Originally, the "EncyclopAtys" was created by players who wanted to record as many (if not all) RPG and MMOG on the one hand the story of their character and on the other hand the tricks to survive in the universe of Atys.
Today it has become the wiki of Ryzom supposed to collect all the useful information of the game in all its aspects and interests, "Gameplay" and "Roleplay".
Contents
Preamble
Like any wiki, it has been enriched with data, documentary "pages" and various tools of "normalised" representations.
It later inspired wikis, German and English twins also based on Mediawiki (and Wikipedia). These two wikis needed to exchange images, as they often worked together, so this was the birth of the "Ryzom Commons", the place where images (and other media) can be shared.
It should be remembered that at that time the game universe was slightly different under each DE, EN and FR server, which caused a lot of confusion, even frustration, during the fusion. It was thought that languages such as Spanish, which is very present all over the world, and Russian, which is widely used in Eastern Europe, could promote the game, so two more language wikis were created.
The need to create a workplace for development and a workspace to avoid misinterpretations of the previously too secret tradition giving free rein to the imagination of players led to the creation of two new wikis.
The first three wikis were independent, 100% managed by volunteers. They had gradually been fully integrated into Ryzom's servers.
With a desire for simplification and above all for visibility, the two wikis, Forge and Lore, have been integrated into the "linguistic" wikis of the players so that they can access their information very easily:
- Those of the Forge to keep up to date players interested in the progress of development.
- Those of the Lore in order to avoid the drifts of scenarios of players and developers.
Thus was born the new architecture of Ryzom wikis, architecture that had to answer the questions :
- What is the Ryzom game?: the Ryzom Universe, given by the ("'Lore"'), and how to play there.
- In which world do I live?: Atys, planet|the planet, so its flora, its fauna, etc.
- What are the races I can play?: Fyros, Matis, Tryker or Zoraï.
- What are the divine or assimilated powers of the planet, as well as the large out-of-State groups that will direct my acts?: Kami, Karavan, Marauders, Rangers, Trytonists.
And then the "Encyclopedia" co-managed by the players and animators:
- Atys Chronicles which are the official texts to describe the past.
- The Great Library contains all the player experience that does not necessarily fall into any of the headings above.
- The X-files ;-) contains the "behind the scenes" of the wiki.
The following cartridge summarises the various important points of interest and access to associated information. This cartridge should be present at the end of pages on all portals, and sometimes as an introduction to some key categories.
Ryzom: The Lore • The Game OOC
Atys: Atys world • Flora • Fauna
Nations: Fyros • Matis • Tryker • Zoraï
Factions: Kami • Karavan • Marauders • Rangers • Trytonists
Encyclopedia: Atys Chronicles • The Great Library • Mysteries OOC
A documentary site managed by several groups
With such a past, it is necessary to return to context and consider well that the role of each imposes restrictions and options of different rules and instruments.
- First of all, we must not forget it, the readers. For them we wrote.
- Then "contributers" who will have different knowledge can divide it into three groups.
Players and animators
This is the group of those who are present in the game and who "lives" in it and makes it live. We can add to this group translators and "SysOp" who are also players or animators.
- Players enrich the documentation based on their own experience. It is interesting to see in this case the wiki as an RP extension of the game, but not an obligation. At the same time, unlike wikis like Wikipedia, it is useless to invent a nickname, we already have the one(s) that we have for the game. Obviously, secret agents or members of clandestine factions can use the nickname of their nickname. In fact, Ryzom wants to be an RP game and it can be enjoyable, even motivating, for players to invest in the wiki as a character rather than as an anonymous worker. Sometimes the information will be mandatory IRL. The case has been planned and the details will follow.
- Animators will appear with their animator nickname when expressing themselves as an animator, it is the same for developers and lorists. The last two have a workspace in the wiki a bit separated from the others.
- Translators are those who ensure as far as possible the dissemination of information in each language.
- The SysOps monitor and ensure the quality of the site, open accounts and guide beginners, the "SysOps" is like the steward for passengers of a plane, while the "piloting" is provided only by the administration of the Ryzom system.
