Link again to the draft: http://scpsandbox2.wikidot.com/anqxyr

If anyone has any suggestions on wording or formatting or stuff like that, I'd be glad to hear them.

I'd even argue for losing rewrite and simply using author (with multiple author designations with differing dates) implying rewrites, but that would present a problem when you run into a page that was posted for someone by member X. If there's only one author designation in the table for that page, is that a rewrite, or an original author? So unfortunately rewrite is needed, otherwise you could do with 3 tags.

1. No.
2. Yes

My issue here is that it wasn't Roget who wrote this stuff (except if he did co-write any of it with Salman but that's anecdotal), it was Salman. So taking those votes and averages away from him and giving it to Roget, even if Salman isn't coming back, feels wrong. I may be misunderstanding you but that's what it appears to be. I think Roget, when searching for Salman's stuff with !au or !ad, could be reasonably brought up as maintainer1, but again, it wasn't Roget who wrote that stuff. It would also hugely inflate his article count2.

Oops, sorry, it should be the other way around. Yeah, as I said later on in the above post, maintainers should receive any ratings or stuff like that.

Re: other stuff

!ad will include literally everything. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. That doesn't mean that everything in !ad will count for net ratings and such.

I'm open to discussing specific priority issues, but I also think it would be fine to resolve them later on as they come up and implemented, instead of deciding on everything before the page goes live. After all, these decisions wouldn't alter the page itself, only how the information from it will be used.

1. No.
2. Yes

My issue here is that it wasn't Roget who wrote this stuff (except if he did co-write any of it with Salman but that's anecdotal), it was Salman. So taking those votes and averages away from him and giving it to Roget, even if Salman isn't coming back, feels wrong. I may be misunderstanding you but that's what it appears to be. I think Roget, when searching for Salman's stuff with !au or !ad, could be reasonably brought up as maintainer¹, but again, it wasn't Roget who wrote that stuff. It would also hugely inflate his article count².

In general, maintained pages will not count for the maintainer in stats or calculations or (in the future) graphs made about these pages.

Doesn't this contradict 2. then?

They will count for their next priority user instead

&

Note that as I mentioned in the original post, this is only a vague order. Each particular combination of relations and statistics they're used in will be much more nuanced and will have to be decided on a case by case basis. Nevertheless, I think it's useful to have at least a rough outline like this.

I think before this page goes up on the main-site we really need to hammer this order out. We don't need to account for every situation of course, but I think having something more than a vague outline would be good for both a regular user and staff to know and get used to.

More specifically, the format for pages in the new !ad page will be something like this (for Alice):

Suggestions and questions, because now I wanna nitpick your brain here for this kind of thing well in advance.

Any other nitpicks and specific examples of things to include on the .ad page can be sorted out later!

One last thing; I would like Pixel to chime in on his thoughts as well, given the work he put into making the list originally and any ideas/plans he planned to have before Alex went down.

1. Leave the current page as is. Create a new page and transfer the data to it. Delete the old page after 1-2 months.

This is in order not to break anything that currently relies on this page. I can probably fix everything I have in ~10 minutes, but I don't know what else is out there that parses this page (e.g. that X-com-like Foundation game, maybe? Who knows), and I think it would be nice to offer a grace period.

Fine by me, I need to update a few things, but the impact is minimal.

I like "relations-metadata" for the url of the page. It's not bot-specific, and it reflects the fact that it's not about authors anymore, but about all the possible relations between pages and users. Another possibility is "link-metadata", but that may be confused with url links.

"bot-metadata" would probably be better. That way, if you want to keep other metadata on there in a separate table, you don't have to rename it again. Or just "metadata". In the end, it doesn't matter all that much though.

2. Make the new page on the main site, not on 05.

I don't see why we can't allow authors to record their own rewrites and such. I don't find the argument of "they will break things" to be sufficient. The new format for the page will basically be just a table, and that's it. When a table is broken, it's really noticeable. Most wiki members can edit a table without breaking it just fine. If anything does break, I'll make jarvis ping the ops about it, and they can go and revert the last edit.

