Talk: Village pump

Revision as of 10:21, 25 January 2009

Template:WoWWiki:Village pump/Intro

Spellpower changes to existing items?

Is there a way that all items with +heal or +dam can be updated with their spellpower, or should we do so manually?

In the past we had separate healing item pages (such as BC healing equipment (cloth) but what should the plan be to integrate those with their DPS equivalent?

-- Bregdark (talk) 20:20, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Manually. See Category:Pages which may need their tooltip template updated. --Pcj (T•C) 20:23, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I honestly think we should just run a bot or two over the tooltip list and have it search for the string "Increases [...] spell damage..." and straight up replace it. Don't know what to do about the pure healing items, if those are still in the game. --Sky (t · c · w) 21:33, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

It's "Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to..." and "Increases healing done by up to [...] and damage done by up to [...] for all magical spells and effects." g0urra[T҂C] 21:41, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Spell haste, spell crit, healing, spell damage, paladin gear, any gear with random enchantment including spell damage or healing or spell haste or spell crit. --Pcj (T•C) 23:17, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

"Increases damage and healing..." is an easy change for a bot. So are spell hit/crit/haste. "Increases healing..." I think would have to be done manually, since there's no simple conversion formula and we'll have to cross reference each individual item with Armory data to get the new spell power numbers. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 00:20, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

User Name Question...

How come my user name has been changed from Biron to WoWWiki-Biron. I have been over seas for alomost the past year and do not under stand this. Please leave a message in my talk. -- <Imagelink>Biron Sig.PNG|User:WoWWiki-Biron</imagelink> ^{T•C) 01:15, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Is there any way to change my username would rather have something else then this silly one <Imagelink>Biron Sig.PNG|User:WoWWiki-Biron</imagelink> ^{T•C) 01:40, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Take a look at our upgrades page and the instructions therein. We merged user databases with Wikia earlier in the year and there was already a Biron, apparently. If you own the Biron on Wikia proper, you can request a merge of the two accounts and you'll get Biron back. Otherwise, you can request a name change and one of the techs can accomodate that for you as well. You'll keep all of your contributions either way. Sorry for the inconvenience. --k_d³ 02:27, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Can anyone make bot to add ood tag to all class pages

Someone already did this to all the class builds pages but most of other class pages need the tag as well. XD

-- WakemanCK (talk) 05:01, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

No they don't. Easier to add a site notice or to update it otherwise. I'll just call it a really bad case of Templatecreep. --Sky (t · c · w) 05:53, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Haunted Memento doing strange things in Item template

Code: {{item|icon=|Haunted Memento}}

Output: [}]

Why? -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:54 PM PST 27 Oct 2008

Nevermind: |arg={{{arg|}}}} --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:59 PM PST 27 Oct 2008

Theorycraft link blocked

Lhivera was a leading image in both the official Mage forums and EJ boards. He created a very versatile tool for mage dps measuring called the Theorycraft-o-Matic. He has, however, has stopped playing the game and will stop updating the original version at: [1] ([2] corroborates this claim, also note the link is not blocked)
The following link leads to Zaldinar's continuation of Lhivera's Theorycraft-o-Matic: http://zaldinar.bounceme.net/tcom/ . ([3] corroborates this claim)
The TCOM is a valuable mage theorycraft tool and the spam filter is blocking me from posting it onto the Mage theorycraft article. Can anyone with the power to do so help me with this and unblock Zaldinar's link? Adesworth ^{talk to me} 01:26, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't have any special rights, and I can edit Mage theorycraft. However there are some pages you need to be a user for a week before it will let you post - maybe this is one of them. -Howbizr (talk) 12:22, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Should work now. --Pcj (T•C) 12:30, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

It does. Thanks! Adesworth ^{talk to me} 15:53, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

To Namespace Or Not

I'm adding a namespace to all of the individual achievement pages (probably not to the old achievement pages). Please let me know if I should NOT do this. The reasoning is because there are enough name collisions it seems worthwhile. -Howbizr (talk) 12:29, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Don't do it. --Pcj (T•C) 12:31, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

So conflicts should be Name (Achievement) then by design? -Howbizr (talk) 13:41, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Name (achievement) actually. --Pcj (T•C) 13:46, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Let it be so! -Howbizr (talk) 14:50, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Ha, the discussions we've had about new namespaces... Kirkburn talk contr 14:21, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Steps to take before creating a new article for a new Wrath class ability?

As I have access to the Wrath beta, I've been looking for articles of Hunter class abilities that have been added. I've spent some time with the ability boilerplate, but before I create the article, I want to know if there's anything special I need to do to my article to ensure that it's proper, especially given that it's based off of Beta information, which can (and sometimes is) be very frequently changed. -- Rilgon (talk) 15:28, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

As long as it matches the style of the boilerplate, it should be fine. --Pcj (T•C) 15:34, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

So there isn't an additional template or the like that I need to add to it to denote that it contains Wrath-related/Beta-related content? --Rilgon (talk) 16:04, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Only thing you should really add is {{NYI}}, other than that, nope nothing special.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 16:23, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you both very much, and the new article is complete. :) --Rilgon (talk) 16:36, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

I would add a "Patch changes" section with a note that the content was added in Wrath of the Lich King beta. If the ability doesn't chnage after release, then just remove the "beta". --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 3:29 PM PST 30 Oct 2008

Can't preview or save edits in FireFox 3.0.3

Every time I try to preview or save an edit, I get the following error:

Connection Interrupted

----

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

----

The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.

Works fine in IE7 (which is how I wrote this). Anyone have any ideas? It started happening a couple days ago and the Firefox Error Console shows nothing. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 3:27 PM PST 30 Oct 2008

Been getting this a LOT myself, too, on Firefox 3.0.1. At first I thought it was my code being bad, because the first time I got it, I was working on my sandbox trying to finish off a page for one of the new pet abilities, but then I got it without my code, so I figured it was something server-side. At least the caching on WoWWiki is good enough such that I can hit back and save my work! User:Rilgon/Sig 22:33, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

This is happening to me as well, even when all I'm trying to do is click is view a page through a link (from search and recent changes, at least). 3.0.3 here, for reference. --Flyspeck (talk) 01:31, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

As expected Firefox 3.0.3 Mac is fine... could be Win version or something with my network at work. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 11:58 PM PST 30 Oct 2008

Safari 3.1.2 Mac appears to be fine as well. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 12:03 AM PST 31 Oct 2008

Firefox 3.0.3 works just fine on both my home and work PCs. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 09:02, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

From further investigation, the problem only happens on long pages. I'm trying to narrow down exactly how big. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 11:44 AM PST 31 Oct 2008

Nevermind, it isn't long pages. Strangely, I had a window where I could preview and save edits, but now it seems to have closed. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 11:48 AM PST 31 Oct 2008

I'll ask about this, see if I can find anything out. Kirkburn talk contr 14:14, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh well, it seems to have fixed itself. --

Fandyllic (talk ·contr) 5:53 PM PST 3 Nov 2008

Not quite, I got it earlier today when creating a page. Adesworth ^{talk to me} <imagelink>IconSmall Mage.gif|Special: Contributions/Adesworth</imagelink> 01:20, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

It's still doing it in Opera 10 Preview as of today... I have no idea why. It only OCCASIONALLY does it when clicking "Preview" or "Save page", but doesn't do it at ALL in Internet Explorer 7... It's pretty weird. ~ Doc Lithius [U|T|C] 07:31, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Seeking image

[Netherwind Presence] is in need of an image that I just know is being used for another spell(s) already, and isn't listed as having been introduced in any beta patch by WotlkWiki. The image I'm talking about is in [here], as the talent icon. Can anyone recognize it? Thanks in advance! Adesworth ^{talk to me} 02:22, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Never mind this. Thanks Gourra! Adesworth ^{talk to me} 02:49, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

High General Abbendis

So it's been revealed that the younger High General Abbendis is called Brigitte Abbendis, while the father's real name is unknown. Does someone oppose moving High General Abbendis (father) to High General Abbendis, since we now know her real name? g0urra[T҂C] 16:09, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

They are both High General's, so I'm not sure that's a good idea. Kirkburn talk contr 14:19, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

This article is about the named female High General. For her father whose name is unknown, see High General Abbendis.

Could use a rewording, but you get the point.

Ose ^talk/₃₇₂₁ 15:19, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Mounts: Items or Spells

I know before the big 3.0 patch, mounts were usually items, and they were actually in your inventory. But now all mounts have spell IDs, and only live in your inventory for a moment, before you learn to summon them. They're only usable as a spell, not really as the "reins" item, as they're often called. Shouldn't we start listing mount article as spells?

I entered a small handful of new mounts in this fashion, and they all got changed back to items, which I disagree with, but I'm not looking to start an editing war.

I was curious if anyone else had an opinion. I still find it kind of confusing when I'm looking up someone's mount spell, that I have to know what "reins" they used to learn the particular mount spell. -- Howbizr (talk) 19:33, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

I would think the item versions are preferred since thats how they are first discovered (same with the small pets), also cause items show on other pages using {{loot}} or {{item}} rather than visiting the mount's page.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 22:09, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

I could always make a {{spell}} template. -Howbizr (talk) 05:20, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

We had {{spelllink}} before, and I would strongly advise against it. Mounts that are learned are still items, you can check Wowhead or some other database if you're still unclear about the mount's properties... g0urra[T҂C] 05:22, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

It seems pretty clear to me... I won't argue that there isn't historically an item. But in the end, you have learned a new ability that is a spell. Summon Charger and Swift Brewfest Ram seem no different to me, in the 3.0 world. -Howbizr (talk) 17:41, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

The mounts are still items in any case...the spell names can redirect to the mount items. --Pcj (T•C) 17:53, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

[Summon Charger] is exclusively a spell.

[Swift Brewfest Ram] is an item that teaches you how to summon a mount. There's a difference right there. g0urra[T҂C] 17:53, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Guild page being recognised as spam site

Hullo, I am just a noobish editor taking care of our realm's page (EU Executus) and I was updating guild list lately. Unfortunately wiki does not allow me to save it, bacause of one of the links to one of the guilds. The URL is: www (dot) oprahwindfury (dot) tk. When you look at the page you'll surely find it as legitimate and c'mon it's one of the best progressing guilds on our relam :) I'd be greatful for any help.

Chris

-- Khanador (talk) 08:18, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

You mean http://www.oprahwindfury.tk ? I've added it to the whitelist. Kirkburn talk contr 14:06, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, thank you :) -- Khanador (talk) 08:18, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Blizzard official spotlights

Morning! I apologize for how little I've been around recently - been very busy and flying all over the place. But onto business...

As many of you know, Blizz has a community spotlight area on their main page. It draws a surprisingly large number of hits, despite it's location (which will hopefully be improved eventually). If there's anything on WoWWiki which you think would be good to highlight - or even anything from the general community which you think is cool - drop me a line at Special:EmailUser/Kirkburn and I'll pass it on.

Given the nature of WoWWiki, I know we're not prone to having specific things to point at, but if you see a really well written article, guide or whatever, just poke me :) I'll try and get Blizz to spread the word. Kirkburn talk contr 15:09, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Please Unban the following Turalyon EU Guild Addresses

http://guild-reflection.tk

http://www.thesplitters.tk

Thanks :3

-- DaytimeTEEVEE (talk) 01:30, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Done! Kirkburn talk contr 15:18, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Druid Builds Page

Getting a bit frustrated, seems some people don't know how to wikify pages. I've sorted the balance druid section, but the other sections are complete messes.

Can I do what I did with balance with the rest for tidyness?

-- Iravada (talk) 20:26, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Sure. --Pcj (T•C) 20:28, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

By all means, be bold. --k_d³ 20:29, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Cool, done Feral, moving onto restoration now. --Iravada (talk) 22:05, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Good job. Nevertheless, be prepared that it will be the same complete messes several weeks later. It is the nature of class builds pages. Time to time random people think they have "invented" a good build and should show it to everyone. After everyone add their own builds to the page, it will resume its messy form. To make thing worse, many of those random builds have major design flaws.

You can have a look at Paladin builds page. It has been using another approach for a few months. The main Paladin builds page should only contain incomplete basic builds with the core talents. The number of builds are restricted to PvP, PvE and leveling for each of the three trees. If someone want to put up their own complete builds, they put it in Paladin build samples, or someone will move it from Paladin builds to there. Pro: the main page can be kept relatively tidy and accurate. Con: end up with a messy samples page, but otherwise the main page would be the mess. WakemanCK (talk) 09:56, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

I think that could be a difficult line to draw for some classes. It remains to be seen how it will play out in 3.0, but splitting the specs effectively into "primary" and "other" for is likely to offend some folk. I only know the druid class sufficiently well for this particular point, but there were a good number of builds in 2.x which fell half way between balance and resto "best" specs, for example.

I suggest that it's better to worry about cleaning up the pages for 3.0 and getting a good set of information for both 70 and 80 (although I guess the real focus will be 80 in the very near future), and see how it goes, before worrying about splitting the pages. If some of them do need split, it's probably best done on a case by case basis, as it makes navigating to the desired information more cumbersome. --Murph (talk · contr) 15:36, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Mage talent analysis

I'm rather new to the wiki and started awhile ago this new article inspired by Druid talent analysis.

Well not started, but 95% of all in there is mine. How am I doing so far? Any advice/tips are welcome. Everything in there is 100% updated and I've created all the previously red links in it. Could use some help from some Mage types as well!

Thanks, Adesworth ^{talk to me} <imagelink>IconSmall Mage.gif|Special: Contributions/Adesworth</imagelink> 01:36, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Cleanse Spirit needs a new icon

The icon for [Cleanse Spirit] was changed with patch 3.0.3, it no longer is the same as for Ancestral Spirit. -- Subanark (talk) 08:38, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. --

09:17, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Offtopic StarCraft into

Redirect StarCraft and StarCraft II to StarCraft franchise - yes or no? The content is not Warcraft related, and the information can better be seen on the Starcraft wiki. This is not a Blizzard wiki. g0urra[T҂C] 21:58, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Starcraft wiki imo, but franchise is better than nothing. --Pcj (T•C) 22:00, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, Gourra. --Imperialles 08:53, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Raid Template issue

I think there is an issue with the raid template box. Example: Under raid and Naxxramas. On the right side, click to show the WotLK raids. The Naxx page shows it right. But in raid, you get 2 extra "(closed)" raids, and the first and last raid doesn't show the players required nor the level. Maybe someone can look into it? --slxception (talk) 08:49, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. Widened the template. -Howbizr (talk) 18:09, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Please stop unbulleting subsections...

I have seen some folks removing bullets and adding extra line breaks instead. DON'T DO THIS! It decreases the readability and makes it harder to separate the points.

Here is an example of the kind of changes I've been seeing:

Before: == Notes ==; * Blah blah blah doesn't stack with blah blah blah.; * Blah blah blah is useful when blah blah blah.

After: == Notes ==; Blah blah blah doesn't stack with blah blah blah.; Blah blah blah is useful when blah blah blah.

For one thing you need to put 2 line breaks between paragraphs in a wiki to make a noticeable separation, so if you have a bunch of short paragraphs with only 1 linebreak between them they just look like one big, oddly-wrapped paragraph or a big blob of text. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 7:22 PM PST 6 Nov 2008

I don't mean to be condescending... but I think most new people don't even know about this page. You might want to just address "offenders" directly on their talk page. Or maybe add some comments about it on the style guidelines. -Howbizr (talk) 18:57, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Most new member don't read the guidelines either though... least until they do something wrong and are told to review that certain guideline... but then again, I am generalizing.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 21:05, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

As I see the problem, I will link to here on people's talk pages. I don't want to explain it for every person who does it. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:42 PM PST 7 Nov 2008

The boilerplates for abilities and talents specifically says to "Separate each note by using double enters". If using bullets is to be considered standard for all articles, then the article templates should be edited to match. Right now editors are explicitly told that double enters should be used to separate subsections. Alltat (talk) 01:48, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Done.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 02:19, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

The idea was to suggest that a person use prose instead of simply listing. Ie, it is the editors' fault in that case and not the boilerplates. --Sky (t · c · w) 05:59, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Can't post to Korialstrasz server page, because of .TK links

I was trying to add my guild to the various content sections on my server page, but another guild's link goes to http://www.darkomenguild.tk which keeps triggering the spam filter. -- Guido666 (talk) 21:26, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. --Pcj (T•C) 21:28, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Faction Policy

For example, when you have two quests for each faction that are identical, other than the location and the quest giver, do you make one article or two? It seems like depending on the author, some pages went separate while others were merged. I was just wondering if there was a general policy for this kind of thing, including quests but not limited to them. -Howbizr (talk) 13:21, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

If it's the exact same quest objective, description etc then it's merged to one article. If there's any differences then they should be on separate articles. g0urra[T҂C] 13:42, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Hunter pet article edits posting blocked

The TKA Something website is triggering the spam filter and prevents saving changes to the Hunter pet page. If the link is beneficial, the site should be whitelisted; if the link is spam, the link should be removed. I looked at the site, and it appears to be beneficial with spammy overtones. Can someone with a strong interest in maintaining Wiki neutrality look into this? The current situation is absurd. The link already exists on the page, and edits not related to the link are blocked. Madkaugh (talk) 00:12, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I commented out the TKA Something link. See if you can save some changes now. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:19 PM PST 10 Nov 2008

It works now; should, since that was what was flagged, just tried it to be sure; but is the removed link truly spam? It does not appear that the link is primarily self promotion. Madkaugh (talk) 20:45, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

It appears all .tk links were blocked, I've reallowed them. Kirkburn talk contr 13:55, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Achievement template renamed to achievementbox

See Rename achievement box/tooltip template section of Achievement talk page. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:18 PM PST 12 Nov 2008

Looks good, except the redirect on Achievement talk is confusing. -Howbizr (talk) 06:16, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Ezra "Ephoenix" Chatterton

The home page has a news item about the passing of Ephoenix last month. I think it makes sense to create a page summarizing the contributions he inspired, and putting it in Category:Memorials. (BTW, what's the correct syntax to link to a category page?) Should the page be titled Ephoenix or Ezra Chatterton? (With a redirect from the other title.) -- ScratchMonkey (talk) 14:16, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

It would be "[[<server> US/Ephoenix]]" per WW:PC. g0urra[T҂C] 15:35, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Your syntax suggests that we're talking about a character, not a real person. -- ScratchMonkey (talk) 17:02, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I would suggest you make the page, if you consider it important. However, I suggest the above articles (Ahab Wheathoof,

[Ashes of Al'ar],

[Merciless Gladiator's Crossbow of the Phoenix], Kyle the Frenzied) go into Category:Memorials and not the article about the person. I would suggest making the article Server:Norgannon US/Ephoenix¹ (with a redirect to it from Ezra Chatterton²) and putting it in the Category:Characters. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:07 PM PST 11 Nov 2008

Found some articles for you, ScratchMonkey. --Howbizr (talk) 02:36, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I do somewhat feel that a main namespace article is justified - he's certainly notable, and, like Leeroy Jenkins, he had a direct impact on the content of the game. Kirkburn talk contr 14:56, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Unlocking a locked page?

