User:Tyagi/tyagiBotStuff

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TyagiBot Stuff

Solving Multi-Format

Some options for getting tyagiBot creating multi-format entries from Xevious's games to be added list:

Option 1

Leave the list as it is. Tyagibot needs to:

• Pre-process the list (current run is linear processing). Create a data structure (hash?) that looks like:

• Game Title (string)
• List of Platforms (list or tuple of strings)
• Publisher (string)
• Release date (string)

• Process the data structure

• Where an entry has one platform, create a single game template and upload
• Where an entry has more than one platform, create single game entries and a summary multi-entry page.

• • It would be slightly more work but I think this is the process that ought to be followed. But where it's a multi-platform game, you need to create the Games/XXXXformats template and the Games/XXXX template and insert those into the individual game pages.

Option 2

Change the list structure. The list needs to:

• Contain a single line entry for each game title that appears on multiple platforms.
• Between ## markers for the game's platforms, the platform titles should be comma separated.
• This field entry should be parsed by tyagiBot and the final two steps of option 1 applies.

Limitations

• This does not solve the problem of a game having existing entries in the Wiki on other platforms. This is more difficult to solve, as it requires the bot to search the Wiki for other possible platforms. This is time consuming and an intensive task for the Wiki.

• • To solve this, when a single format page is made, add it to the category Single-Format Games. We can then manually look at the list of games on that category and easily see which ones have the same name.

• • If it helps I can make sure the lists are in alphabetical order when creating them ...

• • The order of the titles doesn't make any difference to the bot.

• • • But it might make a difference to the way the multi-format thing works ... Xevious 11:19, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

• • Provided all the formats are released on the same week ;-) The algorithm I had in mind was to take the game's name (without the format in brackets), then create a hash table which uses the game's name as the key, with the formats as a list of platforms, associated with that key. I would also store the other data such as publisher, release date etc. as part of that data structure associated with the key (the game title). -- tyagi 20:19, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

• • Erm, OK. (You lost me!) For now I think we should start the new category of SFProcessing for easy manipulation until you work it out ... I'll add it to the template and so you should add it to your bot template. What this will do is to create a category which contains all automatically-generated games from now on. Someone can then go down that list, and where a game is single-format, simply remove the SFP tag, and where it's multiformat, they can create the template sheet and formats sheet and feed it in, then remove the tag. Xevious 14:03, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

• • OK, see this category. Obviously, we'd need to add the category to everything existing, but that's not urgent. It's a handy category by itself, anyway. But what you can see from what I've applied it to is that:
    • City Life is single format
    • FIFA is multi-format
    • Dreamfall is multi-format, even though it came out a couple of weeks apart

So single format games remain in here forevermore, and if a couple of years later they're released on another format, we'll see immediately. The bot can then run from this category, if that's possible. It can search for an instance where the game name is the same as that above it, ignoring the format. If it finds this, then it copies the main body excluding the Infobox into a template Games/gamename. It replaces the current page body with this. If you're clever, which you are, it could move the screenshots and review scores and the game series indicator to the bottom before it did all this! It then repeats this for every format that's listed there. And then finally it creats the Games/gamenameformats template and inserts in into the Games/gamename template. Easy, eh? Xevious 14:36, 15 August 2006 (UTC)