Template:WoWWiki:Village pump/Intro
Requests for adminship
Check out the new Requests for adminship page, and nominate someone you think qualifies for administrator or support/oppose one of the existing nominees. --Pcj (T•C) 16:44, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
- In the past becoming an admin was much more informal, so I hope this process doesn't get too political... Let me see, who's been nominated to possibly be an admin? Oh look the first one is Pcj! ;-) --
Fandyllic (talk · contr) 9:40 AM PST 2 Jan 2008
Criticism of WoWWiki
I created WoWWiki:Criticism, because I figure we should have a place for people just to vent, if nothing else. If we're really doing a good job, the page will be short. Hopefully things will be added, but also disappear for good reasons. --
Fandyllic (talk · contr) 3:30 PM PST 6 Jan 2008
- People will vent just to vent... There are always people that hate some aspect of wowwiki. Be it because it has material from some source they don't like, or doesn't have enough material form a source they do like.Baggins 23:51, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
He is right, people are gonna go on there and complain that they HATE WowWiki cause the font is white...Aseh 02:45, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
In-game books and styling
Coobra and I were discussing how in-game book text should be displayed (such as on 
[Legacy of the Aspects]). Should they be shown with a table using 'class="darktable"', 'bgcolor="black"', or in some other way? WW:MOS suggests using darktable as much as possible for tables, and I tend to agree. --Pcj (T•C) 23:03, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Where I think how darktable is for in-game books does not look good. Compared to how it currently is. 
(Sssss/Slithered) 23:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
- Coobra, note that we have to develop for MonoBook skinning as well, which is the coloring that wikipedia uses. Meaning, black text on a black bg doesn't work real well.
For others just joining conversation, see also User talk:Pcj. --Sky (t | c | w) 18:16, 9 January 2008 (EST)
- Setting the bg to black is pretty bad, but I agree darktable may not be perfect for that. Perhaps a new CSS class? Kirkburn talk contr 23:25, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
- Possibly...depending on what it is, of course. :P --Pcj (T•C) 23:30, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
- All I know is that its been black since 10-03-2006. I wouldn't have choose black either, but I didn't want to change it too dramatically. But yea what Pcj said, depending on what it is (Sssss/Slithered) 18:36, 9 January 2008 (EST)
- Should have left a comment: Personally, using darktable looks fine, though it might be prudent just to change it to .darktable in the css from table.darktable. --Sky (t | c | w) 23:32, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
- It's not tabular data, don't use a table. Simple divs with border and background colours will suffice and require less code. -- Zeal (T/C) 07:16, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
I would sugest a parchment coloured background, with black text, for all skins (to make it look like the in game pages). I would also suggest a common but less modern looking font for the text. —MJBurrage(T•C) 10:23, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
- How about this:
I have done a great deal of research about the Aspects and their titan creators--as much as any human could in a lifetime. There were five Aspects when the titans left this world; they were mighty dragons tasked with protecting the world of Azeroth. Their tales are vast and varied, and even now, in spite of all the information I have fathered, I know that there is much more to be learned of these magnificent creatures.
Much of the knowledge I have now I could not have possibly learned on my own. Because of this, I am extremely grateful to the night elves. It was only with their help that I have as many details as I do. As a result of our interactions, I am under the impression that their beginnings are much more closely tied to the Aspects than I had first thought. However, they guard their secrets far too closely for even me to know for certain.
The information I learned of the Aspects I put here for others to reference in the future. I know it will prove useful, as I feel that these dragons will have a much greater effect on our world as time goes on.
Alexstrasza:
Alexstrasza, the ancient and powerful Queen of the Dragons, was named the Life-Binder by the titans. She was first to be created by the titans to protect the world after they left. It is said that she witnessed the birth of all modern races upon the face of Azeroth. Her red dragonflight, known for their proud demeanor, once ruled over all over dragonkind.
...- For some reason "brown" renders very red on my version of FireFox (2.0.0.11), so I'm using #382800 for the text and #684800 for the border (with #C8B088 as the background color, since "tan" is a little to reddish to me also). We also see in my example the problem with link coloring which we'll have to find a clever way of making not look so bad. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 11:44 AM PST 10 Jan 2008
- By the link situation do you mean the colours? As I cannot read the links in the scrolling box. (the light blue is too close to the background.) Having said that, I love the scrolling box, although it would look better without the unneeded horizontal scroll bar. Also I would increase the height to 180px, and add an inverted (italic bold tan font on a dark brown background) title bar for the name of the book. (see below, note I am not sure how to change link colour within a division without adding a class to the overall style sheet.)—MJBurrage(T•C) 23:22, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
I have done a great deal of research about the Aspects and their titan creators--as much as any Human could in a lifetime. There were five Aspects when the titans left this world; they were mighty dragons tasked with protecting the world of Azeroth. Their tales are vast and varied, and even now, in spite of all the information I have fathered, I know that there is much more to be learned of these magnificent creatures.
Much of the knowledge I have now I could not have possibly learned on my own. Because of this, I am extremely grateful to the night elves. It was only with their help that I have as many details as I do. As a result of our interactions, I am under the impression that their beginnings are much more closely tied to the Aspects than I had first thought. However, they guard their secrets far too closely for even me to know for certain.
The information I learned of the Aspects I put here for others to reference in the future. I know it will prove useful, as I feel that these dragons will have a much greater effect on our world as time goes on.
Alexstrasza:
Alexstrasza, the ancient and powerful Queen of the Dragons, was named the Life-Binder by the titans. She was first to be created by the titans to protect the world after they left. It is said that she witnessed the birth of all modern races upon the face of Azeroth. Her red dragonflight, known for their proud demeanor, once ruled over all over dragonkind.
...- My eyes hurt... the brown doesn't work on the grey as expected, :p. ...and no I won't change my skin.Baggins 23:33, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
- I have checked this against each of the skins listed under User Preferences, and it works fine with all of them. I would suggest bold black for the links (see Human above), since a third colour would look busy even if readable. (I also restored Fandyllic's example to the way he posted it for comparison. —MJBurrage(T•C) 23:51, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
- I also just fixed the borders on my example (I had left out a key word. —MJBurrage(T•C) 23:54, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
- Awesome work MJBurrage, and I'd have to agree using the bold black for links...it looks nice, and it works. (Sssss/Slithered) 00:00, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
So is there a proper way to change the default link color from within a division? or does the WoWwiki CSS file have to be changed? (either way, how does one do it?) —MJBurrage(T•C) 02:20, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
- I have to say the worst bit is the links, the light blue is blinding. But I don't much like the brown on grey either.Baggins 02:25, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Who knew Taurens could handle a pen so well.
Could always do something unqiue for them. Like how I did the Kodo Skin Scroll =) What do you think about that? {T•C) 05:25, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
- While the desire to replciate parchment is well intended, it looks awful and ugly on the wowwiki skin. Just keep it matching the skin colour please, grey. Shouldn't be changing the expected link colours on users for special cases either, bad design practice.
- As with {{tooltip}}, it wasn't designed to look like a the in-game tooltip, it was designed to be simple and fit with the default skin, just so happens the in-game tooltip did that anyway. Same goes for the infoxboxes, especially since the removal of the horrible border design which had no place on the wiki realy. -- Zeal (T/C) 08:43, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
- Ignore the coding, as i'm simply using my existing template to show examples of styling atm, but how about one of the ones on http://www.wowwiki.com/User:Zeal/Sandbox#Book. And before some misguided person comments that they don't look good on other skins, they're not meant to, do it differently on other skins, merely proposing a wowwiki skin design atm. If any of those are liked, i'll do a template with greatly reduced coding (and change away from a
<h2>for the title). Personally i prefer the 4th then 3rd. -- Zeal (T/C) 09:54, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
- Ignore the coding, as i'm simply using my existing template to show examples of styling atm, but how about one of the ones on http://www.wowwiki.com/User:Zeal/Sandbox#Book. And before some misguided person comments that they don't look good on other skins, they're not meant to, do it differently on other skins, merely proposing a wowwiki skin design atm. If any of those are liked, i'll do a template with greatly reduced coding (and change away from a
- those look much better than tacky colors above.Baggins 09:59, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
- I would still suggest using a serif font for the text, and italics for the title. With the colours this subtle—which I don't dislike by the way—the font change would help clearly distinguish the quoted "book" from the rest of the text on the page.
I would also have the height be dependent on the content (so usually there would be no scroll bar), but with an optional parameter that would allow setting a height so that longer texts could use a scrolling box. (This would improve layout of already long pages.) —MJBurrage(T•C) 16:13, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
- I would still suggest using a serif font for the text, and italics for the title. With the colours this subtle—which I don't dislike by the way—the font change would help clearly distinguish the quoted "book" from the rest of the text on the page.
- A sneak peak User:Zeal/Sandbox/Templates/book. Let me know what you think, things that need changing etc. -- Zeal (T/C) 12:28, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
- Looks great, and I like all of the optional parameters you added, they will make it easy to fit on a variety of page layouts. I added italics to the title (hope you don't mind). If it were me, I would also put the title in a serif font, but that's pretty minor. As is, I would think this could be implemented now since no CSS changes are needed for this color scheme. —MJBurrage(T•C) 17:30, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
- The CSS would still need to be implemented, there's some extra bits with can only be added via a CSS, and it's not going to display on all skins right now (unless i force a text colour, but it still won't be as nice). Plus i'd like to remove most of the style declarations in the code. Also like a few more people to throw their opinions at it.
- As to the title being serif, i did initially try it, and being bold (and probably even worse now italic too) it wasn't as easy to read, so i left it as normal. -- Zeal (T/C) 18:03, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
- I do not have any of your suggested CSS rules loaded in my preferences, and the template still looks great in the skins I checked (dark and light), so unlike the tan version were the links are unreadable, your colors work well (as blue links are readable on very light or very dark backgrounds (all of the WoWwiki skins).
Having quickly looked over your CSS suggestions there was nothing I saw–and I could be mistaken—that could not be done within a template. Of course a CSS class would allow for a light colored version that better matches the light skins, but a template would work as is.
With respect to the title, have you tried the Georgia Font, as you may know it was designed specifically to be a more on-screen-legible version of TNR, and is preinstalled in both Windows and Mac.—MJBurrage(T•C) 20:07, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
- I do not have any of your suggested CSS rules loaded in my preferences, and the template still looks great in the skins I checked (dark and light), so unlike the tan version were the links are unreadable, your colors work well (as blue links are readable on very light or very dark backgrounds (all of the WoWwiki skins).
Just drawing some attention back to this...seems we let it sort of die... I'm assuming the CSS still needs to be implemented. {T•C) 07:16, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
Unicode characters and their use
Computers have pretty much destroyed the correct usage of certain symbols and characters because they've typically been harder and slower to work with due to a lack of support by software and/or hardware.
Now i'd love to see correct usage of things such as dashes used, but alot of people don't know when and where to use them, and inputting the smybols or knowing the character references to use is difficult and slows down the editing process. Seeing such symbols used often confuses other editors too, so it's practice has clearly been avoided.
Therefore we could use a policy to either eliminate their use, or help in their use. I recently commented on User talk:Markkawika#dashes and asked him to stop, as if we're going to support these unicode characters, we should be consistant as not to confuse people.
WoWWiki is served as unicode, so straight away, there shouldn't be any XHTML character references in pages, but there are, and we should start converting them to unicode when seen or run a bot to do so.
As i said, i support their use and would like to see them used, but we need to both educate editors and provide methods to allow them to use them more easily. To solve the first problem, i suggest for a short guideline or more extensive help page that is linked to on the edit page, explaining their uses in regard to WoWWiki. As to the second, a cheat sheet that appears next to the edit box (as WP uses) to provide these symbols, either with javascript input, or simple copy&paste. As i'm sure there will still be confusion, a bot could auto-replace much of the previous and future incorrect usages, but it is a delicate process and not all symbols could be checked from a bot as they're context sensitive.
Thoughts? -- Zeal (T/C) 11:53, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
- I am a big fan of the proper use of hyphens (-), en dashes (–), em dashes (—), ellipsis (…), daggers (†,‡), and fractions (21⁄3). I also like more obscure typography like the numero sign (№) and typographic quotes (‘,’,“,”), although I understand that a number of common fonts render those last ones poorly at small sizes. I also wish that convention still supported typographic spacing—before typewriters full stops used to have 11⁄2 spaces after them, which became two spaces in monospaced typing, and than only one space under HTML.