Moved from Warcraft pump.

Im not sure if this is the right place to ask this... probobly not but this is my first time on the forum.

Is there a way to get a locked page unlocked? I wanted to make an edit to the Cenarion Expedition page to add that the DEHTA quests in Northrend result in Cenarion Expedition reputation.

-- EternalMydNyt (talk) 04:54, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Done. Feel free to edit as you will. --Sky (t · c · w) 07:48, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Title/Agnomen

I sort of see why someone might put "Agnomen" along with Title, but without an article explaining its usage and why it is used, I think we should get rid of it. I'm also not particularly fond of the mixing up "Title" as a generic sort of vague term and the use of <Title> in as it becomes very confusing as how the term Title is being used. For example, Malevus the Mad shows up in List of unaffiliated paladins as "Malevus" with Title/Agnomen as "the Mad", but doesn't have that as an in-game <the Mad>. Very confusing. Any ideas? -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:38 PM PST 18 Nov 2008

The nearest I can figure is putting all in-game titles in brackets like you did above. "Agnomen" is far too limiting a term. Apart from anything else, what about praenomens?--Ragestorm (talk · contr) 17:05, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Fandyllic, I'd generally agree it's confusing. I'd prefer if title was strictly bracketed titles, and did not include "the Mad" in your example. -Howbizr (talk) 00:52, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to having the "the Mad" somewhere, but calling it a title when it will obviously confuse WoW players is not the right thing to do. I will have to think harder about a good alternative. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:52 PM PST 20 Nov 2008

Nomenclature for repeatable quests

For a faction reputation table, should "repeatable quests" be listed by their correct name, or the name of the initial quest that leads to them?

For example, see Cenarion_Expedition/Reputation_table, which was corrected to list the names of the quests that lead to the repeatable, and not the actual quest the player will be repeating.

I believe the correct name of the repeatable (and correct rep value) should be used. Any lead-in quests (which often give more rep than the repeatable) should be lumped with the regular quests for relevant zone. Anything else is confusing to someone trying to research the actual repeatable (which isn't always identical to the lead-in), and calculate their requirements for rep. -- w.woods (talk) 01:05, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Contrary to Tekkub's edits, I would agree with you, Woods. I think its more intuitive as something like "

[67] Coilfang Armaments (Q)" than "

[67] Preparing for War (R)" (as it is currently). -Howbizr (talk) 01:09, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Yup, you should list the actually repeatable quest and put the lead-in quest in the Notes. Go ahead and fix it if you want. Having the (R) as a different click-able link after the lead-in quest name is non-intuitive.

I would prefer the table box either show

[67] Preparing for War /

[67] Coilfang Armaments (RRQ)

or have just

[67] Coilfang Armaments (RRQ) and

[67] Preparing for War in the notes. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:50 PM PST 20 Nov 2008

Thanks! You're right, that (R) thing really is non-intuitive. Until you mentioned it, I hadn't even realized it provided a link to the repeatable version. I thought it just meant "repeatable" :) --w.woods (talk) 04:03, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Category naming conventions

I thought that generally Capital Casing was frowned upon, so I re-created & re-categorized Category:Feats of Strength achievements as Category:Feats of strength achievements, to match the other sub-achievements in Category:World of Warcraft achievements, however it was deleted by housekeeping. Any idea why this might have happened? -Howbizr (talk) 01:22, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

As you said, generally it is frowned upon, but we try to preserve Capital Casing where it appears in game. In the Achievements window in game it appears as "Feats of Strength", not "Feats of strength", so we would preserve it in a category. Does that make sense? --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:38 PM PST 20 Nov 2008

If it's a proper noun, we leave it as is. --k_d³ 01:41, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Then Category:Dungeons and raids achievements, Category:Player vs. player achievements, and Category:World events achievements need to be fixed as well.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 07:56, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I think the difference is that you would say "Feat of Strength" in normal typing ... but you would not say Raid (raid), Player (player) or World Event (world event). Kirkburn talk contr 10:26, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

It was just weird to me, because I could swear about a month ago they were all Capital Cased and have since been changed to First capital casing, and now they're getting changed back. As long as someone understands the convention.

-Howbizr (talk) 12:33, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Loremaster categories

It is not the case that any quest picked up on Kalimdor counts towards the Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement (I can provide examples on demand). The same holds true for Eastern Kingdoms. Possibly it also holds true for Outlands and Northrend, though I am less confident.

I think it would be a Nifty Idea to add to the Questbox template parameters that add the quest to appropriate categories, I.E. Loremaster of Kalimdor quests (Alliance).

To the best of my knowledge, most/all of the following are not counted towards the loremaster achievements: any repeatable or daily quest; any event (seasonal or otherwise) quest. I believe (but am not certain) that racially or class limited quests are also excluded, but I have not tested that exhaustively.

I have verified that at least some quest chains continue to count on the same loremaster achievement from which they started. Again, though, I have not tested this exhaustively.

I have also not tested whether (non-repeatable) PvP quests count. --Eirik Ratcatcher (talk) 21:21, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Or, you can mark any quest you find that does not count toward the achievement. It's not an easy thing to modify {{questbox}} to do what you want. g0urra[T҂C] 22:49, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Grand Master / Master division (JCers needed!)

There's something of a dilemma when deciding where to add new WotLK jewelcrafting recipes to the designs page. I wonder if people involved in other crafts are experiencing the same thing.

In Burning Crusade, Master-level jewelcrafting took us up to a skill of 375.

But in Lich King, "Grand Master" training is available at 350, and new recipes were added for 350, 360 and 370 skill.

Presumably anyone with Master (but not yet Grand Master) training could also learn the new 350-370-skill recipes, though there's little reason for them not to train up at the same time. And I also guess that the only recipes they couldn't technically learn would be in the 380+ range, which is where I assume "Grand Master" recipes really start. Unfortunately I didn't check this out before I trained up.

Is there anyone with a jewelcrafter who has their skill at 350+, but hasn't trained in Grand Master yet? If so, could you please let me know if: (i) those new recipes are available to you before you train up in Grand Master (ii) if they're available through the Master-level trainers in Outland, or just the Grand Master trainers in Northrend

If the former, then they can easily be inserted amongst all the current Master recipes. If not, they'll have to be added to the Grand Master table, even though that will throw out the sorting by skill level.

Thanks for your help :) -- w.woods (talk) 04:11, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Euphonia is a JC, and while I didn't actually click on the recipies (I guess I'm a top down person), I remember them being "green" before learning Grand Master. So I guess to be consistent, yes, only the recipies that require 380+ are truly "grand master." But that's because of the whole 6

business. Max crafting is really about the dedicated/hardcore now... not about the rich. -Howbizr (talk) 12:58, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Just what I need. Thank you! :) It'd still be handy to know if the lower trainers also offer those recipes, but not essential. A level 60 with 350 JC could still find ways to get to the trainers in Northrend. I'll add them under "Master" anyway, but probably later tag them with WotLK if I can confirm only the Nothrend trainers offer them. --w.woods (talk) 00:44, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I looked at [Bold Bloodstone] on wowhead for example, and it's only offered by Wrath trainers, which is what I expected. You could look as you go, but it's a pretty safe assumption that the new recipies will only be available in Northrend. -Howbizr (talk) 01:24, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Links to inappropriate sites alert

Someone added links to http://paladinbuilds.com/ on several paladin pages. The left side of the site contains the following lines:

Need a Paladin Guide?

Killer Guilds- Has a good guide for how to play a Paladin.

Need WOW Gold?

IGE - Very good place to purchase WOW gold. IGE is the largest supplier of online game currency and currently has the best price on gold.

*Please note buying guides or gold at the above sites helps support this site.

So I consider it is an inappropriate sites that support gold sellers. (Besides, some of the builds were directly copied from Paladin build samples. The page also includes some of the worst builds I have ever seen. Imo these are clear indications that the site owner is actually a gold company instead of WoW fans.) I'll remove this link from the paladin pages.

That page also linked to several other page such as http://magebuilds.com, http://hunterbuilds.com, etc. Please help remove them if you see them on any pages.

-- WakemanCK (talk) 02:31, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

It's not quite the same thing as above, but I think WoWWiki:External links is lacking some clarity on sites which carry adverts which are contrary to EULA/TOS. That site made it quite clear that it was happy to support gold sellers, and I think you were quite right to remove them (and I wonder if we should even have them hyperlinked from this page?). It's fairly obvious that sites which actively encourage such violations will come under WW:DNP, but what about sites which may not deliberately be carrying them, just being served them by a generally respected ad supplier, e.g. Google? I've posted an example of this and raised the question on WoWWiki talk:External links. --Murph (talk · contr) 11:45, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

The WoWWiki:External links page refers to WW:DNP for types of content that could/should be removed. I think a policy for removing obvious advertising sites should be added to WW:DNP. The External links page already gives good reason to remove the http://*builds.com sites: 'If the website linked contains only information already present on the wiki (or you need to pay to access the extra content), the link should not be present.' ... 'Elinks to republications that do not cite their source will be deemed as "stolen content" and removed from the wiki.'

Sites such as Crafter's Tome have historically shown that they provide unique additional info not covered by WoWWiki. Although the inclusion of gold seller and hack ads is troublesome, the site is clearly not designed primarily to drive people to those sites. People will have to use their judgment, as many external WoW-related sites have gold seller ads and we can't exclude them just for that.

If you want to add to or change a policy, a good place to start is WoWWiki:Policy status phases. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:00 PM PST 8 Dec 2008

Yup, that's pretty much what I thought. For the record, I think we're quite right to remove the *builds.com links, and I don't have an issue with Crafter's Tome (for me, the balance of probabilities says the site is legit, just the ads cause concern). I do think that some additional clarity on either WW:DNP or WoWWiki:External links would be useful. I know we can't cover every situation, but it wouldn't hurt to clarify the obvious situations, e.g.:

Site created solely or primarily for advertising or affiliate click-through - not permitted.
Site actively encouraging EULA/TOS violations (e.g. voicing support for gold sales, as with *builds.com) - not permitted.
Site without the above issues, with real content, but carrying incidental adverts against EULA/TOS from a mainstream ad supplier - permitted (but we'd prefer not to have the problematic ads).

I dare say others can probably think of situations to add to the above, those are just the most obvious scenarios that spring to mind.

--Murph (talk · contr) 21:34, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Instance split/merge

I thought I might bring this up again, as it seems boldness struck again. Should the WotLK instances that have a wing that shares its name with the overall winged instance be split or merged? Like The Nexus/The Nexus (instance) and Utgarde Keep/Utgarde Keep (instance)? Azjol-Nerub too. Merge or split? Whatever gets decided, it should be consistent.--SWM24 48 18:37, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Good question, actually. I remember I hated when people referred to The Eye as "Tempest Keep", but this time, those are the actual instance hub names. I'd say keep it like Utgarde Keep is atm, instance page as a section of the hub page. ~ Nathanyel (talk) 17:46, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Currently, Nexus is split, Utgarde is not.--SWM24 48 00:26, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

What's the word on this? I was thinking about working on WoWWiki:Zone category project again and I was going to start with Azjol-Nerub when i came across this. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 21:17, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Grand Master JC table added

I finally added the Grand Master jewelcrafting designs table to Jewelcrafting designs today. The non-embedded table can be found at Grand Master jewelcrafting designs and its format mirrors the other design tables. I see some fast individual has already proposed it for merger with Northrend gems, though that seems inappropriate, given that (i) this table is a list of all jewelcrafting designs and includes rings trinkets and amulets, not just gems, (ii) gems aren't only just cut by jewelcrafters, and (iii) if it's merged then it'll destroy its intended use as part of the Jewelcrafting designs page. -- w.woods (talk) 11:34, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

I removed the {{merge}} tag from Grand Master jewelcrafting designs. As a rule, if you don't explain why you want a merge or {{split}}, the tag can be removed. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:09 PM PST 2 Dec 2008

Thanks Fan! :) Yeah, I wasn't sure how to respond, since there was no discussion. And the merge policy page doesn't say what to do. --w.woods (talk) 00:43, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Check the ads being displayed

There are reports something is setting off AV programs while visiting this site.

http://vnboards.ign.com/world_of_warcraft_general_board/b19789/109603188/p1/?10

-- User:Sharlin/Sig 20:40, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Need info outlined at http://help.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Bad_advertisements. Send it to community@wikia.com. --Pcj (T•C) 20:57, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Session problems

I've been having problems with my session for a while now, especially when I open several pages at a time, e.g. from edit notification mails/the watchlist. The first handful show I'm still logged in, but later pages often show that I'm not anymore, which persists until I log in again. This happens in both Firefox and IE, and only with WoWWiki, so I don't think it's a local problem - as far as I checked, FF listed the corresponding cookies as valid for a month.
Still can't rule out problems on my end though, so I'll ask for suggestions here. Has anyone experienced similar problems?
Since someone will ask for it anyway, here's a tracert ~ Nathanyel (talk) 13:23, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm convinced there are bugs with the logging in, at least in regard to the homepage. Frequently, if not 100% of the time, the portal homepage doesn't show me logged in when I really am. But if I navigate to any other URL, I am logged in.

I don't use separate windows, however, I will tell you in IE there are windows that "share" session and windows that are a "new" session. For example in IE6, I believe if you use File - New Window, or Ctrl+N, you will get a shared session. But if you click on the IE icon, you get a new session - so you'll have to login again in that window. If you're using IE7, tabs should all be sharing the same session, but new windows again may not.

Hope that helps. I always recommend using a better browser, like Firefox or Chrome, at least until IE8 comes out.

-Howbizr (talk) 14:21, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I know about the IE Session thing, I always check that "remember my login" box anyway, so this can't be related, and as I said, it's happening in Firefox as well. ~ Nathanyel (talk) 15:25, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Assuming it's a bug with the "remember me" code/cookie, try not using the checkbox, but have your browser remember your password, so that you have similar functionality. Or you cout edit the URL's of the offending windows/pages manually to be in "edit" mode (&action=edit).

I don't think the admins of wowwiki can do anything about it because its probably in the shared code. Either way, if you could give exact steps to reproduce the problem (and I could verify for you) then it will be easier to get whoever is in control of the login code to put in a fix. -Howbizr (talk) 15:40, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, not seen it at all on Firefox 3. However, you might see some pages saying you're logged out when you're actually logged in, it's possible those pages were cached on your PC before you logged in - if you refresh while on them, they should update. Kirkburn talk contr 15:46, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

As I said, this persists until I log in again. Tried several forced reloads and opening other pages many times, never recovered my login. ~ Nathanyel (talk) 23:13, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Image licensing templates

I've copied a bunch of image licensing templates to WoWWiki, see Category:Image wiki templates. We, er, really should be doing more about the licensing of our images, especially as we expand beyond solely game screenshots. They are direct copies, so they do need tweaking to "fit in" with WoWWiki. Kirkburn talk contr 15:46, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd suggest changing the "licensing" to categories, for example Category:User screenshots, Category:Mob screenshots, Category:User images etc. The main distinction between images and screenshots are that screenshots are directly from the game and not manipulated in any way. g0urra[T҂C] 15:50, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Licenses is the dropdown that appears on the image upload page. That could probably be altered to aid this, for different image templates/categories. Kirkburn talk contr 16:00, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Why exactly does wowwiki:general disclaimer not cover us? --Sky (t · c · w) 16:10, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

IANAL, but I doubt that covers us that well. I'm not suggesting some massive purge or anything, but we do need to get our image licensing/categorising up to scratch as Warcraft becomes a bigger and bigger phenomenon. And especially if we have a live action film coming. Kirkburn talk contr 16:16, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

One issue that springs to mind is that only the copyright holder can license something under GFDL. That does not prohibit use of images via fair use or a non-GFDL license/permission, but they should be marked as such, so that someone considering further copying (copying from WoWWiki to elsewhere) does not mistakenly believe that they are entitled to do so by the GFDL. --Murph (talk · contr) 16:26, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I can't figure out how to change MediaWiki:Licenses to be categories instead of templates... I'm thinking of making a template such as "Template:Sscat" and subst: it for every type, but I'm not sure. g0urra[T҂C] 13:45, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

I suspect we should make templates or a template with choices to tag stuff based on the list in MediaWiki:Licenses. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:42 PM PST 9 Dec 2008

Trouble editing; please help!

