Wowpedia talk:Category policy/Names

World of Warcraft category proliferation re-think needed

The following has been moved from the Village pump.

Okay, I didn't say anything at first, because I didn't realize how annoying it would be. Unless this wiki becomes Warcraftwiki, we need to stop having a bajillion categories with World of Warcraft at the beginning to distinguish them from other Warcraft game categories. The default is World of Warcraft, so categories should only need to mention their related Warcraft game, if does not have to do with World of Warcraft. Also, adding World of Warcraft at the beginning of everything definitely discourages people from adding categories by plain old typing and we don't want to discourage people, if we can help it. I don't want to put this up for a vote, but I will, if needed.

Zeal, I think you need to step up and defend your position. Your idea of "correct" and "common sense" doesn't coincide with mine and some other folks, apparently. Also, please don't use common sense as a defense. It doesn't mean anything. I'd also like to point out that User talk:Zeal/Proposals/Format shows that proposal losing 4 votes to 2. Not a strong case. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:29 PM PST 6 Feb 2008

I'll try to defend his position :), because to be honest I find it kinda annoying as well. (I only just learned of this new "WoW cat renaming" when I stumbled upon the  [Major Frost Protection Potion] article.) This is "wowwiki", and it should be assumed that the default is WoW. Furthermore, it looks kinda silly to see all the category names at the bottom of a page with repetitive "World of Warcraft" text in front of them. Also, it's a bit harder to find the useful non-repetitive part in all the text. So in short, I think other game related categories should prepend as necessary in order to disambiguate, and that the default should be WoW. (I read over Zeal's proposal but it seemed much bigger in scope than just this topic.) -- User:Adonran/Sig1 00:09, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Oh ffs. That proposal has nothing to do with it. Read the top level cat discussion on here and the non-wow content discussion Fandy. If you still don't get it (which apparently is the case atm) or if you don't agree, then i can't say anything further. I spoke to Kirkburn a few days ago, and mentioned the problems with the end results of what i was doing and how the up coming upgrade will fix some problems and improve things a hell of alot and hopefully the wikia devs can work on improving the rest in any number of ways.

If you hadn't noticed, i've stopped contributing. I'm only replying to this because you asked me to.-- Zeal ^(T/C)  08:44, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, sad to hear you've stopped contributing Zeal.

However, on the topic of mass re-categorization, from what I've read, I didn't see any widespread agreement, just not alot of disagreement. But... there was disagreement and I don't think you really addressed the disagreements, you just talked over them. I don't blame you for moving forward. I somewhat blame myself that we're in this situation because I didn't voice my disagreement clearly at the time you started.

If you're still talking on the Village pump, I really would like to have you recapitulate your reasoning, but especially why we need "World of Warcraft" in so many categories and address some of the above concerns about how it makes it harder to find the distinguishing parts of categories.

After you summarize your case, I'll probably start a policy vote, because it really sounds like a policy thing. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 8:22 AM PST 8 Feb 2008

I'm only talking on here when it's adressed to me or requested of me.

The reasoning for the naming was adressed twice in the same topic above, non-wow content. I've already re-explained with more clarity it for the benefit of one person in the same topic, so i don't see a reason to do so again. If there's a particular thing you want explained further or have an issue with, then that's something i can respond to differently. I addressed all the disagreements appropriately. Some people don't agree on princples, which i can understand and respect. Others are seemingly stubborn or ignorant despite it, i can't do anything with that.

As i said before, what i did was by existing policy and doesn't need a new policy, it's all implicitly supported. If you wish to add upon or make the policy more specific to explicity support or prevent what i did, that's a different matter. -- Zeal ^(T/C)  09:07, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I lean towards having the more explicit categories because we don't know where Warcraft and WoWWiki will go in the future. We already should be able to carry Warcraft III info, but make it more difficult through use of ambiguous categories. If we find that the new MMO is also set in the Warcraft universe (unlikely, but not impossible) we will have a bigger job on our hands to recat everything later. Kirkburn  talk  contr 17:46, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Um... no bigger a job than recatting things now is... OTOH, I've already been shouted down, so I don't have anything more to add. --Eirik Ratcatcher 19:03, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

My 2 cents is that "WoW" makes sense as a category name qualifier if/when there is a significant amount of related non-WoW content. Eg, a cat for WoW Geography, for locations that exist in-game, as a subset of locations in lore in general. The extensive recent renaming affected lots of content that is currently unambiguously specific to WoW, like Professions, which IMO do not need the "WoW" prefix. I think that it's good for categories to kind of organically be created when the content comes along that requires them. -- Harveydrone 18:48, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Category descriptions

I find some of the category descriptions (the actual category page, as it were) insufficient to the task.

For instance, Category:World of Warcraft tailoring items is described as "This category is for World of Warcraft tailoring item articles and categories".

