User blog:Noreplyz/On the Design and Structure of the Yogscast Wiki

On the Design and Structure of the Yogscast Wiki ▪ ▪ ▪

These are my own opinions. They include concerns and praises for the wiki layout and content. Discuss! Upon approval by the general community, I’d be free to help change the wiki for the better. This blog post will be updated in the future.

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The Homepage
Your homepage, is what most people will start their journey. People look for certain content, and the home should link to specific categories of content (but not category pages) or featured sections that are of interest to the reader.

You need more links than just those to official YouTube channels and pages on members, rather:

‘’’The Yogscast’’’ are a group of YouTube broadcasters who produce gaming-related video content. With over 20 million subscribers and offering stellar commentary and (occasionally) exceptional gameplay, they have expanded to include musicians, animators, editors and artists in order to deliver fun. (Or something a bit less cheesy than this.)
 * An About Yogscast that is at the start of the page – wikis are meant to gather information, the home page should have a quick three/four sentence paragraph on what ‘Yogscast’ is.
 * Yogscast Members – could be separate links to each, but this clutters. A link to a list of members is preferred.
 * #|Games – a list of ongoing series, or otherwise a simple link to Yogscast Complete suffices.
 * Shadow of Israphel – many visitors do want to read and explore this storyline.

Following those, you’d keep the ‘OnThisDay’, ‘Did You Know’, ‘Random Article’ and ‘Blog Posts’, because they lead to more interesting topics too.

Changing the Yogscast social media into images would help a lot to remove clutter.

Banners
The banners take up half the column – in my preference, a bit too wide. While that occasionally makes things readable, some are too excessive. Look at Yogscast Complete and Tekkit. It’s too excessive.

Some of these also link to the image, some don’t – standardise this by making them all have |link=| in the middle of the image. This leads on to your Yogscast_Wiki:Banners page – only the ‘Beta Yogscast Banners’ have the link=, so why not all of them? Why do some have different widths, others missing |350px|? These should be standardised.

Also:
 * There’s probably too many banners.
 * Banners and Infoboxes are different widths. I would suggest making the banners the same width as the infoboxes.

Other Small Things

 * Navigation Bar
 * Not so much of an issue, but it feels like listing all the channels in the Media tab is excessive. Two new pages, one with a list of original channels and another with the new ‘collaboration’ or ‘themed’ channels is probably better than sifting through three lists just to find ‘YOGSCAST Zylus’ in the third column.
 * The link to ‘Series’ should be changed to a #|Series.
 * Making redirect pages – while some redirect pages make sense, most don’t.
 * Kinda targeting this message to User:Elfdemon101 – do we really need The Mysterious Tree, Mysterious Tree, Igloo, The Igloo, etc etc etc all linking to The Dark Constructions? Wikia’s search function (once it updates its cache from all the deleted video pages) is done well enough to be able to offer The Dark Constructions as the first link even when you search these words. It forms a sort of clutter with all these redirect pages and will definitely confuse admins when cleaning up.

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Expanded Episode Guides
I still feel that linking episodes to their YouTube videos is not sufficient for a wiki. Short summaries (probably with a ‘spoiler warning’) makes sense because wikis are informational – some might not understand some of the more complex bits of SoI or Duncan being cloned.

These episode guides, particularly those that run for more than 20 or 30 episodes (like Hat Films’ or nearly all of the Yogscast Complete series) should be in their individual pages, probably on a page like Flux Buddies/Episode Guide. I think this was done before – and it definitely makes it possible to add more details like summaries, storylines and galleries in the series page.

Current Series Guide
Always useful to have – people may come to the wiki and see “Oh, Sips started playing Don’t Starve again, let’s watch that” or “Oh, Hat Films is also playing Assassin’s Creed”. Listing them on each YouTuber’s page (like this) makes it less possible to manage – putting them all on one page is much easier. While this requires constant update, I’m sure an admin can easily check up on it.

No, it wouldn’t be a full list of every series done, but it would be useful. Also, we could also just start with having main channels.

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Do you have something to say? Feel free to comment below, or if it’s something larger, feel free to edit this blog post (and sign using ~ so we know).