I've had a WoWWiki account for months now and I've made various minor edits. I recently became frustrated with the amount of information that had not yet been updated to WotLK material, so I decided to try to update some of it myself. However, every time I go to edit a page, I appear to be "logged out", and I'm informed that I cannot edit the page without logging in. Nothing changes this; logging in works correctly, will persist throughout visiting nearly all of the site, but only stops when I attempt to edit something. My browser cookie settings are fine. I've tried creating a new account and the same thing happens.

What do I actually need to do to get to edit a page?

Any help is appreciated!

-- WikiPhazz (talk) 13:40, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

You may want to contact Wikia with your problem. They may have changed the login requirements and you might have to confirm your account now. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:21 PM PST 9 Dec 2008

Has this been fixed? If not, I would offer the suggestion that you are taking so long to edit that the site automatically logs you out. This has happened to me, but I copy my edit, log back in and paste and the edit goes through. I think there's a box you can check for the site to remember you. I don't use that if I'm not at home though.

Actually this looks like a problem for other people too? Session_problems Maybe I just didn't notice. Haven't edited much lately. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 20:55, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Need help removing AmpWoW links

It appears that AmpWoW as it used to be (a decent resource for boss strategies, maps, etc.) is no more and the domain provider now has a message at the top of the site that the domain is expired and all the links go to what appears to be a hack, account seller and gold seller site. I've been going through links to ampwow, checking them and removing them, but there are alot, so I could use some help. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:27 PM PST 9 Dec 2008

Finished. --Pcj (T•C) 23:14, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Pcj. I've been looking into AmpWoW's parent site GameAmp and they still appear to have useful WoW info, but no apparent updates for

. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:40 PM PST 9 Dec 2008

Give me 10 days, and I'll give you 30...

So I've been thinking about getting into WoW again, MIGHT be buying WotLK and another 60 days of time before the end of the year.

I noticed my account has been inactive for some time...

So, at the moment I'm not sure if I'm getting back in, but if I am I am also all for giving people free stuff. :D

Now, I MAY not be getting more game time, I MAY not get WotLK, I'll let you know after/around Christmas. :D

If I do get more time though, I would like to use it to give someone out there a month of time using that scroll of resurrection deal.

My WoW account name is Bluddo, and I ask you... why do you deserve a month of free game time?

Please plead your case here, and I will let you know when I decide to buy the game card/expansion in the near future.

A guild looking for rookie members would be a plus, I haven't been playing for a long time...

-- Bluddo (talk) 06:23, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Not really the place to do this, should use the WoW official forums... As for anyone wanting to "plead" their case, please do NOT respond here, use Bluddo's talk page.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 07:50, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Achievements categories and main articles

I've been doing a little work on the achievements categories and articles to clean things up a little. Firstly, I split Dungeons & Raids achievements into sub-articles, pulling them back into the main article with {{ajax}}. Secondly, I renamed "Dungeons and Raids" to "Dungeons & Raids" for consistency with both the game and armory UIs. Beyond that, there's a few minor tweaks and changes here and there, but nothing to get too excited about. I intend to split the other main articles similarly to Dungeons & Raids in the near future, and the only thing I'm still not sure about there is whether to split the articles which are generally ok for length, for consistency with their peers.

Looking at Category:World of Warcraft achievements, there's a naming inconsistency with Quest achievements and Category:Quest achievements vs. the other categories and main articles. All of the others are "<tag used in-game/armory> achievements", preserving case, plurals, etc, but "Quests" has become "Quest". I can see that it looks less clumsy in the singular, but it's inconsistent with everything else in there. I've thought about this for a little while, and the best solution I can see right now to both keep consistent with the Blizz UIs and stop anything looking clumsy is to rename everything from "<Blizz category> achievements" to "<Blizz category> (achievements)", producing the following:

General (achievements)
Quests (achievements)
Exploration (achievements)
Player vs. Player (achievements)
Dungeons & Raids (achievements)
Professions (achievements)
Reputation (achievements)
World Events (achievements)
Feats of Strength (achievements)

That's both consistent with the naming style used for disambiguation, solves any grammatical clumsiness, and even simplifies linking to them, as there is a wikitext shortcut causing [[Name (achievements)|]] to drop the portion in parenthesis, e.g. General and General. Per previous discussions, "achievements" should remain plural for the categories and main articles, as they refer to multiple achievements.

What do folks think of this change? Don't worry about the effort to do this - I'm quite happy to do all of the heavy lifting on this, the categories are fairly small right now, and the individual achievement articles gain their main category from {{achievementbox}}.

--Murph (talk · contr) 12:36, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

The Blizzard UI is just categorizing their achievements in much the same way how we are categorizing stuff here; we use Category:Quests instead of Category:Quest. Additionally, writing "Quests achievements" makes it a double plural, which doesn't look good at all with grammar and all.

As for achievement pages, making it "General (achievements)" instead of "General achievements" is not in order with naming policy. Additionally, things within brackets are for specific things under the same name; see Bonecewer (weapon), Emberwyrm (mob) etc. g0urra[T҂C] 13:00, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Yup, I can see that's what Blizz are doing, and it both makes sense and looks right to me. Out of curiosity, which part of WW:NAME do you feel rules against it? (I could be having a blind moment, but I couldn't see it myself.) I agree with you on double plurals looking clumsy - that's what prompted this. Do you have any thoughts on whether or how we should resolve the inconsistency between "Quest" and "Dungeons & Raids", "Professions", "World Events", and "Feats of Strength"? --Murph (talk · contr) 13:17, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I would lean towards breaking the naming policy, if this is even violating it at all, so that you can remove the double plural but not have parentheses, ie Dungeon & Raid achievements. Or since they are sub categories of Category:World of Warcraft achievements, why even keep the "achievements" word in the first place, and just stick to the Blizz UI name with the plural in tact? Aren't sub categories inheriting from parent categories so it's implicit that we're referring to types of achievements? -Howbizr (talk) 17:43, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure that it's such a great idea removing "achievements" from the category names - it seems to me like best practice to have category names stand on their own, even when they are in a hierarchy. There would also be naming collisions with some of them, e.g. Category:Quests, Category:Professions, Category:Reputation. There's also the question of the article names. Personally, I think it's quite tidy and coherent having the main articles sharing the names of the categories. --Murph (talk · contr) 18:14, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Can we all agree then that the article and category should be "Dungeon & raid achievements", with no double plural? Lower case for the whole category and article name as per WW:NAME, except for Feats of Strength as I find it more special compared to the rest. Any objections? g0urra[T҂C] 19:12, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

If we're going to go with that, I don't really see why "Feats of Strength" should be an exception. Personally, I'm only 50/50 on that solution - it solves the double plurals, but it breaks from the convention of mirroring Blizz names on two counts (capitalisation and minor modification of the name). Let's not rush any solution, this doesn't strike me as a particularly urgent problem, so I'd like to leave it open for at least 3 or 4 days to gather any other views on the best way to deal with it.

I still prefer my original thoughts of handling it in the style of disambiguation, although I'll obviously go along with and respect any consensus and/or admin decision. Here's a rough explanation of my thought process that lead to my original suggestion above - "(achievements)", in case it helps. If this were a wiki solely about achievements, we could just use Quests and Category:Quests, and there wouldn't be a problem. Since we cover many different aspects of the game, we end up with collisions in naming. The traditional wiki way of handling naming collisions is either to use namespaces (I'm not proposing that - I don't think it's good or appropriate here) or disambiguation. Disambiguation typically puts the unique disambiguating word/phrase in parenthesis after the obvious name which would be used if there were no collisions. In this case, the obvious disambiguating words are "achievement" and "achievements", depending on the type of article in question (single achievement or summary discussion/list of achievements, respectively). --Murph (talk · contr) 19:52, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

The Feats of Strength isn't a really "urgent" issue, but some people around here like to rush things... Feat of Strength isn't something that sounds good to be honest, so Feats of Strength is something that I'd like to stick to.

I wouldn't want to rename the main achievement articles to "<category> (achievement)" - it simply looks ugly as stuff in parentheses are to specify what the article name is, if it shares its name with other things in the game. However, as there is an easy way to distinguish it ("Quests" vs "Quest achievement") I don't see the point to have the parentheses at the end. The article names are fine as it is now. g0urra[T҂C] 20:09, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I still (personally, but not really that strongly) feel "Feat of strength achievements" is the most grammatically sound, and the capitalization and pluralization doesn't bother me at all. In speech, I would still refer to one of these achievements a (single) feat, a (single) world event.

I see what you're saying about collisions, which I didn't really consider. So I guess I'll switch my vote to a)Single capital b)Single pluralization c)Achievements at the end vote: "Category:Feat of strength achievements," "Category:World event achievements," etc. -Howbizr (talk) 21:19, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't feel strongly about the pluralization vs. not and such, but I don't thing there is a good argument for including parentheses in the names. Many of the UI elements in the game cannot be reproduced exactly in a wiki because... it's a wiki and not the game. Also we support a whole variety of Warcraft info and not just WoW stuff. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:44 PM PST 10 Dec 2008

Ok, since there's no consensus support for my original suggestion, I consider it shelved unless anyone wants to re-visit it. I did have one alternative thought for the naming here - "Achievements/< type >/< sub-type >", e.g. "Achievements/Quests/Northrend", but I'm not really proposing that right now, just throwing it into the air in case anyone thinks it's a better way of doing it.

Having thought about the naming here a bit more, I think it's ok to leave things mostly as they are, with one exception. I'd like to propose renaming "Quest achievements" as "Quests achievements", despite it appearing slightly clumsy at first glance. Here's the rationale - feel free to disagree, but please spend a moment to think about it.

With only a few exceptions, each of those achievements requires multiple quests, so singularly they are a "quests achievement", and there's a certain logic to saying "quests achievements" when referring to many of these individual achievements. I did a little reading around to see if I could find any formal English rules for forming the plural of such a term, but I've drawn a blank so far. The closest thing I managed to find was "languages expert" - it does not seem clumsy to refer to a group of such people as "languages experts" [4] (example in paragraph 2 of that article).

So, on reflection, I'm now saying that I think the double plurals are ok (in appropriate context). I'll gladly revise that opinion if there are any pedants of formal English usage and grammar that can cite a reference to the contrary (I'm genuinely interested - I can usually figure out the correct grammatical usage, but this one has me scratching my head a little).

Do we have any support for or objections to using "Quests achievements" based on the above? It achieves consistency between all the articles, categories, labels used for achievements, and the Blizz UI. I'm not convinced it's actually bad English usage.

--Murph (talk · contr) 07:16, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Eternal transmutation

Moved to Warcraft pump.

Adding WoWDB to external links

As suggested by a few people I wanted to start a discussion about adding WoWDB to the e-links in addition to those already there. I know that site rating has been brought up, but I'm looking at data quality, and imo the sites are WoWHead > WoWDB == Allakhazam > Thotbott.

Also to be clear, I am a moderator on CurseForge/WoWAce, and my main mod ARL gets all of its data from WowDB.

-- Ackis (talk) 18:55, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I would argue against Allakhazam > Thotbott. Thottbot has been much better updating for

than Allakhazam which was far behind at release. Otherwise, I would agree we should reconsider adding WoWDB to the standard elinks, since Wikia used to have a partnership with Curse Gaming (seems over now, though) and WoWDB definitely has near equivalent presentation quality to Wowhead. Wowhead has way more helpful comments than WoWDb, though. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:56 PM PST 12 Dec 2008

Thottbot may be better at updating, but their comments and screenshots are god-awful. Allakhazam could need some better work at updating their info, but they use a client that requires user input, and there's not enough users using it. While Wowdb has more information, they really need to be better at filtering out their stuff... there's way too much crap on it. g0urra[T҂C] 21:04, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Wowdb < Wowdigger, imo (mainly because of Curse), and if we were to consider Wowdb we should consider Wowdigger. --Pcj (T•C) 21:05, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Previously we've generally gone by Alexa rank and user opinion (which gave us, overwhelmingly, Wowhead, and Thott/Alla trailing as 50/50). Should we do another vote? Changing the templates isn't a huge job, but there's lots of factors which could affect it. I think it's not a big problem to link to slightly more sites, as it encourages linking back and it gives users more choice. Kirkburn talk contr 00:41, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I have a simple and silly test for comparing DB sites: I call it the [Overcharged Capacitor] test. I look up the item in a DB and if there are any comments, than I can tell there is an active base of user submitting to the DB. Why this test? Well for any

who has quested for awhile (around level 71) and done most of the Fizzcrank Airstrip quests in Borean Tundra, you eventually get the quest

[71] Just a Few More Things... which has the Overcharged Capacitor as one of its objectives. Invariably you hear people on General chat asking, "Where do I get an Overcharged Capacitor?" and than a variety of answers from, "I'll sell you one for 20g" to "Engineers make them."

If a DB has no comments on this item, then not many people are using it. BTW, Wowhead, Thottbot and Allakhazam have comments, but WoWDB and Wowdigger do not. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 12:38 PM PST 15 Dec 2008

Obviously, it's because we're not linking to them in our External links section. --Pcj (T•C) 20:19, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Lootbox vs. Itembox

I am very new here, and I hope I am asking this in the right place... I have recently been adding a few quest and item pages, and had lootbox entries (in the Rewards section) changed to itembox. Is there a preference for one over the other, or a specific situation that each template is intended for? Going by the template discussion pages, it seems that the itembox was intended for entries about recipes, to show the reagents, while the lootbox is intended for boss drops. Many of the quests I have seen use lootbox, but some newer quests use itembox. Which should I use for quests? -- Wige (talk) 21:06, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I believe we're leaning towards Itembox, cause it makes it look more like the in-game verison... or cause it can be used to display an amount if consumables are the reward, whereas lootbox can not.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 21:21, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Itembox for crafting pages and quest rewards, Lootbox for loot from bosses. Mainly because quest rewards can be multiple, whereas instance drops are most often not (except for Badge of Justice, Emblem of Heroism etc). g0urra[T҂C] 22:28, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Recent polls on mainpage, incorrect link

And here I thought I'd get a quick and easy edit, but since it's a Main page, I don't get the glory. :p

On the Portal:Main page, in the polls box, where it discusses the results of the "Who would you most want to defeat?" poll, it incorrectly links to the "Favorite TBC patch" poll instead of the "Boss kill" one.

-- Lywellyn (talk / cont) 12:12, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Gourra has fixed :) Kirkburn talk contr 16:21, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Blog articles and more...

I am hoping to launch a new feature on WoWWiki in the near future, called "blog articles", which I've been helping out with for the past few weeks. Now I know some people's initial reaction to hearing the word "blog" is not always positive, but there is reason behind this madness :) We feel this will help community building, and give users more of an outlet for their own creativity, and can help move personal content away from the main namespace.

These are not typical blog posts - they mostly work like normal articles, except they have a different way of utilizing comments (posted below the article), and are "personal" areas of the wiki. That is to say, only the poster (and admins) can edit a user's blog posts. Additionally, blog posts can be categorized in the normal way, but blog related items will appear in a different section, after "normal" articles.

Naturally, the content of those pages come under the policies of that wiki. For example, the most obvious policies are that blog posts must be on-topic, free from abusive rants, and not spammed. On WoWWiki specifically, I would expect it to be used for game opinions, fan fiction, character stories and administration-related topics. This is not to suggest moving the primary focus of WoWWiki away from the factual content in any way, just to give users a little more freedom.

This is not the entirety of the feature - there's a few other things you can do with it. You can find out more about all the new features on Help:Blog article on Wikia Help, and you can see some example posts on Star Wars Fanon, Wikia Gaming and Wikia Entertainment. I don't profess to be an amazing creative writer, but I've had a shot at a WotLK review, just to show off what kinds of things you can do.

I would love for us to test it: if it doesn't work out for us, fair enough. However I think we should try it out, and whatever feedback we get, we can use it to improve the extension for the future.

Thanks for your time, Kirkburn talk contr 16:51, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

As I'm very anti-fanfic, RP etc. on WoWWiki this is still a no for me; we've had problems with RP and fanfic before and I'm glad that it's gone. I can see that it's been successful on fanfic and general Wikia wikis, but since WoWWiki has both general information and (to an extent) fanfic, I don't see it having the same impact.

