Regarding Tier Rating-Specific Categories

[The_Impress]

...are we still doing infoboxes?

And yeah what Bob mentions is a thing on the wiki BUT, I think it stops working for pages with multiple tier descriptions

 

[Damage3245]

...are we still doing infoboxes?

At some point, yeah.

 

[Agnaa]

And yeah what Bob mentions is a thing on the wiki BUT, I think it stops working for pages with multiple tier descriptions

I'm not sure about this, I would like to see some testing done, since implementing it with the infobox template seems like the best way to go, imo.

 

[Antvasima]

Well, given our likely around 25,000 character profile pages, doing this over time would mean a lot of extra edits for me to monitor/patrol every day for a very prolonged time period, which is even worse than the alternative, which is to only allow experienced members to volunteer to help out, temporarily turn them into Bot accounts, and forbid them from doing any other tasks until after they are done with their assigned part of the work.

Also, if we drag out this project over a few years, the wiki would look very messy in terms of organisation for a very long time, which is unacceptable. It would be better to have it done quickly.

However, even after we would be done with the project itself, this would give me ongoing extra work, given how very frequently I already have to inform our members to update the tier categories during statistics changes, and after this they would have to do so even for every single minor tier update, and most of them would not know or remember this according to my experience.

Also, as mentioned earlier, the sheer required workload for this is much better spent on other projects with much greater necessity and/or payoff, including the infobox-adding project, and given how hard it has been to finish even smaller projects recently, it is very uncertain if we will even get remotely sufficient volunteers for even the infobox project.

Muddling up and prolonging the infobox project with extra work instructions also seems like a bad idea. We should handle one thing at a time.

Anyway, I have added this suggestion to the to-do list. Please be satisfied with that solution, so we can end this discussion.

 

[Agnaa]

I'm not sure if you're (partially) responding to my post or not, but from what I understand, infoboxes can be set up, on a template level, to automatically add certain categories when certain information (such as tier) is added to them. The only extra work this would add is some experimentation to get that working correctly; it shouldn't change anything about the actual addition of infoboxes to pages. And would actually solve the issue of needing to ask people to update tier categories when revising characters.

 

[Antvasima]

The infoboxes need quite a lot of information continuously moved to them from the main pages. I do not think that a MassEdit program can easily handle it, especially for 25,000 pages.

 

[Tllmbrg]

Well, given our likely around 25,000 character profile pages, doing this over time would mean a lot of extra edits for me to monitor/patrol every day for a very prolonged time period, which is even worse than the alternative, which is to only allow experienced members to volunteer to help out, temporarily turn them into Bot accounts, and forbid them from doing any other tasks until after they are done with their assigned part of the work.

Ant can you please stop acting like you're the only one doing stuff here?
You're making it sound like this's some uber complex edit that'd require you to look at every edit manually by yourself when neither are true
Again this can be like the citation revision where it's a gradual thing because this revision is really bloody easy to apply considering all pages have the tier listed on the page and it takes like 2 clicks to add a category so

 

[Agnaa]

I'm a lil bit confused now since no-one suggested using a massedit program to implement the infoboxes.

 

[Damage3245]

Technically speaking the blank infobox template could be added to every single page (or just to a group of pages) using MassEdit + a bot. And from there you would have to manually move the information from the rest of the page into the infobox itself.

But that might not be the best way to implement it, and would require discussion elsewhere.

I think that the original topic for this thread has been concluded and should be over.

If there's any discussions about implementation of infoboxes, I'd be happy to hold them elsewhere since I want to get involved in deciding the best approach for that.

 

[Antvasima]

Ant can you please stop acting like you're the only one doing stuff here?
You're making it sound like this's some uber complex edit that'd require you to look at every edit manually by yourself when neither are true
Again this can be like the citation revision where it's a gradual thing because this revision is really bloody easy to apply considering all pages have the tier listed on the page and it takes like 2 clicks to add a category so

I am obviously not the only one doing work, but I am legitimately the one who individually does the most necessary work, and I do not want to drastically increase my workload even further for prolonged periods of time, as I am already near the upper limits of what I can handle.