- Wikipedia has clickable symbols under the edit window for the common but hard to type symbols, and a simple fraction template. They also add common, but often misused bits of typing to the edit bar (like includeonly, nowiki, and ~~~~). —MJBurrage(T•C) 16:33, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
- Agree, except for typographic spacing. It's an archaic practice born out of technical neccessity rather than styling conception. Today it's distracting rather than pleasing to the eye when reading. Hopefully when Kirikburn gets back this will get some more active discussion :p -- Zeal (T/C) 17:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
- As I understand it the 11⁄2 spaces was by choice, and two-spaces was the typewriter approximation favoured by Americans. In some fonts two spaces is too much, and in other fonts one space is not enough. What I want is a half-space, but that's not happening anytime soon.
- Along these lines, I wish CSS had a good way to align whole columns (center or right), rather than having to do it cell-by-cell. —MJBurrage(T•C) 18:25, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
- Should have clarified myself. What i was mostly refering to was the practice of two spaces. The 1.5 spacing can still be emulated through an en space, but the idea is fonts now days are supposed to provide a space character than is the optimal width for inter-word spacing and after a full stop, which is typically smaller than a monospace at roughly 1/3 of an en space. -- Zeal (T/C) 19:26, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
- Use of unicode and special characters (I prefer using HTML entities when possible, &code;) is fine, but we should be careful when using them in links. I'm not sure the linking mechanism handles unicode very well, but I haven't see many examples. I also highly discourage using copy/pasted or inserted characters when entities are available. Not everyone lives in the MS Windows encoding world and some of us actively resist. At minimum people should test their unicode with Arial or Helvetica fonts. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:14 PM PST 14 Jan 2008
- Use of unicode and special characters (I prefer using HTML entities when possible, &code;) is fine, but we should be careful when using them in links. I'm not sure the linking mechanism handles unicode very well, but I haven't see many examples. I also highly discourage using copy/pasted or inserted characters when entities are available. Not everyone lives in the MS Windows encoding world and some of us actively resist. At minimum people should test their unicode with Arial or Helvetica fonts. --
- The XHTMl character references exist as a means to insert unicode characters into more limited encoding XHTML documents. When already served as unicode, they only provide a means of easy insertion because keyboards can only provide a limited set of characters. But they look a mess when editing, there's no need to do so. It also has nothing to do with MS Windows encoding, it's unicode, windows just happens to use UTF-8 unicode by default, which is good. Ultimately if you're serving your site in unicode (which WW is), you should use a unicode font (which we don't). Shouldn't need to test for limited character support with fonts that aren't unicode when serving unicode, that's just bad practice, so it's probably a great idea WW switch to a unicode font where available (Arial Unicode MS is a likely candidate with Windows and OSX support and a large character set). It's a case of standards pushing forward when the reality is still far behind (no font supports the full unicode character set and the ones that do still aren't readily available for free). Either way, most browsers support font substitution in varying levels of ability so many issues can go unnoticed. Read Wikipedia:Help:Multilingual support for more. -- Zeal (T/C) 23:33, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Excessive category renaming
Renaming all the cats to begin with World of Warcraft, isn't that a bit excessive? Who made that decision? {T•C) 01:22, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
- Me. This is WoWWiki, but the name changes were required to ensure they're differntiated from non-wow items and lore from a game neutral view point. Also worth noting is that fact the vast majority of those categories needed to be renamed anyways, as they were against the naming policy (they were title case, which is wrong) and were inconsistant and had doubled up in places. -- Zeal (T/C) 01:30, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
- Zeal: Please! Tooltip changes FIRST! Please don't be breaking the wiki before you have the replacement solution in place! I'm seeing category changes, but I'd like to see a proof-of-concept on the auto-catting first. --Eirik Ratcatcher 01:32, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
- It was already broken. I'm creating something that never existed properly in the first, and what existed wasn't/couldn't be used.
- The changes do not require auto-catting, that's merely to ease the proccess so such changes and extensive catting will never have to be done again.
- You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. You can not build a house upon poor foundations. Basically... not many major changes get done around here because of scale, and it just gets worse and worse the more it's left in the state it is, facing worsening problems and challanges later on. I detest the reliance upon bots to implement change, this is a wiki, it can always be done in by contributers collaborting, but a standard must be set first. That's what this is all about, getting everything in place for a framework so that even without full knowledge or understanding, anyone and everyone can help or have bots do.
- I don't want to have this same conversation yet again.
- -- Zeal (T/C) 02:04, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
- What I see is that this has been less than a week from proposal to execution, meaning that by the time I noticed it and started asking questions, it was already under way - 'so sad, you are too late'. I see the proposal itself splayed across several topics on Village Pump, instead of being given a page of its own - 'find out what is going on under your own power, we're busy doing '. I see a plan being floated without concrete examples of the problem, and without concrete examples of the solution. I see things being broken with the attitude "it'll be broken until someone else fixes it", when even pedestrian-I can see that the means to shorten the cooking time, to work with your on analogy, could have been prepared - but weren't.
You don't want to have this same conversation yet again? Then collect the problem, the solution, and the transition plan in one place, that isn't going to get swept away with the archive tides, and point us to it.--Eirik Ratcatcher 01:15, 25 January 2008 (UTC) --- Edit: Made a separate topic. --Eirik Ratcatcher 01:31, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
- There was no proposal, and i see no reason for there to be a proposal. Everything was already in place, just never implemented correctly or fully
- The problem was self evident, the solution was first proposed by Kirkburn. I implemented it in seeing that nothing was being done when it's soemthing i brought up before so long ago and knowing anything i did could only actually be an improvement. The state the categories was already, and always has been, unusable and inconsistant. Everything i've done has been by policy and by example, the rest was common sense which apparently people never thought far enough ahead about. It's fixing the fact that barely any existing categories followed policy, it's fixing the fact that the category tree could not be used for browsing the wiki.
- Will you please stop claiming that i'm breaking things and letting other people do the work to fix what i've done. It was broken already, it was never implemented fully. I've fixed it, it needs further implementation to be completed and is something i am contributing towards, but it's already well beyond where it was. Getting sick of you constantly commenting on my contributions with this same sentiment and attitude.
- If anything i'm simply forcing WoWWikians to take notice and address something that has never reached conclusion and avoided. After than is a new policy is going to need to be decided upon. -- Zeal (T/C) 01:32, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
- Do I really need to point out the fallacies in determining a policy change after the fact, in any context?
- You're right, you are forcing change upon WoWWikians. And this one is resisting, with what he feels are good reasons. That's the nature of, and reaction to, 'force'. And I'll stop complaining about 'breaking' when things are no longer in transition. That is, after all, my point.
- You illustrate my point about the need for a document describing the problem and the solution, saying that it was something you "brought up before so long ago". At the rate VP changes, this discussion will fall off the page in mere weeks.--Eirik Ratcatcher 22:51, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
- No policy change is required, it's already following existing policy. After completion, a new policy would need to be written up as an extension becuase one has never existed that effects this, because categories have never been implemeted fully. There isn't one, because there's been no need for one. If someone wants to write a priliminary one, by all means, do so.
- "forcing WoWWikians to take notice and address" not "forcing change upon WoWWikians.", there's a difference. Try reading what i said more carefully next time please.
- The proposal i was referencing as "so long ago" was coupled with multiple other changes and poorly explained, so i didn't see fit to link it, but if you're set on seeing it, then User:Zeal/Proposals/Format. Iirc, you've read it before.-- Zeal (T/C) 00:10, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Non WoW content
This is coincidentally related to the above topic - we don't really support non-WoW content well enough. Renaming categories as Zeal has done is actually quite a good idea as it makes everything much more specific to WoW (as these things are). It is quite feasible for us to carry information for every Warcraft game, but organising and advertising it is something to work on. For one, we're stuck with the name WoWWiki, so I think I still need to make some tweaks to the Main Page to make it more obvious we're not just WoW. Kirkburn talk contr 02:33, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
- Put a little banner with every game's logo at the top of the page?--SWM2448 02:36, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
- There's one excellent method Halopedia uses - a little icon at the top right signifying where this stuff appears (multiple icons for multiple games, etc). Example - http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Master_Chief ... The reason this came up is because someone requested a Warcraft wiki on Wikia (again). Kirkburn talk contr 02:53, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
- The Master Chief page renders totally horribly on my FireFox browser (2.0.0.11). Is anyone else seeing this? The Eras template seems to be broken for me, but only in normal view. It works when I edit and preview. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:41 PM PST 23 Jan 2008
- Okay, today it looks fine. My browser must have been munged by something else. However, the eras icons cover some wiki message:
- Community links: Usergroup elections; Video editing for Halopedia? John-117
- So we should make sure any thing we have that's similar doesn't conflict with other messages that might show up in the upper area.-- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 11:40 AM PST 24 Jan 2008
- Okay, today it looks fine. My browser must have been munged by something else. However, the eras icons cover some wiki message:
- The Master Chief page renders totally horribly on my FireFox browser (2.0.0.11). Is anyone else seeing this? The Eras template seems to be broken for me, but only in normal view. It works when I edit and preview. --
- Well the idea i mentioned to kirkburn, was that we should have an expandable area, like a bar, directly below amboxes, that would contain these icons. Alternatively it, at the very bottom of the article so as not to push down content with something which isn't of extreme importance. Having them in some sort of sidebar would be ideal (perhaps even at the bottom of the summary templates?), but that's not really plausible with our current skin and manual of style. I just believe with more and more wow sources being released, we're going to see it overloaded quickly and is unfair on those with smaller screens.. -- Zeal (T/C) 19:49, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
- Crazy idea, but http://www.warcraftwiki.com/ seems to be untaken (or at least doesn't seem to be taken by some ad spammer) :P ~ ŋɑϑ 19:20, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
- You're wrong, warcraftwiki.com is taken, see: http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=warcraftwiki.com
- It does appear to be just a GoDaddy domain squat, though. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:50 PM PST 23 Jan 2008
- Not sure what the name of the template is on halo (Template:Era?), but I know that this is also implemented on Wookiepedia at T:Eras. I personally like the look, so it could definitely be interesting. We even have the mini-icons which we use for -inline and -section templates. --Sky (t | c | w) 19:46, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Our version of Template:Era could replace the templates like {{novel}}, leaving just the -section and -inline versions. As for clashing with wikipedia and language links - the wikipedia template links are mostly pointless now they deleted most Warcraft stuff, whilst the language links should mostly be interwikis now (e.g. [[fr:Tyrande]]). Kirkburn talk contr 20:05, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
Strange, but I really did think that wowwiki WAS World of Warcraft (the game)-centric. And from that viewpoint, I don't find the category name changes helpful at all. Could it not be a separate namespace, or something?
Assuming I'm shouted down, shouldn't the category changes be implemented by bot? (Or are they being so handled?) Further, perhaps I've simply caught Zeal mid-process, but I went from Category:Blacksmith (no name change signed) to Category:Blacksmithing Products (name change signed). Yet, almost all of the pages in both categories would fall under the new naming scheme. ... and I say 'almost' only because I haven't viewed every last one of the blacksmithing pages.
What I'm saying is, you're changing the names of categories, and moving their entire contents... so why did you change the name in the first place? Thus the "WoW-centric"... --Eirik Ratcatcher 00:31, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
- It's WoW centric, but it's not only WoW content. There needs to be generic names to encompass all sources. Items are a clear candidate for that, so "World of Warcraft" prefix is needed to make the source clearer and disambiguate for all of the previous item cat names. There are no seperate namespaces or such things within a namespace, and the name would still be just as long. My original proposal i made so long ago, further placed more restrictions and accuracy in naming, but it never got anywhere, so this is pretty much the same thing but a level below in strictness.
- This is a big undertaking, and will take several days (perhaps weeks) to get everything working properly. Right now, the closest one to being completely finished is Category:Books. What you've described is a case of where i've tried to find (extremely hard due to all the problems with the previous structure) all the existing cats, mark them as incorrect, pointing to new cats, then going through to create the new cats, then again going through to recat all the articles.
