User:Ian07/To-do list

Feel free to contribute to any of these tasks and remove them from the list if completed, or add updates/advice if relevant to the tasks currently here. Additionally, if you notice any new wiki-related bugs that aren't listed in the bugs section, please feel free to add them there as well.

Short-term

• apgcode: Needs explanation of how linear-growth patterns are encoded
• Adjustable spaceship: Expand with info on half-baked knightships and the HighLife basilisks
• LifeWiki:Did you know and LifeWiki:Did you know archive: might be able to make these generate the list from DPL to avoid having to manually update
  • Something like {{#dpl:namespace=LifeWiki|titlematch=Did you know/%|format=,\n*[[%PAGE%]]: {{%PAGE%}}}} but unfortunately this doesn't quite work for two reasons:
    1. Is sorted lexicographically instead of numerically, so it goes 1, 10, 100, 101, etc.
    2. Thinks {{%PAGE%}} is supposed to be transcluding from the Template namespace rather than the LifeWiki namespace, and {{LifeWiki:%TITLE%}} doesn't work either
• MediaWiki:Common.css: add support for custom list-style-types for references (i.e. something like div.reflist ol.references {list-style-type: inherit;}) - I tried this out in my own userspace and, like the last time I tried to mess with CSS/JS, it didn't seem to do anything so not sure what to do from here
  • Probably useful to switch the footnotes for the still life table in Glider synthesis to lower-alpha to conserve space while still clearly separating these from citations
  • Okay, looks like user scripts just straight up don't work on LifeWiki - no clue why; so I had to edit MediaWiki:Common.css directly to try it out
  • Imported Template:Efn from Wikipedia which is theoretically supposed to support letter-style footnotes but it didn't do anything when I tested it out
• Remini: Needs infobox
• Symmetry: Finish images for hexagonal symmetries section
• Template:Conduit: appears that some information in the infobox is reliant on output offset in order to appear (see for example Fx119 inserter)
• Template:Distinguish, Template:Merge, Template:Merge from: currently broken for the use case of multiple parameters due to the lack of a Template:Int, which is called in Template:Pagelist (if I understand correctly, User:Calcyman just copied these from Wikipedia)
• Template:LongLivedMethuselah: is there a way to force the quotient values to display a certain number of decimal digits? May make the table look a little neater.
• These are broken due to MediaWiki update; have now been disabled: Template:OscNumbers, Template:OscModNumbers, Template:SpaceshipModNumbers
• Template:Reflector: support rotor parameter? Seems to be used in several articles anyway e.g. p7 bumper

Long-term

• Replace static images with LifeViewers throughout the wiki where applicable
• Complete transcriptions for Lifeline (also see Talk:Lifeline/project)
  • Lifeline Volume 4 page 10 was formerly missing but has finally been recovered by Heinrich Koenig, so needs to be added to the wiki page
  • Update the Lifeline Index accordingly - there's a comment there explaining how to convert things for a given volume to the updated links (i.e. link to transcribed version instead of scan)
• Update/expand tutorials (mostly ones in User:Goldenratio/Incomplete Tutorials)
• De-stubbify articles created as part of User:AwesoMan3000's 12SL project
• Review Category:Oscillators and add categories as part of User:Entity Valkyrie's sparker category project
• In general, clean up edits by Entity Valkyrie, Entity Valkyrie 2, and Pooping Alien
• Rule info for certain types of patterns where the rule scripts don't exactly recognize bounded grids:
  • toroidal patterns - wicks, agars, titanic toroidal traveler
  • Induction coils, Coolout Conjecture, claw, feather, nine, tail
• Update the LifeWiki:Editor pages, most of which have not been substantially changed since 2009
• Per LifeWiki:Tiki_bar/Archive/2019#Non-notable_isotropic_rules, create some articles about notable patterns in alien rules (e.g. OCA:HighLife/Bomber); however this may still need to be discussed as there were some unanswered questions from that discussion particularly about:
  1. how strict the notability guidelines should be, and
  2. whether the new pages should be added to the same categories (e.g. should the bomber be added to Category:Spaceships with speed c/6?)
• Maybe add rules, glider syntheses, and/or apgcodes for conduits and reflectors? (discuss beforehand)

LifeWiki bugs

User:Nathaniel will most likely have to intervene with these since they seem to be issues with the software itself rather than the content of the wiki; however, other users may be able to find a possible solution or at least identify the cause of the problem.

• Moving certain old pages gives an error (see this thread for more information; potential solutions have been posted but not all of them have been tried)
• There might be an easier workaround for RLE: and Rule: pages not copying correctly under wikitext display - changing the content model. If the default model for those two namespaces could be changed to either JavaScript or CSS, they'll be displayed without the formatting that MediaWiki does normally, including spacing and line breaking. The only caveat is that it'll display an ugly and irrelevant message about clearing your cache, but we should be able to remove that via MediaWiki:Common.js
• Where to even begin with all the special pages...
  • RLE:Loafer is mysteriously listed in many of the special pages despite not being in the main namespace (specifically Special:DeadendPages, Special:LongPages, Special:AncientPages (here, the "L" in Loafer is lowercase despite being uppercase everywhere else), Special:LonelyPages, Special:FewestRevisions, Special:WithoutInterwiki, Special:ShortPages, Special:UncategorizedPages, Special:UnwatchedPages, and Special:AllPages
    • RLE:Lobster is also in Special:AllPages despite, well, not existing, and being in the wrong namespace at the same time
    • I'm pretty sure these were the first two RLE: pages made, and may have predated the actual creation of the namespace, but that shouldn't matter AFAIK since the page information specifically says it's a page named "Loafer" in the RLE namespace rather than a page named "RLE:Loafer" in the main namespace
  • Special:BrokenRedirects: weirdly, RLE:lobster -> RLE:83p7h1v1 appears here, and as blue -> red even though it's actually the latter page that exists, not the former
  • Special:WhatLinksHere: namespace filter is broken i.e. sometimes pages that shouldn't appear do appear despite being in the wrong namespace, and others are eliminated despite being in the correct namespace
  • Special:ActiveUsers is broken: as of January 29, 2021, User:MathAndCode is not listed (archive) despite having made several contributions over the previous 30 days (archive) (credit to User:Goldenratio for pointing this out)
  • Special:WantedCategories may or may not be broken - as of writing it lists a few pages that had been deleted during the Great Numerical Category Refactoring of May 2021 but don't actually contain the pages they claim to contain (258P3, Superfountain, Carrier siamese long snake, Boat with very long tail, Long claw with tail)

Other to-do lists

• LifeWiki:Task list (not used very often, most of these are already addressed)
• User:Apple Bottom/TODO
  • User:Apple Bottom/TODO/Life Lexicon
• User:Dvgrn
• User:Sokwe