UESPWiki:Converting Old Pages

Main Steps

• Choose an original page to add to the Wiki. I find it easiest to browse the original site and add pages as I see them.
• Perform a search to ensure a page hasn't already been added. If we get lots of people converting the site some duplication will be unavoidable. A better way is to simply use the Wanted Pages function which basically lists all broken Wiki links in the site. Just click a link to edit the new article.
• Create the article. Use a short, meaningful names, with no punctuation other than spaces or colons, and with the appropriate namespace (i.e., Arena:...). Pages can be renamed if required but this may break links.
• Copy the original SHTML source (or converted source if available) into the Wiki article and save with no editing.
• Re-edit the new article and make any major changes needed to properly display the page. Minor edits and style changes can be done later on (I would prefer to get all pages converted to Wiki and then go back and edit them).
• Add the appropriate category to the top of the article.
• The new article should be added to the appropriate portal page.

Editing Steps

The original SHTML pages need a small amount of conversion in order to properly displayed as a Wiki article. The below lists is ordered from the most important changes done to minor edits.

• <P> Tags: Unclosed P tags can mess up the display of pages. Unfortunately, most of the <P> tags in the original files are not closed (my excuse is that originally HTML didn't require or have </P>). If you use converted SHTML pages then this step will likely already be performed (though the rare unclosed tag may still linger). You can also just remove the P tags and use blank links instead.

  It also seems that text after <DD> tags must be enclosed in a <P> tag or else it is not properly displayed. For example, the proper formatting should be:

  <dd><p>Text there</p></dd>

  Hopefully this can be corrected in converted SHTML files as well.

• Mismatched Tags: The Wiki is much fussier about missing or mismatched tags which can result in HTML tags showing up in the article. Hopefully this can be mostly corrected in the converted SHTML files, but if you spot rogue HTML showing up, check for unclosed tags, missing quotes, or missing <> characters.
• Links: All links in the original files are absolute or relative anchor tags. Any internal site link will have to the changed to the appropriate article link. External links must also be changed from the <A> tag to the Wiki external link format. It is recommended that external links be changed right away as well as internal links which already have an existing article. I've found it easier to convert internal links right away, even if the page doesn't exist yet as this makes it easy to find out which pages need to be created and created them (use Wanted Pages or view articles and look for red links).
• Images: Any inline or downloadable image can be left as an external link to the original image. Eventually, most images should be uploaded to the Wiki and their links changed to internal images to take advantage of Wiki image features.
• Files: Currently the Wiki doesn't easily support the addition of files (ZIP files can be uploaded the same as images but the Image: namespace is confusing since they aren't images at all). Use external links to the original file for now until we figure out what to do with them in the long term.
• Titles and Headers: Most of the original pages use one of four SPAN classes (Bold1, Bold2, Bold3, title) to format major and minor titles. I upgraded to v1.4 beta which supports the use of Span, so these can technically be left as is (I still have to add the classes to the Wiki stylesheets at this time). We may wish to change some of these tags to Wiki sections and sub-sections, or to simply bold tags or other Wiki header formats appropriate.
• Colors: The original site was white text on black but the Wiki site can (or will) support any dark/light color scheme from the available skins. Most colors used in the site are either with the SPAN title classes (which left as is and changed in the stylesheets) or as absolute colors in table headers (usually biege text on blue background which again should be fine). There are likely some places that light text colors are used that will not show up on a light background. These will need to be changed to either use the default text color or a proper style.
• HTML to Wiki Formatting: I'm still learning Wiki, but I know that some supported HTML tags could be better if they were changed to the approparite Wiki formatting tags in the long term.
• Splitting Pages: Some of larger SHTML pages can be eventually split up into smaller Wiki articles. For instance, the Daggerfall Hints page contains a number of misc. hints, each of which could be on their own page. Another example is the Morrowind scripting function page which contains over 500 function descriptions, each of which could have their own page. Exactly which pages are split and how can be discussed and determined later (I not sure what the best way to split or not split pages is atm).

Wrye's Editing Notes

Okay, I've converted a fairly good sample over the past 24 hours or so, and here's my experience... Wrye 21:33, 19 Feb 2005 (EST)

• Mechanics
  • First, learn the wiki syntax. While you can insert html, I think that you're much better off using wiki syntax. It's more compact, easier to edit and should behave better stylewise. E.g., here I'm using '*' instead of an html <LI>.
  • I find that it's simplest to have (at least) two different browser windows open: one pointing at the original UESP page, and the other pointing at the new page being edited. I also usually have at least one or two other windows open, either pointing elsewhere on the site or pointing to the wikipedia help pages.
  • You'll also most likely want a good text editor. It definitely helps to have a regex search/replace function (and regex facility of course! :) Great for changing all LI's into wiki *'s. Also great for pre-munching tables, etc.
  • There's an html to wiki table conversion function at: here. In IE, use the "Edit source" icon to get the original html, then dump the table portion of it at the url above. Then (optionally) set "Use one-line position of cells in a row." to "yes". Then hit the convert button and copy the new wiki table back to the site.
  • Use the bar at the end of the link to auto-generate the short text version of the link. (E.g., "Morrowind:Mages Guild Quests|" within the double brackets defining the link will generate link text "Mages Guild Quests" rather than "Morrowind:Mages Guild Quests".
  • Put the category definition at the top of the page, and define the sort key (otherwise everything get's sorted under the namespaces, which ends up being very dull:) E.g., in the doublebrackets, it should be: "Category:Morrowind-Quests|Mages Guild Quests"
• Bottom up or top down? Note that it's perfectly fine to create a wiki link to a page that doesn't exist yet. Clicking on that link will then give you a chance to create the missing page.
  • If you're going top down, create the index page first, defining all links. Then follow the links to create the pages. I used this method for Morrowind stuff that I've done so far.
  • If you're going bottom up, use the address bar to create the page (".?title=Morrowind:Something_New"), then create the new page. I'm using this method for Tamriel Factions.
  • When expanding a branch from UESP, you should consider whether you want to manually recreate UESP's index page or use wikimedia's autogenerated category page instead. E.g., top level of Lore, I've got a manually generated page, but main links under it will probably be mostly links to category pages. E.g., Factions. If you plan on using a category page, then you'll have to create the pages bottom up as described above.
• Rethinking Wrye 14:31, 20 Feb 2005 (EST)
  • In retrospect, I'm not at all sure that it was a good idea to split up factions into one entry per page. Basically, there's not enough information per page. Which means 1) you have to click way too often, and 2) you lose the entertainment that comes from reading the other entries on the page. This problem becomes worse with other categories. (Dictionary, etc.)
  • So, it would probably be better to go back to a unified page. Simplest might be to just go back to Dave's A-Z pages. Another approach might be to go with types of factions, e.g., "Orders", "Knights", etc. But there are several one off factions, plus factions that might fit under more than one category (e.g., Thieves Guild: criminal organizations, imperial guilds). A-Z is probably better. Also, that's better for consistency with dictionary, etc.
  • The cost of this is that you lose wiki's simple linking, and categories become less useful.
• Redid Tamriel Factions Wrye 16:25, 20 Feb 2005 (EST)
  • I redid the factions into A-Z pages. Also, dropped the categories and started using templates for the A-Z link bars, which works nicely. I'm dropping the intermediate index page (e.g., no Tamriel:Factions page, rather faction bar appears on Lore page.