- The plan is, to have the summary templates ({{tooltip}} and infoboxes) to categorize pages based on their type (books, games, series, items, quests, servers, etc.) and the information they're already provided about it (sub-types and such), so eventually we won't have to rely on users knowing, remembering, typing and sticking to an existing structure, and only expanding upon it after some discussion. The second part would be the introduction of the templates discussed above, replacing some of our existing templates. This way pages are then further categorized by relationship to sources. beyond that, when you get down to the highly accurate and deep categories, manual cating will be needed or yet another template, as it gets too specific to automate (well, foxbot could probably handle alot of it based on info from the armory along side it's current information). -- Zeal (T/C) 01:00, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
- I'm somewhat concerned about this unilateral move to rename all the item categories with the World of Warcraft prefix. Although I understand the intention, it seems like a cumbersome solution and a way to make WoWWiki not really focused on World of Warcraft, but more of a general Warcraft wiki, which in my mind is only a secondary purpose and should not not guide the structure of the wiki. Zeal, you might be taking, be bold, a little too seriously and verging on reckless. Do other warcraft games have enough similar item categories to justify prefixing all the World of Warcraft item categories? I don't see why we can't just prefix the non-WoW item categories. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 11:51 AM PST 24 Jan 2008
- I'm somewhat concerned about this unilateral move to rename all the item categories with the World of Warcraft prefix. Although I understand the intention, it seems like a cumbersome solution and a way to make WoWWiki not really focused on World of Warcraft, but more of a general Warcraft wiki, which in my mind is only a secondary purpose and should not not guide the structure of the wiki. Zeal, you might be taking, be bold, a little too seriously and verging on reckless. Do other warcraft games have enough similar item categories to justify prefixing all the World of Warcraft item categories? I don't see why we can't just prefix the non-WoW item categories. --
- Seperating wow and other source items is a secondary concern, the primary one is so that there is a generic structure. Otherwise all items, including non-wow items would be under the wow items strcuture, and how messy would that be. Theres also the matter of the fact the previous one had long fallen into disarray because no one had ever agreed on a standard or gone the whole way with ideas for restructing/renaming. I don't think there was a single item category other than "Items" itself that followed policy, and the same can be said for pretty much all other categories too. The reason why the prefix remains is so that there is no confusion and that there's an obvious consistancy in place for people. You don't go changing the wording all of a sudden on a user, just because you fancied something shorter and could get away with it in a few case.
- Servers don't need a prefix, as there's no other kind except WoW. Same goes for quests, it's something that only applies to WoW. The WoW prefix is implied there. Its not the same case with items, spells, books, characters etc. Zones is a nice case of a term that applies to wow only, but can still fit into a generic structure for everything else as cartography, regions, towns, cities etc. I probably could have gotten away with "Loot" for items in wow, but really it's too obscure a term to use for people who might not understand it's relevance.
- The focus is still and will always be on WoW, it's just these changes were needed so everything else can co-exist with WoW.
- As to being "bold". I think this the first time i've done something so "bold", and while it might be seen as reckless right now, i think it'd be worse if i was to stop half way through. Besides, it's the categories i'm having a major impact on. No ones navigates them or categorize consistantly, so i can only improve things. - Zeal (T/C) 20:24, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
- Something i want to point out, is that as i discussed on IRC and Kirkburn hinted at, is that these templates should replace the existing templates for this sort of thing, eg. {{Novel}}, {{RPG}}. That means they should be seperate templates for each one. They should not be in a single template as the other wikis have done. This is a large array of sources that are going to be ever growing as Blizzard release products, and if it's in a single template, it will be on pretty much all pages, so updating it that often isn't feasible -- Zeal (T/C) 03:08, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
- I can only guess, that you discarded the idea of prefixing everything that was not WoW? Being in the vast minority, and destined to stay that way. My viewpoint is skewed, though, by my focus on tradeskills instead of NPCs. Still, there are only so many NPCs that are going to cross over between realms.
- I can but smile at you advocating the breaking up of templates. That was an argument I made about {{Tooltip}} when it was first announced. I was ignored then, too.--Eirik Ratcatcher 23:53, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
- Another wiki that leverages heavily on templates is Paragonwiki. (eg, Invention: Accuracy) While there are advantages to heavily templating, it makes editing pages much more cryptic and exclusive (as opposed to inclusive). The more useful the template, the more cryptic. I ask for caution in this process.--Eirik Ratcatcher 00:10, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
- If you read more closely, it was not primarily about seperating sources, it was about generic naming required to encompass everything, so your argument of minority is moot.
- I've no idea why you're smiling at that, considering it has no relevance to {{Tooltip}}. That is something that should rarely change, and has no need to split while this is something that will change often, so does. There's also the fact that all that is being done is the replacement of existing seperate templates as well as creating new ones where needed and giving them a new format and functionality, nothing more. -- Zeal (T/C) 00:19, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
- I'm also confused/wary about the major changes to categories. If the point is not to separate WoW from non-WoW, what is it? (I can't find an explanation of "generic naming to encompass all sources".) I understand making the site more friendly to non-WoW content, but I also think since it's wowwiki, it's been more than adequate for content to be assumed to be WoW-related, and noted when it's not. Is there a policy page where this is written up? -- Harveydrone 13:46, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
- Basically what it means is that there is a genericly named category structure for which to browse the WoWWiki by. So Items, would contains all items, WoW and not, while WoW would have it's own sub-cat, as with all sources, so that you can view only WoW items. The alternative is Items being used for everything, yet WoW not having it's own sub-cat, so people wanting to view WoW only items, can't. -- Zeal (T/C) 18:10, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
- I don't suppose there are examples of pages where this is the case? Such as, an article for an item not from WoW? Or, say, a mount-related page that belongs in Category:Mounts but not in Category:World of Warcraft mount items? In other words, if I want to only see WoW-related mount pages, what other pages are getting in my way at Category:Mounts? I'm just trying to understand the problem this is intended to solve. -- Harveydrone 19:51, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
- The example was simply Category:Items, and i already fully explained it. If you're refering to the latter part of my reply, i'll guess i'll quote it ¬_¬
The reason why the prefix remains is so that there is no confusion and that there's an obvious consistancy in place for people. You don't go changing the wording all of a sudden on a user, just because you fancied something shorter and could get away with it in a few case.
Servers don't need a prefix, as there's no other kind except WoW. Same goes for quests, it's something that only applies to WoW. The WoW prefix is implied there. Its not the same case with items, spells, books, characters etc. Zones is a nice case of a term that applies to wow only, but can still fit into a generic structure for everything else as cartography, regions, towns, cities etc. I probably could have gotten away with "Loot" for items in wow, but really it's too obscure a term to use for people who might not understand it's relevance.
- -- Zeal (T/C) 03:11, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
- Sorry to not be clear. I meant I'd like an example of a specific item page that would go in the Items category but not in World of Warcraft items. When I look at Category:Items now, it looks at first glance like it's all WoW. I'm assuming there are lots of potential non-WoW item pages and I'd just like to see what those would be (since I'm not familiar with WC outside of WoW). -- Harveydrone 20:28, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
- No problem. One such item could be Brox's axe, which currently has no such article as it's not a WoW item, yet had great significance and history in the War of the Ancients Trilogy as well as speculation on it's current location and possible future appearences in the WoW or the rest of the Warcraft universe. -- Zeal (T/C) 20:48, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
- OK, thanks for that. I can see that a hypothetical Brox's Axe page would fall under Category:Axes as well as say Category:War of the Ancients. One point: with only one article, there would not yet be reason for Category:War of the Ancients axes (according to WW:CAT). Thus, if all of the WoW axes were put into a new Category:WoW axes subcategory, the "Axes" category would then contain maybe one article (Axe) and just one subcategory, which is also against policy. So I see that eventually there could be a use for "WoW axes", but until there is, it's better to keep all the existing axe articles directly in "Axes". -- Harveydrone 23:52, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
- No problem. One such item could be Brox's axe, which currently has no such article as it's not a WoW item, yet had great significance and history in the War of the Ancients Trilogy as well as speculation on it's current location and possible future appearences in the WoW or the rest of the Warcraft universe. -- Zeal (T/C) 20:48, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
- Problem is WoW Axes would also be a sub-category of WoW, not just Axes, yet Axes would not be for just WoW Axes so could no be sub cat of WoW. So the category needs to exist for the structure and navigation to work. Theres also the points i mistakenly quoted further up, and that it would be an exception as explained WW:CAT -- Zeal (T/C) 00:08, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
- Saying, essentially, that Categories that exist for the purpose of holding other categories are an exception to the "needs N entries" guideline. Yes? --Eirik Ratcatcher 00:56, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Predicted icons needed
Per the above dicussion, if we list all the ones we're likely to require here, we can see how much space we'll need. Add more if you know of any. I don't feel the icons don't have to be that specific, the citations and -section and -inline templates can cover that better. Kirkburn talk contr 22:21, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
- Warcraft I
- Warcraft II
- Expansion
- Warcraft III
- Expansion
- WoW
- BC
- WotLK
- Novels (one icon?)
- Manhwa
- Graphic novels (and comics)
- RPG books (one icon?)
- Artwork books
- Is there anything unique to WC2 Battle.net edition that would merit an icon? Also, how is Manhwa distinct from Manga and do Manga get lumped into Graphic novels? -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:13 PM PST 24 Jan 2008
- Not as far as i know.
- As to manga and manhwa, i clarified the issue about the naming on it's page. Manga, and manhwa, as with pretty much all comics are originaly released in a comic format, which may be a stand alone issue or in a compilation comic/magazine. Graphics novel is only applied to books, which is why i made the distinction in the category structure. Its not a standardized term, though does apply to pretty much any story book that makes use of images to tell the story. It's more marketing than anything, but it's been previously popular for comic and manga publishers to market volumes in various trade paperback formats as graphic novels. Now, they've started to move away from the term, and usually just using TPB manga/comic or manga/comic book. So the key terms device up a bit like this.
- Book
- Graphic Novel
- Comic Book/Volume
- Graphic Novel
- Comic
- Comic Issue/Magazine
- Book
- As to icons, we should use actual products, not series or groupings mainly as grouping into series is something that can change and requires made up naming, it's better to be more specific for accuracy and the purpose of catting. No point in me listing here, as the list is fairly long. -- Zeal (T/C) 03:03, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
- If someone would make some suggestions for what to use as icons, especially for the fiction, RPG, and artwork categories, I'd love to get working on a template for this.
- The only thing I have to say about what to include is that I'd keep it far more general than that, Fandy. I would suggest just including WC1, WC2, WC3, WoW, Fiction, RPG, TCG, and Art. Remember that many articles would need more than one icon, and we don't want them taking over the headlines. --DuTempete talk|contr 00:30, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
After some discussions on the topic recently, the instance= paramater has been added to the {{npcbox}} template. What does this mean for those of you who don't speak MediaWiki-ese? The navigation templates that used to appear along side info boxes (e.g., the list of bosses in the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj) now appears in the info box itself. Take a look at any of the AQ20 bosses, like Ossirian for example. The very last line of the box now lists the instance that boss is in. Click on the "[show]" text and you can quickly navigate to all of the other bosses or important NPCs in that instance. Enjoy! --k_d3 17:24, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
This was after a several hour (and sometimes heated) discussion on the IRC channel btw. The problem to be solved was that several people want the links at the top of the page, rather than moving the boss list to the bottom like most navboxes (due to the list style and how they're used, as sequential navigation). Thus the idea is to keep it up top, but merge into the instance infoboxes. Note this means another push to get all bosses properly formatted.
The next step in my opinion is to set up Prev/Next links in instances that support it, such as are used on the patch pages atm. I personally also want the bottom, horizontal nav bars in addition, for consistency.
One other issue that came up was regarding how we link to lore pages - the outcome seemed to be that we should endeavour to put both on templates where needed, but the strat link takes precedence for these templates, because that's what the nav is for. (Thus any bottom horizontal bars should also make that obvious in their title, since they may be shown on the lore pages too). Kirkburn talk contr 17:32, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
- Wow, that is an elegant solution to that problem - it looks great! I will help change what bosses I can, though I have been very busy with school lately. --Jiyambi t || c 18:05, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
- I modified the {{Wailing Caverns}} and {{Molten Core}} templates as examples of hopefully how to make them usable as both vertical nav boxes and without a box (pass nobox=true to instance template) for use in the {{mobbox}}, {{npcbox}}, and {{infobox instance}} templates. It seems to work decently. So, now the other instance templates need to be updated also. When bosses= param is used with infobox instance template, you need to pass instance template with nobox=true. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:56 PM PST 1 Feb 2008
- Why? The idea of this change was to eliminate vertical navboxes. --Pcj (T•C) 02:03, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- There are a few cases where there was no npcbox to add instance= to. Until the npcbox gets added, a vertical navbox is still useful. Besides, what did you do? -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:05 AM PST 2 Feb 2008
- It would then be simpler to add the npcbox rather than have all the extra code for something which is being deprecated. --Pcj (T•C) 14:30, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- Only if I had time to go through every instance boss, which I don't. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 9:26 AM PST 2 Feb 2008
- Then leave it for other people to handle instead of making it harder on them. --Pcj (T•C) 19:56, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
- Love the new instance-nav templates :). However, as I updated the Zul'Aman nav template (and the Zul'Aman articles) I noticed a couple of things:
- 1) It looks kinda silly to have what appears to be redundant Location info. There is a "location=" field and now an "instance=" field that is almost always the same thing. Furthermore, when displayed in "mini-mode" the "instance=" field produces a link to the same thing as Location does. These duplicate links are also sometimes right on top of each other. (see Nalorakk as example).
- 2) I'm fairly savvy, but the usage of the "Show"/"Hide" was not obvious at first. What I initially saw was the instance name link, and I clicked on that hoping to see a list of bosses. Nope. Only later did I realize I had to click on "Show".