This does a good job at saying "world of warcraft only", but it doesn't provide any cues as to what articles should go in that catagory, as opposed to "...crafted items" or "...ingredient items". As you may have seen by looking the category up,  [Primal Nether] and  [Primal Might] have been put in there, but  [Elemental Earth] has not.

The former (primals) was edited by Zeal, the latter was not. While I'm not sold on the idea that "if it's in a subcategory, it should be in the main category too" idea (and that is not what I'm on about here), but we should at least be consistent in category usage.

If you're not out to contribute by editing the category page text, Zeal, would you at least express the distinction in what goes in which category for us here, so we can update those category pages? And if there are differing opinions, we can at least discuss it. --Eirik Ratcatcher 19:03, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Of course. I made the descriptions as accurate yet simple as possible. The descriptions are best read backwards and out of order tbh, as is typical of descriptions in english.

Categories (further sub-cats/cross-cats etc) and articles that are of the type/subject matter "item" (so actual item pages), related to the tailoring profession and exist in World of Warcraft. -- Zeal ^(T/C)  01:36, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

I think what Eirik is asking for (and I'd also like to know) is: What goes in this category that does not go in the ingredient & crafted subcategories? Or does the "tailoring items" exist only to be the supercategory of "tailoring mats" and "tailoring crafted items"? I think this needs to be explained because as is, the "tailoring items" cat seems pointless: the two subcats should just go in Category:Tailoring. -- Harveydrone 18:39, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Based on Zeal's changes, I have been guessing that his view is: anything in "tailoring mats" or "crafted items" should also go in "tailoring items". I would venture to say that "tailoring patterns", since they are items related to tailoring, would also qualify. Part of my vague question is asking for confirmation or denial of that. The other part of my vague request is for "what do we put in the category description that guides future editors and readers both. --Eirik Ratcatcher 19:20, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah, well in that case.. The wow tailoring items category goes in a category for the tailoring profession, and a category for wow items (i think i also categorised into a wow profession items cat too). It's a combination of too overlapping subjects, a cat for items, and a cat for things related to tailoring. Beyond items used as ingredients in tailoring or crafted by it, there's probably some tools and reagents for skills.. i had started to expand that aspect and change my inital structure to accomidate such things.

When it comes to articles, the descriptions i listed should be more than enough to understand what goes where, though keep in mind my intent was articles go into their parent cats too, pretty much all the way up the tree until it no longer seems beneficial or they fail to meet the description of the cat.

For cats, it's probably not, but trying to describe the parent and child structures branching out from a category in it's description is more complex, and wasn't meant to be something users need to understand, as they never have to modify the structure of the cats. Explaining that would probably be better left to a single page, guideline or how to if you want users to know, but if it's to be left as something on a "higher level" so only the people who plan to change much of the structure know, then discussing it should be adequite. Basically just about what's logical and helpful in navigating without being overloaded with subcats on a single cat.

Wouldn't need descriptions with the naming i really wanted, all self-evident. :p

Anyway, hope that's the answers you were looking for -- Zeal ^(T/C)  01:05, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

You still really haven't addressed the question why we need World of Warcraft prefixing World of Warcraft-related categories when this is a World of Warcraft wiki. Is your perspective that this is a Warcraft wiki that made the mistake of putting "WoW" in the name? Having the long prefix doesn't bother you because you believe it represents accuracy which you values as more important than readability or the ability to quickly manual type a category?

Regardless, it would also be nice for you to list the other users who supported you in this endeavor. Was the discussion primarily on IRC? I'm just concerned since there was a point in WoWWiki's history where a small group of people made sweeping decisions about the structure of WoWWiki wihtout really reaching a consensus and I accused the group of acting like a cabal. I don't want to see us going back to that process. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:21 PM PST 18 Feb 2008

It was discussed on IRC. I don't know that anyone but Kirkburn ever agreed with Zeal (I know I didn't.). I somewhat agree with the prefixes, but as I've been watching this unfold, I would have to agree with the fact that WoW should be the default... Will continue to watch. --Sky (t | c | w) 21:29, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Not adressing and you not understanding are different things Fandy, if what i provided is not enough, then i can't say anymore.

I acted alone in the changes, though i showed my plans on here and on IRC as i went and there wasn't anyone against it during those early stages (likely because the finer details weren't understood/explained back then). Changes were made to achieve Kirkburn's initial idea and example, there was never anything in place to determine the exact naming of a category, just generic stuff, which was followed. Afaik changes to correct things or implement something new without any detriment do not need a big discussion or policy additions as they provide something that didn't currently exist or in use and were not governed by an existing policy. As i mentioned before, some people seem to want to make an uproar about something they didn't even use and has always been broken, i'm guessing because they simply want a say in something that has covers the whole wiki.

