PZwiki:News
August 2023
Wiki news(27 August 2023)
It's a last Sunday of the month, so time for another monthly recap! August was less active when it comes to tackling main projects, but we got a lot of works, including new contributors!
The Knox Event in Real Time finished
With the The Knox Event in Real Time officially concluded, a site notice has changed to the usual Project Build 41 Update (which saw minor updates, but is still planned to be finished, hopefully before Build 42).
However, that allowed the Knox Event to be fully updated with the new info, thanks to contributions from the Cinderous, Susceptance and ThatLeaf and some cleaning up. Make sure to check it if you want to see a detailed breakdown on how Knox Infection happened (mind the spoilers, though!).
Refreshed help pages
All existing editing help pages were checked and refreshed this month, which should allow for better and easier editing! Some duplicate pages were removed, instead pointing to the great documentation on MediaWiki help pages (that are translated to multiple languages!), while more PZwiki-exclusive info being added with the long overdue Help:Tables having info about the usage of PZwiki tables classes.
Style guide was updated, including the new Preferred code style section for those more technical-minded folks (like Vibrance who's helping a lot, thanks!) and some further information, so be sure to check it out!
The translation help page was added, to aid more and more translators the wiki have as well (more about this below).
Finally, the help contents page and all the pages saw navigation and layout updates too, so they are more concise and hopefully everything is easier to find than ever! There were also some minor updates to the sidebar, projects and properly including the former things to do page!
Project Locations and Maps
This month, Project Locations and Maps saw the most attention from the existing projects, with great contributors from ThinkDock1721, but also some minor contributions from IndiePz1027, Survivor27!, Theoneofmyth654 and XelaThing, thanks!
Project Translations
With a lot of folks from around the world, the Project Translations is always seeing some updates, but before listing regular translators, let me thank from the great support of Vibrance who is consistently doing great work editing and fixing not only the Simplified Chinese pages, but also stretching to the English pages. He's the one helping with various templates too, including the help pages clean-ups and style guide ideas, thanks!
We also had great recent additions from Sarah52 who not only helped with recognizing and improving Brazilian Portuguese pages out of the regular Portuguese pages which should finally be settled after the recent split up, but also helped by providing fixed to usual English pages and adding a new template for Project Translations, thank you for the hard work!
Now let's summarize all the languages other than English now (in alphabetic order):
Simplified Chinese
Vibrance was adding translations for templates and help pages, and improving existing pages as well Azsx3241001 helping with one page, thank you!
Traditional Chinese
While Traditional Chinese didn't see much updates lately, it seems that Aicegs and Fishyang did some work on Traditional Chinese pages as well, improving some things after the name migration, nice!
Japanese
While Japanese does have some translations, most are outdated, but this month both Halkaze and Tsunpi made some minor work, thank you! Additionally, thanks to an addition of the Japanese version of Frequently Asked Questions to the Project Zomboid Wiki/ja, I also added it to the English main page for it to hopefully see more attention. It might be outdated, but if so, it's only best to make it up to date, and not bury it totally!
Brazilian Portuguese
All thanks to the great work Sarah52 (continuing on some initial work of Cau and folks from the Brazilian Portuguese translation team), Brazilian Portuguese saw lots of updates recently.
Firstly, both the main page and the sidebar were translates and are up to date!
Secondly, all the remaining Brazilian Portuguese pages out of the regular Portuguese were moved, as noted before.
Thirdly, some templates were translated and finally, some pages saw some love too, including Containers which must have been hard. Thanks for the hard work again!
Russian
Russian didn't see many contributions, but Артур Фрост and 4apayev did some minor works, thanks!
Spanish
Spanish is in generally good shape (except some new additions such as main page and the sidebar translations, feel free to help!), but this month it's Maca doing all the work this month!
Thai
Finally, Thai saw the translated sidebar thanks to looknai and Riko Prushka from Discord, thanks!
Modding
Modding pages are unfortunately a bit on a back burner, but we got some contributions to that field too, all thanks to the work of Filzball, Glytch3r, Neznajka and Wagnarok this month, thank you!
Minor additions and fixes
And lastly, from the community updates, let's mention some minor, but still worthy contributions!
First of all, let's all thanks Angostura for their great work on adding some food pages that are up for standard! We still have things to do such as improval of infoboxes (more on that below) and boilerplates, but new pages that are quality, are always welcome, thanks!
Other than that, there were some minor additions too:
- Hiimray doing some additions, including adding the quite handy exercise summary table (it needs checking and filling, but it's looking great!).
- Dakenho did some additions to the Fire page.
- Undefined added some minor info to Logs Stack page.
- Eclasto added some reference links for what likely inspired Quagga Cakes and Choco Cakes.
- PerleLacEst added code block in Padlock page.
- Littlegreenrock added some info to the skill pages.
- Goder5555 did some minor additions to Trapping, Vehicles and Notched Wooden Plank.
as well as DeadCell adding a basic Poncho (disambiguation) page (that needs to improved; feel free to do so!) and Slamjam9 prompting to creation of the Gas pump page (thanks Vaileasys!), so I guess it counts?
