User talk:Spider

From Toadwater Guide

Kudos on fixing up the tree articles! I had not been putting much effort into them because those articles were not viewed much (of course they might not have been viewed much because they were not useful). I also was not sure if tree pictures would be considered spoilers like statue pictures are.

When you get a moment, take a look at internal link (the UPDATE part) -- I have been trying to keep only the first letter of the first word of most things including trees capitalized.

Keep up the great work with the trees, categories, etc! Clatra 10:39, 10 Aug 2006 (UTC)

In pretty much everything else I agree that only the first letter should be capitalised, as per Wiki standards. However the tree names are all proper nouns, and so should be capitalised :)

The trees still need an awful lot more work for those pages to be useful, but the important thing which has resulted in me doing them is that I now have a good understanding of templates, and so will create a few more for useful things such as crop items, birds, well pretty much anything in game that has an image actually... Spider 14:50, 10 Aug 2006 (UTC)

Although tree names are proper names, I have seen them in other sources both capitalized and not (as near as I can tell I think when referring to the idea of a tree, Balsam Fir is preferred while an actual tree would be balsam fir). While I was trying to standardize things in Toadwiki, I kept running across articles that referred to balsam firs, ponderosa pines, etc so I figured the fewer exceptions to the "only capitalize the first letter of the first word," the better. Keep in mind this is only for titles of articles -- wiki editors should feel free to use whatever capitalization scheme they please. Also, I am lazy so the fewer times I need to hit the shift key, the better. :P Clatra 17:21, 10 Aug 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, after thinking about it, I decided you were right and I fixed up all of the newer entries. I will go through the individual tree pages at some point in the future and remove the capitals from the links, although there are redirects in place so it doesn't matter all that much. Spider 20:09, 10 Aug 2006 (UTC)

Cherry_Belle should be deleted since cherry belle radish already exists. How can the Cherry_Belle link be removed from Category:Farming? Clatra 15:43, 28 Aug 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking... There are no pages linking to Cherry Belle, so you can just delete it. Am I missing something here? Spider 12:22, 29 Aug 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I just realised what you were on about :)

The category links are generated automatically, so the link to Cherry Belle was removed when you removed the category bit from the Cherry Belle article. I have deleted the article now. Spider 12:27, 29 Aug 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Spelling? 2 Centralization (centralisation) 3 Formulas 4 Will/Should

Spelling?

I think it is Wookiee.

I looked it up and you're quite right. I have a friend whose nickname is wookie, and I guess thats just how I've always spelt it. Correction made, and many thanks :) Spider 17:31, 10 Mar 2007 (CST)

Centralization (centralisation)

You Brits and your spelling! Anyway regarding the subject, I am not sure I see the value in centralizing articles, particularly articles about quest items since a list of all quest items could spoil the surprise for some people. Also I am beginning to question the value of categories but I will withhold my judgement to see what you do with them. :) --Clatra 08:33, 17 Jan 2008 (CST)

The value is that an article which contains one sentence and no particularly useful information is not a good thing. Whereas an article which contains lots of useful information is very good. As for a list of quest items spoiling anything... you could equally argue that having the articles in the wiki in the first place could spoil quests. Listing the names of quest related items does not constitute a spoiler in my opinion since it gives no information on finding/using them. However listing all of the items is useful because it lets a player know "oh, that's for a quest, great".

I'd like to hear your reservations about categories. If there is some issue with them, I'd rather you say it now instead of after hours more work is put into them. --Spider 13:00, 17 Jan 2008 (CST)

I like having an article for each item in the game (except for things like high, medium, and low grade sliver) then having every item in the index. The main reason for this is searching Toadwiki is wonky when you are logged into Toadwiki -- if you are not logged out it seems to work fine (but I do not want to discourage folks from logging in). To see what I mean about the wonkiness, search for "rami" while logged in and while logged out. The "Go" button under the search box works fine logged in/out if an article exists with the term you typed in the box.

As for categories, I just think the index combined with appropriately-wikified articles allows new players (Toadwiki's target audience) to find what they are looking for quickly. Take the example of someone wanting to find out how to work on their textile skill. Now this is debatable but I think the primary route this person would take would be Main Page>T(index)>Textile not Main Page>Skills>Textile. Then looking at the textile article there is a brief intro to the textile skill and bullets indicating the four ways to increase textile. Following any of the four ways leads the player to appropriately-wikified articles that brings him to info quickly.

Now if there was not a brief intro (or a poor one) in the textile article/category and this same person saw the 16 articles in category "Textile" at the bottom of the article, he would not be able to get to the info he wanted as quickly. He would be doing more clicking both on links and the "back" arrow as he waded through all related articles to try to find pertinent info.

In summary, categorization can be a useful way to organize but I do not think it is useful in helping new players find info. An updated index and appropriately-wikified articles (which Toadwiki has, for the most part) are more useful for that. And old players are used to using the index to find the details they need -- the folks who post things like "I looked in the wiki and could not find..." did not look very hard and, frankly, I am not sure categories could help them anyway if they are not willing to spend more than 15 seconds looking. --Clatra 14:26, 18 Jan 2008 (CST)

I see no problems with the search function. I searched for rami as you suggested both logged in and out, and got exactly the same results. If you're experiencing problems with the search function when you are logged in there may be some account setting you changed or something, but MediaWiki is a piece of tried and tested software, and the search function is not broken! (have you tried creating a dummy account to test this problem?).

One article per item would be fine if each of those articles were full and informative, and clearly gave you information about related pages (be they other items or skills or whatever). At the moment that just isn't the case, and I don't think it ever will be, simply because there just isn't that much you can write about certain things. Whereas if you are searching for an item such a "Hemp Stalks", what is more useful, finding an article which says "Hemp Stalks can be found in Hemp Crops" and nothing else, or finding the article about Hemp in general, which details not only the crop, but the Industrial Hemp process which follows and tells you exactly what the purpose of Hemp Stalks is and how they fit into the game as a whole. I know I would rather have a single broad article which gives a clear picture of where each aspect of the game fits.

As for your comment about the categories leading to random searching for information and more clicks etc. Well first of all if someone knows what they want in the first place they shouldn't have this problem. On the other hand if they only have a vague idea where to start and are planning on browsing for the right information, the index won't help at all, and whilst yes, a well written article should lead them in the right direction, if you couple that with categories navigation becomes much easier. I'm not for a moment suggesting that because of categories we can be lazy in writing articles. Categories should complement the other aspects of the wiki! In case you hadn't noticed, those articles which I converted into categories have changed the content very little. Category:Textile still tells you all the informtation the Textile did before it was changed.

I'll grant you that the example of quest items was a bad one, because yes, that may lead to spoilers. But there are a great many other pages which could be combined allowing easier access to information and a generally better idea of how TW works as a whole. For example, if you have the three pages "Radishes" "Hemp" and "Strawberries", then a player searched and finds each of them individually, and may well get all the info they came for. However if instead all three of those are combined into one article, "Crops", then the player will not only find all the info they came for, but also realise that there are other crops in the game and that Radishes are just the starting point in the farming skill. --Spider 18:51, 18 Jan 2008 (CST)

Formulas

Make formulas with your fancy new math abilities :P Mattsiegman 16:34, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Will/Should

Hey.

I feel like I'm not reading the part of the article that you're trying to suggest I revert back... or I'm completely misreading the message you sent me. Hoping you can shed some light on this. --Zylvyn 02:41, 11 November 2011 (CET)