Sky, based on you saying "wow should be the default", i don't believe you understood what i said either, so what i said to Fandy probably applies to you too. -- Zeal ^(T/C)  00:07, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 1

Here's where I, Kirkburn, stand:

• The overall way the categories have been restructured under Category:Root is excellent. I can't imagine anyone complaining about that, as it finally makes for a navigable top-down category system. It may not be obvious from first glance, but by using the (rapidly approaching) CategoryTree extension, it makes a lot of sense.
• As for the prefixes - we are obviously a WoW-focused Warcraft wiki. However, I do believe it would be good practice to be explicit in our category naming as the direction of the wiki may change over time. For example, we should be able to cover Warcraft III info, but with category names like "Category:Quests" pr "Category:Items" it is ambiguous as to what that refers - and confusing for new users wanting to add stuff from WC3. Had this discussion come up a while ago, perhaps we might have come to a compromise on having "WoW" as a shorter prefix - but we didn't so the point is moot.
• Having longer category names does not break the wiki, though it extends the length of the categories box. It's not perfect, but there are ways of dealing with this. One may be to redesign how categories are presented - as a vertical list, rather than a box. Another may be to reduce the number of categories. In my view articles should be in their most specific categories only, which makes category navigation much much easier.
• Zeal did not break any policies in what he was attempting though more coordination with bots would have been useful for the larger categories I think some categories still need moving, but this may be unrelated. It's easy to concentrate on the controversial bit, and easy to miss the huge improvements made elsewhere. As changes go, it's not a huge one. We do have WW:BOLD, too.
• The wiki has grown up from its beginnings as a WoW-only wiki, and it is absolutely feasible for it to carry all sorts of Warcraft info. The creation of competing Warcraft I/II/III wikis would be unsustainable as WoW is so tightly integrated to the lore, which we carry. To not make it easy for such content to be added is to do a disservice to the many non-WoW-playing Warcraft fans out there. Given the upcoming Warcraft movie, Warcraft is only going to get bigger. We've got to be able to deal with this in a clear way. They will be coming to us for background info, and will be confused by continual assumptions of WoW playing. One thing that continually comes up at Wikia is the apparent lack of non-WoW stuff which does exist, but is hidden by mazes.

I hope that was not too long :) Kirkburn  talk  contr 16:54, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I'd just like to state, that I questioned it here, not too long after it originally started to happen. Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! ^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 20:56, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Response to Kirkburn...

A fair response, but I think you should take a bit more responsibility for the current situation. Did you give permission to Zeal to make sweeping changes or not? This isn't clear to me but Zeal seems to obliquely imply you did. Was this done with or without any kind of consensus? The current evidence, although scant, indicates there was no consensus or even any kind of significant discussion beyond IRC. I don't think "Be bold" would stand up in light of re-categorizing possibly 30% or more of the wiki.

Perhaps we can start staging a warcraft.wikia.com for a possibly future migration to a non-WoW-specific wiki, but that needs to be planned in some way and not imposed on WoWWiki behind the scenes.

Some responses to the above:

• I agree that alot of the restructuring was good, but most of the good part were adding structure where none really existed as opposed to redoing a structure that was mostly already in-place. As many people know, the unfortunate way things go is that you get ignored for your good and slammed for your bad, but I have repeatedly asked Zeal to explain his rationale and he never really replied and more talked around the question.
• Long category names was never the issue from a technical standpoint, it has always been an issue of: Is this a WoWwiki or a warcraft wiki? Does prefixing with "World of Warcraft" provide enough benefit when "World of Warcraft" is by far the most famous and pervasive of the warcraft properties and it makes the category listings at the bottom of the page unwieldy and repetitive. It is quite a pain to parse out the repeated World of Warcraft's on articles that cross many category boundaries.
• Like I said above, unless we explicitly choose the direction to make WoWWiki or some future incarnation a more general Warcraft wiki, it doesn't necessarily server our main population to cruft up the categories so those people who want WC3 content or such don't get confused. I'm definitely more inclined to accept a "WoW" prefix, but saying "what's done is done" is not a defense or explanation, merely a platitude.
• Unfortunately, as changes go, prefixing "World of Warcraft" on as many categories as the change was made to, was not a small change. If it were a small change it wouldn't be as controversial and easily undone. As it stands, the prefixing change is unfairly benefiting from inertia and not from agreement that it was a good idea. Zeal didn't break any policies per se, but he was in effect making new policy without following the policy process and that is a violation of policy to some degree.
• I understand the concern that users looking for non-WoW Warcraft info may have a harder time finding what they want without some changes, but re-categorizing all the WoW stuff is not the only solution. Another solution is to just make sure the non-WoW Warcraft stuff is properly identified and categorized in categories that distinguish them as non-WoW. I argued about this when the RPG classes (whic vastly outnumber the WoW classes) were mixed in with the WoW classes. For those WoW users looking for class information the organization of Category:Classes makes it harder to find the information they need.

