Category talk:Goblin

Articles vs. Categories - This category (and a number of others) contains a large amount of information that really should be in a proper article page on the topic. Looking to Wikipedia's (and other high-quality wikis') example, articles and categories should be distinct and separate - information goes in the article(s), while link groupings go on the category page(s). Is this acceptable as Mistipedia policy and can we implement the changes need to follow this? (Sorry if this was too pushy on my part!) --ChrisNichols 06:53, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Myself and others are mostly, to different degrees I am sure, new to this. It is an overwelmingly large and daunting task, so I don't doubt that much of the little that has been done perhaps resembles stabs in the dark.

Still, we have done some experimenting, with more and with less categories. We have reached some tentative conclusions, in particular that no NPCs and no domains should be categories, but that organisations, societies, clusters and monster types, for example, should be categories grouping together articles. I am personally in favour of this for the immediately foreseeable future (but not necessarily our ultimate goal) as at a glance one can see everything that falls within one of these groups, recognise relations that should be added via additional categories, and then sit down and actually start writing quality material.

The goblin page in particular is not yet any where near the last stage. What is there is simply the accumulation of a handful of traversal operations that deposited material there and in other categories at the same time. If one is trying to make sense of goblin beasts one might as well drop in what is relevant to goblins at the same time. Or even more generally, if one is flipping through Gaz V, and one finds a point that touches a handful of categories, one drops it in them and then moves on.

Far more advanced results do, however, exist. Mount Nirka, the South Dnar River and Nova Vaasa, for example, are not complete, but are well on their way.

But more to the point perhaps, ultimately why shouldn't Vampire be a category with all the individual instances of the creature listed at the bottom? No article about vampires is ever going to touch upon each and every one. A list is clearly no substitute for quality text, but is it a distraction from quality text? And if it is, what are the implications of that for the current stage of the project? I would at a minimum argue that our current use of categories is extremely valuable scaffolding that is essential for the construction but can come down bit by bit as the construction progresses.

Thoughts?Cure 12:24, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

As cure mentions, we started out fumbling in the dark a bit. A few of us have done some wiki editing before, but most of us hadn't. But over the course of the past few months, we've come to some (At least tentative) conclusions. Most of them are scattered about random Talk pages, as they came up in relation to various pages. I've been trying to collect them into Mistipedia:Guidelines recently. In most cases we've looked to Wikipedia and other wikis for guidance, but our conclusions weren't always the same. The case of categories is one such case. The Mediawiki software sets no limits on what can be on a category page. That Wikipedia chooses to limit it doesn't mean we need to. Having a Goblin page and a Category:Goblin splits the information into two places unnecessarily. The Category:Goblin page can easily contain all the info that would have been on Goblin up top, and then down below, there's the list of known Goblins and Goblin subcategories. For ease of linking and searching, Goblin is simply a redirect to the category.

This seemed to us a good idea so we went with it, though as there have been a small group of core editors making most of the changes, and hence most of the decisions, these decisions are very susceptible to error. This particular decision was based on discussions in Talk:Elsepeth, Talk:Dread Plant, Category Talk:Hiregaard Family, & User_talk:Gonzoron if you want to see them, and if you present a good argument as to why to change course, it's certainly possible to do so. (No need to worry about being pushy, this is a collaborative project and everyone can contribute to policy as much as they can to content!) But IMHO, "Wikipedia does it" alone is not good enough. "Wikipedia does it because ____" may be so, if the reasons apply to us as well. -- Gonzoron 13:16, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Hmm... Apparently, I've stepped headlong into an on-going discussion! In general, I like what I've read about the wiki's efforts at organization. Unfortunately, the editor in me winces every time it sees a Category page with information on it. When I go to look up goblins (as our on-going example), I want to find the information on goblins, not the links to every goblin related article on the wiki!

Why not both? Isn't every goblin-related article in the wiki, by definition, "information on goblins"? -- Gonzoron 16:39, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Every goblin-related article on the wiki is not a top-level informational overview of the what/how/why/where of goblins in Ravenloft - which is exactly what Article:Goblin should be. --ChrisNichols 17:24, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Having a Category:Goblin page is great, but as goblins are a topic as well as a category, a Goblin page seems also logically necessary.

Both are only "necessary" if you start with the assumption that there can be no information on a Category page, and that all information must be on a regular page -- Gonzoron 16:39, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Since this is the usage across every other wiki (at least that I've ever seen), yes, I'd say there should be no information of Category pages. --ChrisNichols 17:24, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Especially, since from an organizational and formatting stand-point, combining the two seems very unwieldy. (It makes my head hurt!)

