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[Proposal/Discussion] Reworking Ranking Criteria Glossaries

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Topic Starter
Mir
So at some point a project was begun to move the ranking criteria glossaries into separate pages from the ranking criteria for… standardization purposes? This ended up causing multiple problems. Several terms got lost in the transfer, the navigation for the glossary pages is very unintuitive due to deriving from extremely old and outdated links, and only the general and osu! gamemode-specific pages were actually moved at all, with the other three still there. Unless this project is picked up again with the intent of seriously overhauling the entire mapping-related wiki, the general and osu!specific glossaries should just be restored to their ranking criteria pages.

Links for reference
Original osu!standard glossary
General ranking criteria glossary

Examples of missing terms:
  1. Fully overlap (more akin to an perfect overlap; think stack leniency 0)
  2. Reasonable spread (that made the entire spread rules legible and contextualized)
Missing ranking criteria bullet points:
  1. Difficulties above 5 minutes are exempt from requiring a reasonable spread (originally located in the lowest difficulty requirement section of the general page)
Navigation issues:
  1. Several glossary category pages such as “beatmapping” do not link to their subpages that are linked on the ranking criteria page
  2. Glossary subpages are not intuitively organized, with “mapping techniques”, “patterns”, or general “beatmapping” all being categories for related terms.
  3. Some category pages are tiny, like “patterns” only having 2 subpages.
  4. There is no general ranking criteria glossary page that can be linked to from the ranking criteria pages, terms can only be navigated to from their specific links and as such are not collected into a central location
Additional concerns:
  1. Definitions on the subpages were not written by the same people and as such they can be missing information or be overly misleading, such as the “stack” definition not accurately defining stacks
The missing terms would require new pages which is simple enough, but the navigation issues would require a massive overhaul that is unlikely to happen any time soon. it would be far better to just re-merge the rc glossary pages we used to have to keep things simple and organized for both the average mapper trying to read it and the unsuspecting nominator trying to ensure maps follow the rc.

Further thoughts welcome.

collab with UC
pw384
collab with UC
Yes plz, glossary hyperlinks may need to tidy up

Probably a page categorizing all terms related to ranking criteria so people can do a ctrl+F there conveniently

Also 'A background contains alpha transparency' in rc test is overkilling bcz there's nothing in rc forbidding this
enneya
id support adding it back

as someone who is interested in other gamemodes, having the glossary at top is way more intuitive because of how easy it is to ctrl+f and scroll up instead of clicking on a hyperlink and dealing with browser tabs/going back all the time
clayton
a lot of the pages linked to are just not complete (most are labeled as such). idk what solution there is for that other than someone pls work on it lol

as for anything plainly wrong, missing links, etc, it was probably missed in the initial rework and not intentional, so let's fix that here

something to note though: any pages not under Ranking_criteria aren't rules or guidelines and should never be treated as such, it's just a community wiki. if you absolutely do need some info to be included as part of rules or guidelines it should be in the relevant RC places. however a big chunk of the original osu! RC glossary was defining clearly understood terms that imo had no place in that document and should have been written about elsewhere on the wiki anyway
Topic Starter
Mir

clayton wrote:

however a big chunk of the original osu! RC glossary was defining clearly understood terms that imo had no place in that document and should have been written about elsewhere on the wiki anyway
this is precisely why it was needed in that document, because the rc was directly referring to said terms, so that whoever is reading it could be like "oh, what does 'reasonable spread' mean?" and scroll up and get a definition for what it is, and not have to fumble through a completely unrelated section of the wiki to find a definition that may or may not be correct

when the spread rules were amended the glossary was put there because it was relevant to the rc, thats why this proposal exists to bring it back. i dont know why it was ever removed in the first place because now instead of having a nice collective place to see what terms mean what you have to literally go digging in random places for a definition that is either from 2010 and completely outdated, or something that is actually useable.

furthermore "clearly understood" is a huge assumption, and the rc glossary wasnt only for people who already knew what everything meant, but for newer mappers/bns and older people alike to learn what it meant/refresh their memory respectively.
clayton
should have clarified what I was referring to. "reasonable spread" for example does make sense to explain in RC, in fact that's hardly relevant anywhere besides RC. something like "stack leniency" on the other hand... it's a setting in the editor, and it's got nothing to do with rules other than being a fact of the game

and you're right "clearly understood" to is too vague. I guess what I mean is something that does not rely on having an opinionated definition for the purpose of RC. fwiw I still think these things should be explained by reference, for all the people you mentioned. the fact you have to mention it in this thread probably means we didn't do a good job the first try =(
Topic Starter
Mir
i think it would be a reasonable compromise to define critical mapping terms that are crucial for properly understanding what the rc wants in the rc page itself as a mini-glossary up with the terms for rules vs guidelines

things like "fully overlap" being missing from any glossary, "reasonable spread" being nixed for some reason when that was the entire basis of our current spread rules, and the fact that this even exists:

Ranking Criteria wrote:

A stack is a set of hit objects that overlap each other in the playfield. The most common objects that are stacked are hit circles.
vs.