Eh, I'm all for putting responsibility where it belongs (decentralisation I think - humor me). I like this, but I'd still advise you to make recording stuff as easy as possible. See below…

3. New page format.

Page Name	User Name	Relation Type	Date
example_page	Alice	original_author
example_page	Bob	rewrite_author	2012-01-03
example_page	Carol	rewrite_author	2015-09-10
another_page	David	coauthor	2012-10-20
another_page	Emily	coauthor	2012-10-20
translated_page	Фёдор	original_author
translated_page	Bob	translator	2015-03-22
abandoned_page	Alice	maintainer	2015-09-15

There's a couple of ways you can go about this. I agree that the data should be page-centric, but I have a thought on how to record stuff.

The member who posted the page is not the author as far as Wikidot is concerned, he's the creator. It just so happens that this also in most cases implies authorship. Thus, something like "original_author" is unnecessarily complicated. I'd suggest the following designations: "author", "rewrite", "translate", "maintain" (or variations thereof.) This severely shortens your list of possible combinations, but still facilitates those combinations, and you can even shorten to just the first letters for ease of recording. Using your example above, this would look this way:

Page Name	User Name	Relation Type	Date
example_page	Alice	a(uthor)	2011-02-13
example_page	Bob	r(ewrite)	2012-01-03
example_page	Carol	r(ewrite)	2015-09-10
another_page	David	a(uthor)	2012-10-20
another_page	Emily	a(uthor)	2012-10-20
translated_page	Фёдор	a(uthor)	2014-01-03
translated_page	Bob	t(ranslator)	2015-03-22
abandoned_page	Alice	m(aintainer)	2015-09-15

Example-page was posted by member X for Alice, and has since been rewritten by Bob and Carol. That still means Carol adds it to her net total, and perhaps Bob and Alice get it mentioned on jarvis' author page, but not counted for their rating.

Another-page was co-written by David and Emily. As there are two author designations, jarvis should assume it's a coauthorship. He could also give a warning if the page wasn't tags as such, so people could check what's up (tagged wrong, or recorded wrong).

Translated-page still functions exactly the same.

Abandoned-page also still functions exactly the same.

The main difference between recording as you're suggesting and recording like I'm suggesting is that jarvis'd need to work a bit more in my case. However, I firmly believe that keeping it simple for our members means less reversions to the table for staff, and less frustrated chat users when they notice shit isn't attributed right.

As for your list below, using only those four designations (author, rewrite, translate and maintain):

• rewrite_author: One rewrite designation for the page with a specific date
• rewrite_coauthor More than one rewrite designation for the page for a specific date
• original_author One author designation for the page
• coauthor More than one author designation for the page
• maintainer One maintain designation for the page
• comaintainer More than one maintain designation for the page
• translator One translate designation for the page
• cotranslator More than one translate designation for the page

I like "relations-metadata" for the url of the page. It's not bot-specific, and it reflects the fact that it's not about authors anymore, but about all the possible relations between pages and users. Another possibility is "link-metadata", but that may be confused with url links.

I think something with attribution in the url would help to make it clear what it is.

attribution-metadata is fine too

2

:D

3

For the purposes of the !author command, Carol adds the page's rating to her net total, while Alice and Bob do not.

Will the page show up in someone's .ad page even if it was rewritten and even if it doesn't count to the net total? Will the !au command indicate they have pages rewritten?

*All* pages connected to the user will show up in their !ad, even if they're not involved with them anymore and they're not counted anywhere else at all.

More specifically, the format for pages in the new !ad page will be something like this (for Alice):

!au will not show pages if they're not counted into net rating. If Alice wrote two pages ever, awesome_page and example_page, !au for Alice will show that she has written a single page. Same for Bob. !au for Carol will count example_page.

Will this functionality support more than two co-authors?

Yes, in general you can have any number of anything in there.

where a rewrite was done by two co-authors

See my reply to #4 later in this post.

translated_page is pretty self explanatory. Both users add the rating to their totals.

Their .ad page will mention this as well, correct?

Yes, !ad will include everything.

Will it count towards their avg rating as well if they've done non-translation work?

I expect so, unless people are opposed to it.

Or if they are the same author as the original? For example, Reach's 179 was originally written by him on the Spanish site.

That's not something I expected, but I'll work it out. The sane thing to do would be count each page once per user even if they have multiple relations to it.

The author of the abandoned_page is no longer active on the site. Since they aren't listed in the table, they default to the user who made the 0th revision. Alice wasn't involved in the creation of the page in any way, and doesn't add the rating. However, before the original author left, they specifically granted the rights to make decisions about the page to Alice. Thus she is listed as a maintainer.

