Dota 2 Wiki:Discussion

Welcome to the Dota 2 Wiki!
Hello, new users, and welcome to the wiki. We intend to be the primary source for any and all information for the upcoming Dota 2. If you're new, we'd love to have you help out and pump some juice into what is currently a very thin wiki. Here's a list of some things you can do, even if you don't have access to the beta: Here are some specific changes we need, if you'd like to help out big time: Just be aware that, as a wiki, we try to keep information mostly factual. Please disclaim any information that might be subjective. Don't hesitate to write and rewrite, though! -Lancey 13:18, 17 October 2011 (CDT)
 * Discuss changes to the wiki and its many templates on their talk pages.
 * Contribute information where you feel it's lacking.
 * Build and improve our current templates, or design your own.
 * Correct errors and issues you might see.
 * We've been looking to improve our Hero pages for a while now. See Ancient Apparition for an example of how we'd like the Hero pages to look, and feel free to rewrite ones that don't use this format.
 * Many of the Item pages are very short. Try to add information while at the same time keeping it somewhat objective.
 * We are missing a metric ton of information. Most of what's on PlayDota is still relevant. Add information at your leisure but please rewrite it in your own words.

To do
Let's make a list of stuff we've yet to do - and we can tick them off as we go. RJackson 19:09, 16 August 2011 (CDT)


 * General templates (Maintenance, formatting, ...other stuff)
 * We'll implement these as we come across a need for them.


 * Infoboxes


 * Help namespace - we could probably import most of these from The Portal Wiki or TF Wiki... just have to make some minor changes.
 * Use for reference.
 * Template:WikiHelpNav
 * Help:Images
 * Help:Image guidelines
 * Help:Image licensing
 * Help:Style guide
 * Help:Style_guide/A-Z
 * Help:Style_guide/Characters (Is this applicable here?)
 * Help:Style_guide/Trivia
 * Help:Style_guide/Community content (This might not be applicable either)
 * Help:Language translation
 * Change examples that reference Portal mechanics to Dota 2 mechanics.
 * Help:Translation switching
 * Help:Maintenance templates
 * Help:Userpage
 * Help:Userboxes
 * Help:Custom signatures
 * Help:Taking screenshots
 * Help:Updates
 * DISPLAYTITLEs
 * Template:Hero infobox
 * Expand it to support stats and info relevant to heroes. -Func door and I worked on this and managed to get something reasonable out of it. Lancey 04:20, 21 August 2011 (CDT)
 * Template:Hero bio
 * Figure out what sections are irrelevant and remove them. Add new sections if necessary too.


 * EXTENSIONS
 * EmbedVideo


 * Hero Pages
 * Add pages for missing heroes
 * Redirect old hero names to their proper pages
 * Add stats, etc.
 * Items
 * Get the items onto the wiki!
 * We need a template
 * Template done, needs improving Lancey 15:35, 21 August 2011 (CDT)
 * Started adding some basic info to the main item screen
 * User:Lancey/Missing_List

God of Death Reporting
I'd like to assist in the creation of this Wiki. I'm known by the same name on playdota.com. I've already editted the page of Pudge, adding the post descriptive tips.

Skill pages.
Heyo. Having the skills listed on each hero page as they currently are - lots of huge tables - is very messy and takes up too much space; especially considering how much the hero pages will expand once we get our hands on the game and throw introductions, bugs, trivia etc on the pages. I think it's pretty sensible to give each skill it's own page, and have a very brief overview of the skill on Hero pages; and so I'm putting this note here so that when we've resolved all the content-related kinks and start work on the Style-guide pages, we already have it documented how we do things... if that makes sense. RJackson 00:13, 13 September 2011 (CDT)
 * Is it possible to put them into multi-panel tables? Like they did it here in "Skill Handbook" section.--XRdR 00:49, 14 September 2011 (CDT)
 * Doubtful. It might be possible with actual HTML, but I don't know if Mediawiki is that flexible. Otherwise, separating the skills is a bad idea. That would be the equivalent of, on the TF2 Wiki, giving each individual stat per class its own page. I remember a similar discussion about the main page layout where it was decided that Skills wouldn't be able to support itself as a section. -Lancey 13:53, 14 September 2011 (CDT)
 * Maybe having a page for each skill is a bit excessive as there isn't that many info on a single skill, but maybe there could be a simple description of each skill on the hero page, and then a separate "this hero's skills" page, explaining each on detail, strategies and combos, and such. -ChocolateWaffle 14:11, 14 September 2011 (CDT)
 * Hiding skill descriptions under spoiler tags would be the best decision. Oh wait, we don't have spoilers here...--XRdR 03:58, 15 September 2011 (CDT)

