Talk: Vanilla WoW Wiki

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-Eth3r (talk) 02:06, July 4, 2013 (UTC)

Link Pages

So if I go to the warrior page and click night elf if gives a completely different description then the Night Elf link from the main menu. So my questions is how do you link pages??
-Stallion_air21 (talk) 11:33, March 25, 2015 (UTC)

I looked into this. It appears there are two different night elf pages: Night elf and Night Elf (note the capital "e"). The information from one page needs to be cross-referenced with the other and converted to a re-direct. I can do this myself when I have time, if someone doesn't beat me to it first. In case you're interested yourself, here is some info on Redirects. :)

-Sitb (talk) 22:11, March 25, 2015 (UTC)

Awesome thanks for the info, I saw even the tauren pages are different, well gives me something to do at work

When I first created the wiki, there was actually like 4 pages for night elves, Night Elf, Night elf, Night elf (playable), and Night Elf (Playable). I've been working on making every racial page the same as their actual name without any stupid parenthetical, which is why there's multiple Night Elf pages. Night Elf is the appropriate page, and I just never finished using the other page resources, which is why I didn't delete them. At some point, Night elf (playable) should disappear, and Night Elf should be the only remaining page. And this is because of the template system I created for races and classes to disambiguate sections of those topics. -Emhilradim (talk) 23:13, April 11, 2015 (UTC)

And I see now that I never actually got around to making the template system for the races yet... Woops. -Emhilradim (talk) 23:15, April 11, 2015 (UTC)

Alright, I put in the race template system. I'm probably going to expand it with another 4 links, just like classes, for a total of 8 tabs. I've already got an idea for 3 of the tab names, just need a 4th. In the end, I'd like to merge the contents of all the Race and Race (Playable) pages together, and then put in disambiguation pages for offchutes of races (i.e. the player races are the focus, and then if someone wants to read about say Zandalari trolls, they can go to a Troll disambiguation page). It's been a bit of a pain in the ass to get the race_info page working quite right, but I'm glad that it finally does. Probably way better solutions than I went through, but I don't want to rewrite the templates again, I feel the more times you rewrite a template, the more chances you promote for a critical failure of its functionality. Edit: And once again, I forgot to sign. -Emhilradim (talk) 01:10, April 12, 2015 (UTC)

Don't mean to spam this particular subject, but I've given an example of what I mean in the human subpages. I took all the info off of the Human (Playable) page and laid it across the various Human tabs. This is the ultimate goal for the player races to start with, and then later on, I'd actually be interested in doing something similar for NPC races. Unfortunately there's so many NPC races that the solution to that particular problem is still only an idea. Perhaps different templates for each NPC race phenotype? I don't even know. Anyway, this is why there are still different race pages on the wiki, is because there's info left to be stripped still. -Emhilradim (talk) 01:28, April 12, 2015 (UTC)

In order for the wiki to grow I think we need to focus on trying to provide the info that people are looking for. I think people want profession leveling guides, talent specs, pve guides, pvp guides, instance attunement guides, dungeon tactics and the original vanilla zone and instance maps. The kind of vanilla info that isn't readily available anymore on the internet with all the revamps that happened during the expansions. They are all scribbled around on various vanilla server forums, and I feel would be a great asset of the wiki to collect this info. That's why I think the c-top template looks very good since the class pages are also the most visited pages, allthough I think on the c-top there are some unnecessary tabs (for example you should merge talents and builds), it looks great. 

I'm sorry about changing the r-top template  yesterday, I really wasn't aware that those race tabs were only added 2 days ago. I thought it was like that for years and since there wasn't really much info under those tabs I figured it was better to remove them. Either way I'm personally not a big fan of the way r-top looks right now with those tabs. It only makes navigating harder. I don't see the point in chopping up the race info into little bits into the various tabs besides wanting to waste your valuable time. I'm also unsure what info is supposed to end up in the tab quests (list all the quests?) , abilities (mentioning the racials?) and homelands (just saying where the starting zone is?).

Yesterday I added all the missing pictures to those race pages, I thought that had bigger priority than chopping up info that is just a copy paste of wowwiki (with some adjustments ofcourse: removing classes, notable figures and other stuff from later expansions). If people are looking for that info I don't think they would look for it here. 

