User blog:SlyCooperFan1/Acepedia Update: 30 Days After AC7 -- Uploading, Editing, Citing

Welcome to the first Acepedia Update after the full release of Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown on all three platforms! We're over a month after the console releases, and almost three weeks after the Steam release! Early indications are looking really good. AC7's sales figures appear to be far surpassing both AC6 and Assault Horizon, and reviews are fairly consistent and mostly positive: tight gameplay, deep (if at times complicated) story, and incredible visuals.

As you would expect, Acepedia has been hard at work over these last few weeks, gathering as much data and info as possible. Aces At War: A History 2019 having accessible English and Chinese versions in addition to Japanese is an incredible help in this aspect.

So let's go over what the past month has seen on the wiki, and what you can look forward to in the next couple of months!

AC7 Content
Remember, our spoiler warning policy expires on April 1.

Our top, number-one priority at this moment is any and all content related to Ace Combat 7. Welcome to all of the new editors who have joined us in adding any small or large detail from the game to our articles! There are plenty of subpages from the main game article, as well as our mission articles and lore articles, the latter including the Lighthouse War, the International Space Elevator, Princess Rosa Cossette D'Elise, and legendary pilot Mihaly A. Shilage.

Of course, we can't forget the real stars of this franchise: the aircraft! There are plenty of aircraft to fly in Ace Combat 7, from the starter F-16C Fighting Falcon to the endgame F-22A Raptor, YF-23 Black Widow II, and Su-57. And of course, there's gotta be that spoiler, secret aircraft...

One big aspect of our AC7 content collection was researching how S Ranks worked, and User:Qbicle put together a blog post detailing all of the info he discovered with help from other users across the entire community! Click here to read all about S Ranks in Ace Combat 7!

As the weeks continue to roll by, we'll continue gathering as much info as we can on AC7's story and gameplay. We'll be developing mission and cutscene transcripts as well, so look forward to those or browse through what we have in progress already!

New Upload Form
Over the past week, I've been developing a brand-new file upload form! This allows for new users to properly explain their file uploads -- descriptions, sources, and licenses -- while ensuring that all file uploads from here on out are properly formatted. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time, but never had the chance to until now. A big inspiration for the new upload form's design was Wikimedia Commons and how they have a similar script to help new users.

Qbicle and myself didn't realize until very recently (thanks to User:Ishimura Elite for helping us!) that a lot of Acepedia's file uploads are performed while users are in the middle of editing a page. This is complicated to work with, because we can't feasibly squeeze a form like that into the editing process. However, we also can't have users continuing to upload files with no information to accompany them. For the time being, I've completely disabled mid-editor file uploading -- but this is not ideal. What I'd like to do is include a link that will open the upload form in a new tab, users can upload their file with the form there, then switch back and resume editing. The challenge here is actually putting a link in the editor to do that. I'll figure it out!

In the very near future, I'll continue to tighten up the script's code, porting some styles to CSS and making it easier to tweak in the future. And, as explained, I'm going to add at least a link to the new upload form in the editing process so users who upload that way aren't hung out to dry.

Rich Text Editing Disabled
We've been having a big issue with some edits recently. Situations where templates were replaced, all content was put onto a single line, or even duplicating an entire page -- all for seemingly no reason whatsoever! After ripping my hair out thinking that this was the brand-new VisualEditor, and after plenty of users, Qbicle, and myself got extremely annoyed, I put a request in with Fandom Support...

...and it turns out, all of these glitches were caused by the classic rich-text editor. This is sometimes referred to as "Visual" mode in the source editor; some of you may have seen the "Visual" and "Source" tabs at the top of the editor. The "Visual" mode was actually the classic rich-text editor, which is apparently riddled with bugs and formatting glitches. After an email exchange, Fandom Support graciously disabled the classic rich-text editor on our wiki, so these issues should no longer happen.

If you're still looking for a "What You See Is What You Get" experience, where you edit the page how it would look, try the new VisualEditor. But if you're like me and you want 100% control over the page's contents, use the source code editor. It's never too late to learn wikitext! And there's plenty of resources to help out!

New Citation Templates
In February 2014, right before the international Ace Combat Infinity beta ended, I created Template:Ref. The idea was that this single template would standardize all citations across Acepedia, without having to use multiple templates or rely on HTML  tags like Wikipedia does.

That was a short-sighted mistake. We should have been doing what Wikipedia does from the beginning.

The Ref template is unintuitive because the idea of having one template standardize many different forms of media is just absurd, it always forces a reference name even if the reference is a one-off, and it doesn't even parse properly on mobile. To make matters worse, for some inexplicable reason, I created Template:Refcall to use for calling a previously-made reference later in the page instead of just putting that in one template.

We're going to backpedal out of this mess. Thankfully, with the addition of Lua modules, we're in a better position now to create more efficient game citation templates. Template:Cite game is now available and works for a select few games, including AC7, with more on the way as I verify cutscene names. We've already had Template:Cite web and Template:Cite tweet for a while, so these will be brushed up and we'll go from there. Maybe Cite book? All of this will be explained on a new policy page, Acepedia:References, so users in the future will easily be able to cite their sources for our information. Verifiability remains one of our priorities for all information on the wiki. In the near future, I look forward to purging the wiki of all uses of the Ref and Refcall templates.



Whew... we've certainly got our work cut out for us! Rest assured that we're up to the challenge, and we've had an incredible show of support from many editors old and new alike! Not to mention, we surpassed one million monthly page views, breaking our all-time record from the release of Assault Horizon! Here's hoping AC7's sales show just as strong and break just as many records!