Guild Wars 2 Wiki talk:Projects/Category reorganization

Archive

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• 2011

Page categories and subcats

Just as a question (and apologies as I wasn't sure where to put this), but in terms of page categories, should we be putting pages simply in the end category or including the higher categories as well? For something more concrete, currently we're putting NPCs simply in their end categories like Blood Legion or Nightmare Court and not including them in larger categories like charr or sylvari. Meanwhile, we're putting skills in situations as being dual-categorized in Fire attunement skills and Elementalist skills. Is it simply just different policies for these, or will they eventually align to one format, or is there some other avenue in the works? Redshift 17:50, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

Missing cats?

Pirates, Oozes, Raptors, Skelk, and Nightmare Court. All have or at least had a Slayer achievement tied to them according to our data and we've seen these creatures in the game. Giant, Machine, Minotaur, and "Shell" (which might encompass the nebulous aquatic creatures that really don't belong in the Fishes category) do as well, but our information/evidence for them is still scant. The Inquest are also not currently included, but likewise information hasn't been forthcoming on them. Redshift 16:52, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

Revisiting skills

As a note, if [[:Category:Virtues]] exists, then [[:Category:Attunements]] definitely should as well. In addition, for mesmer skills, I recommend having "Illusion skills" which then is divided into "Clone skills" and "Phantasm skills." Aqua (T|C) 21:21, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

We might as well make the professions categories and their placement step 4 of this project; it would clear up an extreme amount of chaos and redundancy. - Infinite - talk 21:32, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Skills

See Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Projects/Category reorganization/Skills categories for my proposal of how this should be handled. Opinions? Aqua (T|C) 03:34, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

A couple of things I'd suggest to alter on that proposal, in order of encountered;

• Category:Attunement skills doesn't contain the subsequent categories (Category:Air/Earth/Fire/Wate attunement skills), which makes the Attunements skills category obsolete. I suggest making the individual attunement skills categories a sub-category to Category:Attunement skills.
• Category:Backpack kits and Category:Backpack kit skills (equally; Category:Weapon kits and Category:Weapon kit skills) should not *both* exist within Category:Skills. Both Category:Backpack kits and Category:Weapon kits should not be categorized in the skills category; they are mechanics of the engineer. Only Category:Backpack kit skills and Category:Weapon kit skills should remain in this category.
  • This also applies to the Category:Skill types instances.
• I am skeptic about Category:Steal skills; we don't know if any "steal skills" are steal-unique skills. They might all be environmental weapon skills that can be obtained via other means. Until then, though, I think it should stay.
• Category:Skills by type → Category:Slotted (or Slot) skills maybe.
• Category:<Hand> <weapon> skills should all be removed. The categories should not be further divided between handedness; we can DPL with the infobox's slot parameter. Only retain the weapon categories individually, i.e. Category:Axe skills.

I believe that the rest is flawless as proposed, but the above bullets should further improve the finalized result. - Infinite - talk 13:03, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

EDIT: Added my proposal on the proposals page. - Infinite - talk 13:14, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree with pretty much everything. Except handedness, those are actually somewhat useful, but as you said slot= makes them somewhat redundant Aqua (T|C) 18:31, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

The more I think about it, the more I feel handedness *should* be included. A main-hand mace is the equivalent of a scepter, but a off-hand mace is not. Categorizing them into the same general "grouping" is unnecessary, especially when there are trait lines for main-hand and off-hand weapons. Aqua (T|C) 04:42, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

A-Net Employee

Missing gw1:Zack Nickerson. Ariyen 08:34, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

User categories

Proposal :

• User catgories (Country, played professions, played races, etc.)
• User made templates (to help people sharing good templates and enhancing them user pages)
  • Userbox templates
  • tabs
  • character box
• ...