Another thing I'd like to see then, if this goes through, is the ability to choose what namespaces to be in the RecentChanges; I've seen that the blog uses four namespaces: "Blog", "Blog talk", "User blog" and "User blog talk". I'm all for seeing if this works, and if it's getting out of hand with policies and so on, then I don't see it staying. g0urra[T҂C] 17:02, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, and I do understand what you say - I certainly don't want it to 'taint' the main articles. Regarding recent changes: yeah, I'd love to see that too (even narrowed by watchlist, I still don't want to see everything all the time). We are looking at improving the recent changes list, but I don't have a timescale atm - rather depends on when we can slot it into our schedule. Kirkburn talk contr 17:51, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I've started on some rules at User:Kirkburn/Dev9. What do you think? Kirkburn talk contr 18:22, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

I think blogs = DO NOT WANT. --Pcj (T•C) 18:28, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not really convinced that WoWWiki needs this feature. Perhaps a vote would be useful to determine how much interest or opposition there is to it?

If it was to go ahead, borrowing some of the rules in the Blizzard Forums Code of Conduct might be a good idea, particularly regarding harassment, naming and shaming, and not calling for nerfs. Given the popularity of this site, I don't think we want to end up being a clearing house for incendiary posts which are unwelcome on the Blizz forums.

--Murph (talk · contr) 18:55, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

I may be blind, but how should a blog author advertise their blog? It seems like this might just end up filling up the database with personal crap that almost no one will ever see. Is WoWWiki gonna get a forum feature? I prefer that.

I will put more thought into this, but this is my initial reaction. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:15 PM PST 15 Dec 2008

I think this extension is poorly conceived; an alternative that I would rather see would be to encourage people to start their own blogs, and then the RSS related functions improved. So much so as to be able to embed the blogs in RecentChanges, for example. There are already blogsites out there, and I don't think we should be encouraging people to attempt to use wikiblog, as wikiblog is limited in its function. --Sky (t · c · w) 23:22, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

The extension is also active on w:c:warcraftfanon, though it is fairly quiet there. The method for collating posts is via the blog list extension, which you can see part of in action here. Blog posts and comments both appear on the recent changes list.

I do understand the potential for abuse, especially on a site of our size (and I don't want to burden our admins with more work) so we could do something like limiting blog posts to those who have made X edits, or something similar. If it is made clear to users that it is not a replacement Wordpress or Blogger, and that abuse will mean their toys are taken away, it would hopefully run like other parts of the site. Users could already use their user pages for that kind of abuse, but they generally don't.

Please remember, this wasn't designed specifically for WoWWiki (so don't be surprised that it's not perfectly designed for us), but we want to try it out in a wide variety of situations to see what can be improved. There's been a fair bit of interest from other wikis, so we're not relying on WoWWiki for success - but it would be nice :) (Note: I do think there's a larger amount of fan fiction writers amongst our audience (and passing editors) than amongst the dedicated editors who will comment here - which is fairly natural)

Regarding forums: I'm still working on that, though I'm unsure what direction we should take with it. There's a couple of options, but probably the easiest one is to go with wiki forums as seen on other Wikia wikis - see for example [5]. Kirkburn talk contr 17:57, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

We don't want it. --Pcj (T•C) 18:57, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

pcj, I'd like a discussion please. That's not helpful. Kirkburn talk contr 19:32, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

You're trying to force blogs down our throat; that's not helpful. No one from WoWWiki has been positive about this concept except you. A vote has been proposed, try that. Otherwise, just forget it. --Pcj (T•C)

What I would like is to know what the community would like from a blog-style extension, and why they would or would not like it. Yes, you don't like it - however, you have not elaborated in any way, which doesn't help me. I know what people's reactions are to seeing the word "blog", but that means little - I'd love to see people looking at it and maybe trying it out and giving opinions based on that. It is not a replica of standard blogs.

I get that the most prolific editors are not creative/fiction writers: this isn't aimed specifically at you. It's aimed at the more passing author who might be enticed to stick around longer if they felt there was more of a community presence, and they could express themselves more than with edit summaries and discussion page posts. Kirkburn talk contr 20:06, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

There should be nothing for me to elaborate. I do not think extending beyond the wiki metaphor is best for WoWWiki. Blogs are best kept off-site. --Pcj (T•C) 20:14, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

After looking at the links provided, I feel more or less the same as I did on WoWWiki talk:Domain name. I do not see the difference between the blogs and current talk pages, besides the layout, the focus on fan fiction (a bad thing), and the editing security. If the counter for that is that blogs could be about general topics that would not fit on a talk page, I counter that with the Village Pump. We have the limited editing more or less now: it is called politeness.--SWM24 48 23:05, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I still feel like I'm missing something... what void are these filling? I think a vote would be good, and a better explanation (or maybe an example blog) so I could understand why this might be a good addition to the site. With my limited concept of the idea, it just feels like a solution looking for a problem. -Howbizr (talk) 01:48, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree completely with Sandwichman2448. I don't think this wiki needs a blog extension. My understanding is that this is mostly used as a place to gather factual information about all things Warcraft, not to create your own content. It seems to me that talk pages and user pages work perfectly well and a blog extension would not add any utility. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 03:18, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Not that I think WoWWiki needs the blog extension, but I think Kirkburn may be thinking of how WoWWiki could serve a wider audience of people interested in commenting on all things Warcraft. I do think it would add an outlet for active WoWWikians to express themselves in a more public way than talk pages and such.

Although I've been a proponent in the past of WoWWiki as a wiki for collecting and disseminating info about World of Warcraft primarily, it has really become something bigger. I do think, if we were to add the blog extension (seems unlikely at this point, but if we do), we should restrict it to our most active members who have really done alot to make WoWWiki better. Just opening it up to any bozo who has an account to relate their experiences or express their opinions would not be helpful.

We could also make an exception for folks who want to serve a semi-journalistic purpose in their blogs. I think it would have been a great thing to have members who attend Warcraft related events blog about their experience to share with others. A prime example is when we give out BlizzCon tickets to contest winners or beta keys. Having someone blog about those experiences I think would be valuable and a good extension to WoWWiki. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:08 PM PST 17 Dec 2008

Yup, that sounds much like the direction I would want to take with it. Naturally different wikis want different things out of the extension, and it would be great to accommodate that - I look into whether an edit count limit is easily added (obviously atm it's holidays so development has slowed :) 16:14, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Can low level's tank?

Moved to Warcraft Pump.

Northrend gems new format

We want to know what people think about the new format for northrend gems (and my "future plans"). Please add your comments in the old format talk page: Talk:Northrend_gems_by_color#Future_plans

(Right now the old format is Northrend gems by color and the new one is Northrend gems by quality.)

(Also, can someone rerevert the redirect at Northrend gems? I don't want to be accusated of edit warring. I need a third person to consider the legitimity of what I ask. Also note, this redirect is temporary.) (Someone did it.) [Edit by Xhamon (talk) 21:10, 15 December 2008 (UTC)]

-- Xhamon (talk) 21:59, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

The colors don't match up well, so I think there are probably better ways to do it. Perhaps removal of the colors with the quality colors in the header instead. Otherwise, there's no reason you can't do both, though I'd list both on the same page rather than two separate pages. --Sky (t · c · w) 23:18, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Having the quality color on every stat link (yeah, I know it's for the tooltip) is overwhelming especially for the uncommon gems. Otherwise, I'm not against it. All the stat links don't have to be given quality color, because we know what quality they will be by what table they are in and the base gems in the header row at the top. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 9:55 AM PST 16 Dec 2008

Message from Wikia Community Team

Hello.

All wikis will be "read-only" from 9am - 10am UTC Tuesday morning (that's 1:00am Pacific, 4:00am Eastern). During this time, editing will be disabled while we do some routine maintenance, but you will still be able to access the site.

This message is only being sent to wiki admins, so please pass this information along to other members of your communities as needed.

Thanks,

Wikia Community Team

This message will expire on 14:13, 16 December 2008.

I got this on my talk page. At least they didn't pick 9am - 10am Pacific. When the WoW realms are undergoing maintenance and I can't play, guess where I often come? -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:14 PM PST 15 Dec 2008

Bed? --Pcj (T•C) 00:28, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

WoWWiki and then bed. Rolandius

(talk - contr) 03:18, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

--

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 9:51 AM PST 16 Dec 2008

Just to mention, the maintenance went without a problem, and only lasted 20 minutes in the end :) We do try and pick off-peak times to do it, and WoW maintenance certainly do figure in those calculations :P Kirkburn talk contr 20:08, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Citation Guide!

WoWWiki:Citation has been updated into a detailed guide containing information on how to use most, if not all, citation forms on the WoWWiki! Users who are not already familiar with citation methods should check it out!

Please do not take everything on it too literally, as it is a guideline.--SWM24 48 22:40, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Great job SWM! The only thing I would quibble with is the suggestion to put <references/> or {{Reflist}} under == Notes ==, since a Notes section also may contain info that has <ref></ref> items in it and that would be confusing. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:31 PM PST 17 Dec 2008

Actually, there's a way to handle that that was built into a who-knows-how-recent version of the extension. The short of it is you can assign "groups" to refs, so if you want to have notes, you can. Ie, <ref group="nameOfGroup"></ref>. I think, but do not know, if this works with the "name" function of ref, though you could try that out. For fuller documentation, see here and here. --Sky (t · c · w) 21:48, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I thought it was <ref name="groupName">Reference text</ref> and that it was called with just <ref name="groupName"/>. g0urra[T҂C] 22:12, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

That suggestion is left over from the version that existed before my overhaul. I will fix it.--SWM24 48 22:31, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Icon claimers

I can barely make out what this icon (Image:IconSmall Frost Dwarf Male.gif) is of. Varghedin made a better version and should be used. As to Whitedragon254's comment on Varghedin's talk page, I'm getting tired of those using the official name for icons and won't allow it to be improved cause its "theirs".

So lets get an official opinion of the community, Who thinks Varghedin's icon should be used and who thinks Whitedragon254's should be used? Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! ^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 20:47, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree the old icon should go. Could we stick with Varghedin's version for now, but if someone wants to make a correction (like making the beard a color other than blue, if that's incorrect), please use it as a starting point? I'd much rather an icon that's slightly wrong than completely cryptic.

We're comparing Varghedin's to Whitedragon's right? -Howbizr (talk) 22:01, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 22:16, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Here are the icons side by side, as I'm struggling to compare when having to flip between pages, and I'm sure others will have the same issue.

- Varghedin's 20081218200854
- Whitedragon's 20081218200904

I've got to say that Varghedin's looks better to me. As to whether it's completely accurate, I don't really know. If it's not accurate, a colour variation on it rather than Whitedragon's would be my preference. This is, of course, a rather tricky issue, as colours can appear significantly different between different systems and displays. With small icons in particular, it's more difficult than the layman might think to produce something which is going to look reasonable on the majority of systems.

As for not allowing updates, I think articles in the main namespace must always take precedence over articles in the User namespace. If an image uses a generic or official name, then it should be the best available version, and not constrained because someone wishes to use a particular version on a User page. As I've just demonstrated above, it's quite possible to use historical versions within pages, or if desired, the historical version could be made available as "Image:<name>_<author>.gif", or something similar to that. While people should not deliberately break images on User pages, I think the main responsibility lies with the owner of the User page to update their page accordingly, not the person trying to improve the main namespace to avoid the breakage.

--Murph (talk · contr) 22:31, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

As they would say in court, Whitedragon254 has no standing. The current Image:IconSmall_Frost_Dwarf_Male.gif image ( 20081218200904!IconSmall_Frost_Dwarf_Male.gif

20081218200904!IconSmall_Frost_Dwarf_Male.gif

) is unrecognizable. Please upload Varghedin's. If Whitedragon complains, send him to me. If Whitedragon254 wants to use a particular image on his user page(s), that's fine, but doesn't give any right to dictate how it appears on pages in the main namespace.

If Whitedragon254 makes a better image then it can be considered as a replacement. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:05 PM PST 18 Dec 2008

Reverted it but image isn't updating...oddly. --Pcj (T•C) 00:34, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

So as not to overlook Whitedragon's last version that has since been overwritten, 20081219003747!IconSmall_Frost_Dwarf_Male.gif

is better, but I would still vote for Varghedin's, but I would again encourage you to propose an improvement on that version if you feel the beard (or other details) need improvement. -Howbizr (talk) 20:59, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

And PCJ the revert took. -Howbizr (talk) 21:00, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Last note, I made a home for icons that could probably use some love. Category:Icons to clean up -Howbizr (talk) 21:35, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

How about this one: File:18px-Frost dwarf.gif? I made it to be more recognizable as a dwarf, but also more like what I think Whitedragon254 is going for. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:03 PM PST 19 Dec 2008

Looks good to me. g0urra[T҂C] 23:06, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Go for it. It's less "ghostly" yet still "dwarfish"

-Howbizr (talk) 20:33, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Varghedin made

and I'm fine with it. Not sure about

, but I guess it's okay. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:07 PM PST 22 Dec 2008

we dont know what frost dwarven women look like yet, noone has seen one yet. and yeah the reason why i didnt like the one he's using is because it looks like a dwarf spirit. thats all. the new icon i like better. still the female icon i think we shouldnt use yet.--

^{{T1337 to the extreme.•CThe dragon protects me...that and my MG 30 glock of course..)} 04:32, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Admin move request for Druid of the fang/Fang

Could an admin please move Druid of the fang over its redirect at Druid of the Fang. I believe that these should properly be capitalised as the proper name of a recognised organisation in the plural, and an effective title in the singular, similar to Knight of the Garter. I've already boldly moved the similar pages, but this one has a history on the redirect page, so requires admin assistance. Thanks in advance. --Murph (talk · contr) 14:47, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Pcj fixed this. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:15 PM PST 22 Dec 2008

Redirects in the Template namespace

I was having a browse of the Template namespace and noticed that we've got quite a few redirects lying around from moves, and at least a few of them are still being transcluded by articles. Should we work towards deprecating these (i.e. updating the articles which point to the redirect so that they point directly to the template)? I'd be happy to do the heavy lifting which can be largely automated via pywikipediabot (via a bot account - I think this could be large enough to merit it). Obviously there are some that clearly exist to be a convenient shorthand, e.g. Template:Sd -> Template:Speedydelete, and I'm certainly not suggesting that they should be deprecated, just the obvious cases where a template has been renamed, e.g. Template:ClassFooter -> Template:Classfooter. What do folks think? I certainly won't go ahead with this unless it's clearly desired by others. --Murph (talk · contr) 18:19, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd prefer dead or deprecated code was fixed, but I'm not an admin. -Howbizr (talk) 20:35, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Does anyone think this is a bad idea, or that it shouldn't be done? Howbizr neatly summed up my motivation for this (thanks

). It's not a hugely significant issue, but I view the Template namespace essentially as a codebase, and it's untidy to me to have old versions of functions (the redirects, in this case) just lying around, with relative randomness over whether the old or new name is used, when it's within our reach to fully deprecate most of them in a semi-automated fashion. --Murph (talk · contr) 19:49, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

I think we should do it on a case by case basis. There are some widely used acronym redirects that seem to have taken over like {{ood}} and {{sd}}. I don't like the acronym versions, but people are lazy. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:18 PM PST 22 Dec 2008

I have mixed feelings about the shorthand/acronym/convenience template redirects, but then again, I often use them, and they are well known, so I'll gladly view them more as a #define type macro rather than legacy junk. I can see that they are a different issue.

The only ones I'm suggesting deprecating are the obvious ones where someone has tweaked the name to comply with policy, e.g. "OneTwo" -> "Onetwo", "OneTwo" -> "One two", etc. There's also a second case that's just jumped out at me on having another look - the server templates that have been moved out of the Template namespace to be local - it seems a bit nonsensical to move them to another namespace, but then keep the redirect, rather defeating the purpose of the move (assuming the idea was to clean up the Template namespace). --Murph (talk · contr) 00:20, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, since there's some support for this, and no obvious objections to the principle, I'm going to go ahead with this for the ones which are clearly just adjusting the names to conform with policy. I will not be touching the ones which are clearly shorthand/acryonyms. It will take a little while, and I'll be doing them one redirect at a time. --Murph (talk · contr) 03:37, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Indentation break. Ok, MurphBot has been busy, and many instances of transcluded redirects have been updated. The deprecated redirects have been tagged for speedy deletion and now appear in Category:Miscellany for speedy deletion explained. If anyone thinks a particular redirect is useful and should remain, please feel free to revert the {{sd}} to the previous redirect. I hope none of them should be too controversial and that it's generally seen as a good thing to clean out the namespace (Template: is a special case from other namespaces, as it shouldn't be referenced by off-site pages). If any of the changes have gone against the direction someone was trying to move in, just let me know, and I'll gladly bot the change in the desired direction. --Murph (talk · contr) 01:30, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

This is now more or less complete. The vast majority of the obvious candidates have had their usage deprecated and the former redirects tagged for deletion. Some of the remaining cases could probably still be deprecated. Are there any particular ones that people would like to see changed? Here's a convenient list of the remaining redirects and where they point:

--Murph (talk · contr) 01:09, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Pet Problems?

Moved to Warcraft Pump.