- I'd apprediate any input on this. One suggestion is to not make the Instance name a link in "mini-mode". That encourages the reader to notice that "Show" is a link. It also removes a (little) bit of what appears to be redundant links. -- User:Adonran/Sig1 23:42, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
- Then leave it for other people to handle instead of making it harder on them. --Pcj (T•C) 19:56, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
- Only if I had time to go through every instance boss, which I don't. --
- It would then be simpler to add the npcbox rather than have all the extra code for something which is being deprecated. --Pcj (T•C) 14:30, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- There are a few cases where there was no npcbox to add instance= to. Until the npcbox gets added, a vertical navbox is still useful. Besides, what did you do?
- Why? The idea of this change was to eliminate vertical navboxes. --Pcj (T•C) 02:03, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- I modified the {{Wailing Caverns}} and {{Molten Core}} templates as examples of hopefully how to make them usable as both vertical nav boxes and without a box (pass nobox=true to instance template) for use in the {{mobbox}}, {{npcbox}}, and {{infobox instance}} templates. It seems to work decently. So, now the other instance templates need to be updated also. When bosses= param is used with infobox instance template, you need to pass instance template with nobox=true. --
- <----- unindenting...
- When I added the instance parameter, I considered the location parameter. However, the existing location parameter has no formatting added to it by default, and as such most of them have links around them, thus: |location=[[Zul'Aman]]. This wouldn't work with the usage of the instance parameter, which would make it something like {{[[Zul'Aman]]}}- so deleting the "extraneous" instance field wouldn't really work. Making the "mini-mode" link work to pop open the box might, however. --Pcj (T•C) 00:03, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- I like it . I didn't realize that the default was no links for the Location. In addition to your change, perhaps then it's also just a small matter of removing any links that people added in the Location field. That way at least only one of the locations will be a link (and hence seem a little less redundant), and it will expand to show the bosses. -- User:Adonran/Sig1 00:44, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- I like it
- I have a bit of a problem with that - sometimes the location link is actually more specific than just saying that the mob is in the instance (example: Captain Skarloc). So I would personally prefer to see both links stay, but it's not that big of a deal. On a side note, it would be nice if the box were a bit bigger - on that same example, the full instance name overlaps with show/hide because there is not enough space. --Jiyambi t || c 02:02, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- Good point. Maybe I'll just remove the "Location=" fields in npcbox'es where they do provide repetitive info/links. -- User:Adonran/Sig1 05:02, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
Display issue that I've noticed. I updated the {{Blackfathom Deeps}} template and updated the Lady Sarevess boss entry and the new drop down sits underneath loot boxes (at least on my browser). Best method to fix this? -- User:Kochira/Sig 23:37, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
I just wanted to add the new instance boss navigation is very elegant and well designed, good job! 
Daos 23:20, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
We should get on WoW-Europe.com fansites list
I was looking at WoWWiki:About and noticed we are on the official US fansites page, but not on the EU one! What are you people across the pond doing!? Stop playing WoW or anything remotely productive and start badgering the Blizzard EU folks!
Seriously, is anyone working on this? I know we do have some representation in the general area... 
-- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 12:55 PM PST 1 Feb 2008
Correct race
I've been noticing a confusion on which race name to give to the undead forsaken. On some of the forsaken members in the npcboxes, are marked as race = Forsaken, while others race = Undead. Shouldn't the correct the race be declared as Undead, since Forsaken is just a group name? {T•C) 21:52, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
- If you select one of the forsaken they actually come up as humanoid, not undead. This is distinction Blizzard made so that spells and abilities that were designed around undead didn't affect players of that race. Ultimately I think the idea that they went with in order to explain this was to create the Forsaken, a race of thinking and independent undead, rather than the scourge who are either unthinking or under the control of higher and more sinister powers. Basically you can think of them all as Undead, but separate races through a sort of evolution, just like we have Caucasian, Oriental, and other races but we are all human. --User:Mucke/sig 23:36, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
- Right....I know the history, I'm just asking to the correct way to label the forsaken undead in their npcbox. Cause I see them being classified as both. Here's two examples: Apothecary Zamah and Apothecary Lydon.
- Zamah under race is called Forsaken, with Humanoid as their creature type.
- Lydon under race is called Undead, with Humanoid as their creature type.
- What I'm asking is which is the correct way to label them? Forsaken, or Undead.
- I would put "Forsaken", since they are really distinct from just any kind of "undead". For example, most Abominations like Glutton and Ramstein the Gorger are listed as Race: Abomination and not undead. By your logic these creatures would be race "Undead", but known as "Abomination"? All Forsaken NPCs should be under race "Forsaken" with mobs being only classified race Undead, if we don't really know what type, but we usually do (see Undead#Types of Undead for a start). -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:10 PM PST 1 Feb 2008
- I would put "Forsaken", since they are really distinct from just any kind of "undead". For example, most Abominations like
- Thinking on it further, I understand your confusion, since there are abomination guards who affiliate with the Forsaken and perhaps some banshees and other sorts, but I think we can still use the rule that for those NPCs and mobs who have free will and were once humans we can use Forsaken as their race. Do we know of that many non-ex-human Forsaken NCPs? -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:16 PM PST 1 Feb 2008
- Thinking on it further, I understand your confusion, since there are abomination guards who affiliate with the Forsaken and perhaps some banshees and other sorts, but I think we can still use the rule that for those NPCs and mobs who have free will and were once humans we can use Forsaken as their race. Do we know of that many non-ex-human Forsaken NCPs? --
Dear lord this place should have a Suggestions Portal
Its not like this is a burning desire or anything, but its not even about the game anymore for me- its about...idk things that make sense happening, good vs. evil or w/e. When I read something like this: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4184984703&sid=1 I swear I can feel a migraine coming on.
That nice long list of wallish text and tightly packed ideas has a shelf-date on those forums for about what, 1 day tops? A week of desperate bumping maybe? It could instead be here nicely formated with internal links and such, not getting pushed off by clones of complaints and dumbage. The sheer weight of sense that this makes to me is cliff-like.
Somethings just fit certain formats-wikis are for keeps, forums are for disposable info- ie. conversations. Imagine if their was a lore forum, or a raid strat forum to replace WoWwiki. Gods that would be torture. Webs of Stickies, their links dieing like flies every few months and everytime your portrait becomes a sweet. Unfortunantly the Suggestions forum hasn't made the Wiki leap yet, so "Ret pally form" must follow "Player housing" who is desperatly trying to rundown "AV fix" who is beating "New AV fix idea" to death with a 2H stick.
Heres my cheap and too-simply formatted example of a Paladin one User:Talgar/Paladin Suggestions. I would urge anyone and everyone who has ever thought of an idea to improve the game, or wants to engender some change to it- make a suggestions page, merge them with others, and publicise it on the forums.
-- Talgar 13:29, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- Wowwiki is not a forum! You are welcome to host your own ideas in your namespace if you want, as long as it does not get to big. Also, does Wowwiki of Blizz control the game? Why would blizzard listen to us more than anyone else, or at all?--SWM2448 15:32, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- Aye- its so much more than a forum, with so much more potential for the stimulation and gathering of ideas. There is a large section of the community that is interested in giving their thoughts on improving the game- its all nigh but wasted! If there was a common pool of ideas then people can inspire each other. I can understand a nervousness that the madness of the forums would descend, but i think its unfounded, in truth. I'd see the Portal as a repository of all the gems gleaned from the silt of the Forums.
- I believe Blizzard is interested in our ideas, the very existence of the forums are evidence enough of that. It follows that any measure to improve those ideas, and the ease of reading them, would be welcomed. They'd listen to 'us' because the highest quality of ideas would congregate here, as the highest quality of information has- and to stress this again- its so much easier on the eyes. This is a role the Wiki could play. --Talgar 16:08, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
- Your ideas are not unfounded, but they yearn for more than I think WoWWiki can provide. Blizzard has always sought to distance itself from WoWWiki (though I'm not sure why) and has never responded to WoWWiki as far as I know on WoWWiki or given us a liaison. However, they have responded repeatedly to forum posts, even if usually not with much detail or useful feedback. What you're hoping for would probably find more success as a "sticky" post on the forums.
- We do host speculative ideas on WoWWiki, so I'm not opposed to having a page for desired changes to the Paladin class here. However, your page lacks some important elements before it should go in the main namespace. Here are the ones I can think of:
- You need a {{speculation}} tag.
- Your page title really doesn't seem to describe its contents or the contents need change or be organized to better fit the title. Your title suggests a general set of changes, but the goal and suggestion seem oriented toward a particular type of Paladin... aka hybrid leaning toward PvE. You should put these ideas under a section with a subsection goal describing it, not put it forth as an over-arching goal.
- Make your suggestions more constructive with detailed evidence and examples. Currently the list looks more like a litany of complaints with solutions that have very little or not enough context.
- Comment more on balance with other classes. This suggestion list looks like a typical, "why can't paladins be uber and make other classes suxxor?!" rant. You can't just expect Blizzard to add abilities without weakening some or strengthening some countering abilities of other classes. I could say as a warrior, "sure give them all that stuff, but take away their bubble!" How would you feel about that?
- You can go ahead and add your personal subpage to the Paladins category. It should be obvious to others that these are your personal suggestions, since it's under a subpage.
- That's all I can think of at the moment, but it should give quite a bit of work. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 9:47 AM PST 2 Feb 2008
Thankyou for the critique, I'll do some work on it. If Blizzard does read the Forums then the least that could be acheived with this idea is an increase in the quality of ideas. If you get the playerbase, you'll get Blizz, one way or another. No sticky can match Wowwiki for this, I conjour for you again the spectre of a Lore forum, or Raid strat one. Painful.
Its intended to be a compilation of ideas, so a litany does kinda appear. While my personal prefference is no doubt shining through, well its going to when I'm the only one contributng to it sadly. I've left out detailed arguments as those familiar with the class will generally understand the ideas placed there, and the forumes are a better place for a discussion to ensue.
With regards to my own ideas I have tried to consider class balance- most of mine will have negatives aswell as positives for the player, and address areas that are of a particular weakness, or not that fun a mechanice to play. To keep balance alive I'd hope that the other classes continue to be developed too. I've included others ideas that might be a little imba, and I don't think are the most developed- if nothing else it stops people from needing to post the same imba ideas again and again- and it can lead to a more balanced idea being formed.
Oh and considering how the ideas often overlap and thus would never be instigated together, if you gave us all these things at once, we wouldn't need a Bubble. :P --Talgar 00:14, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
User pages in new classes, class suggestions, etc.
I noticed the paladin suggestions one above, and someone's user page in the "New classes" category, is this fine for WoWWiki? It seems a lot of people will have these types of suggestions and ideas, and clutter up the pages, but perhaps not if this was done.Minionman 22:18, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
- If what was done? A suggestions portal?--Talgar 07:10, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
- People adding user pages with new clasdses and suggestions. (sort of like what you did adding your suggestion page to the paladin category, though you were free to do that.). What I am wondering is whether it is fine for someone to just go and add their user page to, say, new classes, shaman, etc. categories, since a lot of people may have ideas, some good, some bad, but the large amount of user pages in those categories might clutter them up.Minionman 20:50, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
- No, you should not add your user page (aka [[User:username]]) to any category unless it is a list of users. You may add a user subpage to a category if it is directly relevant to the category, i.e. speculations about paladins to Category:Paladins. However, a bunch of ideas lumped into a poorly named page or subpage disqualify it for being added to a category.
- Also, you must add the {{speculation}} tag to any user subpages you plan to add to categories. It is also a good idea to explicitly note at the top of your subpage what your wishes are concerning changes (i.e. Please do not alter the contents of this page without the permission of <username>.). -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:52 PM PST 4 Feb 2008
- O.k., just curious after the paladin suggestions, and a new class category article.Minionman 22:50, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
Hopefully I'm not breaking things...
Hi there. I'm been using this site for awhile now, so I thought I'd help out! Problem is, I don't really know what I'm doing yet. I've done HTML editting and programming in several languages before, so that part isn't hard. I read all the editting help pages and usterstood what was there, but there seems to be a couple things missing. For example, it shows how to make new sections using '=' section name '=', and how to link to them, but not how to make a table of contents. I found the instructions for making a table, and I'd assume it has a preset style or some such, but I can't seem to find it. I also can't find anything on how to align things, except for a center and a frame for images that aligns right. If I've missed it, feel free to point it out. I'd have asked all this on the ICQ channel, but my computer hates connecting to ICQ. Ever. At all. Thanks in advance! Decibal 14:15, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
- Table of contents is generated automatically when there are 3 or more headings on a page. You can also force the TOC by placing __FORCETOC__ on the page. --Pcj (T•C) 14:30, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
- __TOC__ works as well. I believe FORCETOC can be placed anywhere, and the toc will always appear above the first heading, whereas TOC will place the toc where TOC is placed.
