User talk:AlekBalderdash

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Welcome, AlekBalderdash, to BattleTechWiki!

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Again, welcome to Sarna's BattleTechWiki!

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-- New user message (talk) 20:34, 26 December 2022 (EST)

Welcome and some info

Welcome to Sarna. I saw your user page post. Given your interests and comments, I thought I would point you to some additional information that may be helpful. (Our interests do overlap.) For a sense of what information currently exists in Sarna about miniatures, please feel free to take a look at Category:Miniatures and Miniatures. Category:Miniature Sets is a specific to miniature products, so that particular category page does not capture everything tied to miniatures. These further pages may help you in developing both your ideas and a sense of Sarna needs. Please feel free to reach out to me or the wiki admins with questions, ideas, etc. The Discord channel is also a good resource. --Dude RB (talk) 21:36, 26 December 2022 (EST)

Reply test

Not sure if this is how replies work? Seems weird, was expecting a DM system.

Anyway, I vaguely recall seeing some of those pages when I had first started, but didn't have enough context to understand what they were saying. They're all word heavy, I'm a fan of (sortable!) tables.

I updated my profile with a first pass at what I was thinking. Tables like this are the sort of thing I tend to make in Excel, and I keep finding it odd that this sort of thing isn't already on Sarna.

Does this seem to be of use? In my head, this might be a standalone page like "List of official Minitures and products" or something. My frame of reference is something like (edit: can't link yet, but main Wikipedia, page is called List_of_Magic:_The_Gathering_sets), which has a few paragraphs to explain what's happening, but is otherwise an info dump. MTG has 20K+ cards with 100k+ printings, so it can't list every card, but BattleTech seems to have a few hundred models at most. Maybe listing them is possible, maybe a database would be better. Who knows! AlekBalderdash (talk) 00:06, 27 December 2022 (EST)

For replies, it is customary to reply with one higher indentation level. So one colon will indent one level. A reply to a reply would use two colons to indent two levels, etc.

Another page to examine is List of BattleTech products. This is closer to the style of what you are considering, but it is focused on all products as a whole. However I also believe that there is an effort afoot to try to make that more automated by updating the product template. User:Deadfire is one who is working on that. So I would encourage that you drop a message on his talk page User talk:Deadfire. He is also active on the Sarna Discord

With regards to individual miniatures, as opposed to miniature sets, we do not have individual pages for each mini/model, and doing such would likely be a bit unwieldy (which is why we have the list pages). There may be ways to improve some of the list pages, but we are also balancing editor accessibility with final readability on a wiki platform, and so one constraint is that there is not a true backend database. See Miniatures - Iron Wind Metals and MechWarrior: Dark Age Sets (Collections) to get a sense of the longer lists or list summaries.

I haven't had a chance to a deep look at the examples you shared yet. I am about to head out the door here. But I will circle back around to process those more. --Dude RB (talk) 07:45, 27 December 2022 (EST)

My apologies for the slow reply. Holiday travels and visits have limited my available time.

I have examined the Wikipedia article you mentioned. It is definitely a nice summarization of a lot of different MTG sets. Of course, the parallel structures of MTG sets make that quite doable. One of the characteristics with BattleTech miniatures is that they have been made by different companies with different manners of release over the year. Even Catalyst Games Labs has adjusted its manner of producing and releasing miniatures (releasing 24 as part of an intro box years ago but they've adopted a different approach since the last intro box set), so they do not have the same parallelism between products for minis as there are for sets in MTG. So that is one issue to note.

Also I noticed your examples on your user page. Thanks for penning those to show what you are envisioning. In terms of style, tables within tables would tend to cause problems, both for purposes of editability by editors and for viewability by readers on certain devices. So of your three examples, Example 1 (the third on the page) would seem the most effective. Changing the release date to either release year or release month (the precise release day can be left to the individual product page) and adding a product code field/column would be two potential refinements.

One concern/reservation that comes to mind is that creating a list/summary of miniature sets would add some redundancy. (The more places information is present on the wiki, the harder it becomes to keep it all in sync.) There are some things that distinguish this from other summaries/lists, but there is also some overlap with both Miniatures - Catalyst Game Labs and List of BattleTech products. So one would need to define the niche of this to make it clear how/why its purpose/function differs from those other lists. (I can see some potential distinctions that can be made, but whether those distinctions will make sense to most editors/readers is another question.) Let me pose the following question. What is your envisioned scope for this? Are you looking to list every official miniature set produced for any of the BattleTech related games (going back to the 1980's)? or do you have a somewhat narrower scope in mind? I presume that you would be excluding individually sold miniatures such as those by Ral Partha and Iron Wind. --Dude RB (talk) 09:07, 3 January 2023 (EST)

Honestly, I'm not sure what my desired scope would be. I'm just lost and overwhelmed and trying to wrap my head around too much info.

