Reorganizing and cross-connecting articles in the wiki

[Loctav]

Hey!

We have debated in the recent days that the decreased interest in the osu!wiki might find its origin in its rather unorganized shape and presentation. While the wiki itself certainly lacks core functions (such as proper image embedding, etc.), I believe that we could improve the wiki by a tenfold when we treat it less like a stockpile of copy-pasted ancient forum posts.

A wiki thrives and lives from having each article be intertwined with each other. It lives from the idea that you can go to an article you find or look up and you can follow down the rabbit hole of information by clicking every important term and be sent to a new article that tells you more about it.

Right now, majority of the articles are orphans or the information is scattered across various articles while making it incredibly hard to find specific information (because it is buried within miles long guides or articles or because it doesn't exist)

The aim here is to reorganize all present information and add missing information by following the simple logic of most wikis that use articles to define individual terms and explain more on-top of it. (e.g. you don't find a guide "How to visit Japan" on Wikipedia. You have an article about "Japan")

There are many articles present already that do exactly that (such as the mascot article or some hit object articles), but they lack integration into other articles via cross-linking.

Ideally, every obscure osu! word (e.g. Hitsound, Hit Circle, Beatmap, osu!lazer, Kiai Time) present in any article should be clickable on its first mention and should lead to an article or a sub header of a larger article that defines this word and explains more in-depth what's the matter with it.

For that purpose, I have created a google doc that lists a whole lot of terms that require stubs to be created, barebone articles that can be linked to when found on existent ones. They (almost) all should be separate articles for each and contain a basic definition of each. Later on, we can add more explanations, depth and visual appeal to each of them. For some terms, we can consider grouping them up into bigger articles (e.g. Sliderhead doesn't need an own article. We only need Slider).

While building these stubs, they need to cross link each stub by referring to each other from the very beginning.

You can find my aforementioned list of terms here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sYphJvwxAU0av_dQVwdqYgRC3UqW6cv-TZSl2pX34oE/edit#gid=0

[Loctav]

The list is nowhere near complete. It's a whole bunch of stuff I came up with by just browsing existing articles such the RC and the website itself. We can expand the list as we go, but we need a starting point somewhere.

[Endaris]

As discussed in #osu-wiki, part of the goal for this issue should be to largely or completely remove the need for the Glossary page by adding stubs for its elements and removing them accordingly. This should be used in addition to the already existent list of terms.

We need support for a stub-tag from osu-web before this work can properly be started.

I think it would make sense to add a project for this as there are a lot of small pieces of work that we need to keep track of.
From my point of view this would run in 2 stages:

1. Getting the stubs up and cleaning up Glossary in the process.
2. Adding crosslinks for existing pages that aren't marked as outdated.

[cl8n]

I believe that we could improve the wiki by a tenfold when we treat it less like a stockpile of copy-pasted ancient forum posts.

an important distinction to make here is that nobody wants to treat it this way; there's such limited manpower around here that a very outdated/messy article will usually stay that way until there's some reasonable prompt to work on it. if you look at the open issues right now, most of them aren't generic "rewrite this" posts, they concern specific issues possibly spanning multiple articles or the whole wiki. it's also important to distinguish between "the wiki" and "the English wiki", because a major reason for the English wiki's slow development is that the English wiki is only a subset of what active contributors have had to work on over the last few years

I don't think there's any major problem with the current workflow, it's just hella slow cuz it's being carried by a single digit number of people. I like these ideas you're giving, but I'm also not very optimistic about them resulting in some kind of drastic improvement (ignoring the possible increased contribution from ppl helping out with this)

The aim here is to reorganize all present information [...]

so with the above in mind, this is a super unrealistic goal, assuming you want to complete it in any reasonable time frame. reorganizing information is one of the main things people have been doing here for years, as well as marking up what's horribly unorganized (see outdated and needs_cleanup). the beginning of this post seems like stating the obvious in context of all of that work.

anyway the actual suggestion+direction of this issue is good imo. just commenting on the beginning part 🏃

[Loctav]

so with the above in mind, this is a super unrealistic goal, assuming you want to complete it in any reasonable time frame. reorganizing information is one of the main things people have been doing here for years, as well as marking up what's horribly unorganized (see outdated and needs_cleanup). the beginning of this post seems like stating the obvious in context of all of that work.

Nothing is unrealistic, this is an idea that pursues a longterm goal with a clear direction, something that needed to be said to introduce people to the core idea and something that needed to be said so everyone is on the same page instead of everybody working towards some ominous goal without anybody really knowing what the result should actually look like.

You don't need to justify or defend the people working on this so far, they did amazing work and we all know that. We all know why all these things happen. But since this issue introduces a proposed full new direction of how the wiki should be organized and all the strings attached to this scheme (as the already discussed categorization of articles), these words were necessary to put everything proposed here into a perspective.

it's also important to distinguish between "the wiki" and "the English wiki", because a major reason for the English wiki's slow development is that the English wiki is only a subset of what active contributors have had to work on over the last few years

so this needs to change as well. It should and cannot be that various degree of information is available on an article depending on what language version you are looking at. The content you look at in English should be the same as when you look at it in German. The main language of this wiki should or could be English. And yes, there sure can be exceptions from this rule (such as Chinese tournaments not really needing an English article), but I would still push forward to have AT LEAST an English article for every present article of any language (simply because English is the "world language" and despite all the languages spoken in this community, the majority can agree to communicate in English when they are unable to find another shared language). Having every content available in English makes sure that this community stays whole-inclusive and that everyone is aware of everything or can find out more about e.g. tournaments that happen in China exclusively.