Talk:Helping Out

Long Pages

I've been looking through this page and I see a lot of pages that are listed higher up with a bit of unneeded information/text. This text will lag FSwiki because each letter takes up a certain amount of space measured in bytes. We should all be considerate and do what is best for the Wiki by editing out repetitive parts and such.

The Map Tilesets page could definitely be broken up into smaller bits, but right now I don't think it is much of an issue since I doubt it gets many views (I didn't actually check).

The next longest pages are the sortable item lists. I am in the process of remaking these with slightly different information and removing unnecessary comment tags. So far this helping reduce the length of the page (example: Sortable List of Weapons was reduced by over 10,000 bytes despite my adding many more weapons). I do not think these pages should be broken into smaller pages.

That leaves the rest of the longest pages: various Areas and User/Guild pages. The Area pages can get lengthy when they have the maps on them, but the maps can be useful when planning for areas you are not currently traveling in. The user/guild pages we really have no control over, so I don't think much can be done about those.

In the long run, I am a bit skeptical that 'long pages' are very detrimental to the performance of the wiki. Perhaps the concern would be the time it takes to read them from the database, but I believe that the server hardware is quite capable of handling the load (our FSP purchases at work). If the concern is the bandwidth used, 100,000 bytes is pretty irrelevant except to someone on dialup.
— Belgrave, Moderator / Sysop  Talk  Message PM 

What I'm seeing is that a few Profile/Guild pages have more than 20k bytes of information. When I'm looking into these pages, I see a lot of information that is either common or repetitive. Take a look at this, you can see a lot of repetitive things, taking up space in cyberspace. I'm not pointing any fingers, but like you said, Long Pages are very detrimental to the performance of the Wiki, and therefore, more pages containing a bit less information on each page will do less harm, if not make it better.

The Map Tilesets page has been viewed 5 times, so it's not much of a problem, and as for the sortable item lists, it'll be done soon, eh.                  CHiNback - [ Talk - Message - PM ]

lol, that example page you gave is also the most edited page in the wiki... Anyway, there isn't much we can do about user/guild pages.

I'm not trying to nitpick, but you did misquote me there. I do not think that long pages have much of an effect on wiki performance, especially since the load on the database would be no different than a lengthy thread on the forum. I also just went through the php code used for Special:Longpages and there is no magic number that determines if a page is long or not. Instead, it is just a simple query that finds the 50 or so longest pages in the wiki. Likewise, the Special:Shortpages just finds the shortest pages. Also, if the database starts getting too much of a load, there is a Job Queue to deal with it.

Anyway, I personally don't think this is a major issue at the moment. Let us finish getting on all the items, creatures, and areas, and then revisit this issue.
— Belgrave, Moderator / Sysop  Talk  Message PM 

Multiple Edits

EDIT POLICE

Go ahead... make all of those small edits to a single wiki page. I know the server and the hardware can handle the load, but you will definitely know it irks me when I mention on your talk page how you're clogging the recent changes page! Take my advice... plan out what you wish to add to your page and do it all in one big worthwhile edit. Also, USE THE 'PREVIEW' BUTTON and make sure you have it perfect before you save. Don't give me a reason to get all 'bad cop' on you!

User Pages vs. Player Pages

Do we want to make an official wiki policy on this issue and start moving and redirecting player pages to their user pages so they don't clutter up the main namespace?
— Belgrave, Moderator / Sysop  Talk  Message PM