Forum:Category edits

So, yeah... Just realised I spammed the edit log with about a hundred entries for Category changes. Just so you don't think I've gone completely off the deep end, what I was doing was changing things like:

Divide Missions

to

Divide missions

This was because virtually every "mission" article in the wiki links to a "missions" (lowercase) category, but the only categories which had been editted to contain category lists and descriptions seemed to be "Missions" (uppercase) categories. If you catch my drift...

Anyway, hopefully I haven't broken anything, think I'm about half way through, sorry for the spam. :) Hopefully the categories should be a bit more coherent when it's all done.  I've marked all the Missions blocks that I've dealt with so far for deletion.

Oh, I almost forgot - hi everyone, I'm new here. ;)

CommandoXXX 16:21, 22 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi CommandoXXX and welcome to Tarapedia! Thank you for your work and clarifying your edits
 * A bit of introduction: Me and Dashiva are local admins, although we were rather inactive in the last few months. I've got back to Tabula Rasa with Deployment 11, but I don't have as much time as I had before. If you need anything to help you out, feel free to ask. You can leave me a message on my talk page.
 * A few notes:
 * I've noticed you've created new Itemref pages for the Armor article. We were trying to get rid of it, because it's very confusing system for new and casual wiki editors. The preferred way is to reupload the images under the new name.
 * When uploading screenshots and game graphics, please do not use the Fair Use template - it's not valid for this usage. All Tabula Rasa images are licensed under NCSoft Ownership Policy - TaRapedia:Formatting/Images
 * When you need to move a article to a new name, please use the wiki Move feature - this way the article will retain it's history and the old article automatically receives a redirect to the new name. (The Move link is next to the Edit link)
 * If you need to upload item/skill or ony other internal game image, you can specify it on TaRapedia:Requests page and I will upload it for you.
 * That's all for now and I'm happy to have you here with your new energy for Tarapedia
 * → Zarevak 00:55, 23 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Zarevak covered most of it, but I figured I'd clarify one point: We were planning to do all that renaming you just did for a long time, we just never got around to it. It's good to have active people around. - Dashiva (talk) 08:54, 23 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi Zarevak and Dashiva, and thanks for all the information!
 * I hadn't noticed the Move button, that's really useful, I'll make sure to use it in future. :)  I'm guessing it shouldn't be used for the categories though, as deleting the old pages rather than turning them into redirects should help cut down on confusion?
 * For the copyright, should I be choosing "None selected" in the Licensing dropdown box when uploading an image? I've noticed a few other images uploaded by others have picked the Fair Use option, should these really be edited to remove the Licensing section on the image page?
 * I hadn't noticed how the Icon template worked, oops! Looks like I just ended up making things way more complex than they needed to be.  :P  Should I reupload the icons with the appropriate name and then mark the Itemref pages I created for deletion?
 * Thanks for pointing out the Requests page, I hadn't spotted that one either - there's several icons I'd like to see and I was wondering where I was supposed to get them from, I'll post on there shortly for the ones I couldn't find.
 * Glad to be helping out, I'll be sure to get in touch if I have any more questions (and let me know if I do anything wrong!)


 * CommandoXXX 13:58, 23 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Images license notice: There was a discussion on Template_talk:Fairuse page. The result was to use "None selected" and possibly add site-wide notice about the license to all images. Fair use should be used only on images that are not created by NCsoft and there is no alternative image available...
 * The Icon template has gone through many iterations and is not very user friendly. The current preferred way is to name icon images the same way as the respective articles. The Itemref system is there only for backward compatibility. If you get to reuploading the images, feel free to do it. It's not necessary, because it just works now and there are more pressing issues needing our attention
 * I've uploaded some overhead images - they are in slightly different format then normal icons. In the future I plan to upload them all and categorize them. Currently uploaded images are Image:Weapon vendor.png, Image:Prestige vendor.png, Image:Grey market.png and Image:Military Surplus.png.
 * BTW: In the game files, there are 4 basic types of icon images:
 * 128x128 overhead images (but there is no Completed objective image - it is animation created on the fly)
 * 64x64 item and UI icons (schematic icons are created on the fly by combining the base image with schematic overlay)
 * 51x51 logos symbols images
 * 32x32 map legend images (these images come in pairs: normal version and mouse over version)
 * → Zarevak 17:46, 23 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the Category list...
 * Looks like my work isn't quite done yet. I'd forgotten that empty categories wouldn't show up in this list, but there are plenty of them about.  Take a look at Category:Mission by zone and Category:Mission by contact - there's dozens of mostly empty categories that are empty because they're badly named, but have been created in order to categorise them.
 * What do we want done with these? The idea of "Mission by zone" and "Mission by contact" categories is a nice one, allowing us to group together all the "missions" categories into two big list which allow users to drill down to see what zones and contacts are available, but it would require the creation of a category page for every zone (a fairly big job) and every contact (a very big job) in the game.
 * It could also be argued that this is already covered, to an extent, by pages like Alia Das mission list and Receptive Liaison Langerman, which already list all missions in the area or given by the contact - the problem is that these are manually created and have to be manually updated every time something changes, leaving massive room for errors and out-of-date information.
 * If we do want these then I'd suggest the creation of a template, similar to the template used for things like Wilderness mission list, which automatically creates a header and categories for each, erm, category. If we don't want them then we should probably remove the "Mission by zone" and "Mission by contact" categorisation from the properly named pages that have it and delete the badly named ones.
 * Going back to the issue of the manually created zone and contact articles, is there a way to automate these? Category:Receptive Liaison Langerman missions already gives a list of every mission available from this contact, automatically created from the mission articles themselves - is there a way we could automatically enter that information into the Receptive Liaison Langerman article?  If so that would be incredibly useful.
 * CommandoXXX 10:54, 28 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Yeah! The Category:Mission by zone and Category:Mission by contact categories are made just for that reason. Even, when they don't exist, they can be used in DynamicPageList (DPL) extension.
 * Receptive Liaison Repp article was first one to use DPL extension to automatically create list of relevant missions. The syntax for this is very simple:

