Editing 2024 Wiki update

Hi everyone, it's your friendly neighbourhood Alsadius here. In mid-2024, I decided that I was tired of the wiki being stuck back in the [[VB6]] days, and decided to update it to [[CSharp|C#]]. As of October 13th, I'm finally done (huzzah!)

However, there's still a bit more follow-up work I'd like to do. Here's what you can do if you want to help. 

== Get a wiki account ==
This wiki is locked, due to past spammer issues, so you'll need to message [https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2 Erik L on the forums] to get an account. 

== Unfinished work ==
If you want to clean up unfinished pages, go to the [[Template:Not done]], [[Template:Unsure]], and [[Template:Redlinks]] pages, click "What links here" on the left sidebar, and work on those articles. "Not Done" is for pages with major holes, "Unsure" is for things that need small tweaks or clarification, and "Redlinks" is for pages that are complete themselves, but that link to a bunch of other pages we might want to create. 

== Additional cleanup ==
What I'm doing is just intended to make the wiki usable for C#, but it won't be as complete as we might like. If you want to make any of these articles better, feel free - there'll be plenty of space to improve. 

Here's a few other things on my to-do list:
* "Race" is a really misleading term - should go back and use "Empire" instead. 
* Tutorials really need rationalization and updating. 
* Maybe move all the ancient 2010-era sample ships and "Garbage Dump" pages to a separate namespace? (Check with Erik, that's mostly his stuff.) 
* A lot of screenshots are still VB6, and should be replaced. 

==Technical Notes==
=== Namespaces ===
The wiki had a brief attempt to use [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Namespaces namespaces] to split between C# and VB6, but they weren't used much([https://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?from=1.10.0%3ARelease+Notes&to=&namespace=3002&title=Special%3AAllPages C# pagelist], [https://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?from=1.10.0%3ARelease+Notes&to=&namespace=3008&title=Special%3AAllPages VB6 pagelist]), and IMO they're clunky to work with. So instead we're using prefixes for now. Generic pages have generic names, but for game concepts that have separate articles for the two [[versions]], use the prefix "C-" for C# pages, and "VB-" for VB6 pages. If you're doing this, you should also have a page with no prefix, using the '''<nowiki>{{generic}}</nowiki>''' template at the top of the page. It will display a note like this when you do: 

{{generic}}

'''Example''': [[Terraforming]] is a generic page that covers the basic concept, and links to [[C-Terraforming]] and [[VB-Terraforming]] for version-specific details. 

If the two versions are similar enough that separate pages aren't needed, then make an article that discusses both, and use the '''<nowiki>{{bothversions}}</nowiki>''' template at the top of the page. That'll display like this: 

{{bothversions}}

If a game concept only appears in one version and not both, you can simply leave it with the generic name. However, because VB6 is the old one, I've also added a '''<nowiki>{{vb6 only}}</nowiki>''' template. The editor should add a link to the C# version if there is one (e.g., '''<nowiki>{{vb6 only|[[Naval Admin Commands]]}}</nowiki>'''), or "nonexistent" if there is none (i.e., '''<nowiki>{{vb6 only|nonexistent}}</nowiki>'''). That looks like this: 

{{vb6 only|[[Naval Admin Commands]]}}
{{vb6 only|nonexistent}}

===Other Templates===
If an article still has significant holes in it, use the '''<nowiki>{{not done}}</nowiki>''' template, which looks like this: 

{{not done}}

If the article is basically finished, but there's a specific question or two where you're unsure of the answer, use '''<nowiki>{{unsure}}</nowiki>''', which looks like this: 

{{unsure}}

For articles that are themselves complete, but that contain a lot of red links, use '''<nowiki>{{redlinks}}</nowiki>'''. This will not display on the page, but will collect these pages for later additions. 

=== Useful tools ===
If you want to check the stats of anything in the game, the most reliable source is the game's database. If you're not familiar with databases, you can think of them a bit like spreadsheets, with each DB table being a single sheet. (A complete tutorial is beyond the scope of this page.) A good lightweight database viewer is [https://sqlitebrowser.org/dl/ DB Browser for SQLite] - download it, and use it to open AuroraDB.db in your game folder. The tables "FCT_TechSystem" ([[technology]]), "DIM_PlanetaryInstallation" ([[installations]]), and "FCT_ShipDesignComponents" (ship [[components]]) are especially useful for a range of wiki pages. 

It's also possible to copy directly from the database into a wiki table. [https://tableconvert.com/excel-to-mediawiki This site] can do the job, and includes a simple editor to help you rearrange/trim columns or clean up the table. You'll need to manually type column headers into a new top row, but otherwise you just copy-paste like you would with any table or spreadsheet. The output can be copied straight to the wiki.

If you have any questions, I'm on Discord constantly, Reddit fairly frequently, and for the moment I'm also on this wiki and the game forums pretty often as well (and I use the name Alsadius for all of them). 

Thanks!