Lastly, we must remember, although the Main Page confuses the issue by having had specific World of Warcraft mention conspicuously removed in most places until near the bottom, the amount of World of Warcraft players is likely to vastly outnumber players of other franchises which are probably shrinking. We do a disservice, I think, to the majority of our users when we make it harder for them to find info, just so a minority of our users can find info that we aren't focused on. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:30 PM PST 19 Feb 2008

I can't imagine WoW being separated from Warcraft stuff - to carry WoW stuff properly, we need lore background. To carry lore background means other content should be here too, as it's all rather intertwined. At absolutely no point am I advocating defocussing on WoW of course, it's more about allowing the other content to flourish. Yes, I am partly guilty for changing references to be more "Warcraft" and less "WoW", but that was as a result of the content we already carried. There's a lot of non-WoW specific content that was almost being pretended to not exist.

So, regarding the whole focus thing, I have an idea I'm going to work on that may help satisfy all parties - by splitting up the Main Page into portals. A very very rough guideline in User:Kirkburn/Dev3, where the default is the WoW one, but with specific portals for the other types of content (so users can set their homepage to their desired content). All modular stuff, so "Warcraft news" could appear on more than one portal, for example.

As for categories, the problem is mainly that we need a consensus of what should be done next. The items are recatted, and the bots would need setting up again for another change (the person who did the last lot, Zurr, has gone a bit AWOL from IRC, hence the problem). I do agree having "World of Warcraft" repeated a lot doesn't help, so my preference now would be a complete recat to "WoW xxxx", but only if we can guarantee the bots do it completely and we can finally make the category system sensible and clean.

Where did I stand on this? I was in Chicago, being distracted :P Zeal had a very good layout for the wiki down on an article, which I said looked pretty cool. It had the long prefixes, but in that format it didn't look that weird at all - in practise, that's a bit of a different matter. No shady deals going on here. :) Kirkburn  talk  contr 21:58, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

PS. I wish I could give you a link to the test site with our CategoryTree right now, but unfortunately it's down atm. That extension really really helps show how the cat system works too :( If we start using WoW as a prefix, it would follow that the other prefixes we use are essentially those from WoWWiki:Book citation index. Useful! Kirkburn  talk  contr 22:05, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I should add that I'm the one for convincing Zeal to use full names, rather than abbreviations, as I saw the trouble that we could get into when we get into using names of other items of Warcraft; books and such aren't as easily known (say, Rise of the Horde being RotH?). The terminology when we weren't using one of the main games would be, if not ambiguous, than easily misunderstood. Alas, again, I'll be watching j00! --Sky (t | c | w) 22:12, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

And edit conflict > me, with KB responding with how I was concerned originally. Lol. --Sky (t | c | w) 22:12, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I would think WC1, WC2, WC3 and especially WoW would be self evident enough. Of course, with a list like that on the Citation Index, that's half the trouble gone in the first place :) Kirkburn  talk  contr 22:22, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Just to clairfy. I had no "permission", i acted alone. There was the basis of a plan put forward by Kirkburn, but the discussion died off. I decided to implement that plan and expand it past where the discussion had gone. I provided a outline of what i was doing and took feedback form here and IRC, making changes as i went. I know you have some conspiracy theories Fandy, but it's as simple as that. Afaik, adding something to the wiki for which a policy doesn't exist isn't a violation in any form and does not neccessarily need to have a proposed policy before or after (though having one is a good idea imo) it's implementation.

Tbh, i don't think a single person has fully understood why i used the prefixes (even those in support of them), if they have they've not shown so in their comments. Sadly i don't know how to explain it any better than i already did, and a practical example of with and without seems like the only way it will ever click in people's heads. -- Zeal ^(T/C)  22:26, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I may not be supporting the cat changes for the same reasons as you - User:Zeal/Proposals/Format - but I still support them for different reasons :) Kirkburn  talk  contr 22:36, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

And now for a little focus...

The way I see it, we have two central issues, here:

1. We're not as accommodating to other Warcraft games as we could/should be.
2. Category organisation is lacking. It needs to be fixed for category level browsing purposes.

Is this correct? If 1. is the case, then we first need to decide if and how accommodating we want to be. And, because of 1. we ought to hold off on 2. until we've decided what to do with the first issues.

IMO, there's no reason we shouldn't accommodate the entire Warcraft universe. That our domain name is "wowwiki.com" is hardly a problem. I say we go for it. --DuTempete talk|contr 23:35, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Encompassing all Warcraft isn't much more than we have atm, it's just better organised (e.g. we already have WC3 missions, but you wouldn't know it). I would draw the line at WC3 modding (a wiki for such was requested recently), as that's going a bit outside the remit, and wouldn't be aided by anything we already cover here. Anyway, I have one thing I'm going to focus on now, and that's sleep :) Kirkburn  talk  contr 23:51, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

"Is this correct?" My answer is maybe, but only partially.

