Phial:Proposal

Hello, and thanks in advance for the long read! This is a proposal for a new Final Fantasy wiki design / identity / etc. There are a few different components, each of which can be considered on their own, so I'll do my best to break it down into pieces. You can use the table of contents above to skip to specifc parts.

What I'm going for

Here's what I think a Final Fantasy wiki should be, to hopefully illustrate why any decisions I may have made may seem unusual. This is not any kind of mandate for use of the skin - just where I'm coming from as a contributor.

Use Patterns

A Final Fantasy wiki is, unlike Wikipedia, not a general encyclopedia. Much of it is going to act as a reference document for specific existing works, and I think the vast majority of users will want to use it that way. This means activities like looking up where to find items, combat abilities or otherwise checking specific, factual information that they have deliberately come to the wiki to learn. Wikipedia, and other mainstay wiki projects, generally focus on articles - things that are read for broad education and understanding, more than they are parsed for specific info. This doesn't mean there should be nothing article-y at all - articles are fun to write, fun to read, and the most useful way to convey specific types of information. What it does mean is that in designing Crystal, when necessary I have chosen to prioritise quick access to specific information over article content. As an example, the Table of Contents is above the article's opening paragraph, instead of below it, as you'd usually find on a wiki. This is adjustable - indeed, the TOC can be moved anywhere in the wikitext. I think users will respond very well to decisions like this, even if they are novel in the context of fan wikis.

Aesthetic

I think a lot of modern web design can be a bit drab. Final Fantasy games typically look bright and colorful, while maintaining a sparse but informative UI, and I think a Final Fantasy wiki is more fun to use and contribute to if it tries to look like that. As a consequence, there are ways in which this website may look a bit dated, especially in comparison to other modern wiki skins, but I consider that an acceptable compromise, given the ~40 year history of the series. Plus, a Final Fantasy wiki deserves some Final Fantasy specific flourishes, imo. If you're on desktop, mouse over the nav links in the menus on the left of the page, if you haven't already.

Accessibility

It is likely, as the skin develops, that I will spend a lot of time ensuring accessibility features are up to modern standards. This may slow new features, or extension compatibilty, and most users will probably never notice these features are there, but I feel it's important for a project like this to be as available as possible.

Ease of Work

A lot of what I'm doing is in the hope of enabling others to get involved in the skin! It's my hope that with a basic understanding of the underlying principles behind the involved technology, others will be able to help, or maintain the skin in my absence. Plus, if fancy features and templates can be made as easy to use as possible, it is more likely people will want to learn to use them

Miscellaneous

Just personally, I'd like to work on a wiki with high standards for sourcing, low tolerance for bigotry, and a culture that encourages people to contribute, even if they aren't doing so perfectly.

New skin!

First things first; the website you're looking at right now! It's Mediawiki, running with Crystal, a custom skin I've made. I think we should use this for the Final Fantasy wiki! It looks great imo, I'm having fun making it, and the Mediawiki devs have done a great job of making this kind of work easy to understand and integrate with standard wiki features. Even at this stage of development, there's already a lot to show off. Try resizing the page! Open it on your phone! See that? Vector can't do that shit!

Why a custom skin?

For those who may not know, Mediawiki skins are what define what's shown on the webpage of a given wiki. They set the HTML DOM, which broadly informs the layout and page hierarchy. From there, you use CSS to do the bulk of the work of styling and placing elements, but fundamentally the content is set in HTML, by the skin. Many skins - and much of the Mediawiki ecosystem - as free and open source projects, tend to be slow to react to changes in the capabilities of HTML and CSS, of which there have been many. IIRC Vector (what FFWiki is currently on) was released in 2010, and since then a lot has happened! Many of the features implemented by modern wikis can be done in cleaner and more simple ways, to say nothing of new possibilities like accessibility tools and mobile layouts! This isn't to say that Vector can't do these things, just that they're much, much easier and way less janky now. And that's all while maintaining existing design tools like common.css or TemplateStyles.

A new, custom skin would be a way to do basically whatever you want, layout-wise, and strike the kind of balance between encyclopedic articles, image galleries and data structures that a Wiki like this would really benefit from. Plus, Fandom is ugly! We can do better, and I think better will get the attention of readers and contributors both.

