Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

New ERE slogan

The ERE needs a slogan. You can make it. Post your proposals here!

• The collective database of all things Jazz Jackrabbit ( ~RoW_Odin314 )
• All things Jazz, All the time. ( ~com9898 )
• Jazz up your knowledge! ( ~niek )
• Exact Jazz, exactly when you need it. (~PT32)
• No smooth jazz, just Jazz Jackrabbit. ( ~CrimiClown )
• my slogan for ERE. (~cooldude31)
• ERE – Find your Jazz-news whEREver you are. (~andbr98)

ERE Elitism

People seem to be interested in ERE, but not enough to contribute (see the J2O poll). This seems at least sometimes, probably often, to be the case because they don’t know anything they can contribute, or because they do not know where to start. In the meantime the rules disallow writing articles about non-important/notable clans. Rules like that seem to make this wiki more of a thing for the elite, instead of something where people, enthusiastic about their own clan, edit pages about it. Removing the rule would probably cause small and hard to verify entries to be added (as Grytolle did today), but it might be worth it.

Similarly, the encyclopediacal nature of this wiki seems to make it hard to do content aggegration and put all content and knowledge and things in the community on one place. It’s not encyclopediacal to write tutorials about how to configure internet play or introductions to Jazz Jackrabbit 2, or compose lists of utilities and fan games or indexes of where content is to be found within the community.

Something to think about, both, I’d say. I can’t say I’m convinced that the standards should be lowered but it does bear thinking. ~Fquist

Perhaps shift some of the J2O content over to the wiki? Certainly the wiki appears to be mirroring large chunks of the main J2O site (JCS details, character and enemy details, notable community members). Another idea is to make it easier to get to the encyclopedia by adding a link for it to the top link bar (about/characters/…). ~BoggyB

This debate’ll kind of get broader with your reply here (not a problem, it’s nice).

I’d love to shift the J2O content over to the wiki.. it would require a lot of effort of course, but it could improve the site. However, it seems to me that most of J2O’s content is not really written in an encyclopedia-ish way but more an “explaining how things work” way. Or it uses link lists, or an enthusiastic style. The top link bar has long been a problem for me (Monolith I regard the most for his criticism there), it’s a big navigation problem.. just like with the content I’d like to change it but I have no clue how to go about it (partly because I cannot change the buttons myself, but also how to lay out the new thing). I would probably replace the entire about section with an “Information” button, and have some portal into all the information (the current about/characters/… structure doesn’t make a lot of sense).. but it would be hard with how to deal with the wiki in a while.

I’ve been fiddling with how to implement things like the following for a while:

• List of all fangames, of resources – it seems like making ERE contain lots of lists like that isn’t really the wiki’s current purpose
• Tutorials like how to play jazz online – tutorials are not really encyclopedia content (or well, the wikipedia sort of encyclopedia)
• Community collaboration projects to have people be able to easily do things together, for example put a letter draft on the wiki to send to Epic, asking about the source, and having people edit it – this has nothing to do with encyclopedias. Other cool things would be to have the wiki be able to be a gathering place for collecting things like suggestions for the game, or for example ideas for new game types or scripting language ideas, or a manual for certain utilities. All those are probably addable in some encyclopedia form, and wikis would be ideal for them, but that’d probably detract from the usefulness, and they’d still usually not be notable entries (Scripting Language doesn’t exist yet)
• Shift J2O content section content to ERE: how to move things like lists of useful downloads? Again, not encyclopedia-ish. Or the JCS introduction in the JCS section? Or even the section indexes.

Maybe there should be seperate namespaces for encyclopediaic and regular content that can easily link to eachother. A start, and your suggestion provides more motivation for it, would be adding links to ERE in the content sections and directly replace anything that’s double, but not move content that ERE does not provide. That will still mean the content is fragmented, though. It seems like ERE has a very narrow goal, which is a big plus (encyclopedias are great) and some cons (doesn’t provide much motivation for people that find it less easy to write in a special style and on special topics, fragmented content) ~Fquist

While the ERE‘s name leaves no doubt about its purpose (an encyclopedia) it is ofcourse possible to use a wiki as a CMS. You could easily (well, it might take some time, but it shouldn’t require technical skill or so) transform the current J2O content into wiki entries. Ofcourse this could lead to confusion: how can you know if an entry belongs to the ERE or the Tutorials section or something else? Maybe you could make the “list of all articles” show several folders, grouping the entries by various categories (ERE, Tutorials…). If you would then change the url for a wiki entry into something like /wiki.php?ERE/Index for the ERE index, etcetera, it would be easy to distinguish the “normal” content from the encyclopedia entries. ~Fl@$h aka BlewMeUp

Do not let the name guide the purpose if the purpose can be changed for the better. I don’t see any reason why this resource should be limited to whatever limits there are that make an encyclopedia. Tutorials can be just as useful, if not more useful, than just simple descriptions of what things are. I also see no need for a distinction (by namespaces or whatever) between encyclopedia and non-encyclopedia content. It might be nice to have a separation for things like Triggers and How to Use Triggers, but I don’t really think that needs to be done with namespaces or calling things specifically encyclopedia or non-encyclopedia content. ~Monolith

Kind of off topic, but i’d like to see more visual content in the ERE. For example, pictures of events in action, or perhaps images of programs such as Jazztool in action. I could make some of these, but I can’t do them all. ~RoW_Odin314

I agree…see this, Odin, for front page modifications: http://www.jazz2online.com/J2Ov2/wiki/?Discussion%3A_Index&oldID=1134242280 ~White Rabbit.

Dates

Why do entries only have hour:minute dates? Why not have the day, month and year after an entry’s edit, e.g. 3:40pm 23/01/06? And what is the number after the time supposed to be, e.g. ’7:06pm 0’ and ’12:00am 1’? Is Misc. Discussions the right place to bring this up? …so many questions.

Because the month, day and year are in a small header above the changes of that day, foo. The number only shows up in recent changes for a specific entry for a reason I don’t know. ~Fl@$h aka BlewMeUp