Template talk:NPC location

Should this still be used? It seems like a good idea to me. Sunlion (talk) 23:37, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Ive asked 4 days ago and still didnt got any answeres. Its used in WvW but we could use it in PvE as well . Npcs, enemies and even objects. Sure there are some meta data like during events , levels of those creatures and so on. But that could be later added as well. The only big problem would be to apply it to all those pages we already have . Every zone , enemy , npc and maybe even those objects. That was the main problem from the begining. Im all up for it and I know you have probably seen me trying it on Chaks. But it would still take a lot of time for all of us. We would need to manualy go over every single zone and change them . Then we would need to go over every single enemy, Npcs and object to change those and add them into the zones if they are not there already. Even the chak Ive looked over wasnt added into 2 zones. But imagine to have it everywhere. Then all we would need to do is to keep the templates up to date ! So much less work <3 --DiegoDeLaHouska (talk) 00:43, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

We decided no about something like this a good while ago as being unable to be implemented due to too many variables, so I had no idea this template existed honestly. It could probably be used for Story instances and those NPCs but shouldn't be used on regular NPCs. - Do_odleplex 00:45, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Variables ? It is made already and it works ! We can use it as it is. It would be a beginning at least . A start of upgrading the wiki. I know you are afraid of it, we all are. But you will never know if you will not make the first step . Just take a look at that Chak Bracer. It works just fine. Ofcorse its not perfect and yes I can see that it could be better. Taking a zone from the event would add it automaticly into the list .. but that is the future. You need to learn how to walk before you can run. --DiegoDeLaHouska (talk) 00:55, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Here is the discussion. I'm not afraid of it, and you've already been told no. So drop it Sw0rly. - Do_odleplex 00:59, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Not gonna happen and you know it. Tolkyria might be "tired of fighting for it" but Im not. --DiegoDeLaHouska (talk) 01:09, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

I am just gonna quote this from the discussion: "For the situational NPCs, in the HoT maps and some spots in Orr there's a decent number of NPCs that only appear after certain circumstances, ie, in Verdant Brink, some scouts change depending if it's night or day or Dragon's Stand/Orr, some NPCs only appear if the Pact is in control of point X and may not have anything to do with an event, just that they are spawned because an event was successful." So unless you can solve that + add it to all npcs manually yourself alone, it is no from me as well. Also we told you no three times now. ~Sime 01:19, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

The only thing what would change would be [[]] to { {NPC location|<NPC name>}}. Insted of simple link you would have at least a bit more usefull template. Any aditional information can be writen manualy like we have but into |notes=<notes>. You dont know how to do it ? Just write down |notes=<change depending if it's night or day> or |notes=<appear after certain circumstances>. We would just place a framework down for possible future use.--DiegoDeLaHouska (talk) 01:33, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Except the notes do not show on the NPC page, and if we were to write them there it is basically the same amount of work. We can as well just stay how we are, saving us work (come one, it is 15 000 NPCs, you would have to make sure ALL of them work and we do not want to do it, so it would be on you), since it is, you know, working. ~Sime 01:35, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Also forgot to add, you cannot just decide and go start using a template that would affect 15 000 npcs on a whim. If you are so adamant, go to Community portal and make a thread before you go ham. ~Sime 01:46, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

(Reset indent)

Alright. Can we start again with this conversation towards the end of this week. The points I'd like to bring up for discussion are as follows:

• Discussion/context - Other than this conversation back in April 2019, I'm not aware of any other discussion on the topic of this template. In fact, following the comment "withdrawn", I was under the impression this wasn't going to be done at all. Is there some more discussion somewhere that I'm not seeing?
• Deployment of this template on WvW articles - I have absolutely no recollection of these edits by Tolkyria in September 2019 (crap was that a year ago?). I don't think it's a terrible idea if the WvW pages are treated a bit differently to others -NPC links on WvW articles are probably our most unloved of all pages- but do we really want to adopt one set of formatting/templates in a particular subset of wiki pages vs everything else? WvW isn't updated much and it wouldn't be difficult to do a once-through hardcode them all if we didn't want to deploy this template.
• Elimination of "easy edits" - you know what new prospective editors start with? Easy edits. What's this template doing? Partially it's the removal of having to implement menial location information by hand, but it does eliminate a bunch of easy edits we can bring new editors in with. We need to be really careful about scaring people off with templates everywhere.