I don't understand this. So, for example, Salman Corbette has left Roget as the maintainer of nearly all his pages. So:

1. Will Salman still have these pages count towards his net votes, average rating, etc.?
2. Will these pages count for Roget?
3. How will this be indicated in the !au command? Or the !ad command?

1. No.
2. Yes.
3. It won't be included in !au. It will be included in !ad for both Roget and Salman in a normal way. It will also show up when looking up the summary for this specific page (e.g. via !scp-5678 or !search) as "written by SalmanCorbette, maintained by Roget".

In general, maintained pages will not count for the maintainer in stats or calculations or (in the future) graphs made about these pages. They will count for their next priority user instead (also see #4 reply below). The only things were "maintainer" will show up is in !ad and in page summary lookups.

The "maintainer" position is less for jarvis and statistics and such, and more for general record-keeping and so that people would know where they should go if they want to do something with the page and need someone's permission.

Another example could be to automatically generate and update translated-works hubs if we ever get enough of those that manual updating becomes cumbersome.

What we've been working on was this system, where the English list would be automatically updated every certain amount of time, while people translating works and posting them here would be inputting them manually. Do you think you have a way of updating this automatically, especially since we're not using the native number/suffix for when they post their translated works?

I haven't really looked into it deeply. I mentioned it more as a future theoretical possibility of something the metadata page can be used for. Thinking about it some more now, when the new metadata page will go live, jarvis will know

1. the original author of the page
2. the translator of the page
3. the foreign branch the page came from (via tags)

What he will not know, is

1. the url of the original page.

So if we decide on a standardized way to store this information (bad examples: as a tag; linked at the bottom of the translation; written in a marker on a post-it note somewhere), then yes, autoupdates are definitely possible.

This is, however, is very low priority atm. With the number of translations we have right now, it most likely will be much easier to maintain it by hand. If the volume increases, then we can revisit the issue.

4

4) I don't understand this section at all. Were these points not covered in 3)? If not, can you clarify what this means?

They were partially covered in #3, yes. What this section is for, is three things:

1. To include some possible relations that weren't mentioned in #3 (e.g. rewrite-coauthor, which answers your earlier question about Dexanote/Anborough and Dexanote/Roget rewrites)
2. To establish an order of precedence in which jarvis will recognize the users. For example, if a page has both original_author and rewrite_coauthor, to whom should the rating go? rewrite_coauthor is higher in the list than original_author, so they get the bump to their net total, and the original_author get nothing but a mention in the summary.
   
   Note that as I mentioned in the original post, this is only a vague order. Each particular combination of relations and statistics they're used in will be much more nuanced and will have to be decided on a case by case basis. Nevertheless, I think it's useful to have at least a rough outline like this.
3. So that people could suggest other possible attribution options I didn't think of.

Hope that answers your questions. Also I love these wall-of-text posts.

(e.g. that X-com-like Foundation game, maybe? Who knows)

If anyone is able to get in touch with Riscvul to confirm as the move happens, it would be nice.

I like "relations-metadata" for the url of the page. It's not bot-specific, and it reflects the fact that it's not about authors anymore, but about all the possible relations between pages and users. Another possibility is "link-metadata", but that may be confused with url links.

I think something with attribution in the url would help to make it clear what it is.

2) Also fine with this.

3) Questions here. A lot of these questions might have self-explanatory answers but I wanna ask them anyway to make sure it's out there and people understand what's happening with them. Some of these questions are also assuming, based on chat/forum posts, that an author details page (.ad) will happen in the future. If this is incorrect, please feel free to tell me so.

For the purposes of the !author command, Carol adds the page's rating to her net total, while Alice and Bob do not.

Will the page show up in someone's .ad page even if it was rewritten and even if it doesn't count to the net total? Will the !au command indicate they have pages rewritten?

another_page was co-written by David and Emily. Co-written pages cannot have an original_author relation with any user. Both David and Emily add the page's rating to their net totals.

Will this functionality support more than two co-authors? If I remember correctly, from what I found, some pages have up to four or even five authors who worked in them (maybe four but I thought I remembered one with five authors). And then you have a couple skips where a rewrite was done by two co-authors (I know Dexanote and Anborough did one like that, off the top of my head, as did Dexanote and Roget). How will this implementation work?

translated_page is pretty self explanatory. Both users add the rating to their totals.

Their .ad page will mention this as well, correct? Will it count towards their avg rating as well if they've done non-translation work? Or if they are the same author as the original? For example, Reach's 179 was originally written by him on the Spanish site.

