Player Database Wiki

Roz

OMG wiki nerd power.

It seems like you'd need an entry for each player-character pairing, and then a player page to aggregate their continuing identity across time and games, and then tag each PC page with the MU* they were on.

How do you get around that each page would need to be as much as PC Name - MU* name - Player central ID?

Can it be done?

Just name it MUTropes and go from there.

Splitting this off into its own thread because I'm honestly getting pretty interested in trying to put it together.

Semantic MediaWiki. It can basically associate different pages together and provide an automatic feed. You could have player pages and alt pages and the player pages would be able to feed a list of all the alt pages associated with it, etc. People would kind of have to decide on their own what player name they'd want to do by, which is kind of funny just because a lot of people end up going by a name from some past alt across games.

surreality

It's definitely doable. Probably pretty quickly, too, even without making too much use of the explicitly semantic features.

I'm hosting a pile of things right now though so I can't afford to add this to the stack, even if it could probably be set up and done in a couple of days.

Re: what people list themselves as, I'd aim for more 'community name', like the names we use here.

Arkandel

Not to go into @le_mew territory here but how can you certify people's alts are who they claim they are?

surreality

@Arkandel You can't, really, which is the downside.

Thing is, all adds and edits are identifiable on mediawiki by default, so someone maliciously changing things, or making strange claims, are going to be visible in the doing of it.

The bigger practical issue is figuring out a page naming structure for the character/alt pages that doesn't mean we have Catriona, Catriona1, Catriona2, Catriona99...

...which could be something more like Edge@TheReachMUX-surreality, but that's one hell of a mouthful for a pagename.

Roz

@surreality The biggest issue would be multiple alts with the same name on the same game. Just the same names across games you can do something like "Roz (X-Men Movieverse)" for a page name, but when you have stuff especially like with FCs where multiple players have played the same character it gets more convoluted, yeah.

surreality

@Roz Yeah, you'd need the third element of the player ID they're using or it would be a total nightmare, even in the cases of big games like TR with multiple names often being re-used.

surreality

You could, potentially, have the character/alt page named like the above, with something as simple as:

(paged named per above)
{{Alt
|name=Login Name
|fullname=Character's Full Name on the game (helpful to disambig and for DPL lists)
|playerid=surreality
|game=Game Name
|wikilink=Link to charpage on the original game's wiki, if it exists (because neat, also to help disambig)
|notes=whatever
}}

For player pages:
{{Player
|name=name
|notes=whatever
}}
(Then DPL to draw all the alt pages into the list that reference that player, each alt ID'd by and linking to the page for the game as well.)

For game pages:
{{Game
|name=game's name
|notes=whatever
}}
(Then DPL to draw all the alt pages into the list that reference that game, each alt linking to the player.)

faraday

Might consider using Wikidot over MediaWiki. Then you can tie people to their wikidot usernames, and someone could police the changes to see if X was trying to claim to be an alt of Y.

Roz

@faraday No, you'd lose all the ridiculous power of Semantic MediaWiki, which would really make something like this tie together the best.

surreality

Also, it means an extra layer of logins on a place that people may use for other, non-hobby related things.

Which gets sticky if someone is also active on wikidot for something not related to this hobby. There are just enough stalker issues that this could create more problems than it solves, unfortunately.

Ninjakitten

I really like this idea a lot. Hmm.

Let's see. Character page naming order options...

Player - Game - Character
Character - Game - Player
Game - Character (Player if there's been more than one, with disambiguation at Game - Character in those cases)
Character - Game (Player if there's been more than one, with disambiguation at Game - Character in those cases)

Those seem like the basic possibilities. Am I missing an obvious one?

I think I'd lean toward the last of those options, as either Character - Game or Character @ Game, since that's how I'd be thinking of anyone I was looking up -- 'Fred at/from ThatMU*'.

Ninjakitten

@surreality said:

@Arkandel You can't, really, which is the downside.

Thing is, all adds and edits are identifiable on mediawiki by default, so someone maliciously changing things, or making strange claims, are going to be visible in the doing of it.

