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Category Organization
For the sake of consistency, it seems like a community discussion is necessary about the preferred way in which to organize and name categories. In the system I've been tending to implement with categories, a category's name includes the parent categories, separated by "-" symbols. So for example Category:Oblivion-Places-Caves is a subcategory of Category:Oblivion-Places which in turn is a subcategory of Category:Oblivion. Although it's perhaps not implemented completely uniformly, any reorganization that's been done has generally tried to increase the consistency, especially across namespaces. So Category:Oblivion-Creatures-Daedra, Category:Shivering-Creatures-Daedra and Category:Morrowind-Creatures-Daedra were all set up the same way.
However, Lurlock evidently prefers a different naming system, and has just reorganized all of the Morrowind creature categories so that they are no longer consistent with the organization used in the other namespaces. Before this effort goes too much further, I'd like to find out what is preferred overall so that we can hopefully all work together in the same direction. --NepheleTalk 19:15, 25 October 2007 (EDT)
- I'm personally in favor of using the parent categories in category names (ie: Morrowind-Creatures-Ash Creatures instead of Morrowind-Ash Creatures). I think for the sake of consistency it's easier to stick to this system, since as far as I can tell most of our categories are named that way. In any case, the sheer number of "Factions" categories that would have to be renamed should be enough to scare anywone away from any massive overhauls. Another bonus of this system is that for some reason it feels much more organized, which is always a good thing :). --Eshetalk19:32, 25 October 2007 (EDT)
- I'm not too familiar with the categorization sustem, but let's see if I can apply this to something I'm familiar with; Say for instance the page: Oblivion:Tutorial. With the current system there are links to Oblivion:Oblivion, Oblivion:Quests, and Oblivion:Main Quest. If the system Lurlock is proposing would eliminate the Oblivion:Quests link, then I'd be in favor of keeping it the way it is. Or am I totally confused? --GuildKnight (Talk) contribs 21:21, 25 October 2007 (EDT)
- Okay, let me just explain a few reasons behind my logic here. First of all, with all the new categories that are being created, there's a problem with the category sections become just too long and unweildy, especially when you look at some things like Category:Bloodmoon-Factions-East Empire Company-Ranks. It ends up just being a huge block of hard-to-read text at the bottom. My specific reason for this recent change, however, was because the Morrowind:Creeper and Morrowind:Mudcrab Merchant pages were creating abnormal categories due to their use of the NPC Summary template, for which "Race" and "Class" are required fields. Rather than create categories which would contain only one creature in each, I opted to merge them with the existing creature categories. However, the NPC Summary does not give you the option to add a "Creatures-" before the category name, so I figued "Morrowind-Beasts" was good enough. (Also, some of them look pretty ridiculous, like the aforementioned "Morrowind-Creatures-Ash Creatures". Having the word "Creatures" appear twice in the title just seems redundant. If there were maybe some way to make the namespace not display in the categories, it might be somewhat better. You don't need to have something say "Morrowind-Creatures" if you're already on a Morrowind page. (Obviously, we can't rename the category to just "Creatures" as that would cause conflict between games, but if we could make it just not display the namespace part, it would be a huge help.) I just don't want to end up with articles that have a category bar that looks like the one on this page. --TheRealLurlock Talk 22:43, 25 October 2007 (EDT)
- Keeping the parent categories in the category name is my preferred option. It helps explain the organisation of the site and makes it clear how different articles are related at a glance. I think the new system is putting the horse before the cart: because of problems with the NPC template on two pages that don't describe NPCs, we have to change everything else? The same is true of Morrowind-Creatures-Ash Creatures - it's only a couple of categories that have this problem so why change everything else? To be honest I'm a bit disappointed this has been implemented so hastily. There was a brief discussion about this on IRC the other night so you knew that changing category layout was possible and indeed had already been done in a sandbox, and in any case, this sort of thing should really be discussed on the site before seeing the light of day. --Rpeh•T•C•E• 04:19, 26 October 2007 (EDT)
- Fine, revert it all, I can see I'm out-voted. I'd like to then propose a new template to deal with the problem with the NPC Summary template. Call it Template:Creature Summary maybe, and use it on pages for unique creatures such as these. It should have all the main features of the NPC Summary, but with categories and a few other things changed to be more creature-specific. I can think of a few other pages I'd use it on as well. Any named boss-creatures could use something like this as well. You'd have to add fields for their attacks and such, but shouldn't be too hard. --TheRealLurlock Talk 10:42, 26 October 2007 (EDT)
- A separate template for special creatures would be a good idea. The new Battlehorn Castle mod has already led to a couple of cases where it would be useful. Secondly, since this seems to have moved up the agenda, here is the latest version of my category layout changes. It now splits the categories into columns (two when more than four categories are present; three when more than eight) and removes the first "XXXXXX-" from the category name where it exists, although it is still shown on mouseover. If you want to see it in action for yourselves, create your own CSS and JS file in the style of this (css) and this (js). The one major drawback is that it uses JavaScript and so the formatting doesn't kick in until the page is totally loaded. This can look somewhat odd when the site is slow. Anyway. Let me know what you all think. --Rpeh•T•C•E• 13:29, 26 October 2007 (EDT)
- Fine, revert it all, I can see I'm out-voted. I'd like to then propose a new template to deal with the problem with the NPC Summary template. Call it Template:Creature Summary maybe, and use it on pages for unique creatures such as these. It should have all the main features of the NPC Summary, but with categories and a few other things changed to be more creature-specific. I can think of a few other pages I'd use it on as well. Any named boss-creatures could use something like this as well. You'd have to add fields for their attacks and such, but shouldn't be too hard. --TheRealLurlock Talk 10:42, 26 October 2007 (EDT)
- Keeping the parent categories in the category name is my preferred option. It helps explain the organisation of the site and makes it clear how different articles are related at a glance. I think the new system is putting the horse before the cart: because of problems with the NPC template on two pages that don't describe NPCs, we have to change everything else? The same is true of Morrowind-Creatures-Ash Creatures - it's only a couple of categories that have this problem so why change everything else? To be honest I'm a bit disappointed this has been implemented so hastily. There was a brief discussion about this on IRC the other night so you knew that changing category layout was possible and indeed had already been done in a sandbox, and in any case, this sort of thing should really be discussed on the site before seeing the light of day. --Rpeh•T•C•E• 04:19, 26 October 2007 (EDT)
