Forum:Interactive tools and calculators

Ever since we've decided to fork to Weird Gloop, there has been some discussions on RSW's calculators (like the one linked here), which is IMO a great addition to the wiki and something we should definitely explore. To quote Cook, these tools that are although slightly outside core "wiki" boundary, can improve reader experience and transform how people (and how MANY people) use the wiki - on RSW, 30% of the traffic comes from them.

Me and a few others have been collecting some ideas experimenting with implementation of the calculators. These are now organized in a Google doc that you can access at #"Interactive tools & Calculators" on Discord. We have implemented a few things, for example this block distribution graph. With a graph like this in the page (specifically the "Natural generation" section), we can show how exactly the block is distributed, instead of just plain "Stone makes up the majority of the solid blocks generated in the Overworld above y=0.", which is much better.

In addition a simpler gadget we've designed is a Nether/Overworld coordinate converter using a nice table layout. The vision is more than these simple things - the target is more and more complicated thing like 3D viewer, worldgen tools like Chunkbase, etc. I would love to hear everyone's input on this about whether it's a good idea, and you can also join #"Interactive tools & Calculators" in #project-forum on Discord for quick discussion.

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 Strong support. --Dianliang233 (talk) 11:08, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support for this. There is an immense amount of things we could create calculators and tools for in terms of Minecraft, the usefulness of the wiki could expand tenfold and it could attract far more users. Unfortunately I don’t have the expertise to contribute to the creation of these tools, but I massively support their creation and this project moving forward. - Harristic | Talk 👁 DungeonsEntitySprite penguin-onesie.png: Sprite image for penguin-onesie in Minecraft
12:34, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support. --Meeples10 (talk) 15:14, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support. --Delvin4519 (talk) 15:53, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support for the reasons Harristic mentioned. It would be one extra thing we have over the fandom wiki as well! 👁 Image
plighting_engineerd (talk) 16:58, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support - Per Harristic. -- ThatOneWolf ^{Time for a chat?_{See my edits?}} 18:04, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support - per above. I'm not sure if we want to or are even able to try and compete with all the existing tools out there, but there are certainly a number of tools that are either very obscure or simply don't exist that would be helpful for many players. Having a place to consolidate tools is a pretty cool idea though! If some documentation about how to get started on a tool gets made I might be able to take a crack at helping out, but it is probably outside of my skill level unfortunately. Personally, I would prefer to have calculators on dedicated pages rather than integrated into the articles as mentioned. We would obviously link them together, but I think putting them on the same page would be a bad idea. Ishbosheth (talk) 06:14, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Are there plans to implement some of those existing tools you mentioned in the beginning, in the wiki as such as well?

And for the point you brought up regarding them being integrated to existing articles, couldn't they exist both there as well as on dedicated pages under a main overview page that goes over links to all these individual tool pages? Hound (talk) 15:40, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Ideas for our own versions of existing tools are on the google doc, but weather or not we actually want to compete with those tools is part of my question. In any case I would imagine we would start with the tools that don't exist first.

It is possible to include the tools in multiple places, but I think adding the tools into the articles would both break up the article too much and make it difficult to use the tool. Putting them on separate pages (and linking between them) would work better. Ishbosheth (talk) 18:39, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support A small query, would these tools be just hosted in the wiki or would they be exist both on the wiki and as a stand alone thing as well (as their own webpage not in the wiki - just like how most of the existing tools have their webpage)? Hound (talk) 15:40, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

I believe the idea is that they would be hosted on the wiki, presumably via lua, JS or some equivalent. Ishbosheth (talk) 18:39, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support – ThisNewWikiIsSoMuchBettertalk | contribs 16:39, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

This section is about how are we actually going to implement this. RSWs do it by using a JS form that is configured by a template, then an API request is fired to parse an actually template/Lua module on the wiki into HTML which is then displayed to the user via JS. Obviously this process has the advantage of being established and won't require much effort to set up here on MCW, which I actually got working on dev wiki. However, it being configured with a JSON can sometimes be a constraint. For example, there would be no way to implement the table layout like the coordinate converter has. In addition, Lua has no proper support with big integer that exceed double precision floats, which makes it incredibly annoying when working with thing like seeds.

Another option is, of course, using JavaScript client-side, which is the current approach I'm using for all calculators. However, then there comes the problem of which framework we are going to use or just jQuery? How are we going to use third-party packages like Three.js without a) a bundler and b) without ESM support in MediaWiki? For the moment I'm writing all the code in a GitHub repo https://github.com/Dianliang233/mcw-calc with Vue SFCs - I'm using Vue because it's now WMF's frontend framework of choice and is shipped with MW by default, together with @wikimedia/codex, a component library that looks just like OOUI by WMF. Then Webpack will provide you with a dev server and also bundle your code. A script will then automatically generate all the necessary files and Gadget-definition, then another script will use API to deploy it onto the real wiki. Is this all really ideal? Is there any other way we can get around this? --Dianliang233 (talk) 11:08, 23 November 2023 (UTC)