More dungeon icons

I was looking at WoWWiki:List_of_small_icons and notice that it was missing the new Wotlk instances. Does anyone know if they exist, or can be imported into WoWWiki? --User:Slxception/Sig 01:36, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

All of those were hand-made. Though it seems someone has made a couple for wotlk... see Category:Instance icon images for now, until the icon page is updated.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 08:43, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

I was going to say they were probably not handmade, but taken from the WoW Raid Calendar, which notably has not been updated since the

expansion. -Howbizr (talk) 09:26, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

I would like to add that the Raid calendar hasn't been updated since 2.3, as Sunwell Plateau is missing. The ones on Category:Instance icon images look handmade, whereas WoWWiki:List_of_small_icons have some from the Raid calendar and some that are handmade. I suppose anything will do at the moment. Thanks. --User:Slxception/Sig 13:04, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

So thats where they came from ... I never visited that page before. I thought someone decided to make them all.... but technically they were all handmade, just so happens bliz employees made them =P

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 20:52, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Drop Cap Initials

Template:Initial created {{Initial|<Letter>}}, in particular for lore articles. I hope people like the concept (although I think the Blizz art could use some cropping)... I tried it out for size on the dragon article. -Howbizr (talk) 09:29, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

For the love of god, no. If you want to see fancy images like that on lore sites, see somewhere else. g0urra[T҂C] 14:22, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

-Howbizr (talk) 17:46, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

PlaySoundFile page?

I had an idea for a page, but Im not experienced enough with wikis to do it. I actually started to create this, but thought twice of it. Plus, I didnt know if it would fly with the higher ups here.

Anyway, the idea was to get a categorized listing of all the PlaySoundFile and Music commands for the game.I did a quick search for it, and found absolutely nothing. To find an I know its a lot to handle, so maybe the more popular/important files would be listed first. Like, instead of listing the moans for Wretched Zombie, list boss quotes.

If not this, maybe add the command to the pages of each page that it would fall under?

Ayalafatalis (talk) 18:39, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

There was an extensive listing, but it was a huge page and not easily navigable/editable/maintainable, so I deleted it. If this idea proceeds, please split it up/reduce it somehow. --Pcj (T•C) 21:23, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to adopt WoW as the category prefix

I have posted a proposal and vote on the category prefix issue that was never really fully resolved, in the hope that after a fairly long cooling off period we can have a non-emotional and objective vote on it. Followup discussion is probably best held on that page, if required. --Murph (talk · contr) 06:35, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

500 club?

So, I noticed recently that I have over 500 contribs, and would covet a {{wwclub|500}}, but what qualifies a person as notible? I sort of tend to do minor edits and brush-up work, not fancy templates and so on. I'd likely have to pretty up my user page too. :) User:Decibal/Sig 18:12, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Go ahead. --Pcj (T•C) 18:15, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

The standard is not clearly defined, but I tend not to give out the badge if most of a user's contributions are in user/guild/server-specific pages or talk pages. BTW Decibal, you don't appear have 500 contribs by my count. How are you figuring it out? --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:12 PM PST 23 Dec 2008

I'm dumb, and noticed the results per page counter allowed 500 now. Turns out, I have more then 200, not 500. My apologies. User:Decibal/Sig 20:23, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

I use this URL as my starting point to give out club badges. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:13 PM PST 23 Dec 2008

Nooga's contributions are an example of not qualifying for the 500 club. No offense intended to Nooga, but the badge is for contributing at large. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:18 PM PST 23 Dec 2008

Speedydelete abuse

Please do not use {{sd}} or {{speedydelete}} without an explanation. -- Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:17 PM PST 23 Dec 2008

Boilerplates, templates, parameters, and includeonly

I've just changed Help:Achievement articles/Preload [6], so that it should require slightly less editing after being subst into a new article. This was in response to finding a few instances where {{achievementbox}} was being used without the required parameters (now fixed and standardised by MurphBot). The key to getting parameters into the target of the subst is the usage of <includeonly /> (tag intentionally empty) to prevent the parser from interpreting particular parts of the wikitext. The subst process removes the includeonly sections, leaving the desired wikitext in the target. Unless there are any objections, I intend to do the same thing to the other boilerplates, but I thought I'd run it by the pump first, just in case anyone can see any problems with it, or has any suggestions for further improvement. --Murph (talk · contr) 23:51, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

I support the effort, and would encourage him again to update the other boilerplates. -Howbizr (talk) 17:27, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Also sounds good to me. I'm always impressed by wikicode that gets a good desirable result based on knowing the guts of how parsers and such work. I am sort of surprised that <<includeonly />onlyinclude> works though. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:06 PM PST 24 Dec 2008

I can't take all the credit - the ideas came from m:Help:Substitution#Includeonly & mw:Manual:Creating pages with preloaded text#Loading the preload file. I've now revised what I think is best current practice for this trick to be <includeonly></includeonly>, instead of the XML shorthand for empty tags (the XML coder in me always uses the shorthand, where possible, as I think it looks cleaner). It turns out that the XML shorthand works just fine with subst, but it doesn't work with preload (http://www.wowwiki.com/Page_name?action=edit&preload=...). The behaviour from our site isn't entirely consistent with the docs - noinclude tags are meant to be preserved with the preload mechanism (but not subst), but our site is stripping them. (Gourra, that's why I changed your change to noinclude back - it could be a bug in version 1.13.3 - 1.14alpha on meta.wikimedia.org does indeed leave noinclude tags in place when preloading.)

Help:Item articles/Preload has now been updated. --Murph (talk · contr) 01:20, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Spam protection filter being a touch over-zealous

The spam protection filter seems to be a touch over-zealous - it's blocking page updates even when the blacklisted URL is in a part of the page that's unchanged. I encountered this while deprecating {{Infobox BattlegroupN}} for {{Battlegroup}}. Here are the problem pages and the URLs that seem to be triggering the filter (obvious spaces inserted):

Server:Frostwhisper Europe: http://swedishsyndicate.bounceme.net

Server:Skullcrusher Europe: http://www.legioninc.notlong.com

Server:Lightning's Blade Europe: http: //jackheart.dns2go.com

--Murph (talk · contr) 02:14, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Update - in the 3rd case (Server:Lightning's Blade Europe), the link was giving a "404 Not Found", so I've just removed it. In the first 2 cases, the sites look legitimate at first glance. --Murph (talk · contr) 02:24, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. --Pcj (T•C) 04:28, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Spell Power Clear Up

I just got back into WoW about a week or two after WotLK was released, I also stopped playing a couple of weeks after Sunwell came out. I have noticed that a big change that was made was that spell power was implicated on gear as opposed to the usual +healing or +damage. So my main question to you all is, if I were to make something like a shaman, had I been specced for restoration would I want more mp5/spell power? And had I been elemental would I want more spell crit/mp5? I have heard from a few people that in WotLK, mp5 is much more important to healers while crit is more important to casters, which hasn't changed since the game came out, however, I was also told that spell power is no longer important in WotLK as +damage or +healing was in the previous versions of the game. So any help would be great, I am just a little confizzled right now about this, thanks!

-- SoWhatNow? (talk) 14:17, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Normally I would have said to read up Shaman tactics, but the reference to Tier 3 makes me think this article is very much out of date. You may have to result to googling.

However, I should say my general impression of

is that theorycrafting is almost unnecessary, because it simply doesn't matter. Many aspects of the game are "easy mode," gear being one of them, comparatively to the difficulty with choosing gear in

. As long as you stick to gear your fellow players are calling "shaman resto gear" (AKA caster mail with no hit rating), you'll probably do just fine, even through Naxx25. -Howbizr (talk) 16:07, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

One last thought is simply mimic Blizz's idea for your class, and stack stats similarly to tier 7 resto gear. -Howbizr (talk) 16:09, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Domain name

Good morning! As many of you already know, Wikia are planning to move WoWWiki onto the wikia.com domain in the near future. I now have a date for when this is planned: Jan 7th. The main issue is what address do we move to (wow.wikia, wowwiki.wikia or warcraft.wikia), for which I think a vote is appropriate. Note, as a result of the move, few should notice a difference, as the old address will always continue to work - it will just redirect. You can read more about the domain move at WoWWiki:Domain name. Thanks! Kirkburn talk contr 16:21, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

According to w:Moving your wiki to Wikia#Will the URL of my wiki change? While exceptions can be made for very large wikis, most Wikia sites can be found on a subdomain of wikia.com. Neither of the 2 listed "advantages" of moving to wikia.com are in any way relevant to WoWWiki. So, since it's very obvious that we are a "very large wiki" (that page lists WoWWiki as an example of a large wiki), why can we not insist on just staying with www.wowwiki.com, if that was the preferred option of the community? We have a brand, it has considerable status. Any change of this nature damages the brand. Additionally, Each Wikia site is managed by the communities that create them - changing the primary domain seems like a management issue to me, and should only be done with a clear consensus support from the community. --Murph (talk · contr) 17:16, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, we probably should even look at moving WoWWiki away from Wikia, although the cost for bandwidth from other providers and actually getting the database backup promised by Wikia with all the images may limit the capability to do that. --Pcj (T•C) 18:34, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Given our official fansite status and the position we hold in the larger WoW community, the most obvious sponsor for an independent WoWWiki would be Blizz themselves, unless we can find one or more benefactors who would be interested in non-intrusively supporting our efforts. Blizz would almost certainly have deep enough pockets and the infrastructure to support us, it's mostly just a question of how we could do such a deal, followed by the logistics. Without wishing to sound too egotistical, we add tremendous value to the WoW brand, and I'm sure there are at least a few influential folks inside Blizz that either do recognise that, or could come to recognise it.

The images need not be a huge issue, if Wikia were to be uncooperative. Extracting a full set of the current images is quite scriptable (revision histories might be harder or just lost, but that would be a small issue in the grand scheme of things).

Having said all that, my preferred option right now would be a cooperative Wikia that respects community consensus and does not force unnecessary, unacceptable and damaging changes on the community.

--Murph (talk · contr) 19:24, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Murph, I linked to WoWWiki:Domain name, which should already answer some of your queries. The name of the site will not change, only the URL. Old links will all redirect. No breakage should occur. Kirkburn talk contr 18:53, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, Wikia isn't great at following what they say, but the cost burden of WoWWiki is probably pretty large. We should definitely know the real costs of running WoWWiki before making it sound like Wikia isn't putting alot into it.

Otherwise, I'm annoyed that the announcement of a date comes less than 2 weeks from said date. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 12:02 PM PST 29 Dec 2008

I'm more annoyed by the feeling that we don't have an adequate voice to Wikia with our main lead, Kirkburn, actually working for Wikia. --Pcj (T•C) 19:11, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Fandyllic, I'm 100% with you on the timescale. The concept of this change may well have been raised months ago, but announcing the actual date with only 10 days notice is bordering on cavalier and negligent. --Murph (talk · contr) 19:28, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I've read that page a large number of times now, over a number of months, and it has never convinced me that the change is necessary, or that it's not detrimental to WoWWiki. It's not really a question of whether someone can configure a web server to do some redirects or not. A strong and established brand which has been using "www.<brand>.com" as its primary domain name for a considerable period of time is damaged by any change which essentially deprecates a key part of that brand (the primary domain name) for something which is fundamentally inferior.

The other thing that particularly irks me is that this change should only be made with community consensus - it is a management decision, and Wikia clearly state that the management is done and the policies are set by the community, not by Wikia. Wikia also state that exceptions can be made to their normal subdomain policy for very large wikis. If our community was to overwhelmingly call for such an exception (which we already have in place today), why can that exception not be continued?

I should also say that I continue to respect you as a significant and valued WoWWikian, Kirkburn, my discontent and anger is aimed at Wikia, not at you.

--Murph (talk · contr) 19:24, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

If we don't find a different hosting and have to change to a different domain name, I'm out of this. Also seconding what pcj said. g0urra[T҂C] 19:31, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[Edit conflict] Well, I'd like to think my voice is adequate, but unfortunately I am not all powerful, and some choices are not in my hands. Regarding the closeness of the date: it's not ideal. I only just got the date, so it's not as if I've been sitting on it :) If it's not enough time I'm sure I can argue a delay, but the choice is only what domain to go to, which shouldn't take too long. As for the cost of running WoWWiki: it's certainly not cheap, and not something simple. (Crucially from IRC is best to answer that kind of question.)

The exceptions weren't really done on a 'community' basis, they were the result of imports and wikis that came from elsewhere - Wikia is based on the concept of having the wikis at x.wikia.com, and we're finding out that wikis off the main site are more of a problem than we originally expected. While not wishing to be cliché about the issue, these aren't easy times in the economy. Fortunately online ad buys haven't altered much, but we want to ensure Wikia's security as much as possible, to ensure we don't have any problems continuing to support the wikis. Kirkburn talk contr 19:38, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Is there some reason we couldn't do the redirects backward, and have all of the wikia links direct back to wowwiki? Kind of out of the box I know, but just throwing it out there. -Howbizr (talk) 21:03, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

If you try any of the suggested links, you should see they all work already :) Kirkburn talk contr 21:14, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

In an attempt to illustrate why I think this is a terrible thing and must not be done, I'll deviate from the norm a little, and engage in a moment of reductio ad absurdum, sprinkled with a little sarcasm. This is not my view, it's just an attempt to illustrate to Wikia why the community might hate this change. It is absolutely not intended to provide a compelling or conclusive argument, just to (hopefully) cause some folk inside Wikia to stop and think before making a disasterous and entirely needless mistake. For those that already are convinced that this is an incredibly bad thing, hopefully this will give you a brief interlude of light relief.

Since the DNS domain name doesn't really matter, as long as the site name and logos can continue the desired branding, and redirects are provided from the well known, respected and established domain, we can just move *.wikia.com across to *.wikia.wowwiki.com, or any reasonable subdomain.wowwiki.com of their choice. Full redirects will be permanently provided from all existing hostnames, and there will be no barriers to adding reasonable new redirects in the future. The existing communities will retain full management and policy control of their individual sites. The end users, and all bar the most advanced editors and admins should not really notice any difference. It's the obvious choice, since www.wowwiki.com represents the largest single set of web traffic per hostname. We'd prefer not to do it, but the salesman has lost his calculator, his copy of Excel has a weird DLL error, and it's just too much hassle for him to add up all the individual sets of numbers (he's got an important ~~golf engagement~~business meeting to get to). Since it's no big deal, almost nobody will actually notice or care, and we can just go ahead with this on the morning of Jan 6.

--Murph (talk · contr) 22:09, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

When is Wikia known to listen when it comes to these things? g0urra[T҂C] 22:42, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, the track record isn't great, I grant you. Given the unreasonably short timescale thrown at us, and having thought a little more, I decided to escalate the issue a little, and have finally found a use for having a Wikia-wide login. I've no idea if it will get a timely response, or if it will even help, but I have posted a complaint about the change at wikia:User talk:Gil#WoWWikians are extremely unhappy - we like our domain as it is, thanks. Nothing ventured, nothing gained... --Murph (talk · contr) 23:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Looking back at wikia:Moving_your_wiki_to_Wikia#Will_the_URL_of_my_wiki_change?, I find it strange that the main reason why Wikia want to change our domain name to *.wikia.com, despite the fact that Wowwiki is well established, and apparently Wowwiki isn't a "very large wiki". I don't fall for the "page rank" bullshit as Wikia got in that bullshit by themselves by forcing the Monaco theme on wikis. g0urra[T҂C] 00:26, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Quoting from that page: There are no limits to the size your wiki can be at Wikia. WoWWiki has more than 65,000 articles about the World of Warcraft game and is freely hosted by Wikia. We hope your wiki will also grow to that size!. If we are not a "very large wiki", by Wikia standards, I don't know who is. There's also Larger examples include WoWWiki, ... --Murph (talk · contr) 00:35, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

A request: please do not go around pinging various staff members - all are aware of this, and those involved know of this discussion. In addition, this has nothing to do with the skin of the wiki, and we are by no means the only wiki affected by the change. The policy referred to is no longer the situation. Tough times call for tough changes. Of course we are a large wiki - we are the largest wiki on Wikia. However, this change affects all such wikis, large or small.

This possibility was raised several months ago (it was announced here, and WoWWiki:Domain name has existed for some time), and the timescale was originally set for December, which was postponed to January. Now I have a definite date in January. Unfortunately it is a little close, but the domain we move to is the only issue needing to be solved within that time. No rebranding is needed, no big announcements, just a choice of which domain we prefer.

We have a sales team, but unfortunately we cannot change certain ranking websites that do not combine website listings. This is frustrating for us too, as it makes Wikia appear smaller than it is. This is an issue we have looked at for months. Kirkburn talk contr 00:45, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

There have been grumblings and discontent about it since it was first mentioned, on WoWWiki talk:Domain name. I doubt I'll be saying anything more to Wikia staff, I think I've made my point as best I can to them. I'm sorry that I had to do that, but I feel sufficiently strongly about this issue that I was compelled to escalate it, and the extremely short timescale that has been sprung on us left only one option, to escalate it to the highest level immediately. That is my right as essentially a customer in a business relationship where I feel the supplier is behaving in an abhorrent, unacceptable, unnecessary, inappropriate, and/or damaging manner (unfortunately, all of those apply in this case). Nothing posted so far has said what level or which people in Wikia were aware of this issue, or driving the change. It was also unclear if senior staff at Wikia would be aware of the bad feeling that is being generated, and that is something that they absolutely need to know about. I've done it now, and I won't be bugging them further unless Wikia somehow ups the ante on abusing their position as host of WoWWiki.