As for future help, see Meta's help pages. --Sky (t | c | w) 23:10, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
- __TOC__ works as well. I believe FORCETOC can be placed anywhere, and the toc will always appear above the first heading, whereas TOC will place the toc where TOC is placed.
Neutrality
Seeing as certain recent news may have slightly confused the issue - news which I'm not going to link to, since I don't want a flame war starting - I'm going to mention that WoWWiki is as neutral as ever, and we link where the community wants us to link. Where WoWWiki content appears doesn't affect us, I'm just glad more people are getting to see the fruits of all our labours. Oh, and we're now in the top 900 sites on Alexa, so congrats all round :) Kirkburn talk contr 14:16, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
Server pages
Having looked around at a lot of the server pages on WoWWiki, i've noticed that almost every server has a different kind of layout on their page. Some follow a special layout (Server:Garithos US as an example), some are just stubs (Server:Die ewige Wacht Europe), some have lots of info (Server:Moonglade Europe), some barely have any info, just links (Server:Agamaggan US). What I propose is trying to create a standard layout for these pages, with an easy way to add information, like realm history, naming background, major server events and an easy way for not very wiki-experienced user to add guilds to a detailed list (for example something looking like the guild list on Server:Moonglade Europe). Any ideas/comments? -- Ose (c / t) 14:54, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
- Don't get complicated. The people who edit the servers don't need a lot of code sticking up and at them in the face. I made Server:Shadowmoon US relatively simplistic. --Sky (t | c | w) 19:10, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
World of Warcraft category proliferation re-think needed
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)
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
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
- 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.
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 categoriesI 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. {T•C) 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)
- 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:
- We're not as accommodating to other Warcraft games as we could/should be.
- 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:
- 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.)
- Category organisation is lacking. It needs to be fixed for category level browsing purposes. --DuTempete
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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 .
- 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.
- See Issue 5.
- Same as Issue 1.
- 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.
- (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.
- (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.
- (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.
- 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
- There's a conspiracy going on between certain contributers.
- 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)
- 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. --Pcj (T•C) 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. --Pcj (T•C) 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)
How Do I Ask a Question?
Attempting to enter a comment about a little-known area in 1000 Needles. 4 paragraphs (got carried away with the details). Tried to "post" it. Not sure what happened. How do I retrieve the text? But more to the point, how do I ask the question "How do I retrieve the text?" Took me 20 minutes & multiple loops to get here and I'm not even sure where "here" is.
Hate to mention "competitors" but I have been a contributor to Thott for 3 years. Would like to do the same here but... how? -- Artificial Intelligence + Virtual Reality = Artificial Reality 02:48, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
- You may wish to look into editing help pages. Editing on Wikis is relatively easy, but there's a learning curve involved. --k_d3 03:05, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
- What page was it at, Wimbleton? --Sky (t | c | w) 03:41, 7 February 2008 (UTC) ----Roguefeather Cave/Cavern in Thousand Needles. An interesting place (may be included in a Horde quest but I've never seen an Ally quest there) with some farming possibilities but with one nasty little surprise I thought was worth mentioning.
Server speed.... or lack of
I remember we got moved to wikia to improve server speed at one point.
Currently it takes me anywhere from 2 seconds to 2 minutes to open a page... The server is pretty random and slow as hell at the best of times... am i the only one with this problem? User:CrazyJack/Sig 12:20, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
- I've noticed poor performance from time to time, but I think the problem is WoWWiki is much more busy than we probably imagined early on and Wikia is really helping us keep from getting swamped rather than making WoWWiki a speed demon. CJ, did you think WoWWiki would break into the top 1000 web sites in the world by traffic when you first started contributing in 2005? I didn't even think it was possible when I first started and am still pleasantly surprised when I think of it now.
- Of course someone at Wikia who has access to the server infrastructure guts and reports could give a better answer as to whether WoWWiki is taxing their setup. I know Rustak made the transfer to Wikia, because he foresaw his inability as an individual to keep up with WoWWiki's growth. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 8:30 AM PST 8 Feb 2008
Google search and all that
Curiously enough, "Pilferer" turns up pages that "Pilfer" does not, even though the latter is a subset of the former... --Eirik Ratcatcher 20:20, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- ...and? That would be a Google search issue, not anything we can solve or otherwise address. --Pcj (T•C) 20:27, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- I found it worth commenting on. Perhaps there are search alternatives out there. You never know unless you ask. --Eirik Ratcatcher 19:20, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
Need to add to potion list
When searching for potions, an excellent list comes up, there are two additions to make
1) In the list of healing potions, add Minor healing potion 70 to 90 heal
2) In the list of mana potions, add Mad Alchemist potion 1650 to 2500 mana
I didn't add them, as I don't know HTML -- CaJorgensen 21:19, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- lol, also add Crystal healing potion, cost 50 Apexis Shards from the Ogre'la
- Fel Mana potion 3200 mana restored over 24 seconds, char will also lose ( 25 spell damage and 50 healing) for 15 min
- -- CaJorgensen 21:29, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- The nice thing about a wiki is that you generally don't need to know HTML . Regarding this specific issue, which article/web page are you referring to? -- User:Adonran/Sig1 21:48, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- The nice thing about a wiki is that you generally don't need to know HTML
when I use the search function and search for potions, it's the list that shows up as the second web result —The preceding unsigned comment was added by CaJorgensen (talk · contr).
- The potions list is lacking entries for Magic Resistance Potion, Minor Magic Resistance Potion, and the Fel Mana potion also decreases you healing abilities by 50 for 15 minutes also.
- Would someone who is knowledgeable in HTML plz add this information :-) -- CaJorgensen 21:52, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- You don't have to click the Comment to respond on a talk page. Just click the "edit" link nearest to where you wish to reply. Don't forget to sign your posts on talk pages with 4 tildes. (
~~~~). Additionally, be bold and try updating the article yourself! We don't bite all that much. ;) --k_d3 21:58, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
- You don't have to click the Comment to respond on a talk page. Just click the "edit" link nearest to where you wish to reply. Don't forget to sign your posts on talk pages with 4 tildes. (
- Okay I added the following to the potion tables: [Minor Healing Potion], [Minor Magic Resistance Potion], [Magic Resistance Potion], and [Crystal Healing Potion]. I also updated the info for [Fel Mana Potion]. The tables were kind of funky and probably need to be redone to make them easier to edit at some point. Knowing HTML would not have helped. Knowing how wiki tables work would have helped a little. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:13 PM PST 8 Feb 2008
- Forgot to add [Mad Alchemist's Potion], so I added that too. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:24 PM PST 8 Feb 2008
- Forgot to add
- Okay I added the following to the potion tables:
Spellstone
In my attempt to move the page for the item Spellstone from 
[Spellstone] to Spellstone (item) (in order to get some space for generic information about Spellstones, not only the specific one), I probably have messed up the associated table page (Spellstone/table). For some reason, the page now also shows information from the Spellstone page (even though the code does not). Furthermore, the table page does not correctly link to the item page. Unfortunately I'm a noob in this regard, so I'd be really grateful if someone could undo this for me.
Kind regards. --bfx 17:26, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
- Hopefully fixed it. There was a place in the table that still referenced the old spellstone page. Let me know if that worked, since I'm not 100% it was the problem you were talking about. --Jiyambi t || c 19:26, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks a lot, looks fine now. --bfx 13:19, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
Requesting some Wiki code help
I'm trying to make a sortable table of my servers Raid progress (See User:Syzgyn/Sandbox). Now, the sortable part is easy, the tricky part is getting the header row to stay on top the whole time. I know theres a "sortbottom" class, is there some alternative I can use to keep it on top instead? -- Syzgyn 06:33, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
- The best I could think of is at User:Syzgyn/Sandbox/Header2. I just mushed all the stuff you didn't want to move around into the header cells. The sort buttons don't line up very nicely, though. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:22 PM PST 11 Feb 2008
table of Glyphs plz
Plz add a table of all possible glyphs which can be had with the information 1) Name of Glyph 2) type 3) Equip buffs 4) Use buffs 5) where 6) requirements 7) purchase price
Tables are beyond me - I cribbed this list from Throttbot. List hidden by commenting
- price varies with characters reputation with the group selling the glyph
-- CaJorgensen 20:29, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
- I can't make sense of most of the data you have pasted here, do to the loss in formatting from the original source. I tried making an example for you from what I see here, from it you should be able to figure out how to do it on your own.
Using the code:
{| class="darktable"
|-
! Glyph !! type !! Equip !! Use !! where !! Requirements !! price *
|-
| Glyph of Deflection
| trinket
| Increase block rating 12(1.5%)<br>Increase block value of shield 23
| Increase block value of shield by 235 for 20 sec (2 min cool down)
| Drops from Sapphiron in Naxxramas || na || na
|-
| Glyph of Arcane Warding
| head armor
| adds 20 arcane resistance
|
|
| honored with Sha'tari
| 100 gold
|}
You get:
| Glyph | type | Equip | Use | where | Requirements | price * |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glyph of Deflection | trinket | Increase block rating 12(1.5%) Increase block value of shield 23 |
Increase block value of shield by 235 for 20 sec (2 min cool down) | Drops from Sapphiron in Naxxramas | na | na |
| Glyph of Arcane Warding | head armor | adds 20 arcane resistance | honored with Sha'tari | 100 gold |
- If you would like to learn more about how to make tables, see Help:Table. --Jiyambi t || c 21:48, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
Patrollers and rollback, sitting in a tree...
Members of the patrollers group (that is, the "Watchdogs") now have rollback privileges - this is essentially one click edit reversion, and is shown by a [rollback] link on edit logs. Please only use it in cases of vandalism! Enjoy! Can someone archive this page, plz? K thx. Kirkburn talk contr 19:01, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
- NOTE: When you rollback, it will rollback all the consecutive changes of the last user. Or that's how it worked the last time I did it. So, in the case where the last few changes are by the same user, but you only want to revert that last change or not all the last changes by that user, please do it the old fashioned way:
- Click history and click the date/time of the change at a good state
- Click edit this page, select all in edit area, and copy.
- Click edit this page make sure you are editing the current page, select all in edit area, and paste.
- Click "Save page" button.
- -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:54 PM PST 14 Feb 2008
- By the way, here is the list of patrollers and "Watchdogs" -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:58 PM PST 14 Feb 2008
- By the way, here is the list of patrollers and "Watchdogs" --
- Or, if you didn't want to bother to copy and paste...in the history page just select the two revisions you want to compare (i.e, the revision before the first edit you wish to erase and the last revision you want to change), click "Compare selected revisions". On the next page, click Undo above the right diff. This will show you the changes being made, click "Save page" at the bottom to commit. This also allows you to compare intermittent revisions and remove certain revisions without overwriting newer acceptable edits. --Pcj (T•C) 05:12, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
- Your steps 2 and 3 appear to be redundant - if you click "edit this page" on an out-of-date version and save it, it'll function more or less like a revert. -- Foxlit 08:36, 15 February 2008 (UTC).
Missing icons from 2.4
Could someone upload to WoWWiki icons for new 2.4 items (such as 
[Blade of Life's Inevitability], 
[Wand of Cleansing Light] and many others)? I'd be really appreciated. -- Vysogota T / C
- Please put items you would like icons for at
WoWWiki:WoW Icons/Patch 2.4 Wanted Icon List. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:39 PM PST 14 Feb 2008
New set of pages
I am creating a new set of pages. I am going to group them under a new page most likely named "Healing Like a Pro". They will focus on healing properly for the end game. an example is on my talk page Priest Healing . If you have suggestions then make them at the top of the talk page under the "READ THIS BEFORE TOUCHING". Make your comments there. Until I move it to a real you are not welcome to edit it, only tell me what you think needs to be changed.
