state of the wiki

Hey guys, I'd like some input on this. Sometimes it bugs me that the wiki is so disorganized, so much content out of date or needing refactoring, so much unmigrated content on the old wiki. Other times, it feels very organic and like it servers its function perfectly. I'm not sure if spending tons of time cleaning up and migrating old content is really worth the time, but if it is, I'd gladly pitch in on that.

What do you guys think? What would make the wiki better / more usable / more useful / more fun to browse for you?

Personally, I find myself browsing talk pages a lot - it would be nice to have some saner way to browser old / interesting conversations across the wiki. I'd also like to get lots of old bot pages migrated - maybe a semi-automated way of doing that would help.

I´m quite confortable with the wiki the way it is. The only thing that bothers me a bit is having to search for a keyword twice, once in this wiki and again in the old one. Although Google can be a workaround.

I agree that there are some places that need cleanup and such. For my own part, I just need to be bold and go ahead and touch up things when I see them, and not be so afraid to add things. I personally feel far too outclassed and overshadowed by the giants of Robocode to feel myself knowledgeable enough to speak on lots of things, despite my rather thorough mathematical training at university. That might be fixed somewhat when I can get my bot a bit closer to the top of the rumble. *chuckles*

One things that's interesting to think about is the "ownership" of bot pages. There are a lot of bot pages that feature time-specific information (mostly about the bot's current rating) that's quite old indeed. These are bot pages whose authors seem to have left the community, at least for now. The status of what's considered polite to do there is a conversation worth having, I think.

As far as things the wiki could add.. I've noticed lately that there's a Robocoding-term/bot-component that gets mentioned a lot in talk pages and bot version histories and so on, but that doesn't have a wiki page explaining it whatsoever. I've been fiddling with adding this aspect to my bot, and recently decided to scrap everything I've done with it and start it over as a proper Object so it doesn't make a mess of my already messy movement Object. Can anyone guess what it is?

Flattener?

Reminds me... When I started in late 2005, the whole top 10 was Wave Surfing, but there was basically no centralized info on what all is involved or any of the gory details. Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes to notice these gaping holes in the wiki's coverage of topics. =)

Bingo, flattener.

For migrating things over from the oldwiki, a talk page to help coordinate that project might be useful.. maybe have folks vote on whether or not certain articles should get moved over?

I'll try to be more proactive in helping to tidy up and extend the wiki. The information and conversation here is a big part of why I love Robocode! :)

I feel like some parts of the wiki could use a little cleanup to expanding on yeah, though I feel that for the most part it works as it should.

Hmm.. MN's comment about search makes me think that if I find some time, I may look into making a little mediawiki plugin to make the search results also show things for the old wiki.