Tower of Althalaxx

Forums: Village pump → Remove quest prefix from quest pages

I propose we remove the "Quest:" prefix from quest pages for consistency with every other type of content page. Standard disambiguation naming can apply for any collisions. I raised the point in IRC but found no good reason why we keep it this way. So I want to get others' opinions on this. --PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 16:30, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Votes

Yes

1. Yes PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 16:30, 16 April 2011 (UTC) - (Nominated)
2. Yes Sky (talk) 17:53, 16 April 2011 (UTC) - (I have long advocated for this. It's long overdue and should have been done before Cataclysm. (See WP:Namespaces/WT:Namespaces for a few of my musings.))
3. Yes —EGingell^TC Treader of Cenarion Circle 18:07, 16 April 2011 (UTC) - (Unless you make Quest a real namespace (hard coding it in LocalSettings.php is required for this), then they're really in the main namespace anyway.)
4. Yes Dark T Zeratul (talk) 03:21, 17 April 2011 (UTC) - (Consistency is good.)

No

1. No g0urra[T҂C] 16:33, 16 April 2011 (UTC) - ("If it's not broken, don't fix it". Just because it is POSSIBLE doesn't mean that it's OKAY.)
2. No Neutralion (talk) 19:35, 16 April 2011 (UTC) - (Against. It will make A LOT of mess and many quests will end like Name (quest) anyway. At last, preffix looks better.)
3. No Joshmaul, Loremaster of Chaos (Leave a Message) 00:18, 17 April 2011 (UTC) - (Agreed with Gourra - and there are probably better things to do with our time than going through thousands of quest pages and renaming them all.)

Comments

For collisions, we have something of a hierarchy between similar names. I presume quests would be at the bottom of the hierarchy, which is essentially where they are now with the pseudo-namespace. --Sky (talk) 17:58, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

If it's to remove the pseudo-namespace, then make Quest: a namespace. There is really no need to change how it is - unless you want to break thousands of pages/links. --g0urra[T҂C] 18:38, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

That's a false dilemma or possibly a strawman. There's no reason why moving thousands of articles should break thousands of pages/links and I'm not sure where you got the notion. And yes, we should change it: for ease of future linking and searching. --Sky (talk) 18:50, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

From the uses of {{quest}} and {{questlong}}, links WILL break. Unless you have a grand plan for fixing that, too. --g0urra[T҂C] 19:38, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Uh, remove Quest: from those templates. --PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 19:44, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

And the pages that they link to? You'll bot those links as well? --g0urra[T҂C] 19:48, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

The quest pages themselves? I thought that was the idea... --PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 20:13, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

...that's not what I meant. If Quest:Skullcrusher the Mountain (Horde) gets moved, how are the links going to be, through uses of for example {{quest|Skullcrusher the Mountain (Horde)|Skullcrusher the Mountain}}? Will the disambiguation page be  [30-35] Skullcrusher the Mountain, and will that page be handled like the disambiguated quest pages are now? --g0urra[T҂C] 20:48, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. --PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 20:57, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Call me stupid, but I don't really see the point. -- Joshmaul, Loremaster of Chaos (Leave a Message) 00:19, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Consistency with every other content page. --PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 00:21, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

By that standard, I assume we would be doing the same with all the other prefixed pages (with the probable exception of the user pages) - the guild ones, the server ones, so on? Because the only thing I really see this as is removing the "unnecessary" prefix. And again, I don't see the point. Exactly how is the removal of six characters from the beginning of a page name "consistency"? -- Joshmaul, Loremaster of Chaos (Leave a Message) 04:46, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Outdent: Re Joshmaul: All the other prefixed pages aren't content in the fact that they do not exist in-game, and so the entirety of them are in actual separate technical namespaces. Right now we operate with this silly, unnecessary pseudo-namespace for quests which really doesn't do anything more than require the use of template like questlong to link to. It's perceived benefit of standardizing seaches isn't really one at all... --Sky (talk) 05:00, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Consistency shouldn't be an argument for doing this. Is there actually something bad about how it is right now? Shouldn't you be working on making API a namespace instead, that people actually wants, instead of making them API_? --g0urra[T҂C] 09:41, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, if I had my way, we'd move all the API stuff out of its pseudonamespace; there's unlikely to be any collisions to those. That's an institutional rule and one which I've looked into before; even then, I could not discover the "why" behind it. The person to bug about 'why' would be Gryphon, at this point. My suspicion is that it was to deal with the camelCaps style of the variables (specifically beginning with a lowercase letter), which could be dealt with now using the magic word {{DISPLAYTITLE:thisIsAVariable}}. --Sky (talk) 13:02, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

It seems to me that there may be some value to having a Quest: prefix -- it makes namespace collisions a bit more predictable. Consistency seems like a week argument that goes both ways -- what's being proposed is consistency with "other articles" (and we care about that... because it's consistency; everybody loves them some consistency!), on the other, this change hurts internal consistency -- figuring out the name for a quest article becomes a bit more challenging. As I'm not in the business of creating quest articles, I'm not really sure which way this argument swings.

Some of the things Sky has said confuse me -- it's unclear what the benefits of this change to future searching are, and I'd presume nobody is actually using {{questlong}} to link to quest pages anymore.

On a different note, we could very conceivably make Quest a real namespace, if that strikes anyone's fancy. — foxlit (talk) 12:18, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm all for making quest a real namespace, and this could help with searching too. Agreed with the consistency - everyone knows already that all quests already start with Quest.

