This week we have added several experimental features intended to improve the wiki: one that is an all-round improvement on the current state of the wiki, and one with a focus on what’s know as “wiki gardening”.
Table of Contents
The first experimental features is the addition of a table of contents. This feature is intended to improve all wikis without manually maintained start pages. We observe that few campaign wikis have dedicated start pages—which is totally explainable and reasonable, since those start pages take a lot of time and effort to build, especially if you want columns and automatically updating lists.
To help out, we are working on a new table of contents view that is intended to be used as the start page for any wiki without an explicit start page. It takes some cues from the the wiki index, but where the index is a big list of everything (sorted on natural sort order), the table of contents automatically categorizes your pages on what type of thing they describe.
A work-in-progress feature of the table of contents is a way to indicate that certain tags are useful as a category themselves, which will lead to pages with those tags being shown more prominently. This is partially implemented: tags can be marked is categories, but this information is not yet used in the table of contents.
For now this is an experimental feature that can only be accessed by going to a wiki index, and replacing the __index__ in the URL with __toc__.
Backlinks
The second experimental features is aimed mostly at wiki gardening. Wiki gardening is the practice of maintaining your campaign wiki by cleaning up pages, making sure links are working, adding or updating pages if needed, and moving things about to make the wiki as useful to the other players as possible.
We already have one tool available that helps immensely when gardening: Wanted Pages. However, we want to make it easier to maintain and improve your wiki by offering more small tools and better information to help out when gardening.
One of these improvements is the addition of a list of ‘backlinks’, or in non-wiki jargon, a list of places that links to the page you’re currently viewing. This helps when you are deciding to remove or merge a page, or if a page might be better as a tag with a short text.
For now this is an experimental feature that can only be accessed by adding /__backlinks to the url of a wiki page.
As always, we have this week’s changelog ready for you! If you have ideas on some wiki gardening tool you would like, or have anything else to tell us, you can reach out to us via the community forum.