Current state of NESDev Main Page and Wiki

[Bregalad]

So, for the last few years, the main policy on NESdev was to focus all effort to the Wiki, which is easier to maintain (probably because the users just do all the work, the admins/mods just have to remove spams or reverse bad edits), and to leave the deprecated NESdev main page as is, leaving just a big announce that the page is deprecated and redirect to the wiki.

There is also a Wikified main page which is basically the worst of the both worlds : It does not have the charm/style of the original NESdev main page, it is not actively maintained, it lies in a place it does not belong to, and since there was some random edits, NESdev administrators don't have full control over the page. Most of the bad links were removed, though.

I am a mere user so it's not up to me to do important decisions when it comes to how the NESdev website is layed out. But my personal opinion is that the current situation is ridiculous. Info is present multiple times in similar format, which is just terrible. I will also mention the fact that Disch' notes are copy/pasted in the wiki, which is a horrible idea. There is multiple directoins that could be taken in order to make the site organized again, and I don't care either way, but it sounds like doing a major reshaping on how NESdev is layed out is necessary. Personally I'd rise the following points :

• I personally love the NESdev main page, how it looks (dark background) and how it was layed out. I learned everything with that page, and thus it hurts to see it in a so abandoned state.
• Having multiple sources of information is actually GOOD. I am NOT advocating the "let's put everything on the Wiki and let's shut down everything else" fad that has been prevailant in NESdev recently. There is also huge advantages that there is documents written by single individuals that wanted to give their own version of everything, and those documents should remain accessible and unaltered (even if they contains inaccuracies). It is good that mappers are documented several times in NESdev main pages, one time on the Wiki and one time in Dish's notes, separately. The information is presented using different layouts/wording/diagrams and some people could like one better than another.
• However, having the same information copy/pasted elsewhere and then modified to a different version with no clue what's going on is TERRIBLY BAD. I am targeting the duplicate of Dish's notes and NESDev main page here, as well as the mappers which have multiple pages on the Wiki.
• The main page of any site (when you just type http://www.website.com) should not be a deprecated page, period. If deprecated pages should be available, it should be in a sub-folder where it is clearly stated as so.
• If the NESDev main page should be wikified, then typing http://www.nesdev.com should go to the wikified main page, and it'd be good if the fonts/layout could be truthful to the original NESDev main page (although not obligatory)
• There should in NO CASE be multiple "main pages" for the wiki. What I mean is that, if the NESDev main page were to remain within the Wiki, then there should be no two separate main pages.

[thefox]

There is also a Wikified main page which is basically the worst of the both worlds : It does not have the charm/style of the original NESdev main page, it is not actively maintained, it lies in a place it does not belong to, and since there was some random edits, NESdev administrators don't have full control over the page. Most of the bad links were removed, though.

I think the original idea was for the wikified page to replace the main page, although that never happened. I might be misremembering, though.

I personally love the NESdev main page, how it looks (dark background) and how it was layed out. I learned everything with that page, and thus it hurts to see it in a so abandoned state.

I also got started with that page, way before we even had a wiki. I agree that it'd be good if the main page was actively maintained, or at least up to date.

The main page of any site (when you just type http://www.website.com) should not be a deprecated page, period. If deprecated pages should be available, it should be in a sub-folder where it is clearly stated as so.

Hard not to agree with that one.

If the NESDev main page should be wikified, then typing http://www.nesdev.com should go to the wikified main page, and it'd be good if the fonts/layout could be truthful to the original NESDev main page (although not obligatory)

I don't think replacing the main page with a wikified version of the same page is a good idea. I'd much rather see the main page reworked to something new and original, and the old page archived. Of course this would mean that somebody would need to be willing to do the reworking.

I've always thought it'd be nice if there was a centralized place for news about things happening in the NES development community, like what new homebrews are being developed and released. That, also, would require active maintenance, though.

I won't comment on the mapper issue. I don't see a huge problem there.

[rainwarrior]

It seems to me that the forum and we wiki are the main content of this site. As such, the root page might as well just be a simple splash page with prominent links to those things. I'd probably make it look something like this:

Logo, possibly a brief paragraph describing the site's purpose
Link to Forums
Link to Wiki
Smaller link to archived version of old main page
Footer with host information


As for the Disch notes, they were kind of carpet bombed onto the Wiki in an attempt to improve its mapper content (which was very lacking for a long time, and still has many gaps). The intent was that their information be merged into the appropriate article, and then the Disch notes should be deleted. The redundancy is a temporary problem, and one that's simple to fix.

[Bregalad]

@rainwarrior : So for you, all the documents that does not belong to the Wiki and that are much older have absolutely no value, and should be eliminated ?

Pehaps the information they gives is already here in the wiki, but they give it in a different way, and I think redundancy is good. If for some reason the way the wiki sets things up is less clear for a particular individual, it's good to be able to fall back to the old documents. After all, the old documents are how I learned nesdev, long before the wiki was created.

For Dish's notes, I understand they were supposed to be temporary but they're here from years now. I have absolutely nothing against then, don't get me wrong. But I think they should be maintained separated form the wiki, available for download whoever Dish wants them to be (they are on RHDN for instance, but having them host on NESDEV is not a stupid idea either).