After digging into this further, I'm not sure my goal is achievable in any immediate sense. It probably requires more infrastructure than a newbie can master.

That said, I figured out how to link to Flechs sheets directly, and figured a much more achievable goal would be to link Mech variants to their record sheets. I already got approval from one of the Flechs devs. I just tried a test on my personal page and got blocked for linking to an external site. Not sure how to contact an admin or if this post will even work. Could we get Flechs whitelisted? Is linking to individual record sheets allowed? AlekBalderdash (talk) 00:00, 4 January 2023 (EST)

Testing a link suffix: sheets.flechs.net/?s=Annihilator+ANH-1X

Thanks for your notes. Hashing out structure and plan can be iterative process, but it is definitely something where experience and getting the angles from a few different editors can help (especially before launching into something major). We can keep the miniature sets list idea on the back burner for the time being and focus on some other editing opportunities to build your experience and familiarity with wiki editing. I am going to spin off your latter comment into a new section shortly. (Dividing the talk page into sections is a way to separate discussions into various threads of conversation. As your talk page grows, such divisions will be helpful.) --Dude RB (talk) 20:59, 4 January 2023 (EST)

Record Sheets

Quoting from above

That said, I figured out how to link to Flechs sheets directly, and figured a much more achievable goal would be to link Mech variants to their record sheets. I already got approval from one of the Flechs devs. I just tried a test on my personal page and got blocked for linking to an external site. Not sure how to contact an admin or if this post will even work. Could we get Flechs whitelisted? Is linking to individual record sheets allowed? AlekBalderdash (talk) 00:00, 4 January 2023 (EST)

There are certain restrictions on using external links. In particular there are several restrictions on new editors for using external links. This is to prevent possible abuse by spam accounts or editors simply advertising extenal sites. But I think you are triggering some abuse filters. So this is why some of your links are yielding odd results. I am going to flag down an admin to let them know about your situation. I also think that one of the admins may be able to better speak to your questions about the Flechs record sheets. So stay tuned. --Dude RB (talk) 21:05, 4 January 2023 (EST)

Welcome to the wiki AlekBalderdash, Dude gave me a shout concerning your blocking issue. I have unblocked you now. I am not 100% sure what the no links threshold is but I think it is around the 25 edits mark. Anything below that and the system assumes you are a spambot and blocks you.

Regarding the idea of linking to flechs, the wiki is actively moving away from the inclusion of rules material in an attempt to distance ourselves a bit from potential copyright issues. I feel that including links to record sheets would be a popular move with users, unfortunately it also sends the wrong message to the IP holders about what we are trying to achieve.--Dmon (talk) 06:13, 5 January 2023 (EST)

That makes sense, and I understand the fear, but I still find it very frustrating.

As a new player, combining the different pieces of information into a cohesive whole has been my biggest challenge. Nearly all of the info I would like is available, it's just scattered around the internet, with each piece managed by people with different areas of interest :(

If consolidating this information isn't Sarna's goal, then I'm not sure I can be of much help. Thank you for your help. AlekBalderdash (talk) 23:06, 10 January 2023 (EST)

Some Ideas

Given your interest in miniature sets, I am curious whether you own any of the Clan Invasion ForcePacks. If so, there are two particular gaps that you may be able to help fill in. One ongoing project is collecting an image for each individual miniature in each ForcePack. (We are looking for images of the actually produced miniatures, not simply the computer generated renders). See BattleTech: Clan Invasion#Gallery for an example. A second ongoing project is generating character pages corresponding to the pilots on the Alpha Strike pilot cards. Both of these are missing for most of the Clan ForcePacks as well as several Inner Sphere Force Packs. For instance, both of these have been done for BattleTech: Clan Heavy Striker Star but neither have been done for BattleTech: Clan Command Star. Of course, getting the information requires having the actual product at hand (and the first requires still having the miniatures in their unmodified, unpainted state). If you have some of the ForcePacks and this is something that might interest you, please let me know and I can give you some further information. --Dude RB (talk) 08:18, 5 January 2023 (EST)