I'd like to re-do the central issues mentioned by DuTempete above, since I think they are largely incomplete:

1. We're not as accommodating to other Warcraft games as we could/should be. --DuTempete (Not sure if I agree we should be more accommodating, but we definitely could be.)
2. Category organisation is lacking. It needs to be fixed for category level browsing purposes. --DuTempete
3. Category policy is lacking. Apparently it had enough holes to justify a radical re-categorization of the wiki. It does however have WoWWiki:Policy/Category#List of categories that need to be fixed which even though sits on a policy page seems to be convenient to ignore if you find it burdensome.
4. WoWWiki is supposed to have a World of Warcraft focus, but the amount of focus is far too unclear and needs to be clarified. A movement is clearly afoot to largely do away with this focus from comments above.
5. WoWWiki has an unspoken policy for consensus decision making, but may need to be made a real, written-down policy so it can actually be enforced without endlessly discussing what to do when it gets flagrantly violated.

I know this sounds somewhat snarky, but it seems like the conversation keeps getting steered away from some of the problems we've encountered during this whole event and ignoring them will not go far towards solving them.

Am I wrong about the additional central issues? -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:46 PM PST 19 Feb 2008

I will briefly voice an opinion here: Fandyllic, your additions seem reasonable to me, particularly regarding the wiki having a WoW focus. I think it removed that focus and needlessly complicates things to be naming categories with the "World of Warcraft" prefix. However, I don't know enough about the overall category structure nor the intended direction of the wiki to strongly argue one way or the other. These are just the perceptions of a less involved user. --Jiyambi t || c 01:20, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

I can say, largely with certainty, that category browsing was very much fixed by Zeal's changes, even if I disagreed with the top level changes (which were primarily inspired by KB ;p). As to the rest, I definitely agree.
PS: You are awesome Du. --Sky (t | c | w) 03:35, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

I can agree with those being our major issues, except that your issue 4, Fandy, is the same as issue 1. So, I'll reply to them with my opinion, and encourage everyone to do the same.

1. We should seriously consider branching out to full support of the whole Warcraft universe. Otherwise the lines are always going to be blurry because of lore. Like it or not, lore is a major part of WoW, and in order to fully understand WoW lore, one must study lore from other Warcraft Genres. The only way to completely cut out the other games is by cutting out lore. If we did that, we'd be missing out on a serious part of WoW, and Baggins and Ragestorm would have a fit.
   • If we're going to accommodate Warcraft at all (and I've already said it's near impossible not to), we need to give it equal standing as WoW. These subjects certainly wont have as many pages, nor as many dedicated editors, at least at first, but we can encourage the WC/TCG/RPG geeks to show their faces by being more friendly toward their games. Kirkburn's idea to create individual portals for the top-level subjects is a great idea. The wiki's main page would then be a general or mix of the games' front-page information with big bold links to each of the portals. This is similar to how Wikia manages the many genres they deal with. Wikia.com has "hubs", like the gaming hub, where users go to get news about gaming wikis, yes this information is all still a part of the main wiki.
   • Something to consider in order to take that one extra step toward fully supporting all of Warcraft: warcraftwiki.com is open, or we could always go to warcraft.wikia.com .
2. I'm of the sort that likes to browse by category. Our current flow of categorisation sucks donkey balls. This needs to get fixed, but should wait until after we've decided how far we go with issue 1.
3. See Issue 5.
4. Same as Issue 1.
5. I don't think we can manage this one, to the extent you're talking about, Fandy. Where do we draw the line between changes an individual can make, and changes we have to make as a whole? I wouldn't doubt this is why there isn't already a concrete policy like this. However, if there are particularly sensitive aspects of the wiki that are vulnerable to issues like this one, then we may want to consider making a consensus policy specific to that individual aspect. In this case, we're talking about categories, which I do agree, are too sensitive not to have some explicit policy that states there must be a public vote/discussion in which a certain number/proportion of participants need to agree on. I applaud Zeal's use of WW:BOLD, but I'm not okay with how little agreement he waited for before going ahead with his changes to the categories. Kirkburn saying he likes something is never enough reason to go crazy on such a sensitive part of the wiki. Zeal, at least, is competent and smart enough to have done it without causing any problems. What if Sky had done it? We'd be in a real mess, then, instead of just talking about one.

That's all for now! --DuTempete talk|contr 08:09, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Here is what I'm hearing from Kirkburn and DuTempete: We want WoWWiki to treat non-WoW Warcraft topics more equally which means that WoWWiki can't really be WoW-focused anymore. To focus on WoW means cutting out the other games ("Like it or not, lore is a major part of WoW, and in order to fully understand WoW lore, one must study lore from other Warcraft Genres. The only way to completely cut out the other games is by cutting out lore.").