Now what I need to know is, how to keep this protected until its ready for public consumption? Do I just need to keep it a talk page? What if some twit steps in a posts them as pages before I am done? -- User:Sharlin/Sig 15:42, 14 February 2008 (UTC)
Those twits will edit it anyway,after it's all done. But I would just recommend leaving it in your user space for the time being. Most people ignore user space edits. --Sky (t | c | w) 03:25, 15 February 2008 (UTC)- If you want to protect it from being edited by someone else, don't keep it on any wiki. That goes against the nature of the wiki and is counter-intuitive. If you don't want people making changes and User namespace isn't secure enough, save your work in a text file on your computer. --Pcj (T•C) 05:17, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
- I was unduly harsh. But Pcj makes a valid point; if your User namespace isn't secure enough for you, don't release it until you're done. That said, one suggest I would make would be to change the name to "End game healing," or "Raid healing." Healing Like a Pro is... a weird way to say what you want to say as a title. --Sky (t | c | w) 05:23, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
- If you want to protect it from being edited by someone else, don't keep it on any wiki. That goes against the nature of the wiki and is counter-intuitive. If you don't want people making changes and User namespace isn't secure enough, save your work in a text file on your computer. --Pcj (T•C) 05:17, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
- Well I haven't determined a final name. I have two pages currently under development, http://www.wowwiki.com/User_talk:Sharlin/HealingShaman and http://www.wowwiki.com/User_talk:Sharlin/HealingPriest. Of course I will need to get Paladin's and Druid's covered. I would like to group them under one page with links to the other four. Don't think this just about healing for raids, a lot of it works for any five instances User:Sharlin/Sig 07:02, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Collapsable Table of contents
Is there a way to collapse a table of contents further, so that after you click off hide you don't see all the contents at once, just the largest headings to begin with?
-- Talgar 10:18, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
- Not any easy way. If your concern is about the village pump, we will be archiving several threads soon, so the TOC should shrink. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 10:10 AM PST 15 Feb 2008
Ren' Dorei
Although elves are probabally getting boring with their numerous sub-races, but i have hought of another faction. The Forest elves. These are the elves that the Pandarean tribes truly accepted into their presence before they heard of the High Bournes dabbaling in arcane powers. Although the Pandarean empire severed most links with the Elven factions, they could not leave these forest elves to be warped by the dark energys and instead, used them as soldiers, training them up in the laws of Pandarean warfare and teaching them how to harnis the elven druidic potential to that of which no other druidic race could dream of. They are the true druids of the Elves. They have powers to merge with the forces of nature, shifting into the very trees and hills. They call upon nature to create and destroy. They live in peace with the pandarean. No other Azerothian or Outlandish race knows about them. The only records held about them are in the lost librarys of Lordaeron, that not even the forsaken have found. I am suggesting that i could make a fan fiction page about them. Whos with me? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jarkimond (talk · contr).
- You are perfectly allowed to make a fan fiction page under your namespace, just be sure to follow the guidelines. Is User:Jarkimond/Ren'Dorei a good name?--SWM2448 21:37, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
Sure...that sound kwl...i will hopefully be adding the information soon!!
So I started writing a guide. It got too long, so I broke it into separate pages and wrote a vertical navbox to link them together. With all the subsections, even the Navbox got too long, so I monkeyed around with it a long time until I figured out how to make the navbox sections collapsible. Unfortunately, the navbox is now hideously ugly, and I'm out of ideas on how to improve. I haven't finished the navbox (need to linkify to sub-section anchors, etc.), but could anyone help me out with this before I work on it more?
Currently, the navbox is a darktable. Each section is, in turn, a cell of the main navbox that contains a sub-table with class="collapsible collapsed". The section heading is the title of the table. This works fine, but looks terrible.
I'd like the heading of each section to use the "title" style, not the table heading style. Or something. In particular, I'd like them to be left-justified, not centered.
Also, the sub-tables don't go out to the full width of the navbox. It is already kind of wide, so I'd like to avoid the blank space.
The navbox is at User:Kathucka/Hunter's_Guide_to_Karazhan/navbox currently. Any thoughts?
On another note, since the guide uses sub-pages, the headings of the articles show some rather ugly titles by including the parent page names. It looks awful. Is there any way to force a cleaner title?
-- Kathucka 23:08, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
- Well, I got the section headings to be left-aligned, but they're still ugly. Just not quite as ugly.... Kathucka 23:41, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
Datamining policy changes
The DNP policy underwent some minor albeit important changes (written and un-written) concerning datamined information and images posted on the wiki. Currently the wording of the policy is such:
- Datamined pictures and files of unreleased content are not allowed. Note that any in-game screenshots obtained from the live or test servers and clients are okay.
- Datamined images of live or PTR content are permissible, but "true" in-game screenshots preferred and will always be given preference over datamined content.
Nonetheless, items such as [Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury] are currently on the wiki despite the fact that they have not been seen on a live or test realm, nor has such specific information on them been released by Blizzard (CM's have only confirmed the bow's existence and its name, but nothing more). The information, stats, and graphics were datamined, and not permissable on the wiki according to DNP. However, admins have informed me that Thori'dal's article is acceptable and will remain on the wiki.
If there has been a policy change in practice, we ought to change the policy article accordingly to avoid disputes; if not, we should remove the datamined content. --Tyrsenus t c 21:54, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
- I'd imagine the bow is at least linkable on the PTR (or people wouldn't be able to determine its stats), which means item stats and model (dressing room on PTR -- which makes model viewer pictures acceptable (preferable?) as well) are public; icons of new items can be extracted with the addon kit using the PTR client, so those are also public. -- Foxlit 22:08, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
- As best I can tell, the bow was first brought to light by MMO-Champion on Feb 8th. They have a disclaimer that the information is from a "Pre-PTR leak and could be different on live servers." It's clear this is unreleased content. In order to force a link on the PTRs, you need the item ID to create the link command in addition to having the bow actually been "seen" for the link to work and not output regular text. I don't think icons are protected by the server the same way item links are. --Tyrsenus t c 23:27, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
- Another example is the images of Kil'jaeden already showing up. None of the PTRs have come close to even unlocking him, and no guilds have passed the eredar twins yet (if they are even unlocked as well). --Tyrsenus t c 01:25, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
- "Datamined images of live or PTR content are permissible" Read that over and over until you understand the policy allows them. They have not been seen, but are datamined from the files of public test versions which have been released. I'm looking at them right now. -- Zeal (T/C) 01:59, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
- Both in the files. Just to give you another perspective, they're simply unobtainable content, such as the the old Ashbringer GM's liked to show off. It's only not allowed when it's on private builds such as interal aplhas and friends and family ones, which is when the big Blizzard came and told us to take such content off here. ;) -- Zeal (T/C) 16:49, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
- Zeal- while the second line of the policy allows datamined images, the first line forbids datamined images of unreleased content. It looks like there is some disagreement over whether "released" means "seen in-game" or just "in the game files." I personally interpreted it as the former. P.S. Link to orca discussion. --Tyrsenus t c 17:21, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
- The Public Test Realm means it is released to me, just not to those people who don't go to the PTR, but they can, if they want. Does that make sense? I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand. The orca was never publicly released anywhere, so it isn't allowed. The orca also is not just speculation, because it was obviously datamined. The worldofraids.com tooltip screenshot for Thori'dal is in the gray area for me, since it hasn't been obtained by anyone all though it is presumably available on the test realm. The big problem is that the sources for Thori'dal could be alot better than they are. If they were, it wouldn't be as controversial. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:36 PM PST 17 Feb 2008
- The Public Test Realm means it is released to me, just not to those people who don't go to the PTR, but they can, if they want. Does that make sense? I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand. The orca was never publicly released anywhere, so it isn't allowed. The orca also is not just speculation, because it was obviously datamined. The worldofraids.com tooltip screenshot for Thori'dal is in the gray area for me, since it hasn't been obtained by anyone all though it is presumably available on the test realm. The big problem is that the sources for Thori'dal could be alot better than they are. If they were, it wouldn't be as controversial. --
- Ummm, no. If you will never see the content in-game, it shouldn't be in WoWWiki. For example, the orca model is in the game files, but can not be seen in-game and there is no evidence it will be added in the foreseeable future before the release of Wrath of the Lich King. So, it is considered only datamined and not publicly released. If a blue post appears saying something like, "Hey guys the orca is coming in patch x.y, so don't drown looking for it now," then it would be okay. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:55 PM PST 18 Feb 2008
- Ummm, no. If you will never see the content in-game, it shouldn't be in WoWWiki. For example, the orca model is in the game files, but can not be seen in-game and there is no evidence it will be added in the foreseeable future before the release of Wrath of the Lich King. So, it is considered only datamined and not publicly released. If a blue post appears saying something like, "Hey guys the orca is coming in patch x.y, so don't drown looking for it now," then it would be okay. --
- Sigh... then rewrite the policy to make that destinction Fandy, as currently it doesn't. Other than the issue with the Orca (which i wasn't around for) this wasn't the case for previously released but unobtainable content. Given the meaning you're applying to that terminology, you can't make the distinction without Blizzard. Unobtained content will have to be considered unobtainable, until it's obtained. Pretty easy to make a claim for keeping alot of PTR and live content off of WoWWiki for several weeks-months. Enjoy the minefield -- Zeal (T/C) 02:44, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
- Not too long ago Kirkburn was taking down Illidan's model images and sound files, even though he was on the PTR. However, Kirkburn also told me (via irc) that the Thori'dal article was okay. The problem with posting content that's in the files and confirmed by Blizzard is that they change their mind (e.g. Emerald Dream). Kaydeethree (an admin) has been removing model images from the ED page. There's obviously different ways the policy is being interpreted, even among admins. It needs to be spelled out what is okay and what is not okay:
- Information/items/images of content seen through normal game play on an official Blizzard realm or Public Test Realm are allowed on Wowwiki. (given)
- Information/items/images of content not seen through normal game play on an official Blizzard realm or Public Test Realm, but may be found in the files of the client thereof (are/are not) allowed on Wowwiki.
- Information/items/images of content not seen through normal game play on an official Blizzard realm or Public Test Realm, but may be found in the files of the client thereof and has been confirmed by a Blizzard employee to exist in-game currently or in the future (through a citable source) (are/are not) allowed on Wowwiki.
- Information/items/images of content not seen through normal game play on an official Blizzard realm or Public Test Realm, not found in the files of the client thereof and has been confirmed by a Blizzard employee to exist currently in-game or in the future (through a citable source) (are/are not) allowed on Wowwiki.
- Information/items/images of content not seen through normal game play on an official Blizzard realm or Public Test Realm, not found in the files of the client thereof, and not confirmed by Blizzard (are/are not) allowed on Wowwiki.