Why not a skin?

There are good reasons to not do this! First of all, I am not nearly as skilled as the developers of skins like Timeless or Citizen, which I would put forward as viable options for better-than-legacy-Vector. These skins are developed by teams of experienced devs, and have had a long time to flesh out support for various features, extensions, and edge cases. It would take some time and many contributors to ever match that with Crystal.

However, the work Mediawiki is doing to open up skin development has really paid off. Everything you see here was built in a couple of weeks. The primary barrier to achieving compatibility with an extension is, at this point, mostly time, and as a mostly-dormant wiki, time is plentiful. If there's an extension you want, I'm confident I can make it look good.

How to do it

The nice things about skins is that they're trivial to install! Drop it in a directory, change a line in LocalSettings and you're done. However, as of writing this, I do not think Crystal is ready for public display. Many of the backend pages are unappealing, if not nonfunctional, and if there's any extensions you want to use, I'll need time to make them work. I think it needs at least one really good main game page to show it off, and as an aside, I'm making design decisions in something of a vacuum! But, if you like the skin, or the idea of one, here's what you can do to help:

1. Provide feedback! What you like, what you don't, how it feels to use.
2. Tell me about problems! Click around, check things out. If something looks busted, let me know.
3. Let me know what features you want! What's missing from wikis you work on now? What essential extensions do you need?

New layout!

Here's some specifics about the skin, and why I think they're good for a Final Fantasy Wiki.

Site Header

There's a big ol search bar! It sticks to the top of the page on mobile. I don't have data on this, but anecdotally, I think the vast majority of people who are after specific information will use some kind of search functionality to get it, rather than clicking through categories and page links. I'd go so far to assume that most people get to wiki pages via an external search engine! Emphasizing this and keeping it in reach for users makes the wiki more useful as a reference document.

Page Headers

As I mentioned, putting the TOC at the top of the page helps people get to relevant information easier, but I think there's a lot of potential here for other features, like a more targeted, refined navbox. For example, the disambiguation page for Moogles could have a stylized row of links to the Moogle page for each game, or 'Characters of Final Fantasy VII' could have a lineup of character portraits. This would be much like tabs, but more flexible, and individualized to each category.

Dark Mode

Bit of a tangent, but check out whichever of dark / light mode your browser hasn't defaulted to! It's currently respecting your browser settings, so toggling those will allow you to view the alternative color scheme. We can discuss the possibility of an on-page toggle, though it is a much more complex option.

Other Flourishes

I've outlined a few of the more specific new features on this page. Take a look! I think for most users, those are the ones that will really set this wiki apart from Fandom et al.

Again, it's extremely likely that anything you don't like about the layout is totally fixable, in a way that you don't get with existing skins.

New name!

Phial Fantasy! In case you didn't see the link you clicked, or wordmark, etc, that's what I think the wiki should be called.

Hasty draft of a logo concept.

Distinguished!

It's a clear departure from the ambiguous "Final Fantasy wiki", which could apply as easily to any corporate FF wiki as an indie one. While Fandom's still a thing, it's pivotal for users to be able to draw a distinction us and them. With a new skin, the visuals are covered, but a name would help.

Relevant!

The humble potion is a mainstay of Final Fantasy, and has featured in pretty much every Final Fantasy game. Moogles didn't show up until III! I think it's a distinctive, impartial motif, with a lot of potential for fun designs.

Cheap!

'finalfantasy.wiki' is a few hundred Australian dollaridoos a year. Registering 'phialfantasy.wiki' cost me, like, three. It's maths.

Kinda catchy!

Idk, I reckon it's a good name! Rolls off the tongue, clearly sounds like the wiki's topic, is spelt in an interesting way.

Obviously it's no substitute for just being a good wiki, but I think it's intentional, creative choices like this that help to immediately distinguish indie wikis from things like Fandom. As a corporate, ad-driven juggernaut, Fandom simply cannot do things like this.