I never siggested that a WoW-focus required cutting out other games. Warcraft lore was never segregated by game, so I'm not sure how segregating such concrete things like items by game and making them all equal has anything to do with cutting out other games. To assert that one must give all Warcraft games equal status is the only way to cover the Warcraft universe is purely an assertion with no evidence behind it.

When I want to undo some of the things Zeal did, why is that not covered by "be bold"? I feel like I've lost this battle before it even started, because the repeated argument is that what Zeal did is being bold and the old way was just bad. As a WoW player, what Zeal did is extremely aggravating and seems to follow a trend that started with the classes categories. It almost wants to make me start a new wiki that really does focus on WoW and just start copying stuff out of WoWWiki because I've already put so much work into it.

I may just have to take a long break and see what the wiki looks like when I get back. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:04 PM PST 20 Feb 2008

Fandy, try and get your head around this one... Nothing i did negatively impacted the focus of WoW on this wiki, infact, very much the opposite. Several changes you've made to undo what i did, have actually now made it so WoW is no longer focused on and the situation for WoW players worse. Your actions do not reflect your intentions which leads me to believe you simply don't understand the issue and have not thought through how what you want works in practice. I assure you, i do not want to detract from the WoW focus of this wiki and think the WoW focus is a sensible idea that i support. All i was doing was making it so what is and is and isn't WoW related is clearly marked and seperated, while still giving WoW the focus it deserved. I'm a WoW player too, i want what you want, but you apparently don't know how to achieve that.

If you want an example of where your actions betray you, you need only look at what you did to Category:Items. You've reverted it back to being the category for WoW items, without a seperate category as i made it. Having WoW and non-WoW items seperate allowed for a better experience and focus for those only interested in WoW. But now you've removed that, people only interested in WoW items are once again forced to browse non-wow items too. Chewbacca... -- Zeal ^(T/C)  23:28, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Adding my opinions on the 5 points of discussion following DT's lead.

1. (WoW or all-WC focus) I'm not a player of non-WoW games, but it makes sense to me to expand wowwiki to cover them as much as WoW, if that's what the users here want. There's a distinction that may get overlooked: will wowwiki allow vs encourage non-WoW content? One of the arguments given for the new categories is that the cat structure did not allow wowwiki to be anything other than WoW-centric. I disagree, but I'd say the structure did not encourage it. I think the different game-oriented portals would go a long way to encouraging this.
2. (Cats broken) As a WoW-focused reader and contributor, I typically find an interesting page, see what cats it's in, and so find other interesting related pages. With the redesign, I saw that at least some pages would become significantly harder to use this way, with several lines of text mostly consisting of "World of Warcraft" in the category section. Until that happened, I had no problems navigating via categories. Thus, my motivation either to abbreviate these cats, not use the WoW prefix, or limit them to one level (ie not cat pages into every vertical supercategory). It's interesting to hear how other people use cats differently.
3. (Cat policy broken) I found WW:CAT a little confusing in discussing this issue; there are guidelines for creating categories, but then a big list of "correct" categories. Does revamping all the categories lie within or go against the policy? It's really hard to tell. If a category is on the WW:CAT page as a "correct" one, but its actual page is tagged as cats2fix (or even speedydelete, as is the case now), which do I believe? Part of my resistance to the current changes has been this confusion (to put it charitably) which was created.
4. and 5 seem to be covered by the above. -- Harveydrone 00:49, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Zeal, Fandyllic, holy freaking crap, I'm going to beat the crap out of you. Stop being asses, and start working together to get this fixed. Both of you are acting with self-righteous and stubborn pride; stuff it, and lets move on to fixing this thing. I can imagine the rest of us are fed up with the way you two are acting, because I know I am. Please. Focus on the solution, not the people. This will obviously take time to fix, either way, and so threatening to leave (or leaving) are going to affect us little. We could use both of your help in getting this fixed. --Sky (t | c | w) 04:05, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

You know i stopped "helping" already, so why add such a snide comment cleary aimed at me in your reply? You're doing exactly what you're asking Fandy and i not to do, infact worse so imo. I told Kirkburn to feel free to scold me if he felt what i said was too harsh to Fandy (though i received no reply, meh), after all, it's an admin's place to do so. I've tried to help Fandy understand, which is hard when he's been reluctant to help himself and arguing for the same thing everyone else in princple. He's always been stuck on the idea that

1. There's a conspiracy going on between certain contributers.
2. That people want something other than what he wants. Despite having said so numerous times before, to the contrary, he still overlooked that.

I've chosen stronger words and given and example. You know i have no hang ups about doing so, especially when someone's going to make blind accusations about my actions or anyone elses. Deal with me however you see fit, because you know i'm not going to change.

