User talk:Tennessee Ernie Ford/Archive10

For the foreseeable future, I will be posting on the wiki about once a week.
I apologize in advance for any delay in responding to your comment.

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Previously on TEF

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• Join – May 2010
• May 2010 – Nov 2010
• Dec 2010 – Feb 2011
• Feb 2011 – May 2011
• Jun 2011 – Jul 2011
• Aug 2011 – Aug 2011
• Sep 2011 – Sep 2011
• Oct 2011 – Nov 2011
• Dec 2011 – May 2012
• May 2012 – Dec 2012

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Trivia

Hello English master :)

Since you are the contributor with most language knowledge, admirable writing and had been involved editing Festival_hat page. I ask what does Trivia mean? If the term is meant for the modern usage (not education system or a place where three roads met), as reference of popular culture... such new information should be placed in Notes instead. This is because for the past months, I have been finding (and fixing :S) every single article page I visited with very annoying Notes and Trivias: mostly irrelevant, misplaced, lame edits as users want to "say something" but are lazy enough to rephrase the line written just above, etc. Yoshida Keiji talk 11:46, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

To quote directly from Wiktionary: "insignificant trifles of little importance, especially items of unimportant information". Wiki users (and indeed ANet themselves) love trivia. Wiki hierarchy (ANY wiki, not just this one) seem to hate trivia and tend to nuke it from orbit. Excuse my butting in, I'm having one of my RC watch nostalgia days. --snograt 15:10, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

There are several common misunderstandings about trivia (small little bits of knowledge) vs trivial (unimportant aspects) vs Trivia (the section on our wiki's articles):

• This isn't Wikipedia; it doesn't really matter what their rules are about trivia.
• By popular consensus, the Trivia sections on our articles cover three types of things:
  • Deliberate non-canon homages: these are references intended by the developers to things in the real world (fiction or fact), e.g. Ian Sturmme is named after John Stumme.
  • Other non-canon connections: these are things that seem obviously connected to the real world, but without developer confirmation, e.g. Battle Isle Iced Tea and Long Island Ice Tea.
  • Historical aspects of the game are Trivia not Notes, e.g. the fact that acquiring a Dragon Festival hat required finale participation until ~2010 has nothing to do with how one obtains hats now.

As Snog says, some people love Trivia so much that they add trivial connections. Some hate it so much they want to delete anything non-canon unless it has dev confirmation. I try to find the balance between those, primarily by rephrasing speculation into the facts we can prove (e.g. there is a drink called Long Island Ice Tea) and let the reader decide for themselves the connection.

Similarly, I strongly believe that phrases like, "until the update of ____, you could do X, but now, you have to do Y" do not belong in the body of the article, but in some subsection. They aren't "Notes," because they do not relate to the current game and are irrelevant to people playing today. On the other hand, neither should they be removed from the article entirely, because they were (at one time) a key part of the game.

GuildWiki makes the distinction using {{historical}} (e.g.), so it's obvious that text that follows is no longer part of the game. GWW has long handled this by using the Trivia section.

I haven't been paying too much attention to edits over the last 6-8 weeks, so I cannot offer an opinion about them. Before that, I think YK has been only slightly too aggressive in removing trivial Trivia (or notes), i.e. on the whole, I think YK has done a good job of removing the irrelevant, the misplaced, or the redundant (with just a few relevant items that needed to be restored). – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 16:05, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for answering, your time and patience plus all the explaining. Your messages help me understand a lot. Yoshida Keiji talk 16:55, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

YW. And thank you for taking all the time to update the missions/quests etc (especially trying to make the walkthroughs more consistent with each other). – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 19:23, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

mission infobox

Are you any good with inbox editing? I want to make some additions to the mission inbox, but how I want I cannot figure out. Infobox coding confuses me too much. What I'm wanting is two add 5 picture slots to the bottom, two being #ifexist tags like the default top image, one for loading screen (on top) and the other for storybook page. The second thing I want to add is a line for which storybook the mission counts to (and which page). Since all missions sans challenge missions give to a book, and all missions sans 4 have unique loading screens, I figured putting this stuff in the infobox would be easiest. However, for the images, I couldn't get it automated in my past attempts. Konig/talk 06:20, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I am less bad at infobox editing than some, but worse than others. I do agree that the infobox is the smarter place to put this stuff.

I will take a look at this and see if I can help. (Unfortunately, I'm about to leave on a trip and might not be able to give it the proper attention; if it's not done by the time I get back, I should be able to make it work.)

The easiest way to do this is to manually include a parameter for each of the five images, use the PAGENAME as a default base (and allow the parm to override it when there's no match), and use if→then logic to suppress certain images altogether depending on the missions type.

A sneakier way is to do something what Tub did for {{location disambiguation 2}}, which calls DPL to look for the existence of files with certain names. That's only possible for location because each of those articles can be assumed (by their infoboxes) to be in certain categories (e.g. Landmarks are always in Cat:Landmarks). Since that's largely untrue for images (they are all just cat:screenshots), I think it's probably better to go with the less magic, manual solution.

Adding parms for the page number and the storybook wouldn't be difficult.