There were also some fixes:
- Darkonion5 with minor firearm value fixes.
- Lcrichusa5 fixing nutrition (weight) value thresholds.
- Orangecryptid added chopping tree for weight loss.
- Sulphur fixing typo in animal catch formula in Trapping.
- Survived Enough fixing weight for Roasting Pan.
And tiny typo fixes by Driftaloft, Fazbeus, GAS2GOPROTECTER, Jorise and Will – while small, they all count, thanks!
Admin work
Finally, while not as epic as previous work, there's been some other works done by Administrators.
- Other than improving the help pages and patrolling each change, I did some improvements to occupation icons and first time utilizing a bot, though I still find some issues with it.
- Vaileasys is back on track with revamped Template:Infobox item, for hopefully easier additions of new items as well as Project Navigation and Categories, some of which was teased on Discord. He also finally revamped the Medicinal plants, Wild plants and Wild herbs pages to follow the new Foraging categories, with more to come!
- Kirrus is also helping with the categories by installing CategoryTree extension. He also fixed an issue with active users, so now it should display more correctly, by being updated each month so {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} should work, including in pages it's shown, such as in Special:CreateAccount page (and it's currently 47, thanks!).
What's next=
While the focus is still geared toward what's outlined in the up-to-date wiki tasks page, expect continuing work from the existing projects. Maybe finally with the new infoboxes and categories more items will be added and updated en masse (although small fixes and additions will hopefully be there before). I will also probably continue on tackling some minor things from wiki tasks, including image deduplication, optimization and categorization, but time will tell!
Until then, see you next month!
July 2023
Wiki news(30 July 2023)
So here I am, writing a third monthly summary, filling the main page with three month streak! July was surprisingly active, so let's get to summarizing it!
The Knox Event
As you probably noticed, the site notice changed from the usual one, promoting the PZwiki:Project Build 41 Update (which is not yet finished, so feel free to help!) to The Knox Event Twitter (or should I say 𝕏, gotta change the icon soon I guess). For the whole July amazing The Indie Stone developer, Pat Bren tweeted what happend exaclly 30 years ago in the game world. It will stay for a week or so at least, so people can read through it. A summary is also available on Knox Event page here, feel free to contribute if anything's missing!
I18n
Most of the work turned out to be focused mostly on PZwiki:Project Translations, as we've got quite a lot folks coming with translations!
New languages
First of all, we now have added Turkish with quite a lot translations thanks to the Texaliuz! There was also some splitting done, starting with the Portugese creating Project Zomboid Wiki/pt-br to match separate language available in the game, thanks to the Cau on Discord who picked the pt-br pages! There still could be some mislabeled pages, so take a look at any Portugese and Brazilian Portugese pages and feel free to corrent, move or take a note here on in Discord, so they can be taken care of!
Another big change is having zh and zh-cn changed to 僵尸毁灭工程 wiki and 殭屍毀滅工程 wiki respectively, as that's the proper name used both in MediaWiki and in-game. Some pages in zh, that were supposed to be Traditional Chinese were in fact simplified, and those have been moved thanks to Vibrance. However, similar to Brazilian Portugese, if you spot any errors in Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese or pages still using zh or zh-cn, feel free to report! I also had to fiddle around with namings, so you can still find some references to uppercase Hans and Hant, those should be moved too.
New translations
I've mentioned Turkish before, but this month we've seen a lot more of translation updates. Firstly, Czech Main Page and some templates finally got a translation thanks to the Flopflak, while Vibrance has been doing awesome work translating and coordinating with Vaileasys translating to simplified chinese! Ukrainian got some love too, thanks to FreD and Texaliuz helped with the Spanish translations! Very active on Discord SuperLisa is helping with the long-negled translations of Dutch main page, but not only, thanks! I also updated some Polish ones while at it. Thank you everyone contributing, including those not mentioned!
New tools
Vaileasys has been working on updating templates to support new languages, so that took (and is taking) some work, but hopefully pays off with easier translating. One of the new addition is, as you probably realized, category for each languages and option to count how many pages are there, assuming they are properly moved to the subpage of proper language, so if you spot a wrong page, feel free to point to it!
Sidebar translations
Finally, we experimented with sidebar translations. I already translated some parts of it to Polish, but we've got Dutch and Simplified chinese thanks to SuperLisa and Vibrance already, so stay tuned! The sidebar links will also automatically point you to the relevant translated pages according to the language chosen in the preferences!
Categories
A lot of work was given to categories too. Vaileasys, as always, did a great job finally getting somewhere with categories, after some discussion, some vision for categories is already done with a first tease on Discord how it looks and two out of seven phases done in PZwiki:Project Navigation and Categories. It's a long and tiring process to have everything categorized properly, but hopefully will make editing and finding relevant info faster, easier and more structurized.
