Databases and Wikis - Why Not ZAM?Follow

Originally, zam was one of the places to go but ffxiclopedia made editing and having real time information available. Most the time it's correct but newer content usually takes awhile to get edited. This is much faster than the old days when you had to submit page corrections on ZAM and maybe months down the line it might get updated. I can probably pick a random page on ffxi zam and it wont have all the drops listed it should compared to ffxiclopedia.

ex. Chukwa has been out for 6 months or more now. It is spammed for chloris pops by some people. Drops are pretty well known. However, FFXI ZAM has 4 drops. FFxiclopedia has 22 drops.

see the problem? lol

What you could do is like some sites. Have whatever is being talked about automatically linked to the wiki and have that information correct or the ability for people to correct that information.

ex. In the previous example, If I say "Chukwa" It links directly to that page. Someone can look at it as a source of information instead of maybe putting another window/tab and search it on another site.

I used to use alla.com for everything. When I learned of the wiki for FFXI it allowed me access to real time editing/distribution of information that made other sources a stagnant place for outdated information.

Sorry, I don't mean to bash anyone...but knowledge is power as they say. For current info on anything ZAM is one of the last places I go to now.

Edited, Nov 30th 2010 9:21am by spcwill

Alla caused this to themselves by lagging on implementing these systems (wiki database, free search. etc), while other sites were innovating.

I was shocked when Alla was not interested in paying a discounted rate for me to produce high quality happy friday comics, which would have given them a huge viewership edge over the other Ffxi sites and therefore profits. They were also not interested in doing this for the then-upcoming FFXIV site, which would have given them an instant user-grab out of the gate. But this meshes with the realization that Zam has no interest in competing whatsoever, which to be frank dooms them to eventual failure in the face of innovative competition. It is apparent that Zam operates on "minimal investment/no innovation" type operation.

The fact that people are using other sites as their information source, where this site used to be THE place for that, is just another symptom of this. To expect users to revive your horribly outdated database, which you have neglected, is not the answer. Lack of investment by the owners of Zam, and no interest in innovation, is what needs to change, not a database update.

Fact is even if you update everything yourselves, nobody bothers to look here for that info anymore anyway so it will again fall into disrepair from lack of user input. You've lost the FFXI-info battle forever to FFXIclopedia. What else you lose is up to your management. You are now purely a forum discussion site, focus on improving that.


While on that very topic, here's another piece of innovation I suggest. Let's see if you listen this time.

Change the karma system : Allow only a rate-up option, the rate-down replacement being "report a violation" button in which the clicker has to select from a short list of what rule was violated before proceeding. This would then act as a rate-down and be recorded for admin viewing. If a complaint is filed that someone is getting rated down for no reason, it will be easy to look at the reasons people selected for the rate-down and see if they were in the right or abusing the system. Also the more steps a rate-down takes, the less people will spam it just as the "I disagree" button. Posts that become 'excellent would get a small highlight border around them; rewarding good contributions with improved visibility and making them easier to find.

Result :
-Users that contribute positively to your site are rewarded with appropriate status.
-Users that just kick around chit-chatting suffer no ill effects and are motivated to start contributing to discussion instead of hide from rate-downs.
-Rate-down abusers are now forced to provide a valid TOS reason for their down-ratings, 90% will stop abusing it.

Do you see that? It's innovation. Rather than have a system that's more likely to abuse a user, you end up with a system which rewards good contribution with improved visibility. Instead of highlighting the bad by making sub-d collapsed posts which actually stand out.

Want to thank me for this? Guru me. If it wasn't for the years of rate-down haters I would be guru'd years ago. God knows I logged enough contributory keystrokes to earn it.






Case in point: This very post has already gotten rate-downs, i guarentee for "i disagree". Kindly tell me what part of the TOS validates rating down this contributory post that took over 15 minutes of my day to write and edit to help out? This is exactly why people have and will continue to leave even your discussion forums. Defend this last reason for your site to exist, or face obscurity, failure, and loss of what small pay Zam gives you.

Edited, Nov 30th 2010 1:24pm by RattyBatty

This is an example of the failure of Wiki vs. Alla's solution. You see, Alla used to use a back-end edited database (I still remember the days where the front page was loaded with updates from Pikko and others as they added in information submitted via email).