Developers
The developers, associated with the "Forge" project, use this wiki workspace to share centralised information (forging categories). All FORGE documents are at least referenced on the "'FORGE site in English"'. Ideally, any document from The Forge would be translated into two languages, including English, because English is not a neutral language as Esperanto or any other international "mathematical" language, so, it is a minimum of courtesy for other cultures.
The Forge field collects both Ryzom history and "assets", but also tips and tricks, for example, using GIMP instead of 3DsMax.
- also contains the description of using our staging tool: the ARK.
"Lorists", guardians of the universe of Atys
The "lorists" also have their workspace (lore categories), knowing that this space is public (there is no secret on the wiki), and that they are supposed to protect official documents by putting their stamp and "blocking" the modifications.
To get started
There are two problems to start on a wiki. On the one hand, there are the purely technical rules and on the other hand, there is the spirit of the wiki. Being the latter often considered essential to offer online documentation, and to prevent users from discovering a thousand and one online documentation tool, it was chosen to use something known to all and that is very well documented : the Mediawiki, widely represented by Wikipedia whose aids are well updated.
First of all, never hesitate to ask for the help of an "experienced guy" because the loads of things to discover is impressive. And how can I find those "senseis"? The easiest way is to find out who is frequently present on the wiki to contribute to it. And for this you will only need to see it here for each language :
- de:Spezial:Aktive_Benutzer
- en:Special:ActiveUsers
- es:Especial:UsuariosActivos
- fr:Spécial:Utilisateurs_actifs
- ru:Служебная:Активные_участники
Information search
There are two types of searches :
- We know what we are looking for and use a few keywords to achieve it : this is what the Search: field at the top of wiki pages allows. You can read with interest: en:Help:Search.
- One is interested in a field of knowledge, and in this case it is the thematic portals that will "guide" readers.
- In the latter case, there are no portals responsible, because all contributors, arguing with others not to blindly break the existing, can improve it in the idea of always better sharing information.
- Categories are "pillars" on a wiki. We advise you to examine the page categorization.
Who am I ?
You want to contribute to our wiki, if only to correct horrible typos and even more horrible grammatical errors and even worse, sure of your experience, drilling and harvesting techniques. Congratulations! but you must have an account to work in our encyclopedia.
Getting an account is one of our protections against all vandals on the web. But the alternately "marauders and tritonist spirit" is deeply rooted in the homin who does not understand that this restriction is due to the fact that the few "SysOp" of Ryzom wikis were not numerous and were present enough to protect and clean the wiki from the various attacks it suffered. Finally, it was decided that only Ryzom players could contribute and that the only way to find out, in the absence of a hopelessly empty "homin" CV, remained to use a "ryzomian" name of a player character. And in this case, why not make this character express in RP mode here ?
When creating an account, at the top of the page, on the right, above the field described above, there are a number of links that point to items in your profile.
- Your name allows access to your profile. In the latter you can write your RP "profile" and your IRL specialties(wiki role, language skills, etc.).
- Talk is the page where other players/contributors will contact you. It's a tradition to add a Level Two title for any new topic, sign with all four "~" (~~~~), and indent each response Ssublevel by starting the line with ":" more than the previous paragraph.
- The following: Preferences, Watchlist, Contributions and Log out are not specific to the Ryzom wiki.
Additional references
- Toolbar description: en: Wiki tools bar from en:User: Craftjenn
- How and why create an account: en: help: why create an account? from en: User: Craftjenn
Break the blank page
Over time, the wiki has become a rich and therefore complex tool at first glance. Do not hesitate to ask for help from the active users of the site. Sponsorship is free! (at least for now because later, the old one, it will be you :-) )
First of all, it is necessary to get used to the organisation of the wiki and know that some "things" are automated.
The three main automated "things" are document page management (or images on the proper wiki as will be explained later), categorisations, and templates that format certain data or push object that has been entered on the page.