Other works
While i18n and categorizing takes most of the time (and spotlight), there was a lot of work being put in other places too, so let's quickly summarize it at all!
- Finally old infoboxes are gone now! No more pixelated looks on non-English pages. Vaileasys works on a new infobox though, so stay tuned and see progress on the Tasks page (freshly renamed from Issues, as that names was less fitting).
- While at it, we also cleared unused PZwiki:Community portal – let the work focus on the ones we have now!
- I also cleared some User templates, but with more to come!
- Alluseri, the awesome script guy helped us manually reverting changes with wrong
days_rottenin infobox, that was huge! - Further minor cleanups of the Project Zomboid Wiki – and more will come!
- Some item models being updated, there's less and less items without one on a wiki now, some got better angles and bigger models having uploaded, too!
- Some icon optimization and removal of duplicated ones – not much, but some pages will load slightly faster and there will be less confusion about duplicated icons and names hopefully!
- Kenji 03 and Fuberti doing some regular English edits, so that counts! And a lot of other people helping in recent changes, even one typo spotted counts, keep them comming!
Patrolling changes
Finally, it doesn't change anything, Wiki is still open for contributors, but, since I was doing that already, I decided to do it proper and utilize MediaWiki's patrolling feature. It's a feature only for admins, but I marked everything from July as patrolled, that way it helps me and other admin see if the change was actually looked over, so hopefully we should have a better wiki, preventing accidentional mistakes that happen from time to time, as I will spot them!
I originally wanted to revise Help:Contents properly, with more style guide, translation and item names addition, as well as merging and updating pages so they are easier to find, but that will have to wait for some other weekend I guess, hopefully soon™!
Phew, that's it for this month, I probably forgot a lot, so sorry for that. If you need to contact me and add something, do contact me on Discord or any other way! Until next time!
June 2023
Wiki news(25 June 2023)
Welcome back to the sunny (at least around here) month of June. While it's hot outside where I live and sometimes hard to focus, a lot has been done in the wiki in June. Let's get to summarizing it!
Two active admins are always better than one
Wiki is more lively than ever with not one but two very active admins! Vaileasys went back to actively editing and dusting off most of the templates, so while might not seem so at the first glance for regular uses, a lot of the templates are in the better shape than before! Hopefully it'll stay so for a long while so we can both keep the wiki in a healthy shape. If you have any questions, you can ask us directly on talk pages or Discord, with Vaileasys being more up to date with most of the current templates we use today.
Other returning users
With no major updates to the game and lazy holiday months for some, there's probably not so much activity as it could be, but that didn't prevent some from editing and we saw some loose edits from Alluseri, Carina, Fuberti, Kenji 03, Pohly and others I might have missed, thanks!
Main page changes
That's probably the most visible change, although not as prominent as the previous redisigns, the main page has seen some minor tweaks. The quick links icons were updated to feature Spiffo now, a Twitch icon was added and social icons were updated to the lastest ones too (the size will probably be tweaked to be a little more visible though) and optimized for speed, so hopefully, especially mobile users should see minor improvement. Other than that, links were updated to sentence case (preferred as per style guide) and headers are now clickable, too. Some space was also saved, which again can help mobile users. A proper responsible theme is planned somewhere in the future, but that might require a lot of more work. Some minor code cleanups were made, nothing visible, but hopefully can make translating these pages easier.
Sandbox, Polish and Ukrainian pages were already updated with the changes, but other pages will need to be updated too, I'll try to tackle that in the following weeks, but especially if you are a native speaker, feel free to do that yourself, especially as German, Dutch and Norwegian still use an old template back from the 2010s. Czech page is now created too, but not translated, so feel free to do so if you can speak Czech!
First finished project
A small milestone, but let's open a bottle of finest Kentucky's Bourbon to celebrate a first officially closed project! Nothing big, but a dusted old Recipe Template and Distribution project is officially closed and marked as finished, as a first project to do so. Other projects might need some love, but other projects hopefully will be closed eventually too, so the new ones could be made before Build 42! Thank you to any and all contributions!
New model images and page updates
A lot of new models were added, thanks to the constant work of Carina and Vaileasys along with some pages being updated to the latest version (41.78.16 as of writing) and cleaned up. A small step to page being more up to date and hopfully interesting! A size of 200 pixels wide for models (ideally uploaded at 400 × 400 pixels, as noted on the style guide and 128 pixels wide for scaled item images, but thanks to models being in-game the 128 pixels images are less and less used nowadays. :)
Translation cleanups
Some translations being outdated is a slow process; similar to the Project Zomboid Wiki additions, some pages were moved, some had its infoboxes updated, but Vaileasys did some great work on updating some language templates and general workflow. Feel free to help us in Translations project (you can start at choosing better colors, as I'm terrible at it ;)).
Other changes and future work
Other minor achievements usually tracked in PZwiki:Tasks or my page include:
- Removal of old Lua Event pages, with Lua Events being the current one, Modding: prefix is no longer being used, so if you have any scripts relying on it, please update it! Modding page still could use some love, too, with the redisign started by Aiteron
- Removal of any broken redirects and double redirects
- Probably other things I missed, or are too miniscule to mention, but keep an eye on PZwiki:Tasks as I plan to rely my work toward reducing the number of issues there!