So bottom line is that I think that most people that visit this wiki are playing on a vanilla server, and that all that general lore info about the race is not very relevant to them... That's why I also don't think it is a good idea to merge the race page with the race (playable) page. I would even suggest to make all the race pages on the main page link to the respective (playable) page. People mainly want to see the starting attributes and racial traits. 

I'd like to have opinions about this. 

 -JorimKronos (talk) 09:59, April 14, 2015 (UTC)

The reason for the merging of all those resources is to place the unimportant info into tabs so that if someone types in the wiki's address, they can just type vanilla-wow.wikia.com/wiki/Human instead of Human_(Playable) or click a link for Human Playable. The idea is to make all the information easy to find. The tabs themselves are a little arbitrary, yes, but it makes the pages smaller and thus more manageable both for editors and readers. If someone cares about the lore, they can read that on a different page. But when you go to the human page, it should be information explicitly about humans as characters.

Not all information is going to disappear from the main page, I still want that info on the pages, but I want the information to be more neat and tidy which is why I split up topics like racial leaders. If you want racial leaders, then yes, there'll be a page for that. But you don't need that on the main page. And history is not as important, which is why it goes on a tab. The idea is to make it navigable like a dossier or an app, so that the most pertinent information is readily available, and extraneous information is just a click away. That's why I am doing away with (playable) pages. Eventually I intend to do something similar with professions, putting up tabs for recipes, trainers, etc. It makes the information easier to find than having to look for arbitrary links in the middle of page text.

Sometimes if you're lucky you see something like {{main|Tailoring#Trainers}}, but usually you have to try and go looking through old resources on the internet.-Emhilradim (talk) 10:37, April 14, 2015 (UTC)

Working around ads

Wikia's placement of ads on the right-side of the main page (and and being unable to modify them) is causing ads to create a large, unused gray area at the very top of our main page. Are you opposed to converting the wide-style Classheader and Raceheader into more compact ones, which could sit flush against the left-side of the ads? It could help fill the space more efficiently. Another option could be to fill the blank space with an image, logo, small gallery, etc.

What are your thoughts?
-Sitb (talk) 20:47, April 13, 2015 (UTC)

Compacting them would be alright, I suppose, at the time I created them I was just looking for a much nicer way to navigate to player-based pages. Initially to get to races you had to go to main page, click on players, click on player races, and then click on the race you wanted. Ridiculous amount of page loading to get where you want to go. So there was no specific aesthetic in mind, so much as efficiency in mind. It's not set in stone and is mutable, the only thing I was concerned about was just how crappy the old navigation interface was. So if you want to try something new, have a go, and if it's not desirable we can always roll it back and try again. -Emhilradim (talk) 22:45, April 13, 2015 (UTC)

Just did an edit, decreased the size of both templates by 50%, turned them into spans, reduced the size of icons. Let me know if this works for ya. -Emhilradim (talk) 09:19, April 14, 2015 (UTC)

To be honest, I actually did like the wide-style race and class headers, it is just unfortunate that they can't be put right at the top of the page due to the Ad placement. If you are able to get that zone-slider to work, it could potentially fit nicely to the left of the Ad instead, and you could keep the headers wide-style as they were previously. The old format worked a bit cleaner, as the ad was squeezed off to the right of the slider, if I remember correctly. Currently, even with the headers shrunken, there's still a lot of unused (gray) space right at the top of the page. I will try to play around with it if I have time within the next few days and see how I can get it to look.

-Sitb (talk) 10:40, April 14, 2015 (UTC)

Feel free to roll back the templates if you liked their look better before, I wasn't sure how to accommodate the whole thing, so I just went with an idea. I apologise that it wasn't the right one. I figure I'll mention, on my browser, I don't even see the ad box. -Emhilradim (talk) 11:39, April 14, 2015 (UTC)

The ads on the main page display for me in both Chrome and Firefox. However, Internet Explorer (the version I have, at least), appears incapable of properly displaying various elements of the main page, including the ads. Not that I really ever use that browser myself anyway.

-Sitb (talk) 14:28, April 14, 2015 (UTC)