One thing you didn't mention is where the maps fit in (I tend to think they should appear earlier rather than later, so they display without scrolling).

Finally, regardless of who does the coding, we'll want to do a good bit of sandboxing, as we did with LocaDis 2, given the number of articles affected by the infobox (making a list of test cases along the way — it always turns out to be more complicated than one thought). tl;dr it's worth doing, but it's going to take effort and time (in fact, editing the infobox might be the easiest part). – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 06:41, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Map images would remain as is, hence why I didn't comment. I'm not really good with infoboxes so I tend to avoid messing with them, but another thing I think needs fixing is some of the auto-categorization for the location infobox - for instance, it will put a single page into 3 or so categories, the campaign location type, the region location type, the region, and then "all" of the location type. Gets overly complexe making Category:Locations way too chaotic. I'm mentioning it cuz it sounds like it might mess with the disambig to clean it up, but I'm not sure.Konig/talk 07:16, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Categories are only important as a means to an end — they usually aren't a sufficient end in and of themselves, but let's tackle whether there's even an issue there (and, if so, how best to resolve it) separately.

So I think I have everything I would need to create a sandbox updated template. It might be worth doing what we did with {{location disambiguation 2}}, i.e. create a second template and slowly replace the old one (that ensures that we cannot break existing functionality...and is roughly the same amount of effort in terms of per-page typing). – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 07:29, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't think the changes would be that great to need a new template but...*shrug* Konig/talk 08:04, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

I saw this, and I created a copy of the template that works - but per Guild_Wars_Wiki_talk:Formatting/Missions/Archive_1#Storybook_page_info I don't think we should have this stuff there :/ Chieftain Alex 08:14, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Just looked at that edit again, it was labelling which storybook page number it was - not the image at all. Chieftain Alex 08:18, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

(Reset indent) I also want to denote the storybook and page number alongside the page image, but I'd have to disagree with the conclusion there because:

1. I've never seen the infobox as a place for "important" information (fuck, I don't see how neighboring regions are at all important). I've seen it as a place for short and concise information, and having a basic Storybook = The Flameseeker Prophecies (15) is a hell of a lot simpler than some of the things on certain infoboxes.
2. The reward box would work... if it didn't seem outright weird to place there considering the difference in the topics of said reward (it becomes hard to denote both which storybook and which page number when it's in columns of experience/money/faction vs NM/HM and it looks weird going from numbers to text). Notes doesn't work because it's all the way at the bottom and doesn't really include useful information like a storybook.
3. I would also like to argue that it is important to a degree, as every mission sans challenge missions (and elites) have a storybook, and similarly a lot of people, I would assume, work to complete said storybooks for faction or money.
4. Everyone seems to agree that it should be on the pages, but never agreed with where. The infobox seems like the simplest outcome and even one person (TEF) who disagreed with placing it in the infobox now does agree with it in the infobox as the "the smarter place to put this stuff" (unless he, like you, overlooked the storybook and number bit). And all things considered... where else would they go that it would be seen and, just as importantly, be useful? Konig/talk 18:24, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Formatting Guidelines had been slightly updated

Check here everything was accepted except for videos: Guild_Wars_Wiki_talk:Formatting#3_Guideline_updates_at_once_to_uniform_style. This is due to The Great Northern Wall, which I am in the fixing process. Yoshida Keiji talk 04:02, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, I wouldn't call people "clueless" in the actual formatting updates, but that looks reasonable/sensible. Thanks for taking the time (and also for letting me know).

FYI I won't be around for a couple of weeks, starting at the weekend. I apologize in advance if I'm not able to respond to a question/request. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 04:10, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Tossing in my two cents: I see no issue with what I see. Except one thing on the video bit: "uncontested videos will be instantly removed" - I think you mean contested or perhaps non-consensus as uncontested means no issue is raised. Konig/talk 04:22, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah I meant non-consensus, thanks for the correction. Side note: I have extended video discussion here Guild_Wars_Wiki_talk:Formatting/Missions#more_debate_by_analising_an_example. Yoshida Keiji talk 04:50, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Newsletters and Guild of the Week

I'm creating the basic skeletons for articles regarding what I got off of the official site now, starting with newsletters - next will be Guild of the Week, then I'll try to figure out how best to put the manuals and other info up. When you get the time, perhaps you can prettify and expand the bare skeletons I'll be making. Konig/talk 05:37, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Sure. Can you link me to the relevant bit on your "finished" list? I'll take a look when I get back (or before, if I need a distraction). – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 05:45, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

The above as they go from red to blue. :P The content articles that'll be copied verbatim I can take care of when I have the time. I have to stop for the night considering the time (else I won't be able to wake up in the morning for work), but I should finish the Newsletters and Guild of the Week by the weekend. Assuming I don't decide to work on my fanon instead (very likely). Konig/talk 05:52, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Oks. I probably won't get to it until after BWE/3 (which I shall miss). – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 06:43, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Guild Wars Wiki:Formatting/Items

Another Guideline updated. Yoshida Keiji talk 15:36, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Ta da! (well done). Thank you. – Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 15:40, 12 July 2012 (UTC)