-Chieftain Alex 19:08, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I want to add to your third point that I've heard and seen plenty of people who are scared of editing because of the number of templates we have, and more and more stuff is hiding behind them nowadays. For some pages automation is good, but I wholeheartedly agree with your point about easy edits. ~Sime 19:12, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I also agree with point number 3. I will say this template would be great for story instances. As for the discussion, there was another one on discord that I can grab and place here if needed. I honestly don't care about WvW so uh whatever is good I suppose? =X - Do_odleplex 23:07, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

We talked about it on discord from 6 to 9 motnhs ago on wiki discord. I talked about it with Chief as well as Dj if they would be able to make some kind of template for it. Both of them said that it would be to much difficult and if we would have one then there would be a problem with implementing the template. After Ive found this template, I did ask Chief on his talk page if I can use but without ansewer . I did get banned not for using the template but for not listening to admin which I would do again with pleasure. Well except few admins I admire. Also when it was said to "leave it on community" I thought of Gw2 community. Every player would rather see accurate info which this teplate would help with a lot. So for me its yes to help the Gw2 community but I guess you ment "community" as leave it on elder admins to make that decision. Yes the whole idea of "Automatization" is against the 3rd point. That was the idea. Less work for everyone so yes it would mean less new editors. But that is also why Im trying to find redundant data which would benefit from been in templates. Noone wants to write the same thing over and over again on every page. Just write it once and have it automaticly writen on the rest. I dont want scripts data mining all the info and automaticly write it on wiki. Just want to make the life a bit more easy for all of us .. and them (new editors). Just saying that its 20 months without answers. There are some things what shouldnt wait that long. --DiegoDeLaHouska (talk) 18:26, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

(Disclaimer: my response here is answering Diego but doesn't answer any of my questions above)

This wasn't a template I was familiar with, so my talkpage wasn't a great choice in this instance... I probably cleared the notification out of habit and forgot to respond (been working longer hours for a couple of months, looking forward to the break). The purpose of admins is largely to moderate users not content btw, so if we think you're being an uncooperative dork or a vandal, we'll take an interest and act as we see fit. If someone goes to the effort of stating that they're not sure about the way you're doing something and ask to put something on hold for a bit to get more discussion on the point, and you continue editing in the same fashion regardless, then expect to be blocked. This goes two ways and isn't exclusive to you, I'd apply it to anyone, and would likewise expect anyone to apply it to me if they saw something they considered objectionable.

Content-wise admins are supposed to have as much say as anyone else (in theory that is), unfortunately we recently tend to elect super active users as admins so there's some crossover with some admins having more interest in content than others (each admin is different).

It wasn't 20 months without answers as I saw it, it was a topic that garnered virtually zero interest at the time and so everyone concerned probably assumed it was a dead goose 20 months ago, and moved on. -Chieftain Alex 19:07, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

The fact that you are alright with having templates { {gathering node|}} and { {gathering node list}} for nodes, but having the same thing for enemies is a problem, makes me so irritated. --DiegoDeLaHouska (talk) 00:11, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Starting with a small example:

1. Go to Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:NPC infobox, select (Main) and expand the list to 500 entries and probably hit Next 500 a few times.
2. Select randomly 5 different NPCs which have several locations listed (ignore story NPCs etc...)
3. Then open the listed area pages the NPC is located in and check if the NPCs is actually listed there

Mostly likely you will find an area page where the NPC isn't documented, exactly explaining the idea of this template (Note that we haven't checked the other way around, area pages that document NPCs while the NPCs don't document this area). The intention of this template was to provide consistent documentation between the different page types, namely to have the same information on the area pages (section NPCs) and on the NPC pages (section location), with minimal effort while maintaining maximal usability. Regarding usability, compare with the german wiki: they are setting the NPC location on the NPC page, meaning that a NPC will only appear on an area page if the NPC page exists, making it extremely user-unfriendly especially for new maps; here, the NPC is set on the area page (allowing redlinks NPCs!) and encouraging the users to create those NPCs.