The formatting is a non-issue. The Mediawiki software takes care of it. Rather than Goblin, let's take a look at Dwarven Vampire, since there are (As yet) no Goblin NPCs in the wiki. First you get all the info about Dwarven Vampires, then at the bottom, a list of Dwarven Vampires. Then below that, the categories that dwarven vampires fit into. And that list is auto-magically updated every time someone adds Category:Dwarven Vampire to an NPC's page, so organization takes care of itself too. -- Gonzoron

And again, looking at Category:Dwarven Vampire, sets my teeth on edge. My editorial senses scream the second I get down to that list of links. It's counter-intuitive design. --ChrisNichols 17:24, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

For a good example of the kind of organization of categories vs. articles I'm recommending, let's look at the Pathfinder Wiki. Look at the Pathfinder wiki's article on goblins. It's purely informational - no organizing links intrude. But we can go to the category for goblin NPCs for the listing of related links if we need to, keeping content and organization neatly separate. This is the organizational model nearly every wiki in existence uses - why reinvent the wheel?

See, I think that's a prime example of why its a bad idea to separate them. There's no link that I can find from their goblin page to their goblin category. If I'm reading up on goblins because I want to put some in my campaign, it sure would be nice to find that list of known goblins. But a)there's no direct link that I can see. And b) the category is so awkwardly named that I'd need to be an expert on their organizational structure to find it. A link could be added, sure, but that's exactly the sort of extra organizational effort that the Categories-as-pages model eliminates. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I prefer to see it as making full use of the tools provided by the software.-- Gonzoron 16:39, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I didn't pick a perfect example, since the Pathfinder wiki's goblin page is missing that critical category link to the goblin NPC page. But that's a very simple fix to make.

Further, your second point shows that the conflation of articles and categories is not intended by the wiki's code itself. If the wiki was designed to use categories as information pages, it would not have a built-in distinction between them. But at a base level, the wiki uses article pages, list them as the stand-alone base notation, Foo (i.e. Goblin); the creation of categories is a second and separate function requiring a distinct notation, thus Category:Bar (i.e. Category:Goblin). Do things the other way around is counter-productive (and, too me, counter-intuitive). --ChrisNichols 17:24, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

In short: Let's keep the info with the info, and the organization with the organization. For readability's sake.

(All the other discussion regarding organization looks great though. Keep up the good work!)

PS - The Pathfinder Wiki has a lot of excellent work going into it. There's probably a few tricks we could borrow from them to use here on Mistipedia. (The various headings and sidebars, for example.) --ChrisNichols 15:15, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

And, please, don't take any of this personally. Y'all are great and I've wanted a real Ravenloft wiki for a long time. (Seriously, I think the FoS crew rocks! :D ) But the current article/category set-up makes every editorial and design aspect of my being (and as a journalism graduate, free-lance writer, and professional editor, that's a big aspect) come down with the crawling heebie-jeebies. --ChrisNichols 17:24, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

The indent thing is getting confusing, sorry. Let me try to address the points in order down here instead... First, note that the way we're using Category:Goblin is not for everything goblin-related. It's just anything that is a goblin. There isn't a category for anything goblin related right now, but that would likely be something like Category:Goblin Related if we need it. For example, see Category:Vampire (things that are vampires) and Category:Vampirism (things that are related to vampires]]. So the text of the category becomes that informational overview, and then tucked away at the bottom, where's it's not hurting anyone that came for just an overview, is the list of goblins.

I agree that it's not the way most wikis do things (and I'm not going to go hunting for some wiki out there that agrees with us.) To me, that's kind of irrelevant. To some extent, it's useful to go with the flow, as far as making things comfortable for new users that come from the background of other wikis. And we've followed such conventions in other ways. But the usefulness of this method seems to us to outweigh the barrier of having new editors figure it out.

As for how it grates on you, I understand and empathize. I wasn't 100% convinced at first either. But it does seem intuitive to me, and I submit that whatever seems "wrong" about it is only due to preconceptions from other wikis. If this were the first wiki you'd seen, the others would probably seem wrong. From a computer usability standpoint, being able to navigate through related topics is good thing, not bad. Unless the links are overwhelming, but I don't think they are since they are sorted and tucked away at the bottom. All I can say it try it for a week or so, and see if it still grates.

I recognize that there is a distinction in the code between page and category, but the point is that there's nothing a normal page can do that a category page can't. The category page has extra functionality, not less.

And, yes, I can only speak for myself, but I don't take any of this personally. We're working together to make something great. It's not about us, it's about making Mistipedia as good as possible. -- Gonzoron 21:09, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

"All I can say it try it for a week or so, and see if it still grates." Fair enough. I'll give it a week or so, then revisit things. :) And...

"We're working together to make something great. It's not about us, it's about making Mistipedia as good as possible." Amen to this! :D --ChrisNichols 21:15, 18 April 2010 (UTC)