[tepples]

Pehaps the information they gives is already here in the wiki, but they give it in a different way, and I think redundancy is good.

I agree. Particularly NESTECH.TXT by koitsu is well written, and new discoveries since its release are documented.

Older docs also serve to document when we learned what.

[Bregalad]

NESTECH.TXT is the Bible of the NES developer, no less. I would never been able to start any NES development without this document, and it's terrible French translation by Cryspisix (which by the way he called his own doccument without thanking Koitsu. Nowadays this sounds terrible, but back then it was terribly useful ).

[rainwarrior]

@rainwarrior : So for you, all the documents that does not belong to the Wiki and that are much older have absolutely no value, and should be eliminated ?

Not at all, I was referring to the disch notes pasted into wiki itself. They should be folded into the articles, and not presented redundantly the way they are.

Documents that were used as reference, or may provide clarification, should be linked as references in the relevant articles. I try to provide citations like this when I edit the wiki, but I recommend that you add reference links to articles where you see they are lacking. Linking to the disch notes would be nice if we could do it, but unfortunately I think the only coherent form is a ZIP file on RHDN at the moment?

Where information is out of date or incorrect, it absolutely should not appear on the wiki, unless as a cautionary note about legacy incorrect implementations. Citations of old articles that have known deficiencies should probably have an appropriate note attached too.

[lidnariq]

All I really want to say is: Failure to DRY basically guarantees that before long you will have multiple copies of the same information that differ from each other. Ideally, one would be correct, but in practice usually both are wrong, and in different ways.

[Mr. Dude]

Now that you mention it, this funny black box fell off the site not too far away



Can I keep it pleeeeeease?

[Bregalad]

Ok, now this is official, I'll never edit or even read the wiki anymore. I'm just upset. It is a huge pile of mess with multiple pages of info about the same thing, or info about different things merged, and any try to change anything is systematically rejected by others, so it's condemned to always remain the big pile of disorganized junk it grew to be.

This is not the fault of anyone and I'm not accusing anybody to behave badly or to have done anything wrong with the wiki. Actually all of us worked really hard to do our best. The problem is that we do it in different ways, and have different tastes and opinions. As long as there is nobody that is devoted to take the "final" decisions as a "chief" and says "the wiki will be organized this way", it is doomed to remain a pile of garbage like it actually is. So from now on I'll officially say the wiki is a terrible/unreliable source of info and won't look up anything there anymore, and I recommand everyone from not doing so any longer.

The technical-complexity over result ratio is really not worth it.

[tepples]

Then I guess I need to be this chief.

What decisions need to be made? I can think of a few:

• When to keep Disch docs on the wiki: Leave them there until the standard format docs have become adequate
• Organization: We need Wikipedia-style infoboxes for the mappers.

[Bregalad]

Then I guess I need to be this chief.

Oh thank you so much. Now I see the light of hope that the wiki might become decent one day (although nothing is less certain). As for the decsions you take, I don't care anymore I've taken mine for the next 6 months at least. After that we'll see.

The problem with mappers is that there's so many of them than if you want to change the layout of mapper page you have to repeat the same work 100 times which is not acceptable. Also it's ambiguous what even a mapper is : Hardware on cartige? an iNES number? or a software coprocessor that handles the bankswitching? it's actually all 3 at the same time. This gives me headaches.

Actually the problem is that Banshaku was this chef at the start be I guess he grow tired of this and isn't active anymore.

[rainwarrior]

All of those things are mappers, I think?

If you're just interested in iNES mappers, there is a category and convenient grid for just those. Articles don't have to be 1:1 with mapper numbers (though we should have a redirect for every iNES mapper, if they don't have a dedicated page), I think it often makes more sense to discuss several related mappers on one page.

Try to keep a consistent set of information at/near the top of the page (currently the "Overview" section), with prominent links to related mappers if strongly relevant. If a page becomes too complex, consider building a summary or convenient table near the top to simplify getting to the information you need (or otherwise attempt to re-organize).

[Bregalad]

Notice: Changes(*) that were made to Disch's notes in the NESDev wiki were reviewed and incorporated in the original document in romhacking.net.

From now on, it's strongly not recommended(**) to make any edit to pasted Disch's notes in the wiki in order to avoid confusion. Instead, edit the wiki page directly or edit the Disch's notes that are on romhacking.net.
Any edit to Disch's notes on the wiki is very likely to be deleted and lost in the future.

Also I apologies for having been upset earlier. I however see that many positive changes to mapper's page were made recently, great work guys. I still won't participate for a while by fear of ruining everyone else's work, though.

(*) I reviewed changes so that sensible ones (the vast majority) were imported. A couple of changes that didn't significantly improve the quality of the document were not committed.

(**) It's definitely up to the moderators of the wiki, tepples in particular, to decide which policy to apply there. This is just my personal recommendation.

[tepples]

I still won't participate for a while by fear of ruining everyone else's work, though.

Once the big structural changes stabilize, and wiki edits slow down to a couple dozen a day or fewer, feel free to make changes in good faith because I'll be able to patrol recent changes again and fix what you may have inadvertently broken. So don't panic, and be bold!