measures but the average user might not be aware of the risks. MediaWiki has multi-factor authentication support which has to be turned on and is only available for admins and the like, and this wiki is using an outdated version of MediaWiki so it probably doesn't have it at all. If that's not an option then requiring moderators to attach a Steam account with Steam Guard enabled to use a code to log in would help protect against attacks. A full security review is probably in order since the VDC is running a MediaWiki version that went out of support nearly 3 years ago (which has been brought up before, hopefully an upgrade is in the works).

If i can find the time i'll try to write a getting started tutorial for JACK based on TWHL's old one, but i'll need to figure out which style to write it in (templates and stuff, i'm sure you know). It would be helpful if somebody from Valve could confirm whether the VDC is expected to stay online indefinitely, since the reason why people continue to add to the TWHL wiki is due to concerns that modding resources get taken offline. If the VDC goes down a lot of information will disappear from the Internet altogether. A way to download a local copy of the entire wiki (content pages only) would help in that area, but i don't know if that's possible right now. Solokiller (talk) 11:27, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

For my personal use I downloaded a copy of the entire VDC in early 2022, I used HTTrack Website Copier tool. Better than nothing... Cvoxalury (talk) 11:51, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

Hi, regarding TWHL's hesitance to write new articles for the VDC, I wouldn't worry about articles in the VDC being lost. I happen to know a thing and a half about the archival of wiki sites. An entire wiki can be dumped effortlessly with the Wikiteam tool, I've several wikis backed up on my computer this way. By what you wrote, I think you might not be aware that this tool has also made it possible for crowdsourced, automated backups (it's complicated) of all the major wikis on the internet, that are then uploaded on archive.org, which is Wikiteam's ongoing project. I could find a backup of the VDC as recent as a year ago on archive.org.

So just go ahead with your article. If you need to save an article right now, you can also just submit a page as you see it to the Wayback Machine, which has saved 866 billion web pages for more than 20 years. --Sakichan (talk) 12:06, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

Something I think is worth highlighting is because of how out of control things had gotten it became next to impossible for a normal user to actually contribute anything. Part of the goal as I understand it is to bring the wiki back in line with what it once was, a place where anyone could just hit the edit button and contribute with only needing to know some of the very basics of the markdown. Another thing to consider is that for a very long time this space was almost entirely Source 1 related material. This all said I do think there should be an effort made to document GoldSrc related materials and setup tutorials for it.

Concerning backups you can go to Special:Export and do exports of pages. Should be able to automate using a basic Python script. --Wazanator (talk) 11:41, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

It has become difficult to contribute to because the Edit tab (the normal one) most of the time stopped doing anything due to the underlying changes to page structure. But (quoting myself from another discussion on this topic) right now trying to fix it is like trying to heal a fracture that had time to set. It's been months and months since this... alternate, practice went in widespread use. It is also inherently tied to the subject of translation, so to throw it out would right now mean losing a huge chunk of translated material. It staggers the mind that it became the new mainstream months ago, but it did, and untangling it isn't a fast process. Cvoxalury (talk) 11:51, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

What should the untangled, multipage-template-less structure be like? Should each page just be English as standard, while perhaps still containing something like the existing language bar to redirect to regional subpages? Translations are already subpages anyway, so a large portion of the work just sounds like it'd be merging the "/en" pages back to the root, but then again, I know nothing :P --DarkOK (talk) 13:29, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure at this point. You can take some page and use its /en verson to replace the base version, yes. But if you use the previous version of the translation template, which was Tempalte:Lang, it won't find any translated pages, because it looks them up by : mask, not /. For example, for Cubemaps there used to be Cubemaps/es (you can see that in archived versions of that page). Now trying it redirects you to Cubemaps/es, but the Lang template won't work like that. Can the "/" pages be taken and turned into ":" pages? Perhaps. But we need someone who's a better wiki engineer to spearhead it, not me, frankly. (and if someone thinks they're up to it, I implore them to test it on a single page, not a whole bunch)

It's like catch-22. If you replace Multipage with just the /en (as it's the logical default), you lose connection to other languages. If you keep Multipage but try to insert the content of the /en page, then Edit still won't work. Then there's the question of how many languages do we even practically need, I mean there's Esperanto support of all thiings, that's basically a meme...

But even then, some of those those translated subpages, the "/" ones, they follow the structure imposed by the current practice, which is mixing text translated on the page, and text translated in looked-up strings somewhere else. Main Page does that, and it's a big mess, and working on it in English is already tedious, working on it while not knowing the language is impossible. Cvoxalury (talk) 13:54, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

Probably something similar to {{lang}}, but with subpages (i.e. Main Page/ru rather than Main Page:ru). I think templates such as {{stub}} should continue to automatically translate, though. This system has worked pretty well for the TF2 wiki. The main problem with porting it is that it can slow down the website and fill up the expensive parser function count with all the #ifexist calls (but that's an issue already). I'd note that it has to be a mod that does this to existing pages because otherwise revision history of the English page cannot be restored. ―Pee (talk) 13:50, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

I won't have issues with some widely reused templates being autotranslated, but I'll stand firmly on the side of pages relying minimally on strings and template lasagnas, not only for speed, but because that kind of translation inherently can't be very good when it's fragmentary. I happen to speak one of the most translated languages here and the quality of translation ranges from hilarious to overly technical (no, I'm not ready to tackle translations in the middle of all this). (things like stub are good in the way that they're meant to go away, too...)

Apparently we should be bracing ourselves for some 'huge code' solution that will show 'everything to everyone', despite not being close to any kind of consensus yet. Cvoxalury (talk) 11:58, 20 June 2024 (PDT)