--Dreams Factory 16:00, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi there--with regard to user categories, this part of the reorganization has actually already occurred. Please expand Step 3 on the project page and see if what you're thinking of is already there, and note that as per Number 16 in the archive there were a lot of extraneous categories that were intentionally removed. Hope this helps. Redshift 17:42, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

There is this global category. As well as browsing the Users category should suffice in general. However, we welcome any elaborate categorization within the categories, as long as they are thoroughly backed with suitable arguments. Convenience is not an argument for a new category, however; the category tree is meant to be kept concise and functional, not excessive and indexical. A Help-space article might be more suited for listing popular templates. - Infinite - talk 23:25, 23 January 2012 (UTC)

Yep. I think the current organisation is nice too. --Dreams Factory 23:28, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Bugs and anomalies

I was wondering if we should sort an accurate system to categorise bugs and anomalies now. I have both templates set-up, but neither has an accompanied category yet (let alone a tree).
GWWs way to categorising these is downright horrible (I don't believe that that claim needs elaboration), so I wanted to find out what would actually work.
Currently I am thinking along the lines of:

• Category:Guild Wars 2
  • Category:Unintended behaviour
    • Category:Anomalies
    • Category:Bugs

And then sub-categories as needed in time. Is there anything fundamentally wrong in this setup, or should I implement it that way? - Infinite - talk 13:39, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

I recommend three different dimensions to tracking unintended behavior:

• Text/localization vs any other types of anomalies/bugs: ANet addresses these differently. {{sic}} would, by default, go into "text anomalies."
• Is the issue reported? One problem with documenting bugs is that we often don't update the note as issues are addressed. We also get into repeated discussions about "is it a bug or not?" Adding a link-to-forum parameter (for the templates) would allow us to connect our documentation to the reporting system...and to any official responses.
• Has ANet decided not to fix it? In some cases, ANet didn't intend a behavior, would like to fix it, but has decided for various reasons (time/severity of issue) to leave it alone. This, too, often leads to repeated discussions. The same link-to-forum parameter would apply and we could include an optional "willnotfix" parm.

People are repeatedly asking these questions: "is this still a bug," "is it really a bug," and "why hasn't ANet done anything about this?" Also, to a certain extent, now that ANet has a robust bug reporting tool for players, I think it's critical that any bug/anomaly note on the wiki be matched with an actual report. In effect, if no one bothered to officially report the issue, why do we think it's worthy of a note?

Finally, I don't know that we need to distinguish "bug" from "anomaly" in our classification system. I think [category:bugs] and [category:anomalies] can redirect to [category:unintended behaviors]. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 15:04, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Eh, I don't think we really need to keep track of where a bug is at in the dev's priorities. That seems like a lot of extra work that won't really help things. And any links to the forums can just be in the notes or references. As for categories, redirects don't really work for them. --JonTheMon 15:24, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Jon. By all means include links to the forum or whatever, but don't bloat the {{bug}} - that's what the Cite extension is for.

Category:Bugs for any error in the game code that results in an unintended behavior. Trying to differentiate "actual bugs" from "anomalies" isn't really necessary, they're all bugs.

Category:Text errors or whatever you want to call it for typos, grammar flops, subtitles not matching spoken dialogue, etc. These are not errors in the game code and don't affect gameplay, they're purely display errors, so they deserve a separate category. —Dr Ishmael 15:33, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Ish that the first level of concern is "gameplay" or "text" — there's no utility in distinguishing bugs vs anomalies (that generally leads to endless debate about intended vs unintended).

But I still think we shouldn't report something to be a bug unless we link to an official report — if no one thinks it's important enough to let ANet know about it, why do we think it's important enough to be noted in the article? Back in the old days, it was incredibly painful to tell ANet; now, it's trivial. We could use {{cite}} or references, but that wouldn't help us identify unreported issues. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 15:42, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Probably very late to the party here, but I think we should at least have a seperate category for anomalies aswell. The Bug page even links to the unexisting category and we do make the difference in what template we use, why not also in what subcategory we place them?