Until next time, hopefully next month will mark three months of being up to date with the wiki news!
May 2023
Community News(28 May 2023)
Hello again! To brighten up PZwiki a little, after a brief discussion on the Discord, I decided to update this section each month with a monthly recap of what happened in PZwiki if time permits, hopefully every last weekend of the month. So, starting with May, what happened? Quite a few actually, though most changes were under the hood.
Annonymous side statistics
Thanks to the lovely website manager Kirrus, some anonymous site visitors stats are available to be viewed using self-hosted Matomo Analytics, A Google Analytics alternative that is totally annonymous, but allows us to see most visited pages, devices being used and the like – this should allow driving more direction in the areas that needs the most attention, like most visited pages or tailor it better to the devices being used.
Favicon
Thanks to Mash, we now have a unique, nice-looking favicon! It should appear in most browsers, as well as in bookmarks or shortcuts, and being available in several sizes should be picked right for each device. Feel free to let us know if there's some issue on other devices, especially Apple ones, as there are sizes and icons that are unique to some devices, so if something comes up pixelated, we might consider adding something for it!
Wiki manager
Following the news from February, I ranked up higher to a wiki maintainer, this, among some other minor things, allows me to do some more under the hood changes, including changing some of the interface, which brings me to another point.
New sidebar
I cleaned up and revamped the sidebar a little, including adding a tooltip to each of the entries. This was followed by some renames briefly talked about on Discord too. Feel free to leave any comment on Discord or on my talk page if you see any typos or want something changed.
Cleaned up TODOs
Along the improved sidebar comes also improved TODOlist, I refreshed PZwiki:Tasks as well as PZwiki:Community portal, basically moving what I had on my talk page and removing things that no longer apply. You can now watch the direction wiki goes better. While at it, I also cleaned up some of the Help:Contents and Help:Style guide (where, after a brief discussion with TIS team thanks to Kirrus asking them directly whether US or UK writing style is preferred, a US preference comes first so sorry Spiffo!), though more changes, including writing up Help:Tables is still on the table (no pun intended!).
Minor changes to the Main Page
There were some minor changes to the news to the Project Zomboid Wiki, following the changes for sidebar and TODOs, mostly to the news sections. These are not yet carried to non-English Main Pages, though there might be some more changes coming, so stay tuned!
RecipeLookup removal
RecipeLookup template served its purpose since its introduction back in 2011 by then-wiki administrator DUMBELLS and saw a whooping over 600 edits, but since then became too large and outdated and was, after several experiments and tries, replaced with Template:Crafting by our another administrator User:Vaileasys who did lots of the groundwork for what we have now back in 2019. It was largely replaced for the English pages since, and then I slowly began finishing off what Vaileasys started and finally, after months or replacing it here and there, I went up and replaced it elsewhere, finishing it just today. This finally allowed me to remove the template and its surrounding ones. This allows to focus on future, especially as Build 42 will totally overhaul crafting and remove some old item icons and template errors, as well as ease up maintaining what we have now. Nothing is without loss though, as unfortunately the new template wasn't translated to most languages yet and some pages such as non-English Crafting page suffered the most, so if you have time, you can help translate and add missing stuff to those pages based on the newest content!
Also, hopefully it won't be needed, but just in case, old versions of templates can be restored by any administrator, I also have a local copy of the Russian and Japanese crafting pages, as these were the largest, so feel free to contact me if you want to recreate the pages but want to look how they looked like before.
Item models
Thanks to Carina, most items have models now! There'll be still some cleaning, but Carina did mention few times that if you want any model uploaded, you should ask her about it, so I guess don't hesitate to ask her about it on Discord!
Other contributions
We also saw some returning and new editors doing some minor cleanups as well as some updates for French and Russian pages. While this month was quite slow, a lot has happened since February anyway and slow updates are to be expected until the game gets a new update, which gives us time to focus on improving existing things!
What's next
For me first, I'll finish up cleaning and close PZwiki:Project Recipe Template and Distribution which will be a first project closed, clean up and remove duplicate images now that they're not needed, move some templates that use Crafting/core template directly, then move up on removing old navboxes and infoboxes and then follow a little more about categories, especially the non-English one to give a good base to work at. Then update some admin pages and hopefully go on full-on for updating everything to build 41 and closing PZwiki:Project Build 41 Update project! Till the next month!
February 2023
Community News(26 February 2023)
This section was always a tad neglected, but after a few years of radio silence, it's time for some refresh!
New administrator
Kinda weird to introduce myself, but thanks to User:Kirrus, I got admin rights right at the beginning of Feburary. This allowed me to do some Spring cleaning to the Wiki.
Wiki mainteneance
Again, thanks to the User:Kirrus, we had some new Wiki upgrades, including caching tweaks, new SyntaxHighlight plugin and some mainteneance upgrades.
