Help:Extension:PictureGame
Picture games are like social polls, except the main focus is on the images. Unlike quiz games, picture games have no "right" answer.
To play the picture game, go to Special:PictureGameHome and click on either of the images and you'll be taken to the next pair of images. If you come across an inappropriate image or image pair, click on the "Report images" link, which flags the picture game in question for administrator attention and temporarily removes it from circulation.
Creating a new picture game
editTo create a new picture game, go to Special:PictureGameHome and click on the "Create new picture game" link. Give it a good title (for example, "Which one is cuter?") and select two images for it, either by uploading two new ones or using existing images (either from the local wiki or Wikimedia Commons, if the InstantCommons feature is enabled on the wiki).
Note that on uploading new images, you will not be able to customize the file name or supply any additional metadata (e.g. on the creator, copyright status, etc.) at this point. To prevent potential file name collisions, the uploaded files will be automatically prefixed with the current Unix time (e.g. the output of PHP's time()
function at the upload), a hyphen and "imageOne" or "imageTwo", followed by the original file name to ensure uniqueness. This may result in a lot of files with ugly file names and inadequate metadata, so be aware of this.
Once the images have been selected, the "Create and play!" button will appear; click on it to finish the creation process.
Picture game creations are logged to Special:Log/picturegame.
Picture game administration
editBy default administrators are given the picturegameadmin
user right, which is needed to access the picture game admin panel. Via this UI privileged users can view flagged picture games and, if needed, unflag them, protect them and delete them.
Such privileged users can also edit the images used in picture games and add captions to them.
Administrative actions done to picture games by picture game admins are logged to Special:Log/picturegame.
Images uploaded via the picture game creation UI will be saved into the category defined in MediaWiki:Picturegame-images-category.
Restricting who can create new picture games
editIt's possible to restrict the creation of new picture games so that users will need, for example, five edits or need to have two friends before they are allowed to create new picture games. This is similar to the same feature present in PollNY ($wgCreatePollThresholds
) and QuizGame ($wgCreateQuizThresholds
) for restricting who can create new polls and quizzes, or in SocialProfile ($wgUserProfileThresholds
) restricting who can edit their social profile page. (Note that SocialProfile's $wgUserProfileThresholds
uses edit
instead of edits
that PictureGame uses.)
For example:
$wgCreatePictureGameThresholds = [
'edits' => 5,
'comments' => 3
];
This would mean that users must have made five edits (to pages in the namespaces listed in $wgNamespacesForEditPoints
array in the wiki's LocalSettings.php) and three comments before they would be allowed to create a new picture game.
All supported values for restriction:
edits
— edits made to pages in the namespaces listed in$wgNamespacesForEditPoints
arraycomments
— # of comments left on pages using the Comments extension (such as blog pages)comment_score_plus
— # of times your comment got upvotedcomment_score_minus
— # of times your comment got downvotedrecruits
— # of users referred to the wiki via special referral linksfriend_count
— # of friends you havefoe_count
— # of foes you haveweekly_wins
— times you've been the weekly winnermonthly_wins
— times you've been the monthly winneronly_confirmed_email
— self-explanatory, isn't it?poll_votes
— # of polls you've voted inpicture_game_votes
— # of picture games you've voted inquiz_created
— # quizzes createdquiz_answered
— # quizzes answered in totalquiz_correct
— # of points gotten by taking quizzes and getting the answer correctquiz_points
— # of points gotten by taking quizzes
In practise, one or two restrictions are probably sufficient enough to curb abuse. All of the available restrictions are documented here for completeness' sake, but it would likely be highly impractical to use restrictions like weekly_wins or monthly_wins.
Points
editIt's possible to give out points for both creating new picture games and for playing existing ones. A system administrator should define the following variables in the wiki's LocalSettings.php file for that:
$wgUserStatsPointValues['picturegame_created']
— the amount of points received for creating a brand new picture game$wgUserStatsPointValues['picturegame_vote']
— the amount of points received for voting in an existing picture game