And looking closer, the ones that voted Yes doesn't create quest articles - or at least haven't for quite some time. --g0urra[T҂C] 12:47, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Does it matter who's creating the quest articles? This change doesn't change the format of anything beside the name. If you can't change "Quest:ABC" to "ABC (quest)" everytime you hit a collision... I mean, you create thousands of item articles, some of which have collisions. That's never stopped you before, has it? (See also: Ad hominem, which indicates that you've used a fallacious argument.) --Sky (talk) 13:02, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Mmm, you know how much I love sarcasm.

...

I'm sure you can imagine the scenario re searching. Instead of "Quest:ABC" going into the search box (which the poor newbie wouldn't know to do), it would be "ABC", and then they'd either end up at a disambig or a quest page. There are a few other scenarios, most of which support a more consistent approach with the rest of the content or which are negligibly tilted toward either keeping the quest pages as they are or renaming. In effect, no, Gourra, you do not know if everyone knows, and that's a stupid thing to claim. --Sky (talk) 13:02, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Enjoy putting "For the quest, see 'Quest (quest)'." on every single collision then. I'm sure you like to do all that work. --g0urra[T҂C] 13:06, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

o.o. It's a wiki. Changes like that can be made slowly. And, in fact, it would be good practice to be doing so already, because the pages really should be disambiguated using hat notes. --Sky (talk) 13:12, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

An example re searching: If I type "Eranikus" into the search box, the drop down does not contain the related quest. If I click "Search", the quest is negligibly listed among many other results. If we were to remove "Quest:", this page would be listed in the drop down and I could have gotten to it without making another interaction with the website.

One thing we might want to figure out is how we would deal with quests which have the same name and which are connected to each other. Using another example, there is a quest named "Quest:The Essence of Eranikus" and a second quest called "Quest:The Essence of Eranikus (2)". Would it be better to name these "The Essence of Eranikus" and "The Essence of Eranikus (2)"? What about where this name conflicts with an item? I can see that case conceivably using "The Essence of Eranikus (quest)" and "The Essence of Eranikus (quest 2)". Thoughts? --Sky (talk) 13:12, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

You really want to go through all that bother? It baffles me. --g0urra[T҂C] 13:14, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

It baffles you either because you do not understand the reasoning, deliberately do not understand the reasoning, or understand it and disagree with it. Leaving aside option two, which just assumes bad faith, I can respect option 3 and would hope I could clear up option 1, but I suspect I've said it the best I can. There's no need to inject hyperbole. Yes, there are a lot of quest pages. Yes, there are a lot of links to quest pages. No, that's not a good reason why we should not, and we can bot both problems away using pywikipedia, which I know both Starlight and Pcj know how to run (though I know Starlight has been busy with #data and such). --Sky (talk) 13:19, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

The AJAX search suggestions could also be fixed by making Quest a proper namespace, which doesn't require quite as much editing effort. I'm somewhat concerned about the length and mildly unpredictable nature of those disambiguation suffixes -- forms like "(Alliance quest 2)" spring to mind, plus the suffixes are a bit more volatile, possibly changing whenever new items/quests/objects/locations/characters/... are introduced.

For what it's worth, the change can be performed by largely bots without causing major disturbances; redirects can easily be left in place of Quest articles for as long as there are incoming links. It seems like the discussion would be better framed as "if this change happened, would it make things worse?"

As this requires changing WP:NAME, it seems like the policy voting requirements should apply. — foxlit (talk) 13:45, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid of those forms too, but that's essentially what we have now; "Quest" is just at the beginning of the name rather than in the parentheticals.

I wouldn't think they're too volatile, but I can see the point. It's helpful that Blizzard has been pretty good about naming quests differently from other quests (ignoring faction quests), which is the biggest cause of "volatility" that I've seen.

We can go about the botting in two ways: Assume that we'll be able to reach to the tens of thousands of pages within a tight timeline, move everything without redirects, and save us the trouble of deleting (internally) unused redirects, or we can go that way. I'm ambivalent to the particular method there, though I think a massive move with temporarily breaking links would be preferable.

Thank you for bringing up NAME. I was about to bring that up myself after I went to have breakfast. :) --Sky (talk) 14:03, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

On some level, the quest prefix shields us from collisions with NPC, item and location names, which do occur with some degree of frequency. Based solely on article titles, getting rid of the prefix would cause ~1.4k collisions, which, with two (!) exceptions, are resolvable by appending (quest) to the quest title; for a sense of scale, there are ~12k quest articles, of which ~3k already have some form of disambiguation in title. — foxlit (talk) 14:41, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

The numbers are useful. Would it be possible to get how many of the 3k already disambiguated would need further disambiguation e.g. by adding "quest"? --Sky (talk) 14:58, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Just the two exceptions:  [Illidari-Bane Shard] and  [Gjalerbron Attack Plans]. — foxlit (talk) 15:03, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

So we'd have a problem moving about 10% of the quests. That's actually much better than I had feared (!!!!!) and lends a little weight that "Quest:" is unnecessary disambiguation (either as a formal namespace or not) for what is the overwhelming majority of the quests currently on the wiki. It also seems to do away with the fears of parantheticals going on and on forever, if I understand you correctly. --Sky (talk) 15:23, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Conversely, getting a link wrong one time out of ten is worse than I had hoped. Regardless, someone should probably specify what we're doing with the existing disambiguation suffixes should this pass -- what would happen with "Quest:Foo (2)", "Quest:Foo (Alliance)", "Quest:Foo (Alliance 2)" if those do/do not collide with existing article titles? Does that depend on whether "Quest:Foo (1)" collides with something? — foxlit (talk) 17:11, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure how Quest:Foo (2) would not collide if Quest:Foo does. --PcjWowpedia wiki manager (TDrop me a line!•C207,729 contributions and counting) 19:05, 18 April 2011 (UTC)