PCGamingWiki talk:News

"ARK: Survival Evolved and its' DLCs"

• its

As a general PSA: "It's" is short for "it is"; "its" is the possessive form.

Thanks for letting us know. I've corrected the grammar.

February 25th is when payment opens for the Deck. The first units will only begin shipping on February 28th. If this was a game that opened for pre-orders on the 25th and for download on the 28th there would be no argument at all that game's release date would be the 28th. Why is hardware any different?

Sorry that's my bad, admittedly I didn't look over the news post too closely and missed the second date for orders being shipped. Valve were a bit misleading too in their title, though I wonder what the "release" date of the console will be considered as due tot he unique nature of how the Deck is being sold.

Anyway thanks for pointing it out, I've reworded the title to focus on the shipping date instead.

Not your fault honestly, everywhere I looked (articles, reddit, discord, etc.) people are going with Valve's blog title verbatim as well. I also agree with you the title is misleading.

I think only games that were deliberately made available on one store should be labeled 'exclusive' in the news feed. 'Steam exclusive' in this section is misleading, as no agreements were made to this effect.

Every act of publishing is deliberate. Going for Steam but not GOG or another store before Epic Games Store existed is an intentional decision. There are cases of games available only on Epic Games Store, Origin and Uplay that do not mention their exclusivity terms, if any, but they are still commonly regarded as exclusives. Relying only on pronounced exclusivity could significantly reduce the amount of games we can mention.

Personal preferences and biases aside, I think everyone would agree that having more stores and platforms to choose from is always better. As such, it would be hard to argue that over 7 years of PC exclusivity of Borderlands 2 to Steam is less notable than one year of Epic exclusivity.

It would be cool to have an RSS feed for the Gaming News. I think it would help a lot of people if they could subscribe using their favorite RSS reader and get updates continuously.

Do you think something like this would be possible?

As of right now this is not possible while working within the confines of the wiki. MediaWiki (which the site is based on) isn't really designed for that sort of thing. To make matters worse, the extensions that I've looked into that provide RSS generation capabilities are unmaintained and outdated by 3 to 5 years so they probably aren't even be compatible with our site.

We might be able to find an alternative but I can make no promises.

Thanks for your response, I appreciate you looking into this. While browsing through the "feed generator extensions" for Mediawiki (see: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Feed_generator_extensions) I found Semantic MediaWiki (see: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_MediaWiki). While this extension is actively maintained, it appears that it can do a lot more than just generating RSS feeds. Do you think this would overkill for my proposed specific use case?

Huh, TIL that Semantic MediaWiki had that functionality.

Anyway, Semantic MediaWiki is already installed on the wiki and we use it for a lot of things (basically all lists on PCGW is populated using SMW). However the news section isn't based around Semantic MediaWiki's property system, so we can't use it for this purpose without having to rebuild the whole news system and move it away from Cargo (which we otherwise intend to replace SMW with where possible).

Such a move would also bring with it some downsides such as unreliable updates and on occasion stale data.

For the purpose of the news section, the current Cargo setup works the best.

Too bad Cargo does not have RSS capabilities :(. I hope you do find an alternative solution.

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