The author of the abandoned_page is no longer active on the site. Since they aren't listed in the table, they default to the user who made the 0th revision. Alice wasn't involved in the creation of the page in any way, and doesn't add the rating. However, before the original author left, they specifically granted the rights to make decisions about the page to Alice. Thus she is listed as a maintainer.

I don't understand this. So, for example, Salman Corbette has left Roget as the maintainer of nearly all his pages. So:

1. Will Salman still have these pages count towards his net votes, average rating, etc.?
2. Will these pages count for Roget?
3. How will this be indicated in the !au command? Or the !ad command?

Another example could be to automatically generate and update translated-works hubs if we ever get enough of those that manual updating becomes cumbersome.

What we've been working on was this system, where the English list would be automatically updated every certain amount of time, while people translating works and posting them here would be inputting them manually. Do you think you have a way of updating this automatically, especially since we're not using the native number/suffix for when they post their translated works?

4) I don't understand this section at all. Were these points not covered in 3)? If not, can you clarify what this means?

Okay, so I forgot and made new post. I claim Monday morning.

meant to reply to anqxyr's post

1. Leave the current page as is. Create a new page and transfer the data to it. Delete the old page after 1-2 months.

This is in order not to break anything that currently relies on this page. I can probably fix everything I have in ~10 minutes, but I don't know what else is out there that parses this page (e.g. that X-com-like Foundation game, maybe? Who knows), and I think it would be nice to offer a grace period.

I like "relations-metadata" for the url of the page. It's not bot-specific, and it reflects the fact that it's not about authors anymore, but about all the possible relations between pages and users. Another possibility is "link-metadata", but that may be confused with url links.

2. Make the new page on the main site, not on 05.

I don't see why we can't allow authors to record their own rewrites and such. I don't find the argument of "they will break things" to be sufficient. The new format for the page will basically be just a table, and that's it. When a table is broken, it's really noticeable. Most wiki members can edit a table without breaking it just fine. If anything does break, I'll make jarvis ping the ops about it, and they can go and revert the last edit.

3. New page format.

This should help illustrate what I have in mind.

example_page was rewritten twice by different people. For the purposes of the !author command, Carol adds the page's rating to her net total, while Alice and Bob do not.

another_page was co-written by David and Emily. Co-written pages cannot have an original_author relation with any user. Both David and Emily add the page's rating to their net totals.

translated_page is pretty self explanatory. Both users add the rating to their totals.

The author of the abandoned_page is no longer active on the site. Since they aren't listed in the table, they default to the user who made the 0th revision. Alice wasn't involved in the creation of the page in any way, and doesn't add the rating. However, before the original author left, they specifically granted the rights to make decisions about the page to Alice. Thus she is listed as a maintainer.

Note that when I'm talking about adding rating to users' net totals, this is just one example of how this metadata can be used in various circumstances. Another example could be to automatically generate and update translated-works hubs if we ever get enough of those that manual updating becomes cumbersome.

The date column is mostly optional, and likely will not be used for anything, at least at first. The one thing I can think of where it can be useful, is to resolve priorities in cases of pages with multiple rewrites (e.g. example_page). However, at the moment I don't even know if we even have a single one of those, so *shrugs*. Back to the date column however. I think it's a nice thing to have, even if it's not very useful, and it doesn't cost us anything. And it's better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

4. Recognized relation types.

In general, any arbitrary string in the Relation Type column should be parsed and saved. If they don't fall into one of the recognized values, they can then just be ignored.

So, here's some types that I think should be applicable, in a vague order of how much rights they have to the page:

• rewrite_author
• rewrite_coauthor
• original_author
• coauthor
• maintainer
• comaintainer
• translator
• cotranslator

This covers every situation I can think of. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

Okay, I think that's all. I probably forgot something, I'll add it later if so. For now, I'd like to hear what other people think about each point. If everyone is in agreement, I'd like to create and fill out the new page in a couple of days, and add jarvis support soon after.

I still want to hear Pixel's take on this, since he's the one who'll be doing all the work with Alex. While this page is useful for us on its own, Alex is where its effects are most visible.

Oh, actually, I do have one thing to add. On the matter of moving the page to the main site. Users can currently edit titles of their skip, and this can potentially break Alex, and on few occasions did. I don't see how moving this page on the main site would be in any way worse. If anything, the table structure is more rigid and thus harder to mess up. So I'd still like for the page to be moved.

