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BattleMaster => Development => Feature Requests => Topic started by: bofeng on August 05, 2014, 09:11:43 PM

Title: Generate automatic timeline in wiki for important events (revised)
Post by: bofeng on August 05, 2014, 09:11:43 PM
Summary:
Much like generating the “unique items” timeline, BM should automatically log important events (huge battles, diplomatic changes, etc) to separate wiki pages.


Related posts:

Improved World News [feature request] http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,5923.0.html (http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,5923.0.html)
Imperial Calendar [Far East] http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,5985.0.html (http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,5985.0.html)
Request: add a property for published documents on wiki [wiki] http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,6031.0.html (http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,6031.0.html)

Details:

Much like generating the “unique items” timeline, BM should automatically log important events (huge battles, diplomatic changes, etc) to separate wiki pages. This will allow automatic generation of the history timeline on the wiki, both for a single realm and for the whole island, or even for each region or a noble.

We should add another infobox called Infobox:events. Then add at least several properties.
The following important events should be documented into wiki (revised, in order of importance):

1.   Creation and Perishing of a realm
2.   Rebellion
3.   Rumours of a Miracle
4.   Tournaments
5.   Unnatural death
6.   Huge battles.
7.   Diplomatic changes
8.   Change in government office
9.   Allegiance change
10.   Lordship change
11.   Noble initiated referendum (e.g. passing a law)

Benefits:

1.   More access to world news to other continents as mentioned in the other post.
2.   Add greater exposure to the wiki.
3.   Players may start adding RPs to the battle wiki page.
4.   Record the history. Much of the BM history is lost forever. No one can remember the king before the previous one or who were the generals during a war two years ago.
5.   Allow manually logging in other important events using the infobox and the “properties”. This allows historians to work in wiki to compile history for a continent, a realm, a region, or a historical figure.
6.   Character wiki page can automatically generate a list of events that are related to the character: leading an army in a huge battle, elected to a position, lordship, death


Implementation considerations:

1.   We should implement the features one by one in order of importance.
2.   We can add details to the wiki page gradually.
3.   Page title for the events must be distinguish from each other
4.   Huge battles: There are currently 16 huge battles in Dwilight last month. World-wide there would be 100? Annually that would be around 1,200. That just seems like too many “huge” battles for this world. But the counter argument is that it’s really hard to draw the line because realms can be large or small. With the wiki page, players can now add RP stories directly to that battle page. That will be terrific. BM has lost a lot of RP stories related to the battles, which are rarely posted on forum or wiki. The best part of it is that players outside of the related realms can now access all these wonderful RP stories.
5.   If the event is linked to multiple realms or multiple nobles, there shouldn’t be multiple pages. There should be only one page with multiple “property”.
6.   Elections: Should be limited to change in office. If someone remains as King, no event should be generated. Otherwise, we will be looking at a lot of quarterly events on the timeline, which greatly dilute the message.
7.   Reduce the amount of messages by limiting to one page per event. For example, only one wiki page for one rebellion, or one tournament. Only report it to wiki once the event ends.

Template design (to be finished based on discussion):

1.   Creation and Perishing of a realm
2.   Rebellion
3.   Rumours of a Miracle
4.   Tournaments

Page title: Tournament Held in Grehk, Riombara, Beluaterra (4 Aug 2014)
-   Event (event name): Riombara held Tournament in Grehk; Jeremiah Risk from Riombara won
-   Date (occurrence date): 4 Aug 2014
-   Island: Beluaterra
-   Realm: Riombara
-   Region: Grehk
- Noble: Marche (the ruler), Jeremiah Risk, Jerry Lancelot
Page content: The tournament in Grehk is over. 26 nobles from 5 realms fought and drank. It was a swordfighting tournament. Jeremiah Risk, Margrave of Eylmon won, with Jerry Lancelot, Viscount of Melegra coming in second place.

5.   Unnatural death
6.   Huge battles. For example:

Page title: Huge Battle in Aboal, South Island (31 Jul 2014)
-   Event (event name): Ikalak defeated Sandalak in Aboal(; XXX is killed in battle)
-   Date (occurrence date): 31 Jul 2014
-   Island: South Island
-   Realm: Ikalak, Sandalak
-   Region: Aboal
-   Noble: (list the name of the Marshals, and anyone who is dead)
Page content: should include estimated strengths

7.   Diplomatic changes
8.   Change in government office
9.   Allegiance change
10.   Lordship change
11.   Noble initiated referendum (e.g. passing a law)

Title: Re: Generate automatic timeline in wiki for important events
Post by: Indirik on August 05, 2014, 10:55:48 PM
In general, I support the idea of a more permanent record of events. One of the things that I always liked about the wiki was that there was a history that you could read, and learn about what has gone before. Having the game itself record the history of the world on the wiki as a series of discreet event pages would be amazing.