Hero description
As of now, that huge walls of text are pretty much unreadable. We need a template which will cover background story, placement in team, pros/cons, popular builds and other stuff. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by XRdR (talk) • (contribs)
 * Looking at Beastmaster, for example... Do you mean the text at the top of the page - copied from a Reddit post, or in the section that says "Description" on the left? If you mean the topmost section, we could get rid of it and move relevant information into work sections in Template:Hero bio; what sections would you suggest to be added? RJackson 03:59, 13 September 2011 (CDT)

That "description" section which contains text provided by valve is most probably just a placeholder. We can use it as a character bio, but looking back at dota 1 I highly doubt that it won't be changed by the release date. The text copied from reddit guide is too simple and often misleading. It should be expanded and divided into different sections. I suggest the following sections: 1) Hero introduction (general info about "who and how") 2) Possible roles (Beastmaster can be played as ganker/support/summoner/semicarry etc. They are all completely different. He is not limited to only one role) 3) Player requirements (what player skills complement this hero? Like BM needs micro to manage his summons, flexibility to change playstyle during game because things often go wrong on his lane, good farming abilities because he needs lots of gold to be usefull in mid-late game;  Lina on the other hand doesn't need anything like that, her main requirements are mana management and ability to combo spells. 4) Early-mid-late game scaling. Clockwerk shines during early game and mid game, almost useless later on. In this section we should describe why. 5) In-depth skills. General info + comments, like wild axes description in reddit guide for BM. 6) Best alies/worst enemies optional section 7) Advanced tips and tricks. "Pudge can't use blink dagger, so please don't buy it", Doom goes through BKB, etc.

Hello, I recently edited Ancient Apparition's page with the suggestions. See how it looks like and if you got any question or comments, go ahead! --Nuxar 15:55, 30 September 2011 (CDT)

Response pages
Hey, opening a little discussion - or rather noting how we should deal with response pages. Currently, we have way too many boxes and way to little navigable TOCs (well, no TOCs)... The voice lines that play always play based upon predefined response rules - which can be viewed (and modified) within  - the boxes we have should mirror these response rules, for each:

Response ancient_apparition_Spawn {	scene "scenes/ancient_apparition/ancient_apparition_appa_spawn_01.vcd" nodelay noscene scene "scenes/ancient_apparition/ancient_apparition_appa_spawn_02.vcd" nodelay noscene scene "scenes/ancient_apparition/ancient_apparition_appa_spawn_03.vcd" nodelay noscene scene "scenes/ancient_apparition/ancient_apparition_appa_spawn_04.vcd" nodelay noscene }

we would have:

I'm fairly sure each VCD file refers to a single sound file, however I'll get that checked and find out how we view the VCD files.

Each few little boxes should also be thrown within it's own subsection of the page, to aid navigation of our response pages... using the TF Wiki as example (stupid interwiki links, y u no set up.) - a group of responses related to killing are all stacked in the Kill-related responses section. We would do something similar to that, grouping sets of response rules based upon their context.

Opinions / am I dumb / how shall we go about doing zis? RJackson 20:29, 5 October 2011 (CDT)
 * - TFWiki response pages look good. I'll keep uploading those files... Thebigone 10:07, 7 October 2011 (CDT)
 * Get me those .vcd files and I'll set those pages up. i-ghost 14:38, 19 October 2011 (CDT)
 * Did anyone send i-ghost the files? Responses aren't done.

Website policy
Hello, I will mainly do french translation, but will also edit/add english content if I deem it wise. :) My main question is : Do you want the informations to be plainly factual, or do you want, for example, to add introductions, or even guides in heroes' page?