If you ask me we could actually remove the Template:Bug and Category:Bugs completely from the wiki because of the bug report system, ingame and on the forum, and just keep the Template:Anomaly, Category:Anomalies, Template:Sic and Category:Text errors. Mainly because bugs are (at least supposed to be) temporary, but anomalies and text errors are usually not all that important for the functionality of the game and will usually never get a "fix" for that same reason. This means that bugs are only temporary and anomalies and text-errors are usually permanent. I don't think the wiki is the place for temporary content like that. In GW1 it was basically all we had and therefore okay, but it's not at all needed here. 08Ray 20:51, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Bugs may be supposedly temporary, but a lot of them have hung around for a long time without being addressed. It's important for us to document these long-standing bugs so that players are aware of them. —Dr Ishmael 21:14, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

True, that's why I added the "at least supposed to be" part :P But it's a bit difficult to draw the line of when a bug should be placed on the wiki and when not, especially because you don't know up front if/when it will be addressed. Also it consumes time to keep adding them here and keep track of when these are fixed, which could also be used to address incomplete pages and stuff like that. However it hopefully does reduce the amount of double posting on the forum if people see on the wiki that it's a bug. So unless ANet adds a better way to check if a bug has already been reported, I guess that placing long-standing bugs here aswell might have some use. — 08Ray 21:37, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Accessories

This needs to be cleaned up. Currently there are two categories for the same thing, [[:category:accessory]] and category:accessories. Clearly the plural should be the one kept. This is easy enough to correct by adjusting the templates used (I think it's the armor one but I haven't checked each page in question). My question is about breaking up the accessory category into rings/necklaces/earings. Should this be done? Or should the accessory category be filled with all three slots? Venom20 21:17, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

American territory

Is it absolutely necessary to distinguish North and South America in the users categories by territory? Should be simpler and more efficient to go by the 6 continents system. The userboxes can specify which part of America a user lives in. - Infinite - talk 17:53, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

The concept of "territories" is an ancient holdover from the early years of GW1, where the American, European, and Korean territories battled against each other in the Hall of Heroes, with the winner gaining the Favor of the Gods for their territory. That was dropped from GW1 a few years ago, and the closest analogue in GW2 is the server-based WvW. These "territorial" userboxes really mean nothing other than "I live on this continent." —Dr Ishmael 18:04, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

That's correct, but I'm concerned about the categories currently established. I personally feel that Category:Users in the American territory will always be enough to categorize North- and South American players. The userboxes can specify without the need for extra categories. - Infinite - talk 18:25, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I was trying to say that the categories don't really mean anything, and do we even need them at all? —Dr Ishmael 18:31, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I can't remember why we kept them around (and expanded), to be fair. I find them to be slightly meaningless, in the light of GW2. - Infinite - talk 19:03, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) I think there might be two kinds of categories of interest (with associated infoboxes):

• [[:category:Users that play on the ____ home world]], for those who want to let people know where to find them in-game.
• [[:category:Users that live in ____]], for those who want to indicate a country or continent.

I think we can reduce this to two infoboxes with a switch, e.g. server = and realworld home = and delete everything else. There is no such thing anymore as "American" or "European" territories.

(Personally, I won't be using either tag, but I can see that it's a popular thing to do for many people with accounts.) – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 19:06, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I like the world category idea a lot. That could really be useful for users to organize themselves here.

I feel the other category should be restricted to continents (or be removed altogether) due to the sheer amount of countries we'd have to have categories for. - Infinite - talk 19:17, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

My suggestion would be to leave off all categories, use semantic annotations in the templates ([[User plays on world::Tarnished Coast]], [[User lives in county::USA]]), and have the templates link to a page like "Guild Wars 2 Wiki:List of users by world" that generates a table by semantic query. —Dr Ishmael 19:40, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't see any difference between the two for the reader (except that categories can provide the feature today, while SMW cannot, since we don't have it yet). But then, we can use cats in the template(s) today and replace them with annotations later. It also occurs to me that people like the "this user speaks ___ as a native" etc.

idc	This user doesn't use UserBoxes.