Nearest neighbour image scaling
Separate 120 px / 128 px item icons are no longer needed! Thanks to the addition of a class=pixelart to MediaWiki:Common.css by User:Kirrus, it can now be applied to icons which are now scaled using nearest neighbour and are no longer blurry, see User:Faalagorn/120 px test to see how it works. It took a while to update all templates and pages to not use the 120 / 128 px variants of icons, but it should work in all modern browsers and some older ones as well, without having to upload a separate version of the icon (unless you are stuck with IE6, though can you even browse anything at that point?). Currently it is applied only to images using class=pixelart and for galleries it can't be applied automatically, but maybe in future it could be applied globally for everything (since we mainly use pixel art anyway).
Cleaning of old burden
Aside of removing the 120 / 128 px icons, I also removed some old templates. There's still more to do (you can track progress on my User:Faalagorn page, especially for translations, so if you can, please upgrade the old pages to use the newest templates, especially the Template:Crafting, Category:Infobox deprecated. It also helps to add DISPLAYTITLE to translations as per Help:Style guide.
New languages
Ukrainian thanks to User:NeGat1FF, Hungarian thanks to User:Gerizmo and Chinese Simplified (Mainland China) thanks to User:Dlm tamashii are all officially added to the wiki now! Feel free to translate to those or existing languages, or add your own!
PZwiki projects updates
Everyone welcome User:Pohly as the new manager of PZwiki:Project Locations and Maps! Also, some original projects by User:Vaileasys were updated in PZwiki:Community portal. The PZwiki:Project Build 41 Update is close to being finished too, hopefully to be settled before Build 42 hits!
Other works
User:Aiteron did a lot of work with Modding recently, we also had a lot of contributors from the regional existing communities, including Russian by User:ВЛАДИЧКА, Thai by User:Godofpleum007 and a lot of work by others, including plumbing revamp by User:IN REM and loose edits by many unnamed contributors in Special:RecentChanges! Thanks a lot for any edit made!
Future work
For me, I'll keep on cleaning the old burden and eventually focus on upgrading everything to Build 41, hopefully before Build 42 hits IWBUMS. Some of the work I do can be tracked on my user page. Until next time!
May 2019
Community News(16 May 2019)
It’s been several months since the last update, however a lot of both minor and major updates have been made.
Changes to the wiki
There have been some fairly large changes made to the wiki lately, mostly stylistic, however were much needed. Previously all articles would use the default “wikitable” design, however we’ve made our own design could “pztable”, so please use this one instead of the old “wikitable” one.
New Main Page
Firstly, the Project Zomboid Wiki has seen a complete redesign. Much of the design was influenced by the previous design (by MalonyJenkins) and various voices on discord, so thank you everyone that provided some input.
New pages
With the new main page, several new pages had to be made to improve the sections. New location pages for each major location (Muldraugh, West Point, etc.), new item lists (Medical, Literature, etc.), various lore pages (Knox Event, Businesses, etc.), a furniture page, which functions similarly to the current Items page, and plenty more.
Administration stuff
The navbox template has finally been out of a sandbox and into an actual template page, which is Template:Navbox/Core, since we still don’t want to break all the non-english pages (more on this later). The languages template, also known as the language bar, has had a style redesign, with the functionality being unchanged. This has been done to more closely match the category bar at the foot of the page.
Page updates/changes
For many years (since 2013), Project Zomboid has changed the name of the game location from ‘Knox County’ to ‘Knox Country’, however this has never been updated on the wiki. So that has finally been updated. Knox Country is now the current updated map of Project Zomboid, whilst Knox County is the old 0.2.0 map of Project Zomboid. The food page has also been updated, now having a list of all food items.
The state of Project Zomboid
Build 41 is still in an internal testing stage, however with many changes being added each week. We are hoping for an IWBUMS release before too long, however the timeframe is still unclear.
Going forward
We are currently working on a new Items page design, which will be separated into different categories, to improve the load time and for the future of translation. This new items page is getting close to completion, so it will hopefully be added before long.
Translation foundations
We have also begun work on a way of improving translation on the wiki. This is still very early in development; however, progress seems to be going well. More info on this should be coming with the next news update, with the items page being the main target to begin the new translation template.
Recipe/Crafting lookup
This template is ‘’still’’ borked, however we hope to work on this and the translation template simultaneously, once the Items page is complete.
Missing/Stub pages
There are still many missing/stub pages that we’d really like to get sorted. So, any contributions towards these pages would be much appreciated. These include:
- Heat source
- Radio
- Water Bottle (Mayonnaise)
- Water Bottle (Remoulade)
- Cake Preparation
- Recipe ingredients
- Bass
- Catfish
- Crappie
- Perch
- Pike
- Sunfish
- Trout
- Compost Bag
- Insecticide Spray
- Mildew Spray
- Mortar and Pestle
- Poultice
- Candle (merge Candle)
- Generator
New infoboxes
Some new infoboxes need to be made, since many articles are still using the very basic outdated ones. These include:
New pages
New pages that we’d like to see added, to improve the knowledgebase are:
- Survivor – somewhere to describe the survivalist houses (boarded, food hoarding), vehicles and upcoming zombies.