Maybe there could be some kind of process for challenging in the case that you felt someone was claiming to have been a character you actually played. Not sure what that would actually BE, though. Asking for logs is a thought, but they could theoretically be faked or taken from posted places, not everyone logs, and someone would actually have to read them. Just having a little template for 'this character claim is disputed' is also a thought, but people could dispute other people's genuine claims just to be jerks. Plus, anything might get disputes from people who just don't realise the name was used before or after they used it on that game.

I think it would be really handy if character pages required approximate dating (i.e., 2005-2006) but I suspect a lot of people would have a lot of trouble getting that near-right. I would, if I didn't log and date everything.

Lithium

Character@game wouldn't work due to multiple people playing the same FC on the same game at different times.

Roz

@Lithium Yeah, that's why there's discussion on including player, game, and character in a naming structure.

Ninjakitten

@Lithium
Dude. That's what this entire conversation has been about.

surreality

It would be pretty easy to use:

AltName@GameName,_(PlayerUserName)

All are legal characters for naming, and it should cover all the bases while looking Non-Awful.

I agree that Name@Game is the most likely way people would be looking stuff up, so aiming there is the best route.

You also could arguably use the user pages to store the list of things someone has played, too, as the 'player page', unless people want to contribute playlists for people not themselves (which I strongly recommend against).

Ninjakitten

@surreality
I'm against submitting playlists for others also -- one could be wrong, or the player might not want that character tied to them. People have haven alts, etc. So yes, I agree on that for sure.

For the naming, that nearly works, but I'd take out the comma. I think it would be ideal if trying to go to Name@Game by itself goes to Name@Game (Player) IF there's only one Name@Game, and otherwise, disambiguates.

Using the User Pages for the Player makes sense to me, and having Players in a different namespace than characters seems potentially useful to separate them out. Then looking for JUST a name (say, Bob) in the main namespace could get you all the Bob characters, in case you forgot the game name but you'll know it when you see it. Or you want the Bob that YourFriend played, but don't recall the game.

surreality

It could be set up pretty easily with the Name@Game_(Player) without the need for disambigs, actually. I try to avoid them any time it's at all possible, because they become a major headache to manage.

The lists can be generated from almost any property in the template, so you can have a player page that looks like:

Game • Character (Character's Full Name)
Game • Character (Character's Full Name)
Game • Character (Character's Full Name)
Game • Character (Character's Full Name)
Game • Character (Character's Full Name)
etc.

...and a game page that has a list more like:

Character • (Character's Full Name, Player User Page Link)
Character • (Character's Full Name, Player User Page Link)
Character • (Character's Full Name, Player User Page Link)
Character • (Character's Full Name, Player User Page Link)
Character • (Character's Full Name, Player User Page Link)

...etc.

Then just have a page listing of all the user pages, a page listing of all the game pages, pretty much.

You could make a full index of all the character pages pretty easily, just by having DPL spit out a list of them in alphabetical order on a giant browse-me sort of index, which would get hairy if you went multi-step with the disambigs.

Keeping the player name as a third part to the title really, really saves a mountain of time and effort long-term when it comes to maintenance; with it in there, there's more or less no real maintenance that would be necessary after it's set up, which is the main plus of keeping all three segments in the page name and avoiding the disambig pages.

Ninjakitten

@surreality
I was thinking of them more for the situation where someone goes, hmm, I want Bob @ Somegame. <types> http://thewiki.mu/index.php/Bob@SomeGame <enter>

I know how to use DPL.

faraday

@surreality said:

Which gets sticky if someone is also active on wikidot for something not related to this hobby. There are just enough stalker issues that this could create more problems than it solves, unfortunately.

Interesting. Every game I've played on in the past few years uses Wikidot for their game wikis, and people have no problem creating additional logins if they don't want to use their OOC one. Some even create different wikidot logins for each game if they're worried about being stalked. :shrugs: It's a solved problem in my game circles.

@Roz You could tie it together with Wikidot too - I've done player/alt lists before on Wikidot in an automated fashion. That said, if you're more familiar with MediaWiki there's no reason to switch other than the universal login aspect for alt verification.