I do trust you to try to pass feedback on to Wikia, Kirburn, but I'm also acutely aware that you have a conflict of interest in this matter (I'm sure you will do your upmost to represent us, but a conflict of interest cannot be ignored, and we don't know what the culture inside Wikia is like). I have seen how Wikia steamrolled across massive community opposition to the domain change on other wikis, and the damage it caused. As someone who strongly wishes WoWWiki to prosper, I do not want to look back and think "I wish I'd spoken up". --Murph (talk · contr) 01:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi Murph,

Thanks for your note - I completely agree that WoWWiki, like Wookieepedia has built a large brand and has significant name recognition. Many of the heaviest readers of the site work at Wikia and are addicted to the content and I often worry that they don't work enough because they spend so much time on WoWWiki!

Frankly, these are tough times, with the economy shrinking. We are seeing ad revenues slowly declining as a result for us - as I expect all web sites are. As a result we've been looking for ways to support the costs we incur in hosting all of our sites so that we can continue to provide a high level of service and up-time that our customers expect.

We batted around a number of ideas and have frequently talked with advertisers about what makes them pay more - or less - when they decide where to advertise. Here were a few of the options we discussed as options for replacing the lost revenues from a soft ad market

Put significantly more ads on the site and increase the size of all the ads (336x300px vs 300x250px as an example for the box ad) to get more ad network $$
Interstitial ads - even our own staff reacted very negatively to this idea
Put ads in the middle of the content (improves click rates on the ads where we get paid per click from ad networks).
Kontera links (green double underline text links on up to 4 words per page that popup small ads when you mouse-over the link)
Get more premium advertisers to buy, by serving WoWWiki from the wow.Wikia.com domain. This allows us to sell WoWWiki directly rather than relying on ad networks. WoWWiki.com on its own has not been large enough for us to get advertisers excited about buying ads on it

One thing we DID NOT discuss was adding ads for logged-in users. We believe that if a user really doesn't want ads, logging in is a simple way to express that desire and we respect it.

To be honest, we're not happy about any of these choices and we made a judgment call that the domain move was the least intrusive of the bunch. One of the data points we used was looking at Wookieepedia. This wiki is on a wikia.com URL, and still sees, on a monthly basis, 156,578 people get to the wiki via a search for wookiepedia (mis-spelled), 52,064 search for wookieepedia, and 20,226 search for wookipedia. By contrast, only 36,360 search for star wars wiki, 4,974 for starwars wiki, 3,416 for starwars wikia and 2,484 for starwars wikipedia (strange isn't that). What that shows us is that the site name, not the URL still determines how people think about Wookieepedia and as a result how they would likely think of WoWWiki despite any domain change.

Your point that we didn't discuss it long enough with the community is a good one - I take the blame on that. If you think that some of the other alternatives we considered would be preferable, or you have some ideas of your own, I would encourage you to start that discussion here and let us know when you reach some kind of consensus. Giving you a few weeks to discuss possible options is also a reasonable request. If you reach a consensus on another alternative before January 28, we can circle back to figure out if there is a way that we can make your ideas work. If not, we'll move ahead at that time, hopefully with your support and understanding.

Gil (talk) 04:59, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Note, for those not familiar, Gil is the Wikia CEO. Kirkburn talk contr 13:18, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

You're still going to move it from Wowwiki.com, aren't you? g0urra[T҂C] 10:43, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

The additional delay is appreciated. Unfortunately, all of this should have been considered long, long ago.

Such problems aren't solved by letting down your community, though. If Wikia is having problems like you describe, all the domain change will do is push back a few months the date when WoWWiki will be closed.

I believe only what I see. And so far all I've seen is poor management, awkward situations and promises holding as long as a couple of months. What I won't believe is the miracle that will somehow keep WoWWiki up much longer. You will not get any new user with the move. The only kind of reaction you can get is hostile. How is that a good long-term solution?

But yeah, keep going... User:Adys/Sig 12:27, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Gil, thanks for your time, and the long post giving your point of view and issues, it is appreciated, even although I remain unconvinced that the change is necessary, beneficial, or will actually achieve the result Wikia desires (enhancing the appeal to advertisers).

Have Wikia approached Blizzard Entertainment regarding possible sponsorship or support for WoWWiki? We are one of a very small number of official fansites (a status that we have strived long and hard to earn and protect), and a unique resource which adds significant value to their primary product (and a number of additional products). So, it is highly beneficial to Blizz that WoWWiki's success and status quo continues. In that regard, either selling wowwiki.com to Blizz (not a windfall sale, it's not worth that much, but enough to adequately compensate Wikia for time and money invested in supporting us), or doing some sort of sponsorship, advertising, or publicity deal with them to properly cover the operational costs of the site. Blizz now have adverts appearing on their own forums, so they are in the field as both advertiser and publisher.

As far as selling to premium advertisers goes, I'm highly sceptical that changing our domain name will make any difference whatsoever. People spending or representing big bucks on advertising are not stupid. If you can't convince them with "Hello, we are Wikia, and we represent a combined advertising network across 100 different community content web sites, 10 of which are high profile, respected, and long established brands" (using the numbers 10 and 100 arbitrarily - I don't know how many sites you have), I can't see them being convinced by "Hello, we are Wikia, and we represent a single, large, sprawling community site covering over 100 different topics". The size of the opportunity is exactly the same in both cases, and the big players are very good at accurately evaluating the size of any opportunity. I obviously don't know what you have tried, or how you have presented it, that's just a guess of the message the possible advertisers might receive. Once you are talking about a single huge pseudo-combined site and big money, they are going to do some research and see that it's not really 1 massive site, but lots of little sites with a few large ones thrown in, and I think you'd find yourself back at square one. If advertisers are not interested when you talk to them about the combined overall Wikia opportunity now, they are still not going to be convinced when it's all been squashed under a single domain.

Looking at your other options, I'd personally be far less concerned about increasing the number, size, and intrusiveness of ad placement, if it was the only way for us to keep wowwiki.com as our primary domain. Obviously, you can't go too far on that, or you will harm both yourselves and WoWWiki by driving our viewers and contributors away. Popups, popunders, interstitials, and anything with that level of intrusion are almost universally loathed by viewers, for example. Zero or minimal ad content for registered users strikes me as a very sensible policy. I think most of us that strongly oppose the domain change do recognise that it costs real and significant money to run the WoWWiki servers and bandwidth - I don't think anyone is denying that, or that Wikia need to find a way to cover those costs. In a way, what WoWWiki (and all factual & informational wikis, for that matter) really needs is a modern day Andrew Carnegie to recognise the value of our information and knowledge repository, and bear the costs of making it freely available to the public.

So, realistically, are we being given the choice of the following?

Change domain
Keep our domain, but significantly increase and improve ad placement, including larger and/or mid-content ads (please provide a hide button if they are mid content, so it doesn't become a chore to read large articles).

If those are the choices, I'd reluctantly opt for the increased adverts. If we went down that route, an ongoing constructive discussion/dialogue would be essential to tune the presentation of the adverts in such a manner that they do not destroy the usability, content, and appeal of the site.

--Murph (talk · contr) 13:22, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to comment on option #2. I understand that ad placement is an intricate art, but I think the current layout of the website leaves plenty of real estate for ads, without changing the basic layout. In particular, I'd target the left column beside the main content for ads. To be honest when I browse wowwiki, I'm almost shocked (and thankful) how few ads there are. In particular how I can read a long article and it was as if there wasn't a single ad to be seen, making me wonder how this site stays afloat.

Just reaching out to whoever is financially responsible for this website, not necessarily wikia, are Google ads something we've considered as a revenue stream? Again like I was mentioning, there's more than enough room for text ads. I mentioned Google in particular because many people (myself included) support their text based, no flashing, no blinking, context sensitive ad approach. I actually like advertising when it's something I'm interested in - I'm only annoyed if it gets in between me and my browsing, worsened when I have no interest in the ad. But if I am attracted to it on my own time, I don't feel offended, and I think that's a general consensus with consumers.

If ads could keep our domain, which keeps some of the largest contributors and admins in the community, then I'm for it. Thanks again for your comments, Gil.-Howbizr (talk) 15:48, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, Wikia switched from Google ads to the ones we have now because Google ads didn't make enough profit. g0urra[T҂C] 17:50, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm personally most interested in broaching ground in the area of choice #1: Approaching Blizzard about it, and if not Blizzard, another of the other WoW companies: ZAM (hosts Wowhead and co.) or Curse (the largest two off the top of my head). I'd say we get the number of page hits that would make us attractive to one of the two... --Sky (t · c · w) 17:32, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Hahahahaha User:Adys/Sig 18:53, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure there was a purpose to you posting... I just fail to grasp it. Since you're leaving anyway, either a) actually comment on what I said, or b) leave now, since all you're doing is dragging down the discussion. --Sky (t · c · w) 19:23, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

We have Blizzard's attention, but their money? I like your idea Sky, but I don't have much optimism about it, from a realist standpoint. -Howbizr (talk) 19:37, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Seriously? How in heavens do you expect to sell WW to Blizzard? For that matter, why would any host care about it?

There has already been a (failed) Curse deal in the past. Zam? Come on now, why the hell would they buy this?

The wiki is a freehost guild/server page, with a bunch of manually-updated (and way outdated) item pages, which serve as tens of thousands of this wiki's pages. There is very few actual content. It's all lore, and... sorry, lore doesn't make big digits of monies. Seriously, I have the utmost respect for the community and everyone knows that - but this won't interest anyone financially.

Good luck selling that. User:Adys/Sig 20:21, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

How about removing all the "duplicate, still always outdated content", as in - item pages, quest pages (as I've always said it's useless...). The usual suspects of database sites cover that. Invent some voodoo magic that autoredirects. How much traffic could we save with that? WoWWiki's strengths lie elsewhere. Focus on those and get rid of all the bloat.

Armagone (<imagelink> GossipGossipIcon.png%7CUser_talk:Armagone

</imagelink> <imagelink>http://images.wikia.com/wowwiki/images/5/51/BinderGossipIcon.png|Special:Contributions/Armagone</imagelink>) 01:50, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Adys, for giving me something to think about.
Armagone: "get rid of all the bloat." Like your sig, eh? :P However, I'm in agreement with that opinion also, and was also about at the point of telling someone about it. Autodirects? I'm not sure about that, but perhaps something like the current special:BookSources? Ie, an extension which allows people to search the database of their choice through wiki? There is a point in saying that they draw traffic which could probably better directed toward lore and such, though I hesitate when we think of the potential of articles such as

[Going Down?] (it's an ordinary achievement that in my view deserves documentation, to allow for collation of thoughts and such related to it), which would undoubtedly be added to the list of "keep off the wiki"...
Returning to what you said Adys, they are legitimate points. Checking in with them first is still an option, however unlikely they are to be seen through to an end. As for ZAM, why not? We get rid of the database portion, and then we suddenly aren't competing with any of the other sites on the network (not that that is a good or bad thing, naturally). From what I can tell just out and about, when people browse to WoWWiki, it sure as hell isn't for the database that they're coming. Lore does sell, for whatever reason (perhaps as we're the only legitimate collation of it, aside from a handful of other sites which don't have the current ability we do to disseminate information of the sort). If that becomes a dealmaker, as in, the extraordinary number of pages which don't see real use need to be removed, we remove them. --Sky (t · c · w) 04:07, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

I have forked a new section for discussion of the database type content, as I think it's a big subject in its own right, with quite a few potentially controversial aspects. --Murph (talk · contr) 06:10, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

I just thought I would add my thoughts in here. WoWWiki is indeed a brand, if not a household name (while not directly selling anything). Murph seems to know what he is talking about. There is defiantly hypocrisy regarding the things implied by wikia:Moving_your_wiki_to_Wikia#Will_the_URL_of_my_wiki_change? versus their actions. Fandyllic's statistics request was never answered (unless it was on IRC), but the things stated by Gil made it sound like an act of financial desperation. I am sure every group wants a magical rich guy to fund their good efforts, but does anyone really think that will happen? Adys made several good points on the topic of other hosts.

Having more than one 'dot something' in the domain, by its very nature, looks stupid. If major editors and admins are threatening (to various degrees) to leave, then I agree that this will mostly kill the wiki. In the spirit of hopful but impractical ideas, why can the name not be moved back if the economy improves before the world as we know it ends?--SWM24 48 21:02, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Yikes, I take a short break from WoWWiki during the end of the year and a monstrous thread like this appears!

Anyway, although I understand the sentiment of not wanting to change the primary domain from wowwiki.com, I'm not has vehemently opposed to it. I think we should ask ourselves the question (and try to answer it): What will be the observable effects of changing the primary domain?

I will try to give some answers, but I'd like others to pitch in. After we get a reasonable list, I'd like to discuss how truly harmful these effects would really be.

You will see *.wikia.com (* being warcraft, wow, wowwiki, etc.) instead of wowwiki.com in your URL address on your browser.
When you try to go to a wowwiki.com/rest of URL link manually it will probably go there, but then the address will change to something starting with *.wikia.com.
If you lose DNS access or have a DNS problem, wowwiki.com/rest of URL may not work.
Traffic rank sites will no longer give stats based on wowwiki.com alone and instead give *.wikia.com aggregate statistics (which I think is what Wikia really wants).
We might see ad links to WoWWiki use the *.wikia.com address rather than the wowwiki.com address.
Somehow (although I suspect unlikely), people will start to refer to WoWWiki based on the *.wikia.com address more than they used to as either wowwiki.com or just WoWWiki.

So that's my off the top of the head list. Anything heinous that I missed?

I'd also like to ask again that Kirkburn or some other Wikia representative start a vote on alternative *.wikia.com domains (warcraft, wow, wowwiki, etc.) which I did earlier and seems to have been forgotten or lost. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:35 PM PST 5 Jan 2009

Please put response to the above at Foreseeable effects of domain change.... --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:38 PM PST 5 Jan 2009

A proposal - that would require you to designate a representative

All,

Let me start by saying thanks for the thoughtful responses. I appreciate the collaborative tone of the discussion and will try very hard to honor our joint goals here.

A few quick factoids, so you have more information for your decisions

Costs

We have reasonably high fixed costs because we have a team of engineers to support mediawiki upgrades, extensions, improvements, etc, a team to support each of 3 co-lo's 24/7 to insure both fast loading time and full backups if one colo fails, LOTS of hardware that creates a monthly expense, community team members who work with the engineers and help support new communities that are launching, etc
We did a layoff in October to reduce our fixed costs and that has helped
We do make a small profit on each incremental page visited, but we don't have enough visits yet to cover all the fixed costs :-) So anything we can do to create MORE visits, or MORE content is where we focus our time.
We are not desperate - we still have money in the bank to cover costs for a long time to come, but in this economic climate, every small company is increasingly focused on getting to break-even faster than originally planned

Revenues

We have tried very hard to get Blizzard's ad agency to buy direct advertising from us. To date, they have not agreed to, but when they bought through a network (gamepro) Wowwiki was not their best performing site because their goal in advertising is to acquire new users and shockingly, many people on wowwiki already own the game :-) Their best performance was on our music and sports wikis oddly. In a tough economy ad buyers are less likely to risk buying a new site - when they can spend money with sites they already know - which is why we're focused on selling wikia.com to people who already buy it..
We will reach out to Blizzard direct in 2009, but I am not sure if they will bite - if you know anyone there, contacts are always welcome. I would love to get a sponsorship...
We have tested text ads within the content and if that's something you're willing to consider, it might look like this: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-French-Toast-Waffles where text ads are in the TIPS section (middle of article) and in the footer of the page. We would also test box ads on the left and right hand sides of certain sections as another example. To date our tests with google have had poor results - but hope springs eternal and I am definitely willing to try again.
We could test Shopping.com type links to related game products within the content (but those would have a graphical thumbnail)
We might also work with you to get more video onto wowwiki via metacafe, 5min, etc - with video ads that only show during the video
We could test Kontera links - and gauge community reaction (I am worried it will be poor)
We are starting to enable more ads on the left hand side in longer pages and will continue testing that as well.

If not moving the domain is something you as a group decide is important, then I would like to work with you to find reasonable ways to increase our revenues - with wowwiki.com as the domain. I would ask that as a group you should deputize 1-2 people (who are not employed by Wikia to eliminate any perception of bias and not leave Kirkburn in a tough spot) to serve as our advisor. We would then go to this person(s) to get sanity checks on what is reasonable to test as an ad integration and what isn't. Then we would jointly need some time to experiment in good faith as it will probably require a variety of ad execution test before finding the winning combination. If that makes sense, I'm happy to jump off the proverbial bridge, hand-in-hand with you, to find an alternative solution. If that is your preference, let me know who you designate as our advisor before the end of January.

Thanks again for your patience and support

-- Gil (talk) 05:45, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Gil, thank you for the candour of your response, and for recognising what is an important issue for many of us. I'm very encouraged to see your willingness to work with us on alternative measures to meet both your and our requirements. --Murph (talk · contr) 06:27, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Please vote on this proposal, to keep the domain or accept the move to the wikia domain. -Howbizr (talk) 18:05, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

So, the vote is looking like a near super-majority (58.3% or 7 from a small sample size of 12 with 2 thinking it's okay and 3 neutrals) is against changing the domain from wowwiki.com. Please vote, if you care about the WoWWiki domain (wowwiki.com vs. *.wikia.com, where there should also be a vote for *, but I haven't seen it yet). I'm also the "advisor" so far, but I'm not sure what that role exactly entails yet. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 6:55 PM PST 7 Jan 2009

The message below is replicated at Status update section of WoWWiki talk:Domain. Please direct any comments there.