--Tyrsenus t c 04:00, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
- And what of the Ashbringer? It has been stated multiple times that datamining a screenshot of the blade itself is NOT OK, despite the fact that A) it is in the game files, B) the main image consists of woefully outdated stats for a version of the weapon that, at the time, existed solely as a GM weapon, and C) there is a screenshot of Tirion holding it later in the article. And, if it's OK to post images datamined from the PTR and other in-game files, even if said things are not accessible in-game, then what, precisely, is the point of the policy? Unless I'm missing something, there really isn't a way to datamine something from files that we don't even have in the first place. -- Dark T Zeratul 04:10, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
This is a hot topic - it is obvious that everyone (both Blizzard and fansites) are becoming more relaxed about this. As it stands the easiest way to write this (in my opinion) would be: images of announced content existing on the live or public test clients are okay. Certain pieces of unannounced content may be exempt from this for reasons of extreme notoriety and importance. Notoriety would include the tuskarr and Kil'jaeden (both announced), but not give free reign to any and all doodads. Regarding the Emerald Dream, that is unannounced content and would thus not be allowed. Kirkburn talk contr 17:04, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
- Makes sense, but I had to read it a few times. May want to clarify what constitutes an "announcement." --Tyrsenus t c 18:19, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
- I would define it as Blizzard specifically saying that "this thing is coming in a patch". It would have to be fairly specific about the content, so a general "Emerald Dream is being looked at" wouldn't count, but "Kil'jaeden is being summoned in Sunwell Plateau in patch 2.4" would. Any official Blizzard spokesperson would make this announcement (forum/interview/website/etc). Kirkburn talk contr 19:03, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Best Pet? (at lvl 40)
Moved to the correct place --> the warcraft pump {T•C) 08:22, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Loot in Instance Pages Inconsistently Displayed
From one who spends a lot of time on WoWWiki looking through the instance pages to see the loot in each, it's mildly frustrating to note that there's no consistency between the pages. Some pages display the BoEs as the graphical images (which is wonderful to do visual comparisons with instead of having to hover over the names of items) while others don't, BoEs are variously titled (BoEs, Elite Mob Drops, etc. All equating to the same thing), some pages have so many bosses that their loot isn't displayed on that page, and you get redirected (a lot of the time the redirection just has the list of items to be clicked on, and some not even hoverable - i.e. BRD). You get the picture. I'd like there to be more consistency here. Even if the instances with an insane amount of mobs needs to be redirected, at least it could be displayed in a consistent manor as most other boss loot displays. Any ideas/comments? It doesn't seem that hard to do, but I just started poking around here. =)
-- Innocentlysassy 11:50, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
- Many changes are currently taking place, older articles won't be like newer ones as the times have changed, new ways of doing things have changed, and new members are contributing. If you feel things are not how they should be, step up and improve it. There's over 53,000 articles... everything can't be changed in a day. {T•C) 20:09, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
- Don't feel overwhelmed by a task, though. Start making one instance article the way you want it to look and ask people here at the village pump to use it as a model. However, your current complaint seems not so much about consistency, but not meeting your particular requirements and your complaint is vague. Please give a specific example of an instance loot section you like and one that you don't. That way people can see how you want it and either disagree or agree. If there is widespread agreement, people will start making changes without doubts about whether someone might want to change it back. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:18 PM PST 17 Feb 2008
- Don't feel overwhelmed by a task, though. Start making one instance article the way you want it to look and ask people here at the village pump to use it as a model. However, your current complaint seems not so much about consistency, but not meeting your particular requirements and your complaint is vague. Please give a specific example of an instance loot section you like and one that you don't. That way people can see how you want it and either disagree or agree. If there is widespread agreement, people will start making changes without doubts about whether someone might want to change it back. --
- One thing I noticed is that not all instance pages have a loot section or page, but instead the user must look at individual boss pages for loot. I think it would be good to have a loot section or subpage detailing all loot in an instance for all instances. --Jiyambi t || c 23:34, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
- That is something that caught my attention, Jiyambi. As for examples... The Deadmines page, for instance. It has all the loot you can get from that instance smack dab on that beginning page. There's no need to be searching for links to see what you can get there. If you want the strategy for each boss, then there's a section where bosses are linked to the storyline for them as well as the strategy and loot you can get. But you don't have to click on each individual boss just to find the loot, because it's right there. If you ever thought to yourself, "I wonder what mail drops I can find in this instance?" you don't have to click through every single boss just to find the mail drops. Also if you wanted to bring up 2 wowwiki pages to see the comparisons between the mail drops between DM and WC it's right there for you. All at once. Then there are pages like that for BRD that link you to a loot page itself. I can understand why. My god BRD has 3 bazillion bosses, but looking at the loot page can you immediately tell what each type of item is and if you can utilize it? If you've been playing long enough, maybe by what it's called. But what if you're a newbie? And then it's a matter of clicking through every item to see if it's good for you (or clicking on the bosses on the off chance that it'll display all the loot visually). Visual loot displays are extremely handy and as it seems like a simple function to make it so, more pages could definitely be utilizing it. Also if it's all on one page, special items like Enchant Boots - Fortitude will have a home. Currently not listed on the Mana-Tombs page as it's a drop from a trash mob, and not a boss. I've no problem with stepping up and helping out with it, I just wanted to see what input others had and if there was a reason it should stay the way it was (before accidentally stepping on toes). -- Innocentlysassy 02:03, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- Or perhaps even doing the opposite and make every instance page have a link to the instance's loot? So that the pages that have a million and then some won't flood out the informational page. The point still remains to keep it consistent. -- Innocentlysassy 02:26, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- I think having loot as a separate page will be the best solution, especially if we go with a format that has the full tooltip displayed. I really like the way the Karazhan loot page is set up, so there are columns for types of loot and rows for different bosses, making it easy to tell what you might be interested in. However, it doesn't show the full tooltip without mouseover. Still, it could potentially be modified to show the full tooltip (though this causes the table to become very large). --Jiyambi t || c 05:00, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- I agree with that (minus turning it into full tooltips). When I go to an instance page I don't care about the loot information that I can either find on the encounter itself or a quick checklist. Having the Full tooltips with loot of every boss/trash mobs on the instances' page really makes it more annoying to find things... I could only imagine how more annoying it is with a normal size laptop screen. {T•C) 05:08, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- I agree with that (minus turning it into full tooltips). When I go to an instance page I don't care about the loot information that I can either find on the encounter itself or a quick checklist. Having the Full tooltips with loot of every boss/trash mobs on the instances' page really makes it more annoying to find things... I could only imagine how more annoying it is with a normal size laptop screen.
- <----- outdent
- <----- outdent
So it seems the best solution is to have a separate page, linked from an easily accessible section of the main page, which displays in table format but does not include full tooltips? This keeps the page small enough to fit on a screen, keeps the main instance page uncluttered, and still displays info in an easy to access fashion. Specifically, users can see at a glance how much loot from a particular instance is applicable to them. --Jiyambi t || c 05:31, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- That is a very well displayed and organized layout. I'm impressed. =) If that's fine with others then when I have time some pages will start moving over to that kind of layout, getting rid of loot from the instance screen. If there are any other suggestions, I'm all eyes. ;) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Innocentlysassy (talk · contr).
- Take a look at the Zul'Aman loot page, the SSC loot page, and the TK loot page for a very similar but slightly different (and better imho) layout. -- User:Adonran/Sig1 20:56, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Any hope for in-page spreadsheets?
Is there any method for putting small spreadsheets into a page. Specifically I'd like to build a page with a small form. The user would have text-entry cells (say to enter a Resilience), and computed cells (reduced chance for a crit, reduced crit damage).
Currently, the best alternative seems to be static tables, such as
Template:Resilience
but I believe targeted calculators would be more helpful.
-- Erdluf 14:52, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- This would require some JS to operate. I could code it if there's support for the idea. --Pcj (T•C) 23:34, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
When adding Patch 2.4 stuff, please...
I've noticed helpful people adding Patch 2.4 stuff, but leaving out some important info. Please don't leave the elinks id blank, if you can help it. Also, please note somewhere in the article (I prefer a "Patch Changes" section at the end) that the item/NPC/quest is new in Patch 2.4. Eventually when the patch goes live the {{stub/2.4}} will get removed or replaced with a more generic stub, so the info that it was from Patch 2.4 might get lost. We should have done this por patch 2.3 and earlier, but better late than never. Also, please use {{stub/2.4}} at the top of the article. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:33 PM PST 18 Feb 2008
- Just don't forget the WW:MOS: "Patch changes", "External links". --k_d3 22:47, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- And its Category:Quest givers (preferably Category:<race> quest givers) not Category:Quest Givers. {T•C) 23:08, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
- And its Category:Quest givers (preferably Category:<race> quest givers) not Category:Quest Givers.
And it's piggy in the middle time from me. Don't make me separate you two. ;) Perhaps we should be doing Category:World of Warcraft patch 2.4.0 style categories? The MOS is a guideline because we don't ban people for not following it. Gentle soothing advice works better. Reason why elinks should always be at the end is for consistency, so users know where to expect stuff. Remember some users do not visit IRC, which is their choice, and thus may not know about all the (policy-related) changes done by bots. Kirkburn talk contr 17:15, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Category Help/DM Loot up for Inspection
With the suggestion that Jiyambi had for loot pages (to follow the Karazhan loot page, I ended up making one for Dire Maul since it really didn't have one. At least not one that I could find. So that's up for criticism and what not before I go further. == Dire Maul loot == As for categories that it should belong to, they're automatically generated? And will eventually show itself at the bottom of the page without me having to do anything? Or is there a process I should be following? -- Innocentlysassy 03:57, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
- Added a category. Makes think there should be another category, for such loot pages. --Sky (t | c | w) 06:23, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
- Woot! Thanks. Was wondering how to get a ToC in there, and all the mob pages I was referencing didn't have an example command for me to use. -- Innocentlysassy 09:15, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
- Nice page, Innocent. I like that layout a lot... --Azaram 02:53, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- Yeah I noticed that it was a raid template after I was done. Shrugged and figured if it mattered someone would remove it. ;) It was just there when I was following the other page. Went looking for one like that for normal instances, but alas there was none. =( At least not a small one like that. The only other one I found was for the bottom of the page that had every single instance. Perhaps I might consider it. *shrugs* Or if I ever learn to make templates, make my own for the loot. We'll see. =D Thanks for the input! -- Innocentlysassy 06:38, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks. ;) Credit for said layout should go to whoever made the Karazhan loot page. It was a great idea. -- Innocentlysassy 20:19, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- Actually, it occurs to me that this page (and others if they are made) should definitely be put in the instance navigation template for that particular instance. I will try it out for Dire Maul (the nav probably need to be updated anyway, that's another project atm) and see how it goes, and then you can use it as an example in the futre. --Jiyambi t || c 07:17, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- Not sure what you're referring to, but I'm sure I'll learn eventually. I'm finding I like using templates. ;) Also Stratholme loot made if anyone wants to smack it around a bit. -- Innocentlysassy 20:19, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- I know it exists (Category:Stratholme_items). But like I said earlier, I'm not sure how to get the page onto it. It's edit has all of 2 lines. =/ Heh, and apparently I don't know how to make it show up as a link here. Could you perhaps link me a page on editing a Category or what to do after a page to make Categories happen? -- Innocentlysassy 23:38, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- Just add [[Category:Stratholme items]] to the bottom of the loot page - it doesn't link because it's a category. It will then be automatically entered into the category. To make a link to a category you need to type [[:Category:Stratholme items]]. BTW, the Dire Maul navigation has been updated but I can't really add it to the loot page because of the new way the nav is set up. Any ideas for how to deal with this? --Jiyambi t || c 03:51, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Undenting (and rethreading for correct times): Yes, that's the way such loot pages should be done. Um... also, if they do have a specific category for items from that instance, it should be categorized as [[Category:Stratholme items| ]], so that the loot list will appear at the top of the category. If there isn't a specific category yet (which there should be by now, for most instances, by WW:ZCP), then just leave it in the general list as [[Category:X]]. --Sky (t | c | w) 03:58, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
- I set up the navigation box for the Dire Maul loot page. Unfortunately the way I set it up, it only works with the instances that have had their navigations revamped. Essentially, Innocent, if you try it that way and it looks funky, just change it to {{Instance Name}} and it should work out. Alternatively, I can just swing by and add the nav to the loot pages you do, if that seems too complicated. --Jiyambi t || c 04:02, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
- Thanks for reminding me, Sky. It's been a couple years since I've done a tribute run. =D I'll try to get that up later today. And Jiyambi, I put the nav box at the top of the Strath page... but, as there is no
| Main Gate | |
|
Skul (rare) |
(lore) |
| Service Entrance | |
|
Postmaster Malown |
(lore) |
| NPCs | |
|
Crusade Commander Eligor Dawnbringer | |
| Loot | |
... it's currently empty. Shall I just leave them off for the time being until it gets made? I'd make one... but not knowing how is a big barrier. =D Baby steps, ya know? -- Innocentlysassy 04:44, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
- Found them, it's up. Not labeled undead/scarlet without a header, so with exception of a space, lines up nicely. Especially since one of the bosses spawns on the other side, iinm. -- Innocentlysassy 05:37, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Green Triangle
I am mentioned in the Dath Remar Server site for being awarded the first "Green Triangle". I know when I was starting I had a few teething problems adapting from warrior to Priest, but I'd like to know if anyone can tell me what the details of the original Green Triangle incident was, specifically Ltb0619 who wrote the piece.
-- Eccles 12:35, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
- (I added a header. --Azaram 02:53, 20 February 2008 (UTC))
- As an actually useful answer, you might want to post on Ltb0619's talk page and ask him. Assuming he set up an email, he'll get a message that something has been posted there. --Azaram 11:06, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
Something funky going on
So it seems there is something funky happening with the way wowwiki's css is displaying in on my browser (firefox), which was fine up until today. For example, on the instance and npc boxes, the "bosses" or "instance" heading appears small and aligned to the left, when it is usually bolded and centered. More disturbingly, the lootbox has lost almost all formatting, including background, and appears as a bulleted list. Anyone know what might be going on and whether it is just my computer - and if so, how to fix it? --Jiyambi t || c 08:41, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- Everything looks normal on my side. (Tetsted with Safari, Camino and Firefox) - Stupid question, but have you tried to empty thge browser cache? (Reeina 10:29, 20 February 2008 (UTC))
- Try what Reeina said... every once in a while, I get Wowwiki as a page from the 80s, where it's a blank white background with plain white text...
- Relatedly, though, my user page seems to be having some problems. It used to have two columns of the templates, now has one column with the || formatting marks showing as text. It looks like someone went through and modified a lot of the templates themselves with different colors and icons, but would that have changed the formatting of the page itself? --Azaram 11:09, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- Azaram, either use the normal syntax rather than || shortcut, use html, don't use tables, or make someone code userbox properly using divs. Basically the table syntax and wiki parser isn't robust enough for embeding tables like that, hence the change to userbox has broken your page. There's probably soemthing specific to point the finger at, but generally, that's the problem. -- Zeal (T/C) 18:55, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
- I dunno what the normal syntax is... I found someone else's userpage that had something like what I wanted, and copied what they had. I know how to do HTML tables, but I dunno otherwise. Is there a how to somewhere? --Azaram 04:37, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
In Game Lore + Books
I'm interested in starting to catalog lore in the game, particularly the readable books found on tables, but also other readable items and lore nuggets revealed in quests. What sort of tag system should be used to hold these together? Would these be welcome here? -- Lese 04:33, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
I've added Zeal's CSS to the Common.css as it seemed to be the one with the most support. If anything needs tweaking, please let us know! Kirkburn talk contr 10:04, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Wow at 70
I've added a Wow at 70 page, which it is hoped will carry similar content to the nice "Wow at 60" guide produced by Gamespy for pre-bc level cap activity. [1]
I would really welcome assistance by experienced wowwikians in helping to fill out this page.