Of course I have to admit that finding out that the NPC location should be added on the area page isn't obvious at all for the first time (compare with contained in requiring contains), but when the new wiki user mastered it once, it's straight forward. Furthermore, it sounds a little bit strange talking about new user experience and having the welcome bot banned for over 7 month (unbanned recently) which should give the new wiki users some easy to go introduction.

Regarding your arguments, none of them provides the intended consistency or useability, e.g. "Deployment of this template on WvW articles" only (?!) or "I will say this template would be great for story instances" (?!), in these cases it would be the best to remove any usage and delete this template rather than abusing it. --51.68.180.4 09:55, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Proposal summary so we all have an idea what we're agreeing to here:

• Update all individual wiki-links in approximately 4k Location article "NPCs" sections to use {{NPC location}}.
• Update all individual wiki-links in approximately 3.5k Event article "NPCs" sections to use {{NPC location}}.
• Replace all hardcoded lists on approximately 15k NPC pages with {{NPC location list}}.

Considering that there are three possible cases for each NPC ↔ Location link:

1. Perfect: Each link to an NPC on a location article is also replicated the other way, i.e. there is a link on the location article pertaining to the NPC.
2. Probably wrong: NPC article links to a location, but the Location article does not link to the NPC. (caveat: Could be event-only NPC)
3. Probably wrong: Location article links to an NPC, but the NPC article does not link to the Location. (caveat: could be a heart/mastery NPC mentioned in a zone nav)

Using the above three cases, and the wiki API I was able to draw up a table of what links to where (file download link) with a view to making an informed decision of what we're agreeing to. Of the 56712 links which I would kind of expect to go in both directions, only 24708 link in both directions (case 1 above).

23180 links fit case 2 (which would potentially be solved with implementing this template)

8284 links fit case 3 (the underlying data for which would potentially be lost if we implemented this template, due to overwriting any location info given on the NPC page)

(I could update my data to include event data too as part of the "location" info, not too sure if this is skewing my results)

If I was happy that the npcs listed in the "NPCs" section on all Location articles was exhaustive (i.e. zero pages fitting case 3), I wouldn't have a problem with implementing this template. But 8284 isn't zero.

What we could do would be to do a halfway-house solution temporarily, and implement "NPC location" WITHOUT "NPC location list". When we add "NPC location list" we would then potentially want to validate the results in each case by hand... -Chieftain Alex 23:51, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

Some remarks:

• The high numbers of case 2 and case 3 only shows how inconsistently this wiki documents NPC locations, due to requiring duplicate edits (or triple edits if counting the location set in NPC infobox too), and how much this should be addressed already.
• I count only 1628 area pages, not sure why you come up with "4k Location article". Furthermore, at the current stage, simply adding the template NPC location list would mainly delete case 2 instead of case 3. However, noone ever said that we should implement both templates at the same time.
• If we want to keep event NPCs in the NPC locations section but do not want to list them in the area page, then we would also need the new template Event NPC which allows to set an area or inherits the location from the event infobox (this would allow us to create the Template:Event involvement list automatically). Furthermore, this would replace the in my opinion questionable "during related events only" suffix with the actual event (the suffix doesn't provide any proper information, e.g. given five events in the same area but the NPC appears only in one event).
• Regarding the high number of required edits: Two excellent editors somehow wanted to use this template (at least in early december):
  • "Should this still be used? It seems like a good idea to me." by User:Sunlion
  • User:DiegoDeLaHouska having the same idea even before knowing that this template exists.

--Tolkyria (talk) 09:37, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

Dont know how you mean it now by "noone ever said that we should implement both templates at the same time". While I was testing it on Chaks I needed to update zones first so then I could compere the information on the enemy pages. Dont really belive you can use one without the other much. But again its up to you guys how and if even .. --DiegoDeLaHouska (talk) 12:36, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

2023 revisit

Prompted yesterday to have a look at this again.

• 27.5k pages aligned between both Location and NPC articles.
• 20.5k occurrences where an NPC links to a location, but the location does not link to the NPC - these might be event only NPCs. Hard to tell.
• 7.5k occurrences where a location links to an NPC, but the NPC does not link to the location (2k npc pages to edit) - these might be legitimate.

updated misalignment data.

I still think this is too difficult to fix. -Chieftain Alex 17:40, 17 June 2023 (UTC)