So, the community decision appears to be keep www.wowwiki.com as the primary domain and for Murph and I to represent the community in deciding alternate means of increasing revenue for Wikia based on other changes to WoWWiki.

Currently, I'm trying to set up a meeting with Gil (trying to shoehorn it around my work schedule). Most likely it will be Monday (Jan 19, 2009) in the afternoon (Pacific) at Wikia's San Francisco office. I'm not sure how Murph is going to participate, but we could set up some kind of conference call, Skype or something. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 12:58 PM PST 16 Jan 2009

The meeting is currently scheduled for Tuesday (Jan 20, 2009) at 3-4 pm Pacific. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 2:20 PM PST 17 Jan 2009

Info and notes from meeting at WoWWiki:Working with Wikia. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 5:18 PM PST 22 Jan 2009

Looking to the future for database type content

This section is a continuation of ideas first mentioned in the domain name discussion above.

I think trimming down the content which is best served by one of the popular database sites is an excellent idea. I'm a huge fan of WoWWiki, but the current situation with items, quests, etc strikes me as too much hassle to maintain, and the effort being spent on that could be better directed elsewhere (personally, I mostly use Wowhead for such things). I don't think a wiki is well suited to providing information on such a huge number of database items. Yes, we can improve coverage of items and quests with more and better bots, but is it really worth the effort when there are popular, respected, and highly successful sites that already serve that purpose better than I think we could ever hope to achieve?

Here's what I think could be done with the items, objects, spells, quests, achievements, NPCs, etc. Only directly provide content where we have something specific to add, such as strategies for finding/killing the NPC, good and useful information on how to complete the quest or achievement (including any known bugs and workarounds. Any situation where we could provide additional information beyond that on the DB sites, or reliably present the information in a more useful manner (such as annotated and categorised lists, eg the achievements main articles), would be permitted and encouraged, with the one condition that it has to be maintainable. All other pages with just the basic content would then be reduced to effectively a simple stub containing the relevant ID(s), e.g. {{item-info|12345}}, {{quest-info|12345}}. The templates could use JavaScript to seamlessly pull in the appropriate content from a database site (e.g. wowhead), so that visitors to the page still get the information in an immediate fashion, but we are effectively just providing the basic name to ID translation. Tooltips would work in a similar fashion, pulling the information from the DB site. All of the traffic for the DB site information would be directly between the client and the DB site, not via the WoWWiki servers, we would just serve the relevant JavaScript and IDs to enable it. For clients which don't do JS for whatever reason, the template would provide a lightweight and simple method of linking to the DB sites. Creating the stub pages would be largely a one-time, scriptable operation, and the number requiring updates for game changes would be vastly reduced (almost eliminated, but there's bound to be a few situations, e.g. a quest ID being replaced when Blizz change the mechanics of it).

Obviously, such a move would need the approval and possibly some cooperation from the DB site. Providing clear attribution for the source of the information would also be essential, e.g. "Item information provided by Wowhead" (link and logo, etc). It should, hopefully, be seen as a win by the database sites - we drive more users in their direction.

Yes, the above idea leaves us with essentially the same number of pages in place, but the lion's share of the traffic and updating effort is removed from WoWWiki. If we were to go ahead with this, the logical (to me) thing would be to split these stub pages off into their own namespaces, both simplifying the management and categorisation (not wiki cats, per se, more a case of seeing where each type of internal and external content resides) of our content. That would leave our main namespace for the content which is well suited to the wiki (instance, profession, class, theorycraft info/guides; and lore). The point of continuing to have a page per DB item, but essentially a stub page in secondary namespaces, is that it both allows easy name to ID translation for contributors to this site, and allows us to seamlessly augment the content from the DB site on the small proportion of DB items that merit it, i.e. the best of both worlds (hopefully). Scripting the creation of such stub pages shouldn't be too difficult a task. Splitting into individual namespaces both solves most naming collisions and gives both internal and external folk an honest and reasonably accurate count and view of our content.

--Murph (talk · contr) 06:05, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

TLDR version: More work for pcj to do on JS, probably not a good idea. (Not that I mind the challenge, it's just this particular concept is not well suited for a JS wiki implementation) --Pcj (T•C) 06:20, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Yup, it's more coding and development needed, and well beyond the usual wiki Template development and parser functions, but there's no need for it to fall entirely on the shoulders of one person. I, for one, would be happy to try to share some of the load with you, and I'm sure there must be other experienced coders within the WoWWiki community, or the wider WoW community. --Murph (talk · contr) 06:48, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

No, it's not going to happen. --Pcj (T•C) 13:34, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm sure I would be able to code it as a Java/JSP webapp, but in the wiki context? I'm really not sure. The other thing is, if we essentially provided a way to view much of the hard work wowhead or another database site provided, but bypassed their advertising, I don't think they'd be very happy with us. Not that the content is copy written to them, but something legally doesn't sit right with me about this idea. -Howbizr (talk) 14:31, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Not that it happens often, but I have to agree with pcj here :P Don't see any real benefits from your solution

Armagone (<imagelink> GossipGossipIcon.png%7CUser_talk:Armagone

</imagelink> <imagelink>http://images.wikia.com/wowwiki/images/5/51/BinderGossipIcon.png|Special:Contributions/Armagone</imagelink>) 14:32, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

I certainly wasn't suggesting that we do such a thing without the approval of the site providing the information. If we make a major change here, we need a medium/long term supportable solution, and that means that all parties that are involved with it have to be ok with the implementation. The benefits to us from importing the basic item content client side, direct from a database site are that we no longer have to keep that information on the wiki, and try to keep it reasonably up to date. --Murph (talk · contr) 05:57, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Let's separate the idea from the implementation here. The idea is that we remove a massive amount of bot-generated, database-style content: items, quests, non-notable monsters etc from the wiki. It's not a bad idea -- that content is, as Murph points out "too much hassle to maintain", especially considering that "there are popular, respected, and highly successful sites that already serve that purpose better than [...] we could ever hope to achieve".

I think the "we never should've imported game data to the scale that we did" sentiment is fairly common; getting rid of the no-content content would probably be a step forward. There are some borderline cases where the removal of item/quest pages could impair other articles; boss pages tend to list loot, trade skill recipe lists exist. There's a fair bit of decisions to make here; which could probably be put in a proposal and voted on at some point in the future.

The suggested implementation (stub pages, templates, JS) is not the only way to do things, and is hardly worth debating before consensus has been established on what it is we actually want to do with the content. pcj's grumpy summary is irrelevant; the question is "Should we remove this content" not "Should we ask pcj to code things". -- foxlit (talk) 16:11, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

The problem I see with the JS implementation is XSS. There is no Wowhead or other DB API which allows for this. And I'm not sure we want to do it anyway. --Pcj (T•C) 16:31, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I realised that after pondering the idea for a while. Going the JS route would require the DB site to implement a suitable API for populating the stubs client side, or the W3C draft [Access Control for Cross-Site Requests] TR to be implemented by browsers (and then the critical mass of users to upgrade to browser versions that support it, so could be a long while). It's not impossible that one of the DB sites could be persuaded to do it - several provide tooltip JS, and Wowhead (possibly others too, not sure) provide XML access to the item data. That said, I agree with the earlier sentiment of focusing on what we would like to do, rather than worrying about the technical details of the implementation, in the first instance. --Murph (talk · contr) 06:12, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

A thought in the direction of "boss pages tend to list loot": I see no reason to remove Template:Tooltip itself, only the majority of pages it's used on. In general, couldn't we simply move the tooltips which are on separate pages to inline with the boss pages (keeping in mind disambigpage=), and then redirect the item names? That preserves the information, but that reduces it from 11 pages per boss to 1 page per boss. We could ditto this behavior for item sets. Where conflicted, I think I'd be more inclined to have the item pages redirect to the set pages, but this is something to work out a little bit further down the road if we continue down it.
Obviously, we'd disinclude pages such as Thunderfury...
I'm not real sure what to do about the rest of the items; if the coding could be sorted out, that would be nice. Or as I suggested about, an extension that is along the lines of Special:BookSources... let the people who use our site choose which item database they get their info from.
The issue from there becomes the same as the recipes page information; I know also that we have "dungeon loot" pages with {{loot}} links, which would need to be changed in some way... I think it should also be priority to keep as much traffic on our site as possible, as that's what makes our usefulness, Googleability, etc, go up. As you mentioned, there are also the recipes pages, and since about the beginning of BC, people have started making pages such as Wrath healing equipment, which I would guess are more useful than looking at items in a vacuum, which is perhaps the biggest issue with having them secluded on what are essentially stub pages... --Sky (t · c · w) 16:44, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that moving the item data inside the boss pages is such a great idea. To me, that just makes it less flexible, and harder to update the data in the future, but doesn't really provide much advantage for the wiki. If someone thinks the transclusions are using significant resources for normal page views, I might be more convinced, but transcluding blobs of data really should be something that MediaWiki is very good at. --Murph (talk · contr) 06:26, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

I originally wrote this as an answer, but ended up going off-topic. Sorry for that, unindenting.

Wikia nuked the statistics a while ago but... have a look at which pages are the most popular. Grasp the pattern from it. See which ones should be featured/highlighted/easily findable. See which ones should be plainly deleted. Also, there's a .. LOT of deleted pages, most of it being stuff we figured "would be a neat idea" but didn't hold up in the long term. My old spellpage implementation is an example. I don't know what's left from it, but it was a few thousand pages worth and permanently nuking this stuff would alleviate some of the backload. Thirdly, the engineering team needs to observe what is actually causing bottlenecks and what not and fix those, instead of relying on more powerful hardware. Last but not least, I'm not going back on my old rant on the new wikia design. Advertising issues or not, you can change a website layout without making it look bloated etc. You'd be surprised hearing the amount of visitors a neat and clean design can influence. If some real effort is done in a way that can make WoWWiki grow, I'd be up to elaborate some of my ideas on IRC. And a growing wiki means its own community before the visitors and well before advertisers - a wiki without a solid community behind it will not go far. Happy new year from Athens. User:Adys/Sig 19:49, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

The only page I feel is kind of bloated is the landing page, but I'm generally not a fan of portals. It's certainly no busier than CNN, Yahoo, or MSNBC, but I think they're equally overloaded with content.

There are a few actual articles and categories that have gotten out of control, but I've seen some pretty good attempts to restore order and improve load time on some of the larger "directory" pages (all JC patterns, all achievements, all common items, etc).-Howbizr (talk) 20:25, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

There is a lot of stuff that's pretty much a duplicate of sites like wowhead. Item pages are probably the best example. But they do sometimes have additions that you don't see on those other sites, or that you would only see if you scroll through pages and pages of player comments that include stuff like "this is totally a hunter weapon". I wouldn't mind getting rid of the generic pages that have nothing new to offer, and I have no idea what kind of technical work would need to be done to implement this kind of purge. But I wouldn't want to see the original stuff disappear. I like that wowwiki makes useful player comments easy to find. That's just my 2c. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 17:12, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I certainly wouldn't like to see the database content completely vanish. Our strength on it is that the useful comments are easier to find than on the database site, where the useful information can be hidden amongst page after page of junk. Our other strength is in providing complete coverage of WoW, and we can't be complete without some coverage of the database content. Our weakness is out of date and incomplete information, and the hassle to both populate and update it. What I'd like to see is a best of both worlds approach, where the base information is updated in a more timely fashion, but we can still have useful additions to the base (or even override the base info for the rare circumstances where that would be appropriate). So, my thinking is not to give up on the database content completely, but to find a more manageable way of dealing with it, where the base content is more reliably kept in sync with Wowhead (or whichever DB site best suits our purposes). --Murph (talk · contr) 17:39, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Quest chain with extras

I haven't been editing quests much... not really my interest. But I'm editing some as I come across them while playing. I'm stuck on how to format this chain. Here's the easy part:

Now after you hand in Blending In, these two become available: A Courageous Strike and Neutralizing the Cauldrons, but you don't have to complete those two in order to move on.

I'll figure something out and post it, but feel free to correct my formatting if it's not quite right. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 04:49, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

If they are not required to progress the quest chain, the write in the Notes section that those quests become available after completing Blending In. g0urra[T҂C] 13:30, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good. Thanks. I'll do that. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 16:53, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

You could also do:

5.

[72] Breaking Through (opens side quests

[72] A Courageous Strike and

[72] Neutralizing the Cauldrons not needed for chain)

...or:

5.

[72] Breaking Through

a. Side quest not needed for chain:

[72] A Courageous Strike

b. Side quest not needed for chain:

[72] Neutralizing the Cauldrons

--

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 12:23 PM PST 5 Jan 2009

Oddity in the Server namespace

While looking around at what redirects are floating around out there, I stumbled across an oddity that may well need a database edit to fix, as we have a page that cannot be accessed via any combination of URL that I can dream up (and I have tried quite a few).

We have *both* "Server:Stonemaul" (disambig page) and "Server:stonemaul" (redirect). All attempts to access the redirect result in me getting the disambig page.

You can see both listed at http://www.wowwiki.com/index.php?title=Special%3AAllPages&from=Stonemaul&namespace=114. "Stonemaul" is at the start of that page, and "stonemaul" is at the end (after the 'Z' entries). --Murph (talk · contr) 06:33, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Fixed Server:stonemaul versus Server:Stonemaul. Please let me know if you find similar problems. --Pcj (T•C) 15:51, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks.

. I've had a look at the tail end of Special:AllPages for all namespaces, and I don't see any other lowercase oddities like that, so I suspect it was an isolated case. --Murph (talk · contr) 17:37, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Listing Redirects

Having spent some time cleaning up legacy redirects in the Template namespace, I got frustrated with the information available from Special:AllPages and the API XML. Special:ListRedirects isn't particularly useful, as it's unsorted and essentially unfilterable. So, after a little bit of Python hacking, MurphBot can now produce ListRedirects on a per-namespace basis (currently broken from Server due to the oddity mentioned above). I have no intention of acting on the information for anything other than Template and Category (WW:CAT does not allow redirects) right now, I'm just providing it for information, in case others find it useful. --Murph (talk · contr) 06:41, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Guildprogress templates

I'm contemplating having a look at the huge number of Guildprogress templates to see if they can be merged to a smaller number of parameterised templates. Initially, I'll do most of it in a sandbox, just letting folks know, in case someone is already looking at them, or has any thoughts to add. See WoWWiki:Guild Progression Templates for the docs on what's there, and Special:AllPages for a list. It's not an urgent issue, but I think they would be much easier to maintain if there were a smaller number which found their behaviour from parameters. --Murph (talk · contr) 17:29, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

I've had a quick stab at a modular form of this, and it's looking quite feasible to cut the number of Guildprogress_* templates down to a small fraction of the current number through use of some more advanced template techniques to nearly eliminate the duplication. See User:WoWWiki-Murph/Guildprogress for what I've been playing with, but please don't make any changes at the moment, it's a work in progress. --Murph (talk · contr) 19:33, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

WoWWiki:Server project might overlap with what you're doing, but I don't know the status of the project. Maybe check with one of the people working on that? -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 19:42, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

It does overlap to an extent, although the project appears to have been mostly dormant since approx June/July. I also get the impression that we're not going to force server pages to use any particular format for their progression listings, just provide them with a nice standard set of templates that they can choose to use. My interest in the Guildprogres series of templates spawned from going through the Template namespace looking for legacy that was in need of cleaning (limited to stuff which should be relatively uncontroversial).

My intention is not really to develop the Guildprogress stuff beyond what it does at present, just dramatically reduce the number of templates used to achieve the result, while keeping a 99% identical output. Those templates have been done in a relatively simplistic fashion, using a large number of near identical templates instead of a more minimalist number with conditional logic and behaviour based on the parameters. By reducing the number, we make them more supportable, as any required style change should only be required in 1 or 2 files, not 10 or 20. Admittedly they will be more complex when condensed, but we have a reasonable number of folks around that are good with advanced templates. --Murph (talk · contr) 20:42, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

I should add, that the Guildprogress templates date back to pre-Wikia days when we had a much older version of MediaWiki and far fewer parser extensions. I can't easily rewind history to check, but what I'm doing today might well not have been feasible back then, so there might not have been the same alternatives to a mass number of similar templates. --Murph (talk · contr) 20:46, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Lich King Image

Can someone please move this image Image:LickKing8770c.jpg to Image:LichKing8770c.jpg? it's name is Lick King instead of lich king. and honestly lick king sounds very..very wrong. EDIT: I just noticed that whoever uploaded the image made the same mistake with these also. Image:LickKing8770b.jpg and Image:LickKing8770a.jpg --You know im seriously 1337 now. ^{{T1337 to the extreme.•CThe dragon protects me...that and my MG 30 glock of course..)} 21:26, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

I would just re-upload the images as the correct names and add {{speedydelete}} to the wrongly named ones. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:03 PM PST 16 Jan 2009

Feral Attack Power

Anyone have an ideas about how to handle this? Lots of screenshots from 3.0.8 PTR are showing that druids see one tooltip, while all other classes see another. Note that it's strength and feral attack power that are different on the druid version of the tooltip. I think just concatenating it into one tip might lead people to believe there's more strength than there really is, or that druids didn't realize the weapon gave them extra strength (if we only posted the non-druid version). -Howbizr (talk) 20:51, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Journey's End
Binds when picked up
Staff
Two-Hand
Speed 2.40
254 - 468 Damage
(151.0 damage per second)
+87 Agility
+114 Stamina
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 80
Item Level 226Disenchants into:
[Abyss Crystal]: 1-2
Equip: Increases attack power by 228.