How to do it

This one is not so easy to implement if we want to stay on the current wiki. A bunch of stuff on the existing wiki will already be tied into the name. I have the domain ready, but if this part of the proposal is especially interesting, it may be worth considering migrating existing content to a new installation that's set up as Phial Fantasy from the beginning. The small size and relative dormancy of the current wiki makes that a possibility, I think.

New policies!

Having a mostly empty wiki may make it hard to attract new contributors, especially if there are standards we want that work to meet. However, I think the most daunting part of contributing is the idea of having to sit down and write an entire page. If we break that down into specific tasks, the need for which can be signalled separately, then I think users will be more likely to contribute what they can.

Templating

I think settling on common page types and their structures early will help a lot. Breaking down pages into clear and organized sections makes every task easier, opens up opportunities for contributers to specialize their efforts, and takes some of the decision-making load out of the process. For example, if someone enjoys formatting character pages, making it easy for them to only format the character page section of an article will lead to less effort per contribution, and therefore, more contributions. This is something I feel like I could help with, once the initial skin work is mostly out of the way.

Writing

We just need stuff on the page, ultimately, but I do not think copying article text from other sources is worth it. People talk a lot about 'making it' before 'making it good', and I think that can be an applicable concept here, in terms of building a wiki of original, well-sourced writing. Maybe there are limits to that, idk! But if something needs writing, expecting it to also be immediately of a high standard and properly sourced seems perhaps unwise. If something's, like, just written, then it can be marked as needing both cleanup and sourcing with big ol' labels at the top or something. I think this will work better than having a bunch of stubs, or copying things from other wikis.

Cleaning

Once stuff is written, cleaning it up and making it look good with images and stuff should be considered a separate task. I think this is pretty normal for Wikis, but making it explicit and equivalent with other tasks could help. Developing a Manual of Style would help here a lot!

Sourcing

This is a big one for me! It's so easy for misinformation to propagate on sites like this. People copy a table from a different wiki, which copied it from a GameFAQs guide, which was written by one guy in the 90s, or something. These games are all available, in various forms, and I think we can be more rigorous about sourcing. To that end, I propose the following as a start;

1. A page will not be considered properly sourced unless the information is linked to a primary source - that is, in most cases, a screenshot (or video) from the game demonstrating the information, with the release noted.
2. Secondary sources - official materials like published game guides or Square Enix websites - are fine, especially if they're a good source of bulk information.
3. Tertiary sources - online guides, data from other wikis - are accepted, but replacing them with better sources should be a priority.

I'm sure you're already thinking about edge cases where this won't work, and you're absolutely right! But, fundamentally, I think things like item locations, stats, skills and so on can be directly documented, on here, in perpetuity, and that's what we should strive for. Anything that can't be directly pictured, I'm sure we can develop a solution for. Maybe a Source namespace where people can write articles to explain things like damage formulas? Something to work on!

In conclusion

I hope this all makes sense! Please bring me any questions or concerns you have. If you don't like anything here, but reckon it could be worked into something you do, I am extremely motivated to make that happen. Let's talk about what needs to change for you to give it a thumbs up. If you're already on board, here's where I think we should start;

Refresh or reskin

As a group, you should decide whether we're going to modify the existing wiki, or move the original work there onto a new one. It's rare for this to even be an option, and I firmly believe in taking opportunities to lay a strong foundation. It means less time cleaning up later, and an easier time sticking to a new direction. If we are doing a full refresh, then the priority should be things like a main page. If not...

Install the skin!

Just drop it in the wiki! It should not be the default yet, but having it installed will allow for more opportunities to catch elements that need styling, or things that are likely to break. Some extensions may need to be added, but there's no way for it to interfere with users, or the site's normal operation, without people going out of their way to click on the skin.

Templates!

Templating work will be pivotal! If we can settle on how a page should be structured before anyone writes in it, then that writing will fit the page from the beginning. Less time spent tidying up later on, and more opportunities for those specialized tasks I mentioned. Personally I would say this is more important than recording information, at least to start with.

Start making Crystal pages

Either way, another good way to find things to break is to just start writing! Make the page you want to make, and let me know how Crystal gets in the way of that. Technically, anything a webpage can do is possible, it's just a matter of time, effort, priorities and decision-making.

Let me know what you think!