-- Ucgajhe 13:02, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Crushing Blows and Resiliance
I was just out reading the warrior forums, and found folks talking about resilience lowering the "crushing damage required defense value cap". And yet, there is not discussion of this in the relevant pages (Resilience, Defense, Crushing blow), or I am not able to identify it as such.
Would someone who knows something about how all that works do a bit of editing on the pages? Maybe I'm simply info-blind; but if I am, I doubt I'm alone in it. --Eirik Ratcatcher 20:37, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
- Resilience has nothing to do with crushing blows, it only lowers the chance to be critically hit, making it an alternative to defense when aiming for crit immunity. Defense can reduce the chance to be crushed, though, as it increases your miss/dodge/block/parry chance. What you heard probably was wishful thinking - it would be nice for the non-blocking druids to get means to avoid crushing blows, as it is rather easily possible for warriors and paladins to become crushing-immune with the respective temporary block buff up, so it sounds weird that you heard about it on the warrior forums. ~ ŋɑϑ 12:17, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
- I freely admit my ignorance on the topic. What I heard was on the lines of "Resiliance reduces chance to be crit, which also pushes crush off the table". The thought there was, I am guessing, that if you can't be crit, you also can't be crushed. You know definitely, then, that this is not so? Either way the truth lays out, however, it should be mentioned on the respective pages. As I said before, if I'm confused, others will be too. --Eirik Ratcatcher 23:29, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
1.12 test site
We've got a test site up for WoWWiki running on MW 1.12! This is strictly for testing whether it breaks the wiki in any fashion, so it would be really useful if people could take a look and report anything you find :)
Info and reports on User:Kirkburn/Problems please! Kirkburn talk contr 20:51, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
- Because I basically can't access there, is the issue where [[Project:<page>]] is not redirecting to [[WoWWiki:<page>]] popping up (as documented on WW:SR)? --Sky (t | c | w) 09:21, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
Quest tooltips
With the coming 2.4 patch, quests will now get their own tooltips. I was wondering if we should add similar functionality for the quests to WoWWiki. Information that I was able to determine that is included in the in-game tooltips:
- Quest name
- Whether or not you are on the quest (wouldn't be shown on WoWWiki)
- A short synopsis of the quest
- A list of objectives
This would, at the very least, require a few parameters to be added to {{Questbox}}.
Along with this idea, we might change {{quest}} et al. to use the yellow "enchant" loot format. --Pcj (T•C) 15:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
- I don't believe the first set of changes are needed, as the reason they are linkable in game (it would seem, from so little information) is to show people what you're on, rather than as a main information. We can include the main information in hard text. As to your second set... I kinda like how they are right now. --Sky (t | c | w) 22:50, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
- Quests do have tooltips currently (I just have to enable JS to use 'em... :[ ). I'm not convinced those tooltips have any real use, but they're there. I agree with Sky on this one. --Eirik Ratcatcher 23:32, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Category/Template idea
Heres a thought...
Why don't we make templates to match the categories and use them rather than the categories. That way, if a change is desired instead of having to create a bot, all you would have to do is change a line on the template, thus changing the category for every page it was on.
- Using:
<noinclude>[[Category:Article Type Templates|{{PAGENAME}}]]</noinclude>
<includeonly>[[Category:<category name>|{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}}]]</includeonly>
- See User:Coobra/sandbox2 for template example
- See User:Coobra/sandbox3 for template usage example
The page would not receive unnecessary text anywhere on the page, and only the category would be added. {T•C) 18:43, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
- This is what Zeal has tried to do; though I find it disturbing that two would come up with the same idea. To say just a little on my thoughts, it is to disagree entirely with the thought of creating a template specifically for categorizing items/whatnot. That they are two different namespaces should make some indication that they shouldn't be mixed; furthermore, "just changing the template" is usually harder than you think, and could result in errors with the template usage made by people in general. In others' words, working as intended. :P --Sky (t | c | w) 23:35, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
- Aye, Sky brought up that and another problem before in relation to my templates. I understand his reasonings, but i still feel the benefits are worth the negatives.
- The other problem was sort keys. The templates i made to quickly get the job done only allowed for one custom sort key for all categories. It's just not feasible to provide custom sort keys for any category and know what category you want applied to with templates, too much customisation to handle. I still thought they were worth the benefits though. If/When string functions are installed, things like that would become easier to handle with more automation rather than customisation, but still wouldn't be perfect. -- Zeal (T/C) 05:18, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Quest Stacking
Something I've learned over my years playing WoW, is that knowing how to stack your quests can greatly speed up your leveling time. There are things you can do that will help keep you from revisiting the same area several times, and can help mitigate world travel needs.
A great example is the quest Pearl Diving. Although the [[Badlands#Quests|] page mentions you should acquire the Blue Pearl before entering the zone, there is no mention of it in [[Stranglethorn Vale#Quests|]] where it would be very useful.
I'd like to start the process of adding that information, after hearing what everyone has to say on the subject. Perhaps this is what was intended by the "Zone questing guide" links on pages such as [[Badlands#Quests|]]? I was thinking of new pages linked from the Zone#Quests pages, or putting a section on the Zone#Quests pages that lists quests in an execution-order, along with some explanations on why you are doing things in this way where appropriate (To answer the questions similar to "Why the heck do I need Blue Pearl x9?").
There will probably be differences in how the stacking should occur between Alliance and Horde, and rather than creating a single long Zone#Quests page, it might be good to go with the idea of a separate page for each faction.
So, I'd like some feedback on this project idea. Thanks!
-- Loopinvariant 20:28, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Ok, so I found some info on Powerlevel_Northshire_Valley although it seems be indirectly linked. It is a bit confusing that there is a Questing_in_Northshire but it doesn't link to Powerlevel_Northshire_Valley. The style is also inconsistent with Stranglethorn_Vale_quests. I suppose that's because this is a Wiki :-).
Is there an overall style/philosphy/design for quest information? I'm reading the policies now.
-- Loopinvariant 20:55, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
- I didn't even know Questing in Northshire existed >_<. I, along with a few others, have been working to add just the type of information you are talking about. Two pages should eventually be created for each zone: a "quest list" (ex: Teldrassil quests) which is just a table with quests, quest givers, and their locations listed; and a "questing guide" (ex: Teldrassil questing guide) which will talk about the most efficient way to complete quests in that zone, and which will contain the type of information you are talking about. Some formatting discussion for the quest list is currently going on at WoWWiki talk:Quest list project, but as of yet there is no standard for the questing guides (though I think the Teldrassil format has been used for several other zones - Thousand Needles questing guide, Dun Morogh questing guide, Azuremyst Isle questing guide, and one for Eversong Woods is on the way). I hope this answers your questions to some extent at least :) --Jiyambi t || c 22:01, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
- Hmm... I remember seeing that page, though I had obviously forgotten about it. Category:Walkthroughs holds a few more similar to it. --Sky (t | c | w) 05:44, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
BlizzCast Q&A Questions Needed!
A message from your heathen overlords:
We are once again looking for fan-submitted questions to answer in future episodes of BlizzCast. It can be anything related to Blizzard, the company, our games, or the talented people that work here. We do have a Q&A session in the soon-to-be-released episode 2 where we cover a bit of Starcraft lore and several World of Warcraft game play questions. Keep an eye on the BlizzCast home page (http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcast/) for when it is released to get all the details.
So if you have a question you want to get to us, please send an email with the subject line "BlizzCast Q&A" to the email address BlizzCast@Blizzard.com and you can include a name/character along with a location/realm if you'd like for us to refer to you during the show if your question is picked.
While we won't be able to get to every one of them, we want to keep you updated on ours games or the company, whatever aspects are most important to you.
Thanks for your help and be sure to tune into future BlizzCasts (http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcast/) to see if your question was answered!
Actually, it's from Blizzard, but do send along stuff anyway Kirkburn talk contr 00:12, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Theories With No Proof
Should we really let people add theories about things without any proof? I mean it doesn't hurt the page, it just look weird when a proof-less theory is listed. Personally, it reminds of like Elvis or Bigfoot sightings.
Mr.X8 Talk Contribs 20:07, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
- What pages are you referring to? If it is baseless speculation, it should go or get a base.--SWM2448 21:18, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Pained's article has one, the Cenarion Expedition's page has one where it says there's no proof but a theory of the naga draining the lke is to help Illidan make a new Well of Eternity.
Mr.X8 Talk Contribs 03:21, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
Boss tables
I use to go to the instance pages to search for specific boss information. I used the tables that used to be there to navigate to the correct page. Why were these tables removed? -- Scyth02 06:52, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
- THey weren't removed. Click the [show] link in the infobox next to the word "Bosses". --Sky (t | c | w) 06:58, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
Films and podcasts
Since the category Movies is about ingame videos mainly, how about adding a category "film" that includes the Warcraft Movie and "Second Skin", the mmo ducumentary. And how do we define "videos" and "movies"? what would machinima/bosskill/etc be considered.
And would "podcasts" be considered a type of media as well ?
-- SaudiGamer 08:01, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
RFA is not dead
I have nominated myself on the Requests for adminship page to become an administrator, just so you know. --SWM2448 15:37, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
Curious about instance/raids
"Ragnaros, along with General Drakkisath, is the only end-boss of a pre-Burning Crusade raid instance that does not drop a quest-starting item as a reward for killing him." is a quote from the MC instance page. While searching for instance info both on Blizz's website and wowwiki, it appears that almost all baby instances have an option to bring 10 people into said instance. Now I've never brought 10 people into VC or SFK, etc, but it's possible which technically makes it a raid instance? Which negates that above quote as a handful of the end bosses in those intances do not drop quest-starting items (i.e. Aku'mai as well as all SM end-bosses).
Just wanted to check before pulling that comment off. Or perhaps clarify it a bit? -- Innocentlysassy 22:50, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
- They used to be raidiable, but I know places like Scholo and Strath were capped at 5, I'm assuming all others below it were as well? --Piu (?!) 23:10, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
- In my opinion, the fact that you can bring 10 people in if you really want to does not make those raid instances. All quests for those instances are for 5 man groups only, and the instance difficulty is tooled for 5-mans. Therefor, I would say they are NOT raid instances and leave the article as is. --Jiyambi t || c 00:13, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
- I think they're still raidable, Piu, and only 4 instances were capped at 5. O_O I understand the definition you guys are going by, as most quests can't be completed in raids for most instances. And a lot of quests will tell you if that instance is a raid one. I just always thought of it in my mind as "oh I can look at a raid tab as there's more than 5 people in this instance" for a raid. But like I said... je comprends. ;) -- Innocentlysassy 06:30, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
The Terokkar Mana Bomb
A large number of the quests involved in this chain are duplicated horde-and-alliance. The person the character reports to changes due to faction. But aside from the name of that person (where it appears in the quest text), the name of the stronghold/point the character reports to, and the quest ID, the quests are identical.
When I first wrote those quests up, I included both the Alliance and Horde versions on a single page. I felt, and still feel, that no good purpose is served by splitting them up based on the trivial differences between them.
Recently, these pages have been getting split up, with the original page being used as a disambig page. The components of The Terokkar Mana Bomb quest chain are my chief example. I do not see value to the splitting up of these pages. Most comments about the quest would be equally relevant for the other branch.
I was pointed to The Binding as an example in favor of splitting. I find that uncompelling as an example, as neither the quest text, nor yet the chains in which they appear, match one another. (And that when comparing like-with-like, mind, across either city or pet similarities.) Similarly, I can point to Gnome Engineering, with which I did some work myself. There is enough difference between the branches that I did not feel compelled to put them all on one page.
My contention is not that all quests with the same name should be on the same page, nor even that if they have the same rewards or purpose, they necessarily belong together. I am simply saying that, where the quests are so close together, there is no need to describe them on separate pages; that indeed, doing so causes problems that can be avoided by combining them.
--Eirik Ratcatcher 20:07, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
- another example of (IMO) senseless disambiguation: Quest:Stolen Winter Veil Treats. --Eirik Ratcatcher 20:39, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
- I kinda support you here. Wowwiki is different than a data base site in that it's human-added content rather than auto-collected. We have lots of pages that are bot generated, but the strength of a site like this is that a reasonable editor can make decisions about when to group things up like this when it makes sense to do so. --Piu (?!) 20:56, 25 February 2008 (UTC)