- Kentucky State Prison – the location of the jail to the west of Rosewood
- Crossroads Mall – the location of the mall to the East of Valley Station
- House In The Woods – the last stand challenge
- General John McGrew – the man in charge of the going-ons of the Knox Event.
That is all for now, hopefully in the next update we have some more information about build 41, so we can start making changes to compliment its release to stable.
- Vaileasys (talk) Wiki Administrator 15:20, 16 May 2019 (BST)
November 2018
Community News(28 November 2018)
After a short hiatus, we're back with another update.
Changes to the wiki
Return of the regulars
As we all know, build 40 has finally been released to the stable branch, meaning that there's been a small influx of players returning to the game and experiencing the beautiful new weather effects. We've seen a few of our regular players and editors returning and editing the wiki, specifically Faalagorn and The-phil that have made a few necessary edits, so thank you to you both, along with everyone else that has contributed.
For several months Halkaze has been doing some fantastic work in translating to Japanese along with many other super helpful edits, and has truly become a pillar of this wiki.
Weather update
With the release of build 40, we didn't have too many changes or additions, so we've pretty much kept on top of this update. The weather article has been updated to explain the new weather system, however it's still missing some key components, such the effects on the player and some sort of guide to surviving the elements. So, if anyone has anything to add, please do make an edit.
Administration stuff
The navbox has seen a complete redesign, however it is currently using User:Vaileasys/sandbox, since making changes to Template:Navbox will break far too many pages, specifically those not in English. This is only temporary, so we'll eventually sort that out. Furthermore, more navboxes are needed for things like vehicles and environment. So, the navbox changes are still in the early stages.
Once we're done with the navboxes, I'd like to move onto making more infoboxes, specifically for furniture, so we can finally get to making those pages. Since the ability to pick-up and place furniture, I feel like this has become a major part of the game and really should be on the wiki.
Moving forward
With the fabled animations being the next major update, there will be some massive changes to the core of the game. These changes can range from basic survival to clothing and weapons. So as soon as we see a test build, some preparation will need to be made for the stable release to the public.
Other than the animations, we'll be improving the vehicle articles, food, cooking, and anything else that may be covered in the community projects.
That's all for now. We'll be back with another update in a few months time, hopefully with some much bigger news, for both the wiki and Project Zomboid.
August 2018
Community News(31 August 2018)
Since the last update, we’ve had a lot of people, old and new, joining the wiki and contributing.
Community updates
As was mentioned in the previous update, we now have a discord channel dedicated to the wiki (yay). This has already been a great place to get some feedback on changes we’d like to make, while also motivating others to help by contributing. So, if you haven’t already, check out the discord channel.
Furthermore, we have gotten a lot of attention from the guys (and girls) higher up, seeing both a Twitter and a Thursdoid mention. This, along with the Discord channel has caused a massive increase in our active users, from a measly 6 to a whopping 10 (wow, too many to count)! So thank you everyone that has contributed to the wiki over the past 30 days, no matter how diminutive your edit may seem, it is all appreciated.
We are always looking for more people to help contribute to the wiki – while we’ve made a lot of progress, we’ve still got a long way to go before we can consider the wiki 'up-to-date'.
Changes to the wiki
There have been quite a few large and important changes made over the month, some tedious (which are still ongoing) and others are a lot more exciting.
Administration stuff
Notice boxes
First off, a small but important change, the notice boxes have been completely rewritten, since they were using multiple templates, including one which was directly copied from Wikipedia and far too in-depth and complicated for a small wiki like ours. Along with this change, some new templates have also been added, including one for merging and moving. Each of these templates will be added to a category so we can come back to them and either merge, move or remove the notice. All of these old and new templates can be found on a single template/page.
Vehicle infobox
An infobox for both vehicles and buildings has been created, both of which may see some changes as the wiki and game progress. Along with them, the design of the new templates that were mentioned in the previous blog update have been redesigned. The biggest changes include: moodle icons (which link to the relevant moodle), merged primary and secondary use into a single ‘function’ and food templates can now have up to 3 alternate images (this will eventually be added to more infoboxes), along with other more minor changes to the overall look of the infobox.
Main page changes
Some new screenshots have (finally) been added to the main page, along with a caption for each. So no longer will you come to the main page of the wiki and see the same dude jumping over a fence on a basketball court (yes, I’ve been on the main page way too many times). The main page is open to new screenshot suggestions, especially with the new update well on its way. Which, while I’m here, a Steam thread has been created, asking for any screenshots of the beautiful weather effects, which will be needed for an update on the weather article, but more on that later.