Infinite: I don't see what difference the number of countries makes: so there'd be a lot of categories that only a few people care about. They'd be tucked neatly away in the category tree and wouldn't bother those of us (like me) who tend not to follow userboxes. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 22:02, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

The big difference is that instead of having a glut of categories with only a few entries each to browse through, you'd have a single page that lists everyone in a sortable table. —Dr Ishmael 22:22, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Categorisation of vendors

What are people's thoughts on categorising vendors by the items that they sell, i.e. Farmer Claudia could be categorised into something approximating the following categories:

• [[:Category:Vendors that sell Carrot]]
• [[:Category:Vendors that sell Onion]]
• [[:Category:Vendors that sell Potato]]
• [[:Category:Vendors that sell Tomato]]

LordBiro 16:38, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

I've put up an example here User:LordBiro/Farmer_Claudia. LordBiro 18:18, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

That really seems like something we'd use SMW for. --JonTheMon 19:29, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

You'll get probably 100+ categories for vendors that way. That's... a nightmare for category searchers, imo. Konig/talk 20:06, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm not very familiar with SMW. A brief chat with Tanetris has filled in some of the blanks.

I have seen a number of efforts outside of the wiki to attempt to categorise vendors by items sold to help those looking for specific crafting materials, and it seems a shame that currently we need to update the vendor and the item page separately. Is it better to wait for SMW (which I accept is a more ideal solution) and carry on manually updating the item and vendor pages, or is it better to use auto-categorisation (and potentially DPL) to create these lists now?

As for the large number of categories, if it really is 100+ for some vendors then maybe this solution would be unworkable. What is the maximum number of items that we currently have on a vendor page? I couldn't find any with more than five myself but I didn't look very thoroughly! :) LordBiro 23:03, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

I think this is a really good idea, especially if we don't have merchants with tons of items available. If we're only dealing with merchants that have a maximum number of items or whatnot, I would vote for doing this. But other than the potential of having a merchant page with 10+ categories, what would be the other reasons against doing this? -Jyavoc 21:37, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

You would have hundreds of categories for "Vendors that sell X", that's the reason against doing this.

The SMW solution only requires 1 property, Property:Sells item. Each entry in a vendor's table would set this property with the name of the item, e.g. [Sells item::Leather Bag]. Then on Leather Bag, you would have a query {#ask:[Sells item::Leather Bag]} to list all vendors that sell it. —Dr Ishmael 21:49, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Armor

• Category:Armor
  • Category:Armor sets
    • Category:Dungeon armor sets
      • Category:Arah armor
        • Corrupted Orrian Gloves
        • ...
        • Orrian Reward Pauldrons
      • ...
      • Category:Twilight Arbor armor
        • Nightmare Breastplate
        • ...
        • Nightmare Vestments
  • Category:Dungeon armor
    • Arah armor
    • ...
    • Twilight Arbor armor

---

• Category:Armor
  • Category:Armor sets
    • Category:Dungeon armor
      • Category:Arah armor
        • Corrupted Orrian Gloves
        • ...
        • Orrian Reward Pauldrons
      • ...
      • Category:Twilight Arbor armor
        • Nightmare Breastplate
        • ...
        • Nightmare Vestments

We can remove the "set" suffix as it's no longer used in the naming of armor sets, keep the Dungeon armor subcategories, leave the dungeon armor set articles in Category:Dungeon armor. The dungeon armor sets don't need subcategories for each individual armor set, do they? Currently, a category containing only subcategories is suppose to be a bad thing as far as I know. Dungeon armor pieces can simply go in Category:Dungeon armor as you'll be listing the dungeon armor set on its <Armor name> page and the name can be placed easily in Category:Dungeon armor, so is there any advantage with the subcategories?-Relyk 20:14, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

I really like the bottom branch for the armor tree, simple and effective. Dungeon armor is the only exception to general armor sets (afaik, though maybe certain PvP rewards? (haven't PvP'd much)), thus it makes sense to make it the only sub-category to armor sets.

Following that, it would suffice for the Arah armor to be categorised in the Arah armor category, and not also in the armor sets category.

That's mainly how we established the use of subcategories (to avoid the category overflow mess seen on GWW). - Infinite - talk 13:06, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to bump this up. I think the way the Weapon sets category is built-up, is a good inspiration for the armor categories. Being a little OCD on category equality, I propose to organize the weapon sets in the same way. So... category:weapon sets -> category:<group name> weapons -> category:<set name> weapons. ~ Sanna 14:08, 14 January 2013 (UTC)