The documentary pages
The writing of the documentary pages, has been described by several authors at different times:
- The first one in 2005: fr:Aide:Premiers pas by fr:user:Karouko
- The "fusion" version 2012: guide de rédaction
- The actually one with many additional information from Craftjenn, including the public publication of the previous guide en: Writing Guide from Introduction to the Ryzom Forge Wiki.
Categorisation
One should see categorisation in the aspect of Set Theory. Mediawiki handles categories as sets that can be included in others, which is very convenient for quickly finding items that share the same set of definitions. By the way, it is useless to categorise the base (or root) category into a higher category because, always from a set point of view, by default Mediawiki behaves like the Universe set, i.e. it contains all sets. Therefore, the whole art of categorising will be in the choice of the first trunks and the first branches that group together large series of information.
To visualise this notion of nesting categories, imagine the following two examples: Lydix Deps the owner of Pyr's Tavern and his liquor based on Shooki.
- "'Lydix "' belongs to the categories:
- The Category:Non Playable Characters-Fyros that belongs to the Category:Fyros and the Category:Non Playable Characters
- However, the Category:Fyros belongs to Category:Civilization that are part of the Category:Peoples of Atys (which includes tribes and primitive) that belong to the Category:Inhabitants that we can find in the following example.
- On the other hand, the Category:Non Playable Characters belongs to:
- the Category:Homins that belongs to the Category:The Great Library because it contains texts written by players based on their own experience.
- the Category: Gameplay because it is a mob.
- the Category: animation because NPCs are sometimes part of an event
- and finally to the Category: Roleplay, like background actor participating in a RPG.
- The en:Category:Figures of Burning Désert that belongs to the Category:Figures that is in the Category: Homins. In fact, if Lydix belongs to the fyros, we must not forget that many other non-fyros homins live in the desert.
- The shooki belongs to the category:intelligent plants and Category:Flora of the Desert both in the Category:Flora, one of the main branches of the wiki.
Categories allow players to search for information knowing what it is, but not knowing with which specific words. For example, one might look for an NPC whose name he forgot but remembers selling beer in the burning desert.
In addition to these "encyclopedic" categories there are also technical categories of work.
Most of these categories can be inserted through "template", which simplifies the life of the collaborator. These categories are detailed for "specialists" (Lorists, translators, wiki maintenance...)
"'Keep in mind!"': the images will all (for all 5 wikis) be hosted on the Ryzom_Commons, which is in English, with some local exceptions. If you have a lot of images to upload, it's often better to start by creating a subcategory, and especially naming the images long before importing them. You can consult more in: en:SOS/catImage.
Format
For both the translator and the player who reads more than one language, it is useful to find on each wiki the same interface. The design contributes to this visual uniformity.
In addition, the way of presenting certain information is sometimes very repetitive from one wiki to the other and therefore tedious to "copy/paste/adapt". "Templates" help simplify the task of collaborators. But at the same time, the more templates and rules there are, the more writers feel neophytes overloaded with things to acquire.
All willingness can write and improve the guides of this wiki that is ours. It has a forum where you can discuss with others about all the possible improvements.
Portals and main pages
The home page is the default page the reader reaches. It should be designed to quickly direct you to your interests. This page is protected.
Portals are an invention of the French Wikipedia that is not reflected in the same way everywhere in Wikipedias. Portals are entry points for topics and sometimes projects. They were chosen to be able to answer the various questions that players ask themselves and to serve as a welcome point for Forge projects and in general for all Ryzom animation teams.
A portal always has the same skeleton :
- Tabs to access sub portals or related portals.
- Link to the category containing the pages associated with the portal
- Short abstract to introduce it
- The portal body including
- On the left a page advertising to invite the reader to discover more
- On the right, a list of inserts indicating the points that are supposed to be important for navigating in and around the topic. An example is provided in Portal: Portal. However, there are many variations depending on the interests of the subject.
- At the bottom, always, navigation on the site: "All thematic Portals of Encyclopatys (Ryzom Wiki)"
Articles that belong to a topic represented by a portal are always made by including at the end of the article navigation band(s), as you can see below.