Alla, seeing wikis becoming the new wave of editing, tried to wedge in a wiki-editing style to their existing database. However, they fundamentally work differently. What you're seeing is a throw-back to the old GET style of item calling used by databases. The text after the ? is the call into the back-end functions used for a database, where as the Wiki uses a different system entirely.



Disregarding the info sent in/edited on the spell itself, you've encountered the issue I had. Making a page that is easily found via a search is EXTREMELY challenging. Plus it takes time for the indexing of every page to occur, so when you're testing searchability, you literally have to wait for the database to "catch up". Because editing is such a pain, information is bound to be old, inaccurate, or altogether false.

ZAM would either need to go back to having people internally create all pages (ironically by copying info found on other sites of course), or scrap the database and institute a full-blown wiki.

There are many reasons why I go to ffxiclopedia instead of zam for info. Here is a very strong one:

Go to ffxiclopedia and search for "Charis Tiara +1". The page that comes up contains:

* Stats and links to info about stat modifiers
* Quest needed to obtain the item
* Quest that the item is required for
* A link to view the entire set that the item is a part of
* Any special notes about mods provided by the piece

Now go to zam and search for "Charis Tiara +1". The resulting page contains:

* Stats and links to info about stat modifiers

And that's it.

Quick and convenient accessibility to complete and relevant content is why ffxiclopedia beats out others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Basically, the Wiki model is more suited to community collaboration than the forum/database model. And once it starts picking up steam and being useful, it's in the entire community's best interest to support one (or a small handful) or resources for the widespread user base to update.

I use Zam for forums - I'll also note that the structure of FFXI itself was really helpful for Zam's forum setup. I have spent a lot of time in the job-specific forums, which are GREAT resources for learning to play jobs, specific questions, gear guides, etc. For a game like FFXIV, where identity is less reliant on which job you play (one of the things I found myself disliking about XIV), job specific forums are a lot less useful.

I use ffxiclopedia for missions/quests, looking up NMs, etc.

I use ffxiah.com for quick item lookups because it's MUCH faster than any other resource and the search syntax is fairly forgiving (partial word = will come up with correct search). And of course, I also use it to check prices.

I use BG when I want to dig through a sloppy forum full of elitist a-holes, but occasionally find some good high level strategic discussion.

Put simply: Zam's database is a malnourished dinosaur in a back room that you can only communicate with through pneumatic tubes. That was the impression I got just when trying to edit an existing page... Creating a new page without the sort of templates available over at Wiki was nigh impossible (without achieving the same by copying an existing page).

Wiki was up for a year or two before alla decided to cobble their database together.

About the only time I link to the Wikibase here is if I'm linking to something with stats (i.e. an item) and I want people to be able to roll over and see the stats or description without having to click on the link. Implementing that was a very helpful, very good idea.

Wikia also has an autofill function on the search field. Many items in FFXI are not exactly easy to spell, and the exact name may be weird. They have it indexed so that it detects the search string based on the first few letters and provides a list of possible matches.

That's because Alla was pay-to-search for so long and while they removed the need to have a Premium Account to search now, it's too little, too late.

FFXIcylopedia is for ffxi info, Alla is for forum lulz.

In some sense, I agree. That said, a lot of what we do with the wiki is translated to our other sites, so making the user experience better for FFXI would mean making it better for all our sites. I'd hope that, in some ways, if we made it better for XI, there could be some things that would naturally improve - such as the strategy discussions that were talked about.

Actually, you could only change search criteria if you had Premium (they'd appear greyed out otherwise) and the data was, as has been previously stated, out of date at best or non-existent.

To get ZAM up to FFXIcyclopedia standard would require such as massive amount of effort that it would be completely impractical.

Edited, Nov 30th 2010 2:45pm by Miitan

The two big ones I think have already been covered (updates were slow and organization of data is better)....but I think you need to dig one layer deeper to arrive at the reason for that--people like that idea of being able to have real control over how the information is presented.

It's much easier to receive active participation from the community when gathering data for something like a wiki if you give the same users who are helping you greater control.

This is the same reason the open source community works much better than people writing snippets of code and having a software house make use of that code--the coders feel as if they lose that sense of ownership.