I'm a lil bit confused now since no-one suggested using a massedit program to implement the infoboxes.

Okay. My mistake then.

 

[Antvasima]

Technically speaking the blank infobox template could be added to every single page (or just to a group of pages) using MassEdit + a bot. And from there you would have to manually move the information from the rest of the page into the infobox itself.

But that might not be the best way to implement it, and would require discussion elsewhere.

I think that the original topic for this thread has been concluded and should be over.

If there's any discussions about implementation of infoboxes, I'd be happy to hold them elsewhere since I want to get involved in deciding the best approach for that.

I also think that we should close this thread, keep this suggestion on the to-do list, and focus on the infobox project when other important tasks have been properly handled, and we get sufficient free time.

 

[Damage3245]

Then I'll close this for now.

 

[Amelia_Lonelyheart]

I can set up a way with AutoWikiBrowser to do this in at most a week. I can use it to replace instances of tiers with a template that auto-generates appropriate categories, or do a more roundabout way and add a category to pages to pages with that tier. This would not affect policy pages or blogs or anything, it would only affect character, civ, and weapon pages.

Really there's no reason not to do this. I can even make it where they're categorized as both Tier 9 and Tier 9-C for example.

 

[The_Impress]

By this, the process can completely be done by bots, making the process automated and by proxy more accurate. The setup is minimal as well, only requiring some templates, each with only a few lines of codes, hell me and Amelia can whip this prep up today alone.

 

[Tllmbrg]

Yah there’s no reason not to do it if it’s that simple
Not like those other projects that delayed this are going anywhere

 

[Antvasima]

Well, if you are serious about handling this massive project on your own via the AutoWikiBrowser script, suppose that I could technically give both of you content moderator rights until this project is completely finished, so you do not bloat the recent changes page that I use during my daily edit-patrolling. I could also ask Lucas DeRuyter to give your wiki accounts Bot rights as well, so your edits do not show up in the regular recent changes page either. That is probably a better option. However, it isn't at all easy to shoulder this type of task.

We would also need a plan for how we should reorganise our wiki navigation bar link list to accommodate switching to a much greater number of tier categories.

Also, the people involved in applying this project would obviously be strictly forbidden from performing any unrelated controversial edits while it is going on, as I wouldn't be able to notice, patrol, and, if necessary, correct them.

 

[Antvasima]

@AKM sama @Promestein @DontTalkDT

What do you think about this suggestion? Is it a good idea or not?

 

[Antvasima]

We would also need a plan for how we should reorganise our wiki navigation bar link list to accommodate switching to a much greater number of tier categories.

This is what I am referring to. Is it currently possible to add an extra level of folders that would be able to include all of the tier categories?

 

[Promestein]

If Amelia knows a way to automate it with AWB competently then go ahead.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. Thank you for the reply.

Also, it seems like Fandom has implemented a useful new feature that solves our problem:

 

[DontTalkDT]

I have been in favour of having a bot do this for years, so I'm obviously fine with the suggestion.
And if we're at it we might as well add the speed tiers I had been talking about as well.

Just first do some testing on the categories with the AWB to make sure things are working correctly. Thet 6-B doesn't match Low 6-B and High 6-B etc. But I think that goes without saying.

 

[Antvasima]

Yes, it is extremely important that almost no mistakes are made.

 

[Antvasima]

I think that it would turn extremely hard to get our members to constantly update speed tier categories though, which would cause me enormous amounts of extra edit-patrolling cleanup work, and I do not find them necessary in the first place, as our fight discussions are speed equalised. So I strongly object to adding them. My apologies.

 

[Eficiente]

Well, we could only allow this on new profiles being made and otherwise only let staff to add this to already existing profiles, that would be more calm.

 

[Antvasima]

I am not going to accept speed tier categories being added to all our profile pages and drastically constantly increase my already extreme daily workload. My apologies.

The new tier categories are fine if they are applied properly though.

 

[Bobsican]

Wasn't it agreed that the infobox template project would be done first so that while we're at it the categories from specific tiers are automatically added while we're on that?

