User blog:Fairingrey/New Wiki Features!

Opening
Happy New Year's, guys. It's been a while since I've wrote a blog, and I promised to talk about the new features of the wiki so here we are.

New Features and Other Stuff

 * Unit List. Were you ever curious about how some units stack up to others? Well, now you can find out! Credits to User:Coax75ohm for being awesome and helping out with this feature, it's finally here, and it's really helpful. Comes with sorting and filtering, the usual jazz. If you're having trouble with it, do visit Coax.
 * Union List. Ah fine, it's been here for a while now, not like that's anything new. But if you haven't visited it, feel free to check it out. It's something I may do some extra rework on.
 * Revamped Quest List and Trial List. Ok, so I do understand it looks a little bit cluttered and complicated but that's why we need more suggestions. It's certainly more descriptive than the last quest list. This was designed to meet the suggestions that were proposed in Thread:5180 on the suggestions forum.
 * A knowledge base concerning all the different enemies you meet questing in game. You can see them at Category:Enemy, but for the most part I don't know a whole lot about the enemies, which is why I need you, reader, to help me out. More in the following sections concerning this.
 * Illustrator pages! You can see some of them here at Category:Illustrators. Yeah, this was kind of an in-house suggestion by my union, and I was pretty interested in doing it so now its there. We're still missing a lot of illustrators so do check it out and chime in with information if you have the chance.
 * Template:Unit has some new little features, namely the  field. Might make it easier for all you curious bingo players out there.

Stuff That Definitely Needs to Get Worked On

 * Front page and wiki theme. We're reworking it soon. User:MiyukixHime, the other admin and founder of this wiki, is for the most part dead and its safe to say that she's not very good at creating something totally pretty? If someone wants to visit me to help spruce up the wiki, then feel free to message me or User:Coax75ohm, although I will respond back faster.
 * Navigation. I've been trying to make it as navigable and user intuitive as possible, but even I'm not so good at this. If you have any suggestions to make regarding navigation, do bother me.
 * More help! We always need more help. If you're curious about how to get into editing, feel free to visit the Age of Ishtaria Wiki:Sandbox and start playing around - your edits won't be seen in Special:WikiActivity.

And so lets cover some of these big things we both may be interested in.

Unit List
View it here.

Remember my previous blog post where I mentioned I was kind of 'against' having an album page? Well, User:Coax75ohm, as I have said before, has finally finished it. It's pretty usable. Definitely not that pretty in terms of padding, spacing, or alignment, but still very very useful.

Sortable fields are anything under Name/ATK/HP/Cost, and the other fields, including rarity, element, attack type, are filterable. You probably won't need secondary sorting by those means, then.

What's this useful for? Well, if you're someone that likes to assess how units may stack up to other units with raw stats (usually goes for most 6 stars and 5 stars), then go ahead and check it out. You may find some interesting things you never knew about that one unit you were always a little fishy on about its performance in your questing deck or something.

Now, what this doesn't help you a whole ton with is passives, and that can't really be helped that much since you'll have to know what each passive does.

However, nifty tool regardless. Check it out if you have the chance. Regarding if you want to help contribute to it? Just keep throwing in unit information by editing unit pages.

Quest List
Well, it's Quest List and Trial List too, but it's basically a list that should hold all the pertinent information to quests and trials if anyone cares enough to fill them out. It's definitely a lot of work, and I don't want to spend all that time filling that out. Heck, I might even be wrong in some places.

If you're curious about how to contribute to them, then do read the documentation for Template:Quest and perhaps also Template:Enemy-Infobox. I know it may sound a bit daunting, but reading those will hopefully give you a sense of how I've coded them. The visual editor is disabled when you edit those pages so you will have to resort to understanding the source code, but it hopefully shouldn't look all too scary. Just as long as you see those variable names and fill them up correctly, you're totally fine.

I'm not expecting there to be any standard format, but just try to follow the format provided as best as you can so that when others read it they kind of know what you're talking about. Link to the enemy families if possible, and if you're afraid of creating a new enemy family, then don't be. We will, or at least I will, help you along the way. Renames aren't too big a deal, but editing does look daunting at first.

Enemy Pages
This suggestion has been around for a while and I finally got to also finish it. As mentioned before in the previous section, it's Template:Enemy-Infobox. Now if you're curious and want to see a sample page in source, feel free to view Metatron (Enemy) or Veritas the Sage. Just viewing the source is fine, but it should kind of give you an idea of what to expect.

Not going to mention much other than that, well, if you know any strategies and tips to defeat them, do mention them! Even the comments section is fine; it may be edited in in the future by a more able contributor.

No page for an existing boss? Don't be afraid to make one, or let me know. Making a list would be even better.

Illustrator Pages


Want to know more about certain illustrators in game? Awesome. We (in this case, a few others and I) did decide to go out on a leg to actually work on these kinds of things because I honestly think that you, reader, who may be endlessly curious about the other kinds of beautiful grill art that some illustrators draw outside of game, should have the opportunity to explore, share, and contribute.

If you're curious about how to contribute to more illustrator pages, do read Template:Illust-Infobox and get used to using the template. Hopefully it's not too confusing. It's a little easier than the other templates provided. Feel free to visit Yamcha as an example - She's a very popular illustrator.

Now, finding the info about illustrators themselves? Well, that's sort of like a duck hunt. You gotta just use Google or pixiv to the best of your ability or knowledge. But hey, if you think you've found the right person feel free to make the edit or point out inconsistencies if there are some wrong entries.

Closing
Think that covers about it! Thanks for reading, and if you're curious about more, do hit up the Q & A or suggestions forum, or feel free to leave something on my message wall at Message Wall:Fairingrey.

There will be more blog posts that won't just talk about the wiki - I don't want the community blog posts to just be limited to whatever notices we put up because it may make other editors scared to post their own, even though I am very welcome to whatever opinions and guides that may be out there.

To reflect this, my next few blogs will probably be more opinionated and highlighted towards a certain audience - those who are more curious about the gameplay and mechanics of Age of Ishtaria past the general and common tactics and strategy. So just be aware of that!

As always, best of wishes to all you peeps contributing to the wiki or just working hard in game for your cute grills. Seeya around!