Difference between revisions of "User talk:Lymaniii"

Revision as of 04:45, 2 May 2009

Welcome, fellow piñata enthusiast!

Hello, Lymaniii, and welcome to PinataIsland.info! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• How to edit a page
• Help pages

If you're already familiar with wiki editing, feel free to refer to our Site-specific Style guidelines for specific site style conventions.

I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! FeralKitty (talk) 19:41, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks

The updates and additions that you made are appreciated! --FeralKitty (talk) 19:41, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Everything but the kitchen sink

It's a familiar concept that bites many of us at times, to creep more features into an application, to add more bells and whistles to some item, to cram more "content" into a wiki article. Being an idealistic person myself, it's easy to imagine having 100% of the details within a wiki article. Having done that, one could also lay that article out so it's viewable at, say, 800x600.

While it's possible to do something, I think the more important question, subjective as it is, is whether or not we should should do something. As an example, let's use the arctic versions and variants, and how I had set out to fit sub-garden species PV cards into the species article sandbox. Certainly, it's species-specific, so the cards are in the right article, and let's say it looks great at any resolution. Do we want to add those images to the article, and its Infobox? Is there a need to cram more visual information in there, to make the Infobox longer, to make the article longer, to give the viewer more information to look at or scroll past? Surely the majority of people come to the species article for the requirements, and the arctic version card is mostly incidental? Images can be worth a thousand words, but in this case, we're not sparing the viewer from thousands of words. I think seven more images bloated the article, and adding a sentence or two would be a better trade-off.

Giving people too much information can lead to other problems. Maybe some viewers are avid or diligent readers, and will take in and appreciate every tidbit of information, but other viewers may overlook what they're searching for, because its buried somewhere in the paragraphs of text and screenful of images. Now, technically, that's not the wiki's fault (since it's supposed to be a reference source of information about the game), and it should be the burden of the visitor to read articles, but experience has shown us that people don't "find" information (that's) at the wiki.

I don't think the solution is to cram more information in, every single place where someone someone might look for or expect it. I think solutions have to do with improving navigation, organization, and presentation. Yes, trick item cards could be added to a challenge article, but then they should be added to the species article too, right? So, we add this in there, and so forth, and the whole thing spirals. It gets harder to search the site, because you get hits all over the place, and it gets harder to maintain the site, because it's got thousands and thousands of images and repeated information in all sorts of different places, and the harder it is to maintain, the less accurate it can become, which interferes with its purpose as a reference. I favor the "keep it simple" philosophy. If it's not broken, it probably shouldn't be fixed, especially if the "fix" is more complex than what existed beforehand.

I guess that's why I get a little leery of adding features like "click on this link to see a PV card for the item to learn a trick," because the mechanism might not be intuitive or obvious to everyone, because it's not consistent across the site (and visitors haven't had to do that before for other images), and because it didn't feel simple (or look ok, back then). To me, the trade-off for trick item cards seems to be between "making the site make it easier for the gamer to earn achievements," versus "making the site easier to use, period."

We're adding cards to make it easier to accomplish 100% of the challenges. Isn't that good enough? I think that the wiki was meant as a reference. Adding trick item cards too just feels like "everything but the kitchen sink," and I don't think we should take articles that far, to cram every possible image into them. --FeralKitty (talk) 22:29, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

We need to get each other's instant messaging IDs so we can chat better! :-) I just left a long comment on the same topic a couple minutes before you posted this (over on the Langston page). I appreciate what you're saying, but it's a stretch to extrapolate from including directly relevant images that, if executed correctly, are completely consistent with a concise and navigable page to the idea that thousands and thousands of images are going to clog up the flow of the site. Lymaniii 23:19, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

This site takes up so much of my time as is. I think discussions work better for me, timeslice-wise. Also, wiki discussions will keep everyone (especially Jim) in the loop, and any member can participate in (or catch up) with article discussions that interest them. --FeralKitty (talk) 00:32, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Mostly I was joking. It does seem an inefficient way of back-and-forth on something. Especially when it's branched out to different locations.Lymaniii 11:45, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm with you on your explanation of keeping the arctic species details in a separate linked place. That's perfectly reasonable and your rationale makes sense. However, the site *is* broken in the sense of easy navigation, and it does need to be fixed. I have seen many comments from people that *have* searched and scoured and tried to find information that they know is there somewhere, but they're unable to find it. Even BIGsheep has made comments along those lines, more than once. In the case of the arctic tigermisu, a link to the arctic article is good, but a teaser that gives the user some sense that there's interesting information there other than just a list of arctic species is even better. Lymaniii 23:19, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