At the moment I only did Earthshaker's french page and edited Earthshaker's english page. http://dota2wiki.com/wiki/Earthshaker/fr http://dota2wiki.com/wiki/Earthshaker

Tell me if I do it wrong! JeanAlfred 09:49, 7 October 2011 (CDT)


 * Check out Help:Style guide. Articles should have introductions, and it should be the topmost section on articles.  The introduction shouldn't be as you had written it - an introduction / basic guide to the hero; quoting the style guide: The lead should be capable of standing alone as a concise overview of the article, briefly describing its most important points..  Everything should be factual, but that doesn't mean subjective content can't be noted.  For example:


 * Somebody might wish to say Hero XYZ is best played by roaming the forests between lanes and waiting for opportunities to gank opponents. - however that's not written in an impartial manner to be on the Wiki... a better way of stating it would be: A common strategy to playing XYZ is to roam the forest in-between lanes and wait for opportunities to gank opponents. - Simply a matter of replacing "Hero XYZ is best played" with "A common strategy..."


 * I don't think we're 100% contempt in how to handle everything in the Dota 2 universe on the Wiki, but we'll put together some style guides specific to types of content as soon as we're happy with a medium of expressing that content. RJackson 10:09, 7 October 2011 (CDT)


 * Okay, I guess I'll just translate bio/lore and skills for now then. Thanks for the answer, especially this quick! JeanAlfred 11:25, 7 October 2011 (CDT)

Exhaustive or thumbnail - which type of Wiki are we?
I was just chatting away with Zoolooman about the Wiki and he asked what type of content we were looking for, exhaustive (document everything about the Dota universe) or thumbnail (documenting only information the average player will be interested in). Personally, I had my mind set on exhaustive when I got into this project, however I hadn't really come across these "types" before... and so I think it's very much in the community's interest to figure out what content we will aim for. RJackson 00:39, 12 October 2011 (CDT)
 * My Wiki experience comes from contributing to and moderating an exhaustive wiki - Team Fortress Wiki; it's what I'm used to, so it's what I'd like our content to be. When talking with Zoolooman, he mentioned that Valve will likely ship the game with their own little resources for the game - saying they'd likely aim for thumbnail content; and there's evidence supporting that - there being little Hero guides within the beta files, for instance...  therefore if we went with thumbnail, we'd end up mirroring a lot of content from official resources; I think we'd need to distinguish ourselves by growing to be the complete resource of everything Dota 2. RJackson 00:39, 12 October 2011 (CDT)
 * The game seems to be heading towards having small, fast info on hero pick, like small bio, some tips, skill dsecription and a few other things. If people come to the wiki it's because they want more extensive and detailed info, I think we should have every single piece of info we can gather. -ChocolateWaffle 01:07, 12 October 2011 (CDT)
 * I will agree with RJackson. This Wiki should be extremely detailed instead of only aimed towards the average player (We shouldnt exclude them though). But it is actully a very good thing that you asked this because I wanted to discuss something related: How much content are we really aiming for? Obviously, we will have every possible numerical detail about every hero, items and creeps (And patches). But, if we take the Starcraft 2 "Liquipedia" for example; It includes a substantial amount of strategy talk for every aspect of the game but more importantly, in my opinion, everything about the pro-scene is also on the wiki. The latter is something I actually really want to include here too. However, I am unsure if we should include guides. The same kinds of "guides" that can be found on PD.com. Should we have some included (but obviously kept in a seperate section from the hero themselves)? Im just not sure if its totally viable. The Tf2wiki and L4Dwiki have these kinds of guides however, while they have dozens of items at most (Every TF2 classe, all L4D weapons & infected type) to write guides about, Dota has well over 100 items (every hero). Since we dont want to plagerise, we cannot really take from guides on PD.com yet we also want to always stay the most up-to-date as possible. This in turn asks "our" guides to highlight the most important things of a hero while also summarizing a good amount of the content from any and every other guide out there. Also, do note that Gabe (Or some equally ranked valve employee)said that they are looking to expand the DotA universe massively with DotA 2; We should thus expect alot of content regarding the lore. --Nuxar 01:30, 12 October 2011 (CDT)
 * Just keep the Classes Heroes pages small and Zoolooman will be happy. i-ghost 14:38, 19 October 2011 (CDT)

What currently needs strict improvement? Also, about hero pages...
So ive been wondering, what does the wiki currently need most? I speak in terms of content (im a horrible formatter). Does any particular section need improvement? Ill currently try to add more things regarding the mechanic of the game, most of which will come from the mechanic page of PD.com and guides in the forum. But is there anything else in particular which needs alot of improvement?