Ranking Criteria wrote:

An overlap appears when hit objects touch each other without stacking.
is just causing unnecessary confusion for everyone. we can have a mini-glossary if that satisfies you and link to the rest of the more concrete terms like "slider velocity" and "stack leniency" elsewhere - but if the rc specifically mentions "you cannot fully overlap" fully overlap has to be defined otherwise that sentence doesnt work

speaking of "someone pls work on it lol" who did the initial split for the glossary from the rc page? in plain terms it seems like this mess is their responsibility. i dont mind working with them to fix it and i dont think UC would be too bothered either
clayton

Mir wrote:

but if the rc specifically mentions "you cannot fully overlap" fully overlap has to be defined otherwise that sentence doesnt work
yup I agree, was a mistake to move critical info like that out of RC (on top of some of it being edited incorrectly)

Mir wrote:

speaking of "someone pls work on it lol" who did the initial split for the glossary from the rc page? in plain terms it seems like this mess is their responsibility. i dont mind working with them to fix it and i dont think UC would be too bothered either
https://github.com/ppy/osu-wiki/pull/3504 is the bulk of the change, so pishifat and I. the OP of the GitHub PR has a point though, RC isn't meant to be read as an article top to bottom, and it was never made clear if something was a glossary entry, which is why I personally found the built-in glossary very weak. thinking again it's probably ok as long as that stuff is linked to from the rules, so here's what I think we should do to clean it up:

  1. recreate a glossary section in the RCs if it doesn't exist
  2. for every linked term, if it contains info critical to the definition of rules, add it to this glossary and link to the glossary entry
    - if it wasn't useful beyond RC, delete that article/section as well
  3. for every other term, double-check that the linked info is correct/updated and fix if necessary
and then what is left will be hopefully a helpful glossary, properly referenced to, without the bloat from before that inspired its removal

also just to give some more context, around the same time there was a huge wiki project to create more articles or sections for concepts previously not documented or only covered in random mentions in mostly-unrelated articles. the immediate (intentional) result was a shitton of tiny stub articles, some of which were linked to from RC after the big glossary move. I guess I'll find out soon but I'm assuming most of the errors came from how these pages were expanded, rather than pishi's initial attempt to factor out the glossary

also also u could blame my exceptionally bad timing for taking a leave from wiki work cuz I was trying to guide that project at the time, but left part of the way through. not-osu + loved is where my time goes these days. I'll help with this effort though, since I feel responsible, and didn't realise the problems were this bad lol

e: also opened https://github.com/ppy/osu-wiki/issues/5248
Noffy
Is it possible to link to specific bullet points in the wiki? From my knowledge only linking headings is possible, which wouldn't be very helpful if we want to link to specific glossary entries.

I think this topic needs more attention and would like to push it to be resolved by the end of July. Who is currrently involved in the push to get this fixed?

Those also interested in helping please let me know, or if there's already a group working on it, let me know what the status is on that as this thread is fairly important but hasn't been updated in a while.
clayton
latest update was that I said above & talked with Mir a little bit that I'd comb through RC to start making these changes, didn't end up making enough progress to do anything and it's really tedious of a chore

I'm unsure if I can get to it this month. assume I won't do it if I have no updates throughout next week

Noffy wrote:

Is it possible to link to specific bullet points in the wiki? From my knowledge only linking headings is possible, which wouldn't be very helpful if we want to link to specific glossary entries.
need to double-check that it works properly for bullets, but we added web support to add custom anchors to blocks by putting "{#name-of-anchor}" after it.
Noffy
Current plan ->

Documenting where things currently stand on this document
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b74aN_jeOFcVLJ1jBKa9LG0sk7I5gO_JZ9xi456Nqxs/edit?usp=sharing

If you want to help with editing, please let me know and I can add you to it.

1. Documenting current statuses on document
2. Glossary entries will be added back as needed + adding more links where missing
3. There is a work in progress wiki footnote system, which will have cross-linking and tooltips when footnotes are present. We can move the glossary to this later on when it's available.
pishifat

Noffy wrote:

3. There is a work in progress wiki footnote system, which will have cross-linking and tooltips when footnotes are present. We can move the glossary to this later on when it's available.
this is available now, so i'll look into re-incorporating some glossary terms within the next few days
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