The problem is how to implement it. In order to make a proper timeline, each event needs to have its own page. So if three huge battles occurred on EC, the game would have to make three wiki pages. This could quickly generated a gigantic amount of pages. For example:

One huge battle for each island: 7 pages
Two takeovers: 2 pages
So, 9 pages for that turn.
Then two turns per day, so, 18 pages.
Seven days a week: 126 pages
Add in a hero death, four elections, a war declaration, a cease fire, and maybe one more miscellaneous event: 134 pages a week.
52 weeks a year: 6,968 pages.

And those aren't even eventful weeks. There are a lot more events that could be documented as well: Lordship appointments, religion foundings, duchy creations and dissolutions, ducal appointments, region transfers, etc.

The wiki currently only has 8,789 pages. (Content pages, not counting talk and meta pages.)

Assuming we want to increase our page count by well over 7,000 pages a year, with pages that mostly have no content other than a set of semantic properties, we have to come up with a naming scheme to ensure that each page has a unique name. And the name should preferably be meaningful, too. I image this wouldn't be too hard. But you'd probably end up with something like:

EC-01Aug2014-Morning-Battle-Bescanon
AT-03Aug2014-Evening-Diplomacy-Keplerstan-Evilstani
BT-04Aug2014-Morning-HeroDeath-Kepler

That should be relatively self-explanatory.

(Or you could do it with subpages, or something, to help keep things segregated.)

The pages could also be automatically categorized according to island, realms involved, region (if applicable), diplomacy change, etc.

We could design templates for each particular event type, and the game output could be coded to use the template. That would provide a decent looking page. By default the content of the page could include the text of the game-wide message that is sent out.

If this were done, you could really do some interesting things with it. Each island could have its own timeline on its main page. People could click on the events on the timeline, and go to that page. They could post notes on that event, or RPs, or whatever other things they wanted to say about it.

You could put timelines on region pages, showing events for that region, including things like: Lordship changes, allegiance change, battles, TOs, etc. Each event would be automatically linked to a page about that event.

Then the real challenge comes in with this: Someone needs to figure out how to do it. (Which really means Anaris has to figure out how to do it.) Sure, we could help by doing some research into how to do automated edits. But it would still come down to Anaris writing the actual code that would do the work.
Title: Re: Generate automatic timeline in wiki for important events (revised)
Post by: Thehatter on August 20, 2014, 02:00:39 AM
Bring back the BM news letters?
Title: Re: Generate automatic timeline in wiki for important events (revised)
Post by: De-Legro on August 20, 2014, 02:23:24 AM
Bring back the BM news letters?

Find someone with the time to dedicate to them long term?

As to the original post. While the item time line is fun, the fact that 90% of the item page never have anything more then bare bones content is not. Having thousands of battle pages with nothing but the auto generated info does not make for a good wiki.
Title: Re: Generate automatic timeline in wiki for important events (revised)
Post by: Psyche on August 20, 2014, 05:46:33 AM
I have no really coding experience, but if the information was presented to me I could do at least a weekly digest of events.  For this, it almost seems to me either a player driven wiki or google doc would be most appropriate.
Title: Re: Generate automatic timeline in wiki for important events (revised)
Post by: Antonine on August 20, 2014, 07:41:56 PM
One option would just be to autogenerate a timeline for each continent on a single wiki page. It wouldn't be perfect and the pages could get quite long but at least it would be better than the total gaps in history we periodically get for each continent. It would also make it a lot easier in terms of giving people a starting point to write histories of the game.
Title: Re: Generate automatic timeline in wiki for important events (revised)
Post by: Thehatter on August 20, 2014, 10:52:51 PM
Automatic News postings.

Have a spot for the days battles for the realm, gov changes or new lords, date and a place to manually type the new you want.
Title: Re: Generate automatic timeline in wiki for important events (revised)
Post by: De-Legro on August 21, 2014, 02:39:54 AM
One option would just be to autogenerate a timeline for each continent on a single wiki page. It wouldn't be perfect and the pages could get quite long but at least it would be better than the total gaps in history we periodically get for each continent. It would also make it a lot easier in terms of giving people a starting point to write histories of the game.

Automatic News postings.

Have a spot for the days battles for the realm, gov changes or new lords, date and a place to manually type the new you want.

Possible but creating somewhat of a complication. It is easy to make a page and populate it. When you want to append to an existing page you create a more complex requirement.