So, silly old (not so old) Vaileasys (thy author) made a boo-boo when trying to bypass the spam filter (no, I was not doing naughty stuff) in one of the core parts of the wiki, the bypassing methods resulted in some fairly minute, yet noticeable changes to the wiki, specifically the main page. Luckily for us wikioids (yes, we are wikioids now), Kirrus the Wizard of Esoteric Networking Magicks came riding over to our discord channel fixed it… (sorry for dragging that one out), so thank you Kirrus for my incompetence.
Something else, pretty much everyone that uses the wiki regularly would’ve noticed, is the navbar/background template has been updated to a much nicer and slick design that is hopefully easier to read than the previous one, not that there was anything wrong with the old one Mr. Andrew323 (creator of the template).
Page updates/changes
Vehicles
One of the most noticeable changes that have been made is the new vehicle pages that have finally been made. They’re all using the new vehicle infobox, along with an image of each vehicle variant and their vehicle IDs, which can be used to spawn them into the game using server commands. However, unfortunately the articles are still stubs and need more content before we can remove that beautiful new ‘Stub’ notice.
Mechanics, electricals and metalworking items
Along with the vehicles, we’ve also added an article for each mechanic item, both tools and parts. Some of these have more content than others, however the basics are on their which should satisfy that stirring question many players have had.
Adding the mechanics articles has also lead to the addition of the long-awaited metalworking articles, which have been missing since… probably 2 years, when they were first added to the game. Along with metalworking though, we’ve also added ‘’most’’ of the electrical items, radios, walkie-talkies and TVs are still missing though as they’re a much larger task.
Food! Food has been one of the most up to date categories in the entire wiki for the longest time (since the disappearance of poor MJ). So we’ve been working our butts off, asking for suggestions and collaborating on the discord channel, until we found a design we liked, along with a future update to the navigation path. While this is a much less interesting update than vehicles or electricals, this has been a massive task, and is still far from being completed.
The state of Project Zomboid
Recently, build 40 has been moved over to the IWBUMS beta branch, which is accessed by a lot more players. What this means for the wiki is that we still have a lot of time before we see the new animations being released, which will likely change a lot of what’s currently on the wiki (specifically clothing and weapons). However, with build 40 we may also see some changes to the current farming system which has been mentioned in a Thursdoid, although not confirmed as of yet. We will however, be seeing the new beautiful reflections on vehicles, which will mean all the current vehicle images will need to be replaced (dang it).
Going forward
The RecipeLookup template hasn’t seen any love lately, so hopefully some progress will be made on that over the next month. Currently, the food articles are the main focus, then we’ll probably move onto cooking and food. We may also see some changes to Knox County, radio, the addition of television and Knox Event (some beautiful lore), which some work has already been done for in the background.
A quick note on the author's future status on the wiki: while I (Vaileasys) am and will continue to do my best for Project Zomboid and the PZwiki, I will be starting up a new job in my personal life, which means along with Uni, the updates I make to the wiki will likely dwindle down somewhat. Although, I will continue to play the game, read the dev blogs and make edits (especially if it’s something major) to the wiki. I will always still be available to contact.
July 2018
Community News(30 July 2018)
This is just a quick update regarding the changes to discord.
Dedicated Discord Channel
As the heading suggests, we have a discord channel dedicated to the PZwiki set up. This is somewhere we can go, whether you're a contributor or reader, to discuss changes, make suggestions, or ask questions. If you don't use discord, that's fine, you can still leave messages on discussion pages and the external wiki threads. The purpose of the discord channel is to have an instant messaging discussion, allowing us to collaborate more effectively and hopefully respond quicker.
You can join the channel conversation here.
Community News(20 July 2018)
After a long break, we're finally back with more news on the current state of the wiki.
Wiki Administration
You may have noticed a lack of administrators on the wiki for a while, which there is a very good reason for. Since the last update, Connall has been employed by The Indie Stone as a dev, which has taken up a large portion of his time. However, him and Kirrus will still be popping by and are always contactable, see their user pages for details.
So, who am I? If you've been keeping up with the logs over the last few months you may have noticed me, Vaileasys, making a lot of changes to the wiki, which I'll get into in a moment. I am a new administrator here on the wiki and will be frequently active, you may also see me on the forums and Steam. Come say hello to me on my talk page and ask me anything you may be unsure about.
Changes to the wiki
There have been a lot of changes made to the wiki so far, mostly regarding consistency. The style guide has been updated, so check that out, as well, a number of help articles have been prepared to help you learn the basics and get started editing quickly. I've also made some changes to the boilerplates, hopefully making pages less confusing to read and edit.
Community stuff
The community portal has seen a massive overhaul, making it easier to navigate to what you're looking for. All the contents of the old portal can still be found as subpages, including things to do and priority issues.
PZwiki:Community portal are now finally up and running, these are projects run by you, the community, to focus on a particular section of the wiki based on your areas of expertise within Project Zomboid. Anyone is free to contribute to any of these projects or become the leader of any that are missing one, or create a new project. To get the community even more involved, we've decided to pick back up on the long since abandoned userboxes and awards. Userboxes are simply a small piece of code you can put on your user page as a communicative notice, which will help editors to collaborate more effectively.
