Guild Wars Wiki:Project/Guideline Report

The Problem
It is difficult to track progress on projects that check many different pages.

History
Several different approaches have been tried:


 * No tracking:Results in chaos. Nobody knows what is going in.
 * Separate manual table entry:This has been tried and there are many issues:
 * Keeping the table up-to-date is more trouble than the work itself.
 * Creating the original table is time consuming and error prone.
 * Some form of encoding is needed to keep the size of the report reasonable.
 * Encoding requires editors learn the codes, which further discourages keeping things up-to-date


 * DSL reports:There have been several attempts at this. It works better than the Separate manual tables but is not a roaring success. This project is intended to advance those efforts.

Report structure

 * 'Geographic' Report structure:How should the report for geographically dispersed pages be structured?
 * One massive report
 * Takes a long time to load and puts a huge load on the server when it is viewed.
 * Difficult to find specific items
 * By campaign reports
 * Almost as bad as the single massive report. Their size varies a lot.
 * By region reports
 * Some regions are common to different campaigns. (Not a major issue.)
 * Some reports will be quite large, others are small, even trivial
 * By zone (areas, outposts and so on) reports
 * Not currently supported by categories.
 * Some zones are common to different campaigns. (Not a major issue.)
 * Some zones will be empty.


 * 'Item' Report structure:How should reports about items be structured?
 * One massive report
 * Takes a long time to load and puts a huge load on the server when it is viewed.
 * Difficult to find specific items
 * By category
 * What are the categories?
 * By category and sub-category
 * Some categories may not sub-divide.

Content

 * What should be reported:What should go into each report?
 * Section by section reviews
 * Feature presence
 * How should the topics be listed?


 * Where to get the information:What is the source of the information?
 * Individual reviewers
 * These will be peoples opinions - who and when? reliability? consensus?
 * Wiki structure
 * DPL queries


 * Where to keep the information:How to keep the information for the reports?
 * Article page
 * This works for structural information.
 * Talk page
 * The main talk page is expected to be for discussing the article contents. Formal structures are sort of jarring.
 * Article sub-pages
 * Possible, but are usually reserved for fact based material
 * Talk sub-pages
 * Hard to get to

Templates
An example of such a report is here. There are some problems with it:
 * observation:There is a special report for unused templates. Any report on the usage of a template belongs on a discussion sub-page.
 * It uses nested DML, which is hard to write. Maybe using a seperate template for the inner DPL report would be better.
 * It produces two fairly big reports on the same page. One on actual usage, and the other on potential usage. It may be better to have separate reports.
 * It uses a user space template. That template should be moved to main space.
 * Feedback on it is needed.