&lt;DPL&gt; category=Receptive Liaison Repp missions     &lt;- name of the category whose articles are displayed mode=unordered                               &lt;- output is bullet list ordermethod=title                            &lt;- sort the articles by their name &lt;/DPL&gt;
 * Wilderness (and other zone articles) use DPL for automatic Logos lists - these use more complex syntax, because they also extract coordinates from the Logos articles.
 * More information about DPL extension (according to Special:Version we are using version 1.6.3):
 * DPL Manual
 * DPL Version history
 * User:Zarevak - list some ideas about DPL usage
 * The result? We don't need to create all categories, but we can use them as DPL parameters and automate some work . The mission list articles could be automated as well, but now they are sometimes updated even before the mission article is written. They also point out some additional information (like external missions for Instances; missions removed from the game; interesting rewards; ...)
 * → Zarevak 20:22, 28 August 2008 (UTC)


 * That's awesome.   Is there any reason not to go through all the missiongiver articles that don't specifically have extra information and update them to use DPL?  I did a little testing and noticed that using the PAGENAME variable in place of "Receptive Liaison Repp" in the category field works, so it would be a simple (if lengthy) matter of cut-and-paste.  All missions should now be in the appropriate categories provided the mission itself is written up properly, though it would probably be a good idea to check the manual list against the DPL list on each to see if any missions are missing.
 * Back to the Category:Mission by contact and Category:Mission by zone categories though - if we're not actually creating all the individual "Missiongiver missions" category pages (because DPL doesn't need them to be created in order to read the lists as above) then the two "Mission by..." categories will end up pretty much empty, because no pages will have "Category:Mission by..." tags in them. Is this okay?  Or do we ideally want all these category pages created simply so we can categorise them?  Or, alternatively, do we want to end up using DPL to create those two "Category:Mission by..." pages?
 * → CommandoXXX 22:11, 28 August 2008 (UTC)


 * AFAIK there is no reason for not using DPL. It just wasn't done by us and just few editors know about this option :(
 * I didn't know, that worked - great find!  This enables us to create template to handle the contacts/zone mission list and if we ever need to update the format, we can change it in one place. Just one thing to remmember: With XML syntax (there is also wiki syntax) it is not possible to pass template parameters to DPL, because DPL is processed before template parameters are evaluated (and thus DPL is literally getting "  " instead of the variable/default value). I'm not sure about the wiki syntax.
 * As for the categories - I won't create them, because I don't need them. I can see some people seeing red link and trying to fix it by creating the category article. There is nothing wrong with this when the new category article is properly categorized under the Category:Mission by contact or Category:Mission by zone categories. These two main category articles can state, they are not complete and give links to the Mission list and its parts.
 * BTW: Should Category:Mission by zone be flat with Category:Wilderness missions along with Category:Alia Das missions or structured with Category:Alia Das missions category under Category:Wilderness missions?
 * → Zarevak 00:35, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
 * PS: DPL can also create lists based on links. We can create list of all missions that points to the contacts article and get list of all missions the contact is involved in


 * Actually, there are reasons for not using DPL, mainly having to do with parse time/load. See Talk:Main_Page for the initial inquiry. There was some further talk on IRC, but I didn't make any specific changes. Now that you're around again, maybe we can do a full evaluation (on a different page). - Dashiva (talk) 08:23, 29 August 2008 (UTC)


 * You are such fun stopper! I've tried the alternatives: ListPages (which is not installed on Tarapedia) and CategoryTree.
 * I don't like ListPages for two reasons: I haven't found documentation for it and the output is specialized for wikia community features. The simplest version I was able to produce (on another wiki) still contained big space between the article names.
 * CategoryTree is looking much better and can be stylized with the help of CSS. Still not 100% flexible.
 * DPL is my love. For mission lists (and almost everything) we can use cached results, because they still be more accurate then the manual version. Some of the contact articles still never got updated with new missions and DPL will do this for us in a few hours - win. Also DPL can list only current missions leaving out the historical ones by using notcategory=Historical parameter. We don't have to remove historical articles from their Category:Mission by contact or Category:Mission by zone categories.
 * I will try to contact wikia and ask them their opinion...
 * → Zarevak 09:24, 29 August 2008 (UTC)


 * There are a few other solutions as well. Could use static lists with a DPL query in a comment, and run the query every so often to check for updates. Could use static lists and a bot to periodically / automatically update the lists. I haven't really looked into it, so not sure which method I favor yet. - Dashiva (talk) 11:46, 29 August 2008 (UTC)