Here, post your ideas and suggestions about GURPS Wiki. This is an open discussion, so feel free to add questions, notes, thoughts, and so on.

Layout & Presentation

I think I should add some of the most common links in the "Navigation" section of the left pane menu... - Lord Abdul

Content

What about a GURPS Features page, with the Sample Combat page, and a list of cool features from GURPS Fourth Edition? Some kind of demo or advertising panel or something... - Lord Abdul

Characters Format

The lengthy discussion about characters format has been moved to Characters Format Suggestion.

Moderation

How should we handle contributions? Beside really crappy stuff, off-topic things and offensive texts, what do we do with incorrect, badly organized or badly written pages? Should we give the original author a chance to modify his text (for example by adding a note on his page), or should we go for the whole Wiki thing by editing his thing? What about texts that are on-topic, well written, but totally wrong? Should we delete them without notice? What do you guys think? -- Lord Abdul

There will exist ideas that take more than one day to work on successfully. Ideally, a person should do his creating offline and then import the final result here, but in practice, that might not happen. Before deleting things, I highly recommend contacting the author and asking him/her what's up. chances are, they didn't realize there was a problem or it is a work in progress. Assuming the person explains themselves satisfactorily, give them some time to continue/finish their work, and/or ask if they desire any assistance (spell-check, link-check, factoid-check, whatever). Or the author could simply add an appropriate note to that effect, but we're talking real people here, not super-geniuses. -- The DS

This is a problem. We can either fix the pages or delete them / undo edits. There is currently no (!) security in this thing, which makes "owner editing only" a little hard to put up. What we can do - fast - is add a note to the top, that the content on this page is totally off (wrong) and let it to others to clean it up. When the Wiki grows, we wil have to search for solutions for this. I will take the issues we run in (spam?) to drive the development of a commercial CMS' wiki module. -- THONA

Authentification features are partly implemented in flexwiki and we can hope they'll be fully done in the near future (we could even help with the development!). In fact, if you look at the main page on http://www.flexwiki.com and try to edit it, it requires you to login. I suspect that the missing features are only about administration of those editing rights, and assignment of users and groups on a per-topic basis (I'll have to see how it's done right now). I don't think that we'd need such advanced rights management anyway. Appart from pages that should only be editable by the admins (main page, etc.), I don't think it'd be a good idea to allow users to lock their pages (even if administrators can still edit them). I agree with The DS on this - people can put notes and instructions at the top of their pages in order to either ask for help, say that this is still a work in progress, etc. It's what notes are for anyway, and I've written instructions specifically for this on the Contributors Page. We'll need stronger authentification only if we get spam problems. -- Lord Abdul

Authentication features are not in at all - they work by using file system security. S Omething else is planned. T He problem with file system security are two: first, you need a local windows user account to secure to, second you need access to the file system via a tool allowing to manipulate this. Both is not possible in 99.99% of the shares hosting environments. Long term, what I can see what we need will be: (1) a possibility to limit editing of certain pages to certain users only. This can be "admin only", but also "owner only". This is especially usefull when we get rpg group specific pages. (2) a way to account changes to users. Not like now (where you can enter any name as editor you like), but with user management. This will allow to track and eliminate spammers when they arrive. (3) a separation of topic and topic discussion, by slaving a message board to a topic, and having comments go into this. This allows users to still comment on locked pages. (4) Multi-Page-Topics for long topics, but this is not related to security. But this basically runs down to what we need. Now, interesting enough we have everything in place for a commercial CMS and will add Wiki functionality to it in about half a year -- THONA

Do you start working on the Wiki features in 6 months, or do you plan on having it ready in 6 months? It's okay by me, as long as moving everything from here to another Wiki doesn't become an admin nightmare! -- Lord Abdul

Well, I would say I want to start WIKI LIKE functionality into the version 2 of the CMS, which is due end of the year. Actually having worked with the WIKI here tells me that any CMS can gain a LOT from being a little more "WIKI like". Like I love the keyword-auto-linking and we will probably make it available CMS-wide. It just rocks. We are now finishing version 1, then makinga version 1.1 (adding an oinline shop module and workflow, verisoning of items) and then start working on version 2. The move is a problem, but especially if we can dump the history things are really easy. After all, Flex Wiki is really simple, in it's storage system. -- THONA

50 point powers

The powers thread is very interesting (and very long). I know that a PDF file exists with at least some of the powers, but it would be nice if we could also have them here. The internet-connected computer I'm on doesn't belong to me, and I'd rather not download stuff. -- tanya