The state of Project Zomboid
Sadly, Project Zomboid is several updates ahead of the wiki, therefore we ask anyone, no matter your experience, to check out the priority issues or projects on the community portal. As I'm sure everyone would have noticed, Project Zomboid was updated to build 39 at the start of June, this update added vehicles along with plenty of other minor changes and additions. As a response, we've organised the Vehicles and Mechanics project in hopes to get this update covered quickly. Additionally, we've already been able to get our hands on the new weather mechanics that will be coming with build 40. You can find how to opt into that here. Be sure to report any bugs you encounter.
Going forward
I will continue to make more changes behind the scenes, the somewhat broken Template:Crafting in particular. I've also got some more plans to further improve the boilerplates/page layout. If you'd like to see what I, personally, am working on, you can check out my user page. In regards to these news articles, we may decide to make this a monthly thing, reporting on changes that have been made on the wiki along with the state of the game.
September 2014
Community News(5 September 2014)
Another one of these the very next day, pretty surprising in all honesty. You probably won't be seeing these once a day but seeing as there's a fair bit going on it does seem to warrant an update from day to day. Interesting in it's own little way. Anyway, what's been going on today? Well first off pzwiki has a new Twitter account, for quite some time we had the link in the sidebar that said "Follow us on Twitter" I had never clicked on the link. Turns out, I should of. It had been linking to an old wiki administrator account, that was a cross between a personal account and wiki. It was all rather... odd. After a discussion with brilliant blindcoder (you would know him for his excellent Project Zomboid map.) and the magnificent man with the rocking body nasKo I decided to start an account for the wiki. The account can be found at: @ZomboidWiki
so follow it!
The Twitter account will mainly be used to notify users of major changes to the wiki, along with general information.
If you visit the wiki semi-frequently, you can see that the main page has been rejuvenated a bit, to make it look a little bit more sleek. Hopefully everybody will enjoy the changes that have been made. Should you seem something out of place, make sure to pass on a note to me. I'll be sure to look into the issue. You can thank Bowlympicshero for the update to the front page and for his work, I introduced and awarded the Front Page Designer award, so congratulations to him.
Nightmare has put in considerable work into the Items page at the moment, adding class names, statistics and also doing translation work for the German version. It's all been pretty impressive so props to him.
I believe that's all for now. Until next time. --Connall Project Zomboid Wiki Manager 03:19, 6 September 2014 (BST)
Community News(4 September 2014)
Hello again, time for another quick update as we integrate more and more items into the wiki. At the moment we've had a couple of users continue work on things such as the items page, which have been looking pretty impressive recently. In any case I figure I would do a quick rundown of what's happened.
A project page has been created, but at the moment it's just temp as I get more things written down and integrated for the use of projects. What are projects though?
Projects are supposed to be a centralized page in which leaders can create tasks and contributors can be on the same page. It allows people to know what should be focused on and what problems people are aware for. It allows for an easier standardization and a central discussion point on changes that can be made, whether info wise or design wise.
It will hopefully make people more encouraged to contribute to project and will give a central goal that people can work towards. I will be rolling it out in a couple of weeks time and bringing pages under certain projects. Nothing might happen (due to the number of consistent editors is certainly possible) but lets hope not.
Some of things we have pulled from MediaWiki are Ambox Templates, these offer new information boxes that people can access and use on pages to make things look a little bit more slick. Documentation has been included and you should find everything you need at Template:Ambox so be sure to check that out.
I will also be rolling out a new main page design that was spearheaded by Bowlympicshero tomorrow at some point. The final design (short of any objection) can be found: here
As per the last post, I have been looking into user badges and I have in fact pulled over the user boxes template from MediaWiki as well. As a test run I have created an administrator user badge that can be found on my page here and Kirrus page as well. While there is a third admin by the name of Pianoman, due to his inactivity I have not put a badge on his profile. While Kirrus is an admin, anything to do with the wiki should be coming to me. Kirrus is here to make sure that the server boxes are running as smooth as possible and less to do with general editing around the wiki.
That's all for now, thanks for reading.
--Connall Project Zomboid Wiki Manager 05:41, 5 September 2014 (BST)
Community News(2 September 2014)
Hello there, I have decided to open up this community news section, where we will post anything management wise that happens with the wiki.
There will be a few things going on over the next coming weeks and months that you should hopefully look forward to. One thing we will be looking at is documenting Project Zomboids LUA Modding and hopefully getting at least something started on that front. I will also be exploring the idea of "Projects" and "User Badges" as a way to insentivise or at least help users show off a little on their profile for the wiki.
I have cleaned up the administrators list, removing those who were no longer an active member on the wiki.
As always please feel free to ask my anything, if you are interested in something being added on the wiki, feel free to visit my talk page.
Thanks,
--Connall Project Zomboid Wiki Manager 03:24, 3 September 2014 (BST)