Also, I had a question about the hero pages. What exactly should we have in the page? The bio, skill set and (soemtimes) strategy sections are all very good. But should we put a Gameplay section like I did for AA? The first paragraph on most hero pages summarize very well but should we keep it really there? These paragraphs explain the (usual) 4 abilities of the hero; I think that we may be able to incorporate these description seperately for each ability by putting it near the skillbox. I do love the new icons for mana cost and cooldown (the pages should have more symbols like those) but I think there is room for improvement on the template (but i cant improve it, someone with better knowledge should). Anyway, I do think that we can take away the frist paragraph, put a gameplay "guide" after the bio but before the skillset and put the description from the erased paragraph individually near their respective skillbox. But what else should we add? Im totally open for content suggestion and ill try my best to put them up to see how it works.

Two other small questions: Is there a way to put the hero responses on the wiki without being in beta? I would gladly do it if I could. - Can there be themes for the wiki? Something I found trivially fun on some other wikis is that you can change the skin of the wiki. Here, we could make a skin based on each hero. I dont mind making the skins, I like photo-editing stuff. --Nuxar 22:00, 14 October 2011 (CDT)
 * Please, if you can, feel free to add to or write up the Mechanics page I started. I'm not very good at writing mechanics apparently. -Lancey 22:04, 14 October 2011 (CDT)

A small matter of publicity
While I do believe that wikis have a good amount of importance now a days, you guys need to start advertising on the Dota Blogs about this wiki because it's really underground right now, though that could be because Dota 2 is still on beta but this is a problem you guys should work on to fix, I can do the portuguese translations -Caiocas 06:57:45, 20 October 2011
 * That's a main reason we're doing this key giveaway - raise awareness of us. :) I've also been told (Valve employee -> friend -> me) we're to be linked to by the official Dota 2 blog, however we'll have to see if that indeed happens. RJackson 07:29, 20 October 2011 (CDT)

Thanks for the answer I've just finished translating the Windrunner page to portuguese, if I have more time I'll work on translating Other major heros =D

What else can we contribute?
For those of us who don't have access to the beta yet, I was wondering what can we do for contributions? We can't provide accurate articles on DotA 2 without only using DotA 1 information. I was thinking of making a DotA 1 - DotA 2 equivalents page if it hasn't already been done yet. Language translations are limited to the ones from the game itself so I'll have to wait for Valve to implement my second language.

The best contribution I can think of is website design/layout suggestions (which I've added on my User Page as an image). Other than that and the ones above there isn't really much we can do unless we copy paste playdota information, but if DotA 2 is a hard copy then even that can be an option. -Mky160 11:21, 22 October 2011 (CDT)

About the "item suggestion"
The new item suggestion is a rather good idea. However, in earlier discussion, we were aiming to be as objective as possible. I simply find this new feature do be very objective. One could see any other guide and it would probably not show the same thing as what is suggested here. I think that we should instead just a list of "useful" (or "core") items on each hero and explain briefly why they are useful and/or how could they be used effectively on said hero. Thoughts? --Nuxar 21:17, 29 October 2011 (CDT)
 * The pro scene will laugh at us and dismiss the entire wiki if we get anything wrong with the items/strategy. Maybe we'll just copy Valve's default recommended items and leave it at that? Thebigone 05:30, 30 October 2011 (CDT)

Page Header
"Please bear in mind that the Wiki is still in it's early days and is very much in-flux as to how content is handled." This is what shows up in Google searches, it should not have grammatical errors. Decency 05:03, 31 October 2011 (CDT)