It'd be nice if Nobody itself wasn't already taken but eh

Ability to credit things to "Author Unknown"

I have now done this. Horray! (Just under Unknown Author.)

Ability to credit things to "No Author" (mostly for staff and system pages that someone created).

I support this, though I know little about what pages would be needed to credit those as.

Ability to credit things to multiple people.

I also support this, and I know Pixel in chat says he was planning on improving the author function?

I also agree with my previous posts and anqxyr's post. Ideally, would like more feedback on this from other people in case anyone here missed something, but I think everyone in this thread has covered the main topics?

We need to formalize the canonical hierarchy of types. In case an article has an author, a rewrite_author, and a translator, who gets the final say about what to do with the article? I think a good approach would be rewrite_author > author > translator, but we can discuss alternatives if people want to.

I think staff has to be included in here somewhere, as well as owner. So like this:

owner > rewrite_author > author = translator (in the case of articles being brought over from the other wikis. In this case, if the translator can get in touch with the original author, that's what they should do. Otherwise, their prerogative.) > staff

Move this page to the wiki proper and allow all users to edit them. If they fuck it up, staff can step in, but in general users should be able to change stuff like this about their own articles without contacting staff.

The users would have to know exactly what to do and how, and how it affects Alexandra. Given that it's also open to vandalism or mistakes people won't notice for a while, especially if they're not familiar, I don't know if I could support this. Certainly, I'd like a suggestions feature or option, especially in case someone isn't on IRC or the wiki at the moment (which does happen). Not a full-fledged option on the main site for users to edit and Alex to grab from.

(I think the fact we're doing it is great, btw)

• Instead of current :override: thing, make it a 3-column table: Page, User, and Type. User would just have the username, and Type would have one of the possible override types.
• In addition to the currently recognized 'author' (currently implicit) and 'rewrite_author' types, I propose the following:
  • 'collaborator' for articles with multiple authors. Also note that in this case the 'default' author (the user who created the 0th revision of the page) should be listed as collaborator too. The alternative - implicitly treating the 'default' author as a collaborator if at least one other collaborator is listed on the overwrite page - is in my opinion too fragile and would break under more atypical situations.
  • 'rewrite_collaborator'
  • 'owner' - for cases where the owner isn't the author. E.g. author has left the site and transferred ownership of their articles to another user. If owner is not listed, it falls back to the highest priority user linked to the article (see below).
  • 'translator' obviously.
• We need to formalize the canonical hierarchy of types. In case an article has an author, a rewrite_author, and a translator, who gets the final say about what to do with the article? I think a good approach would be rewrite_author > author > translator, but we can discuss alternatives if people want to.
• Move this page to the wiki proper and allow all users to edit them. If they fuck it up, staff can step in, but in general users should be able to change stuff like this about their own articles without contacting staff.

Pixel, you have anything to say about this? I'm asking you specifically since you're the one who'll be left with the work of implementing it, since Alex is where this would be most immediately visible for normal users. So if you have concerns/suggests, I'd like to hear them. For my part, all my rewrite-dealing code would be trivial to expand to include the new types.

Also, anyone else who has things to say about this, please do.

I could implement what you suggest, but it might take a while. The .au function is extremely complex at this point do to me doing only an okay job the first time around (mostly because I'd never really attempted anything that complicated with the bot before) and just adding random stuff as time has gone on. If I were to add the requested features I'd probably just rewrite the .au function from scratch. If the implementation can be agreed on by Sunday morning, I could probably just sit down and get it over with, but I would like to know exactly what people want me to add. If people are on the fence about this I'd like to know as well, I'd prefer not to invest a considerable amount of time into this if people don't really care.

EDIT: To review, we want another option to add a user as a translator, and only the original or rewrite author receives the upvotes?

Too late to reach the Sunday morning deadline, but let's discuss what we want from author listings.

Off the bat, some things I'd like:

• Ability to credit things to "Author Unknown". (unless we have that and I didn't know)
• Ability to credit things to multiple people.
• Ability to credit things to "No Author" (mostly for staff and system pages that someone created).

…and a request for someone besides Pixeltasim: I'd like staff to go through and make note of all attributions, once Pixel updates the function. Rewrite probably has dibs on assigning someone here. If not, then maybe someone on Community, or jr staff.