I'm not attacking Fandy, just trying to make him see what he seemingly doesn't want to see. Hopefully then he can work on a different solution with the rest of you instead of arguing against what he wants. -- Zeal ^(T/C)  05:01, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Why both of you? You Zeal, add little remarks here and there that imo are never, ever needed. Stuff like "Fandy, try and get your head around this one" and "Nothing i did negatively impacted the focus of WoW on this wiki, infact, very much the opposite." and "If you want an example of where your actions betray you,". We don't need that kind of commentary on Fandyllic's intelligence, or rather, the perceived lack of such, or even that what you did was correct and good and you obviously did nothing wrong (with all users). That's just in the last time you posted. I could dig up a dozen other references of such "I'm right and you're stupid, so get over it and do what I told you like a good little sheep." That you're not attacking Fandyllic, from such commentary, is not readily apparent to me, nor to anyone else, and especially not him. I can see why he's frustrated; you're just as much a damn brick wall as he is. Mentioning his weird nuances in your last post was yet more commentary undeserved; none of us care for his nuances, but none of us is going to say "Stop acting retarded." out loud. That's not only rude, but mean. It hurt's.

And, fyi, "That people want something other than what he wants. Despite having said so numerous times before, to the contrary, he still overlooked that." is also rather far from the truth. People want he wants in different ways. What you want is the same as him, you just perceive it to be different. You went about changing it, and so has he.

I did this from what I've seen of both your actions, not you alone. From what I've seen of Fandyllic, while he hasn't exactly been accommodating to exactly what other people wants, he's also stopped to gather more information about what's going on from the rest of us here, and help figure out a different way to do it. You, on the other hand, have charged ahead.

In the end, what's done and said is done and said. I'm not trying to change the way you are, I'm asking you to change the way you act when others, especially those who are a might-side prickly, are around. --Sky (t | c | w) 05:20, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm not even gunna try. You're being an idiot Sky. I'm done with this side line conversation. Do and think whatever you like. -- Zeal ^(T/C)  06:41, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

If anyone cares what my opinion is, I don't care either way. I don't use category navigation, it's nice to have, but I prefer to use templated navboxes, etc. (And I understand category navigation is just another way to do things, which is fine). But I don't see any reason to get upset. Let cool heads prevail, people. If you're gonna let a website about a video game frustrate you, you should take a step back and cool off. You'll find you think and reason better when you come back. Calling people names isn't going to solve anything. --PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 07:05, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

In my opinion, we should handle each issue separately, since they are separate. Should WoWWiki continue to expand past focusing on WoW? I think it might be a good idea, and indeed separating out the articles would help clear some things up for my POV as well, like the fact that lore pages take precedence (for some strange reason) when disambiguated from in-game tactics pages for a given boss. So the portal idea is probably good. That's all I've got for now, the category issue is a bit more overwhelming from my perspective. --PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 07:12, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Fandy, no, focusing on wow does not mean cutting out other games. But, we're in a limbo between cutting them out and merely allowing them because we haven't publicly talked about this to my knowledge, yet. It's like Harveydrone said; I think we should go beyond just alowing it (and as I've said, how could we prevent it?), and into encouraging it. I'm all for it, and can't see any reason not to do this beyond laziness. I also don't think that Wikia is likely to create a WC wiki, so, consider there will be people coming to us anyway, for WC information. Should we continue to give them the cold shoulder, as we do now? I don't think that "Do as you like, just don't come to me for help." is a good way to go about that.

Specifying the game in the category name, IMO, makes us more welcoming to WC information ("see? We've made this shiny new category just for you! Fill it!"), and also makes things easier for the category browsing users such as myself. I want to know that what I'm looking at is WoW (or otherwise) information without having to go to that article. When 1.12 comes out, we'll be able to browse through the categories without even going to the category page. That's where more descriptive category names comes in. --DuTempete talk|contr 07:42, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I really liked Sky's suggestion that perhaps the "World of Warcraft" prefix only be used for the higher level categories. This would keep categorizing articles simple, but I'm not sure it would address all the issues talked about here. Just thought I'd throw in my two cents. --Jiyambi t || c 09:20, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I think you've misinterpreted me, but it did inspire me: it does beg for (at the top anyway): "Items" -> "World of Warcraft items" -> "WoW legendary items", and then to possibly remove the prefix in subcategories to those, as the prefix become all but redundant when faced with such cross categorization as can only mean that the items are from World of Warcraft. Eg, "Cloth head items"; nowhere will you find such usage in any other sources of Warcraft. Summarily, this also prevents issues of "too much information (too little?)", which I (and others, from above) have had concerns of regarding the category box. --Sky (t | c | w) 09:48, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Bleh. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:10 PM PST 29 Feb 2008

I am inclined against fully removing a prefix in subcategories, as without a category browser, the "level" of a category is not readily apparent. I fear you might end up with a page that had some categories prefixed wow, some prefixed (Warcraft III or whatever), and some unprefixed ones that you could not link to the one or the other. --Eirik Ratcatcher 19:01, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Choice of prefix

I just found this discussion after wondering why the category lines on my contributions suddenly got so verbose. I'm not opposed to being more inclusive of other games in the series, but the length of the category names is now being dominated by the name of the game, such that the actual distinguishing category disappears in the repeated "World of Warcraft" text. Can this text be abbreviated to "WoW"? Similar abbreviations appear to be in common use with other potential games in the series (eg. "WC3").