All we need is a volunteer with the time/motivation to step up and start to deal with any navigation shortcomings. As for things like the artic details, or finding other information, I proposed the "ten things" article as a way to pull together obscure information. None of the things you're mentioning are new. It just takes time and effort to add content or fix issues, and my to-do list has enough stuff on it. Find something you want to work on, and go for it. As long as we're moving forward (solving problems), instead of sideways or backwards (creating other problems), you'll have my approval and gratitude. --FeralKitty (talk) 00:32, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

If I could only predict what you believe moves us forward (as we apparently disagree on that with regularity!). :-) Lymaniii 11:42, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

You seem to have a very specific idea of what makes for good navigation, organization, and presentation, but I'm arguing for the exact same goals with a different idea of what gets us there. You and I can speculate about what people come to the site for and how to make it better suited to that purpose, but what we really need is actual numbers of people that use actual pages, search strings, resolutions, etc. For example, I think we agree that a lot of people just go to the species articles to find out the requirements. But what seems crazy to me is that the TIP and classic species requirements are included on the same page. That makes for *horrible* navigation. And it's unnecessary, really, since the page is really just multiple pages that download together when any individual user only needs one of them. If you want to go from species to species, it takes two clicks since you have to constantly be resetting the tabs. The most prominent search term on the wiki is "pinata vision", but the page that it leads to is a very poorly navigable linear list of many hundreds of text links. If that's the *main* reason people come to the site, surely there's a better way to organize that information (and I don't think progressively longer unabbreviated names is it). Lymaniii 23:19, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I have no access to logs. If Jim wants to share referrer strings or statistics, you'd have to take that up with him. I hope though that you won't use actual facts to contradict any of my speculations :p

The tabs may make for inconvenient navigation, but the real horror would be splitting every single tabbed article up into a series of articles. You'd have just increased the number of search hits by a factor of 2-5, making it less likely people will find the right page in the results. It also means additional information would have to be duplicated -- instead of answering a question on one page, it would have to be answered on every tab you split off onto a new article.

Frankly, I find the tabs convenient, as it's easier to visually note differences or missing information between tabs within a single article, than different articles' content.

As for the pinata vision deal, there are articles and there are categories, and categories themselves should have their own articles, with catmores to them. If they don't, no one has gotten around to improving them. I can point you in the right direction, if you need an example to follow. Almost every cloud term is a category. Maybe the cloud should filter out (or rewrite) category links, if corresponding articles exist, since category articles are more user-friendly than categories. --FeralKitty (talk) 00:32, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I recognize that splitting those pages would be a nightmare--it is the real instance of where a particular choice in site design becomes nearly impossible to change (rather than providing a piece of information in two places), and unfortunately this is an instance where it really does matter. While the tabs most certainly make for an easier *author* experience, I can tell you most certainly from my own *user* experience they are a pain. I have finished Classic and no longer need to see those pages, but I am *constantly* being forced back to its pages. Not only that, but the FAQs at the bottom of many pages have answers that apply only to Classic and could easily be giving frankly incorrect impressions to visitors. Now *that's* a problem with site design.

Regardless, I brought up that and the PV list only as examples of how the most used parts of the site are the worst designed. How the category and catmores work is unfamiliar to me. I just know the present state of affairs has great potential for improvement, and that preserving the site's search function and clear navigation as a justification for limiting improvements elsewhere is a bit laughable as there's little to preserve. I'm being frank here, as you have been, and no insults to you or the site owner are intended.Lymaniii 11:45, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Anyway, I hope I haven't annoyed you by discussing these things with you. Online communication is notorious for fostering misunderstandings, and I sense a certain edginess in some of our exchanges. I realize it's somewhat presumptuous for me to waltz in here rocking the boat when you've invested unnumerable hours in this site on a near daily basis for years. So, thanks for all you do and please accept all of these ideas as they are intended--just to be helpful and improve things.Lymaniii 23:19, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't have the same amount of time, energy, or enthusiasm to tackle some of the bigger issues I used to deal with, myself. There's too much work for one person to do it all, and I'm involved with the forum too, to the wiki's long-standing detriment. I don't care if the boat is rocked, but it does at times get a little tedious going over the same issues, as people come and go. I like ideas -- they stimulate discussions and hopefully lead to ideal solutions -- I think we just need more people to tackle the things that need some attention, as I'm less of a contributor and more of a maintainer, these days. --FeralKitty (talk) 00:32, 2 May 2009 (UTC)