User:Pinsplash/(hopefully) final statement on VDC

Chill. I know some of the stuff I did on vdc was bad looking back. Some arguments could have been avoided if I was less stubborn. I do regret the severe lack of discussion that happened regarding the entity article template, and I sort of regret starting it cause now that I've quit, everything's just more fucked up over there. I didn't want it to end like other great suggestions did: a thin sliver in the middle of a random talk page. Hopefully for some of you, this incident was a reminder of what wikis are about: collaboration.

Incidents on VDC would have been much less severe if Jeff Lane or another admin had actually stepped in even once. Valve's philosophy for the wiki was essentially "the community decides everything" and to give very minimal intervention from admins. That doesn't work. A wiki needs present authority in order to keep it functioning and healthy, to carry out maintenance, to resolve disputes, to (maybe, just maybe) enforce a little quality control. Those things have not happened in recent times. They will happen here.

Flags
When I quit VDC, I said that my changing of the position of the flags section was to see how long it would take people to notice. That wasn't really true. I genuinely did think it was better and at that moment felt like taking a stab at no one in particular about the general lack of care and attention shown by many VDC editors. That probably doesn't make you want to listen to me, but consider this: In Quake and Half-Life, I/O did not exist. (Back in my day we just triggered the entities.) WorldCraft had a keyvalues tab, and a flags tab, which you had to click to see, and that was it. The keyvalues were always the first thing you saw, and flags were the second—would you, a late 90's/early 00's tutorial writer, list the properties for an entity outside of an order you had always seen them in? Of course not!

However, in 2004, inputs and outputs were implemented by Source. WorldCraft, now Hammer, needed two new tabs, and tutorials (slash wikis, i.e. VDC) needed two new sections. Where did those go? ...below the flags tab. Why? Do tell me. If you were on VDC in those days, you knew the text placement was relatively questionable:. This was not a permanent state, though. By 2009, most VDC pages were updated to use a KV and I/O listing format similar to classic VERC's, which we'll call Format A, and a flag listing format most closely echoing that of VERC Collective (Format B).

In typical VDC pages, before my interference, text often flowed in this format: First, your standard "X name is a Y type entity in Z game" followed by text describing the entity which might be a single sentence or multiple paragraphs. Then, we'd get to keyvalues, a block of text in Format A, followed by flags in Format B, then immediately back to Format A for inputs and also finally outputs. So this is how it looked: regular writing, A, B, A, A. I believe that "BAAA" results in pages looking less messy, and makes them nicer to read. Do you believe I'm wrong? that the old, Quake-rooted way is easier to read? that it's still logical, because people always go to the flag tab? Well, it's your loss. You can get un-used to it, or go back to VDC. (Comparison: )