I'm seeing references to some kind of category hierarchy coming. Will this accommodate moving all WoW-specific categories under a top-level WoW category, and does this help reduce the verbosity of the category names? ScratchMonkey (talk) 20:16, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

It's actually a rather reasonable comment - "WoW" is a pretty good abbreviation, and is meaningful for just about everybody. I'm not quite sure why we're not using it to be perfectly honest. Kirkburn  talk  contr 06:50, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to adopt WoW as the category prefix

In an attempt to move this discussion forward to some sort of conclusion, I propose that we adopt "WoW" as the category prefix and rename the existing "World of Warcraft ..." categories to "WoW ...". Categories which do not currently have the prefix would not be changed as part of this proposal. This vote is purely to adopt the proposed prefix and rename currently prefixed categories using it. If there is a need to add or remove the prefix to/from categories, or to adjust the current tree of categories, please leave that aside from any vote you cast here. I would be quite happy to do a large amount of the heavy lifting (or even all of it) on the move using pywikipediabot's category.py script. It would take a little while to rename all of the categories, but the actual bot task is not particularly difficult. --Murph (talk · contr) 06:24, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Votes

Yes

1. Yes Murph (talk · contr) 06:24, 22 December 2008 (UTC) - (Nominated)
2. yes Howbizr (talk) 11:37, 23 December 2008 (UTC) - (I'll take what I can get... but I don't know why we need to say it's "WoW" at all on a website clearly named "WoWWiki.")
3. yes Fandyllic 19:58, 23 December 2008 (UTC) - (Saying "WoW" dumbs it down should apply for all our abbreviations and acronyms, so a weak argument IMHO. Having it written out all the time is a waste of memory.)

No

1. No g0urra[T҂C] 08:57, 22 December 2008 (UTC) - (It's fine as it is. Writing "WoW" dumbs it down.)
2. No PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 21:24, 22 December 2008 (UTC) - (While I don't like the current scheme, if we're going to spell it out, we should spell it out.)

Comments

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We clearly need "Universe Local Cluster Milky Way Solar System Earth America Entertainment Blizzard Games World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Northrend Naxxramas heroic items" and "Universe Local Cluster Milky Way Solar System Earth America Entertainment Blizzard Games World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Northrend Naxxramas heroic mobs". It also makes reading so much easier, don't you agree? --Mikk (T) 10:34, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

-Howbizr (talk) 11:45, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Howbizr, would you rather call it "www.worldofwarcraftwiki.com"? g0urra[T҂C] 11:53, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

No I like it being wowwiki... I just think in terms of inheritance - say it once, then don't say it again. But maybe that's not intuitive to non-technical people. -Howbizr (talk) 17:30, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Not sure bringing up inheritance helps the case for contracting World of Warcraft to WoW. Inheritance works in programming because the end-user doesn't need see how inheritance does its job behind the scene. If we don't agree that WoWWiki (as its name implies) is primarily a World of Warcraft wiki, then we need to clarify what categories are WoW specific. However, in the past the rule was specify if a category was NOT WoW specific. I lost that battle, so that is why we have the proliferation of "World of Warcraft blah blah" categories. I'm just glad to see other people find WoW less annoying and less work than putting "World of Warcraft" in every category related to WoW.

Besides, if you want to use inheritance as a pro argument then someone is inevitably going to bring up overloading. That leads down a dark path. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:40 PM PST 24 Dec 2008

You were never alone. I was just kind of shocked no vote was done, for such a huge change. Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! ^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 21:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to stay neutral on this one, this time. I've gotten use to adding World of Warcraft to the beginning of most categories. Not to mention the little helper under the edit box when [[ is used. Personally I'd rather go back to not having to worry about the prefix, but whats done is done. Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! ^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 21:35, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, "World of Warcraft blah blah" categories defeated much of the usefulness of the [[ helper because "World of Warcraft" fills up most of the drop down list and you can't tell the difference between what categories you're selecting. So the [[ helper would be much more useful with "WoW" instead of "World of Warcraft". -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:40 PM PST 24 Dec 2008

I would think the same would be true if "WoW" were used for all cats, but knowing around what you're looking for helps. Like if you were looking for the sword item category typing [[Category:World of Warcraft sw brings up the what you were looking for. Wouldn't it be the same with [[Category:WoW sw if we switched to WoW.... just less typing =)

Unless you meant all you see in the drop down list is "World of Warcraft" with the rest of the category not shown? Cause the whole cat shows for me, no matter how long it is. Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! ^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 21:50, 24 December 2008 (UTC)