 

[Antvasima]

I currently honestly strongly doubt that the infobox-adding project is realistic and useful for us to apply. It would have to be done to over 29,000 pages, cannot be automatised, and virtually all of them would look much worse afterwards, given that the current image sizes would be compressed far beyond what would look good on the pages.

We might get higher Google search prioritisation, and as such considerably more visitors, but I can barely keep with the current wiki edit patrolling work as it is, so if the amount of daily edits drastically increase, that would also be a major problem. In addition, as I mentioned above, the wiki pages would not look good to our visitors as a consequence, and we have up to 827,000 individual visitors per 30 days already.

 

[Bobsican]

Thing is that a very common complaint about the wiki is that it's very unfriendly to smartphone users, and infoboxes would fix that, as a highly respected wiki it's a relevant matter to preserve good profesionalism and reputation, especially when a good portion of the userbase does navigate across the site with smartphones.

A significant increase on visitors would also mean a far higher increase on readers of the wiki forum, which in turn means more ad revenue, which ensures the economical aspect of this place is even safer. It may be a tough thing to do and all, but it'd really benefit the site long-term.

 

[Antvasima]

Well, again, the main problem is that it isn't realistic to find equally good new types of images for 29,000 pages, and we have other unfinished important projects that we need to get done anyway.

However, this discussion thread should focus on Impress' and Amelia's tier category project.

 

[The_Impress]

Thing is that a very common complaint about the wiki is that it's very unfriendly to smartphone users, and infoboxes would fix that.

I am a smartphone user and use the wiki extensively. It doesn't help one bit.

Wiki has FAR MORE prominent problems than just "infoboxes", and has issues with how galleries as a whole work, and that the mobile editing mode is completely scuffed.

These were honestly suggested because FANDOM can't do tabbers, period, on their mobile service, and that'll require us to more prominently remove every tabber on the wiki, which ain't happening anytime soon.

 

[Antvasima]

Impress makes sense to me as usual.

 

[Scottycj256]

finally someone suggests doing this

i agree with doing tier-specific categories

 

[The_Impress]

Anyways we'll showcase the drafts for our bot proposal ASAP, in sandboxes. It may require us making some templates to showcase as an example, however.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. However, you will have to wait with initiating the project until after I have given you content moderator rights, and Lucas has hopefully given you Bot rights.

 

[The_Impress]

Yeah and we don't necessarily require them to showcase our proposals' demo currently, iirc.

So working on them :v

 

[Antvasima]

It is probably best to remove the old tier categories in conjunction with applying the new ones btw. For example, removing the "Tier 9" category from a page at the same time that you add "Tier 9-B".

 

[Bobsican]

That raises the concern of what will it be of the featured tiering categories.
Will they just become a category that hosts the respective subtier categories? As it seems rather counterproductive to remove their contents without having plans for that section, dead links and all.
For example, Tier 9-B having as it's subcategory "Tier 9".

 

[The_Impress]

It is probably best to remove the old tier categories in conjunction with applying the new ones btw. For example, removing the "Tier 9" category from a page at the same time that you add "Tier 9-B".

I thought the notion was agreed to be, we include both of them, since they're important in their own ways :V

Anyways, Amelia made a rough draft of how this template will look, as you note, the only change would be replacing '''9-B''' like we currently do by bolding, with {{9-B}}, applying the template containing the bolded text, along with the tier and rating categories.

It's just an easy substitution, done within the Weapons, Civilization, Characters and Vehicles category for complete precision.

 

[Antvasima]

I do not think that there seems to be a point in keeping both the old and new tier categories. It would also require far more long-term work to ensure that both, for example, "Tier 9" and "Tier 9-B" categories are always added to the relevant pages.

What do you mean with "template"? I did not think that this is what we have been discussing here.

I also do not notice what you wish to illustrate with your linked example.

 

[Tllmbrg]

Thing is that a very common complaint about the wiki is that it's very unfriendly to smartphone users, and infoboxes would fix that, as a highly respected wiki it's a relevant matter to preserve good profesionalism and reputation, especially when a good portion of the userbase does navigate across the site with smartphones.

I feel like making the interface not horrible to edit in would be a higher priority