Wikihack:Next version

Someday, and most of us hope it is soon, we'll have the next version of NetHack on our hands. There will be much rejoicing -- and much work to be done on Wikihack. Much information on Wikihack will be out of date and need to be updated. Wikihack editors have no experience of such an event: every word here was written in the NetHack 3.4.3 era. Toward that end, this project proposes a way to identify articles that will need to be updated.

The present proposal (subject to revision given input from Wikihack editors) is to tag articles with one of the following templates:

• {{nethack-343}} -- article pertains to NetHack 3.4.3 and will need to be updated when the next version is released.
• {{slashem-7E7}} -- article pertains to SLASH'EM 0.0.7E7 and will need to be updated when the next version of SLASH'EM is released. SLASH'EM gets its own tag because of the large number of articles relating to it.
• {{variant-343}} -- article pertains to a variant of NetHack 3.4.3 other than SLASH'EM and will need to be updated when that variant incorporates the next version of NetHack. This tag should only be used for variants such as SporkHack that are still under active development.
• {{noversion}} -- article will not need to be revised; this tag is for historical articles such as the version writeups, or articles on defunct variants, people, external programs, and the like.

The tag templates would display a small icon at the top of the page.

If multiple tags appear on a single article, they can be separated using an "offset" parameter like this: {{nethack-343|offset=2}}{{slashem-7E7|offset=1}}{{variant-343}}. {{noversion}} should never need to be used with another tag, and so it does not support the offset parameter.

With the articles so tagged, once the next version is released, the relevant tag template can be changed to display a prominent header, and add the article to a category. Once an editor has reviewed the article, and either updated it or determined that its information is still current, s/he can change the tag template, say, to {{nethack-350}}. This would go back to showing a small icon, and remove the header from the article and the article from the category.

Article list

This list gives all the main namespace articles that are not redirects as of the time of its creation (23 April 2008); the last-created article on the list is chroot jail. Once all articles are sorted into one of the categories listed above, a bot could be invoked to add the tags.

A note on the tile images

Tile images have been revised in the past and the next version may do so again. If this happens, the old tiles should not be overwritten, as they will still be needed for the version writeups; rather, they should be moved to the historic tiles page and the new tiles uploaded with new names. The What links here link for the old images can identify articles that will need to point to the new tile. Alternatively, the old images can be renamed, the version writeups revised, and the new tiles uploaded using the original name.