Equip: Increases critical strike rating by 57.

Equip: Increases haste rating by 75.
Sell Price: 26 70 3

Journey's End
Binds when picked up
Staff
Two-Hand
Speed 2.40
254 - 468 Damage
(151.0 damage per second)
+114 Strength
+87 Agility
+114 Stamina
Durability 120 / 120
Requires Level 80
Item Level 226Disenchants into:
[Abyss Crystal]: 1-2
Equip: Increases critical strike rating by 57.

Equip: Increases haste rating by 75.

Equip: Increases attack power by 2354 in Cat, Bear, Dire Bear, and Moonkin forms only.
Sell Price: 26 70 3

Also see this screenshot from MMO Champion for more examples. -Howbizr (talk) 20:52, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Put both the feral and non-feral tooltips on the same page, and the non-feral version could be inside <onlyinclude></onlyinclude>. g0urra[T҂C] 21:00, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

We need to know if these are morphing items based on class or actually different item id items first. Having similar items with the same name and different stats is not new. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:07 PM PST 16 Jan 2009

I WOULD like to mention that even before Wrath of the Lich King, there was at least ONE other "morphing item" in the game, namely [Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian]. As you can see on the item's page, the various tooltip boxes for the item were plunked down at the bottom and it actually has no {item} on-hover tooltip thing like other weapons and items have. Therefore, following this trend seems to be the smartest thing to if it's not HUGELY necessary to have it have an {item} on-hover tooltip. ~ Doc Lithius [U|T|C] 07:47, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Azjol-Nerub Instance link

Hey there. I am a brand new noob regarding Wikis and am not even sure this is the appropriate place to give feedback. However, I am certain somebody can help out. In Portal:World of Warcraft under the "Instances by continent" article (Instances_by_continent) there is a link for Azjul-Nerub however, the linked article (Azjol-Nerub) explains the Azjul-Nerub region and lore. I really think the following article should be linked there: Azjol-Nerub_(instance) as this is the article which discusses the actual instance, not the region or lore. Please let me know of any feeback you would have on this comment. -- Ensonix (talk) 22:55, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Fixed.--SWM24 48 23:37, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

More on the Warcraft RTS series?

Hello, I'm a noob here, so bear with me a bit if this subject has been breached before to ill or no effect. While I'm well aware that this is the WoW wiki, it is the first and foremost wiki on the Warcraft universe around. In fact, other wikis of a similar subject are pretty hard to come by. The problem there is that, while I'm certain I'd like to, I don't play WoW--I play TFT. And while this DOES have information on the RTS games, it doesn't have much gameplay info--all of the articles relating to Warcraft 3 and its predecessors are about Warcraft universe lore, or how they tie in with the WoW universe. While WoW is the big thing now, the Warcraft games are still popular, and they are still great games. I think the wiki would benefit from developing those articles that would interest the RTS gamers *cough*(like me)*cough* because most specific information on unit types or campaigns is only found on strategy websites, and they don't go very in-depth. Adding gameplay info to the information on the Warcraft universe would make these articles useful to the many Warcraft 3 fans as well as interesting. And if this is a bit outside what the WoWWiki is about, I understand, but would appreciate suggestions as to a wiki that focuses more specifically on the Warcraft RTS series :3 -- ReySquared (talk) 15:47, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

You are certainly welcome to develop those articles here. --Pcj (T•C) 15:53, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. I'll try to make any edits fit with the rest of the article. I'm not much of a strategy dynamo unfortunately, but I'll give it my best shot.--ReySquared (talk) 16:01, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

This subject has been brought up before, though usually in the reverse from what I've seen. ;) This wiki does encompass all things Warcraft. I keep thinking I should go back and play some of the single player series, but I just never find the time. It's sometimes hard to keep from stepping on the toes of editors that are more interested in other aspects of Warcraft than I am. It would be extremely helpful if you would focus on the RTS games, since WoW tends to overshadow those other subjects sometimes. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 17:01, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Pcj said it. I actually would like to see more RTS content on WoWWiki. Offhand, I think Benitoperezgaldos has done a good amount of work on that recently. If these RTS game info requests would get a little more constant, I would think and suggest a portal.--SWM24 48 03:11, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I'm trying to make an article for every creep, unit and building in Warcraft III, with high quality pictures, icons, in what missions they appeared and statics but now I don't have much time now as I am doing my community service. However I'll try to keep working on this. Benitoperezgaldos (talk) 02:40, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

I have an RTS lore and cleanup based project going on if anyone is interested.--SWM24 48 21:58, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Death knight capitalization or lack thereof

I'm not posting here to debate the capitalization, merely to point out some confusion resulting from it. There is currently a vote to delete Category:Death knight sets because it's not Category:Death Knight sets. I'm getting confused myself trying to figure out when to capitalize and when not so I'm not voting. But I wanted to make sure this was brought up to those of you who do know since I suspect they are voting to delete the correct category. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 20:42, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

The correct category is Category:Death knight sets as per WW:NAME and WW:CAT. g0urra[T҂C] 14:07, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I am a bit confused too on the spelling of it in articles. I have seen it spelled Death knight, death knight, and Death Knight. I am not talking about at the beginning of sentences either. I mean in the middle, end, etc. of a sentence. Rolandius

(talk - contr) 14:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

If used in sentences its supposed to be death knight, in the end both ways are sent to death knight. As for categories Category:Death Knights is reserved for in-game death knights (non-players), whereas Category:Death knights is reserved for player death knights. So everything in the Category:Death knights category is kept in the same case, hence why every category is was changed/created to how it currently is.

^{{TDon't hiss at me.•CIf you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.)} 21:43, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

OnLoad Lua problem.

Moved to Warcraft pump.

Namespaces and guild-specific addons / tools

I'm pondering whether PBDKP (DKP web app, guild-specifc, not publicly available) should really be in the main namespace, or if it should be moved to either Guild or Server. I can't decide right now, so leaving it as is, and flagging it here to see what others think. --Murph (talk · contr) 12:02, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Not publicly available, then it shouldn't be in the main namespace. There are lots of subculture systems and terms that shouldn't be in the main namespace and this sounds like a classic example. You could link to it from the DKP page. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 10:45 AM PST 13 Jan 2009

Image searching

Is there a better way to search for images than to just click through? I tried putting {{bigcat}} on Category:Mob screenshots and that doesn't help because they all start with "Image:". I think ideally, we could add descriptive tags.

For instance, I was going to add a picture for Snowshoe Hare, but then I thought, it's very similar to most other rabbits, so why not just use one of those pictures. There are a few mobs that use the same model in WoW. But searching for "rabbit image" comes up with various "rabbit" articles not necessarily various images, and the only other option is to search for a specific one, "arctic hare" does the trick, but I'd need to know the name first. Ideally, we could add tags to pictures when we upload them such as "critter", "bunny", "rabbit" so that a person searching for an image could find a selection of the most appropriate. Ideally, there would be a way to search within the image namespace as well.

Is there an easy way to do this? Or is this beyond the purpose of this wiki? -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 17:17, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

It might not help for all situations, since I'm not sure how well suited it is to the Image namespace, but have you tried Special:Search? Remember to select the Image namespace and de-select Main. E.g. http://www.wowwiki.com/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&ns6=1&search=rabbit&fulltext=Advanced+search. Edit: when I think about it, Special:AllPages might help you too, e.g. http://www.wowwiki.com/Special:AllPages?namespace=6. --Murph (talk · contr) 17:37, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh cool. I was looking for an advanced search option and didn't see one. Can we move the "Search WoWWiki" option from the navigation bar (part of the menu on the left side of the page) and put it into the search menu? Make a link like Advanced Search under the big glaring Google search box? That seems more intuitive to me than the way it is now.

That mostly solves my problem. The other suggestion I had was to tag images so that they would show up in a search for similar terms. Using Special:Search to find "rabbit" you still don't get Image:ArcticHare.png. Again though, I understand if that type of categorization is beyond the purpose of this wiki. Most users search for articles and not images.

Edit: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching makes it sound like this is possible. "Searching the image namespace means searching the image descriptions, i.e. the first parts of the image pages. For searching the titles, use Special:Imagelist." It seems that our Special:Search isn't doing this - it's only searching the names of the images and the articles that link to them.

If the functionality is there, I'd consider creating a project to tag all of the images we have. And for future uploads, just make it clear that a user should fill in the image description with words that someone would likely use when searching for that image.

Another edit: It seems that wikipedia created a template to do this. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information

Edit of edit: On second thought I'm not sure that template actually does what I'm asking. It merely adds an infobox to the picture's page with assorted metadata. The search function seems to search it because terms in the template are highlighted in search results, but it's not really tagging the images like the proposal I'm making. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 20:50, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

I can actually think of a lot of uses for it. Want to find all of the items in WoW that look like a pink dress? Or a crown? Want to see a gallery of tauren pictures? Or are you writing an article about game lore and you'd like to add a general picture to make the page look nice? I don't see that functionality on wowhead. Could be another way that we differentiate wowwiki from database sites. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 22:40, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Actually, categorizing the images with the existing categories would do what I want too. It doesn't change the search results, but it would group the images together. Is there a reason why we don't categorize images beyond the vague Category:Mob screenshots and Category:NPC screenshots? -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 02:48, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Not particularly, that I know of. It's just never particularly come up. Kirkburn talk contr 12:26, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Can WOW be used to transfer files between users?

Is it possible to use the WOW API to transfer non-WOW files (e.g., pdf's) between players or allow a player to pick up a file that has been left somewhere in the game (e.g., at the bridge to StormWind)?

-- Angler101 (talk) 05:29, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

WoW acts strictly as a sandbox - that is, no information realistically goes in or out of the game from your system whilst you are playing. This leaves only addons, which, to put it simply, can't do it. At least not without some very complex coding relying on converting the files to WoW-readable formats, which would basically be a huge waste of time :) Kirkburn talk contr 18:43, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

You might be able to leave links to files on the Internet at a location in-game, record the location data and URL using an addon which would then broadcast that information to other users of the addon. --Pcj (T•C) 18:48, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

The closest you get to transferring files (and everything Pcj said above is correct to my knowledge) is plugins communicate to each other through channels. So if two users have the same plug-in installed, they both listen on the same channel, and both perform actions based on some kind of listening mechanism. Don't ask me how it works beyond that, but I'm sure that's what

[Gatherer] and Atlas are doing, because I pick up mining nodes & guild member locations in real time if we both have the same addons installed. -Howbizr (talk) 19:36, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I had imagined that people would all have the same add-on or plugin. What I'd like to do is create a plugin that allows people to go on quests for real files (e.g., pdf, music, image, etc.) that they could then use when finished playing. Has anyone heard of any thing like that with WOW? Angler101 (talk) 21:23, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Can you clarify what you mean by go on quests for real files? Do you mean... an internet scavenger hunter? That doesn't sound like something related to WoW at all if that's what you mean. I should note that the kind of add-ons I was referring to are very complex to code. They are not for the feint of heart. -Howbizr (talk) 22:47, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

It could be pulled off, but not in any easy way. It would be more of a hindrance to each user than an improvement, you're better off just sticking to online drop-box services. User:Tekkub/Sig 02:43, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Zebra stripe tables

Would it be possible to add a class "zebra" or "striped" for tables, which would allow for automatic striping of rows? Or would this be too much overhead?

This would obviously be extremely handy for large tables. If you have to add a new element somewhere inside it, you often have to manually swap a crazy number of "alt" values to get the striping correct again. -- w.woods (talk) 07:21, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

I hate striped tables for exactly that reason! But I do see the usefulness of them, I second this, can we get some javascript majicks? User:Tekkub/Sig 07:26, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Atm that could only be done via JavaScript, as there's not enough browser support for CSS-based automatic striping. Regarding doing it via JS, I'm not sure - we already load the website with a lot of JS, not sure more would be ideal. Kirkburn talk contr 12:30, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

I know you were talking about auto-striping, but I just wanted to point out that we do already have the striping styles, but you have to manually do |-class="alt" for the alternate rows. It is a pretty serious pain when you modify a large table. -Howbizr (talk) 14:30, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

I support the general idea - it has always seemed a bit backward to me to manually tag the alternate rows in large tables. It might be a good idea to go for a hybrid implementation with the relevant CSS striping in place for those who have JS disabled by default, and the JS version to produce a more reliable result in cases where the browser doesn't handle the CSS implementation. m:Help:Sorting#Striping has some info and pointers towards some JS which might be useful (obviously, sorting and striping would need to be independently selectable on a per-table basis). --Murph (talk · contr) 14:39, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

From what I recall most automation is stymied by the difficulty of getting the row number at render time with JS. I'm somewhat surprised this isn't a built-in option to wiki table rendering, since you can use a custom markup. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 10:41 AM PST 13 Jan 2009

Getting the row number isn't difficult at all, it is just more JS as Kirkburn indicated. --Pcj (T•C) 17:49, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

From an abstract algorithmic point of view, you don't even need the row number, although it's possible that using the row number might be easier or more efficient in JS for some reason that escapes me right now. The following pseudo-code would achieve it and probably be more efficient than using the row number (no arithmetic operations, just a binary state):

alt=FALSE; while (row=nextrow()) { if (alt) { alt=FALSE; row.class="normal"; } else { alt=TRUE; row.class="alt"; } }

I wouldn't expect the JS to be quite as simple as that, but that's the basics of what it needs to do - no row number necessary, just a simple binary state machine iterating over the rows.

--Murph (talk · contr) 02:09, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Actually, no. You would use a simple for loop to enumerate through all elements of tag name TR in a given table. --Pcj (T•C) 03:39, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I think zebra striping is supported in CSS3, but that's supported almost nowhere so far. I'm not sure if this helps or not, but there was some discussion on the best ways of implementing zebra tables using JS in: [7], which was improved upon in: [8] and then continued in: [9]. Perhaps those implementations are too elaborate for our use, but maybe the theories are useful. One thing that JS could definitely improve upon over the current manual method would be if it correctly re-stripes tables when they're re-sorted (again, assuming this isn't too costly). Currently, re-sorting zebra tables results in a mess of stripes.--w.woods (talk) 04:22, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I did some checking and the Wikia JS already had table striping support on the sortable feature (but was using different CSS classes). I have reworked this and patched the appropriate changes in to the MediaWiki:Common.js. The striping itself is still manual. --Pcj (T•C) 16:29, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I did some quick tests and have a working demo at [10] --Pcj (T•C) 17:16, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I clicked edit, then canceled my edits, and the striping went away. -Howbizr (talk) 18:38, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

The link above links to custom JS which is not included in the skin JS yet and won't show up on page load. --Pcj (T•C) 18:40, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Shared Help

You may have seen the announcement about Shared Help (one of the projects I was involved in), which you can read about at w:Forum:Shared Help - new feature!. The plan is to roll it out to all wikis next week - however, since we already have a multitude of help pages, I have requested that we're not included at first. Nevertheless, we've needed to overhaul the help pages for a while, so we may want to look at sorting this out fairly soon :) Kirkburn talk contr 12:34, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a good step forward, in general. I'm quite surprised, to be honest, that MediaWiki doesn't seem to have a standardised set of pages for easy local inclusion/import (yes, there's the stuff on meta and www.mediawiki, but there doesn't seem to be a good quick way to pull that onto a wiki and maintain it with changes on the original site).

As far as I can see, the Wikia shared help allows local notes, and those will appear below the shared help. Is that the only way for local variations to appear? Can we still have pages which are completely specific to WoWWiki, e.g. Help:Item articles, or would those need to move to the WoWWiki namespace? --Murph (talk · contr) 13:56, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Assuming we use different names to those on Shared Help, there'd be no restrictions to continuing to use the help namespace - the articles would display as normal. Kirkburn talk contr 16:31, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Same Quests, Different Levels

With Wrath of the Lich King, the new battleground Strand of the Ancients was implemented. This new battleground also added two new PvP quests into the game for players level 71 and above. However, these quests share the name with two already in-game quests: Quest:Concerted Efforts and Quest:For Great Honor. I was attempting to make a page for the new quests, however I am unsure of how to title the page. I looked at the page Quest:The Battle for Arathi Basin!, though I was unsure if "Quest:Concerted Efforts (71)" or "Quest:For Great Honor (71)" would be the proper page title.

What would be the appropriate way of titling a page under the circumstances stated above?

-- Jpsblue 02:52, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Your naming should be fine. The real issue is how we should disambiguate the new from the old. We may want to make the new versions the primary name and add "(61)" to the old ones instead. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:15 PM PST 16 Jan 2009

Zone category project

I think this project is almost done. WW:ZCP Looks like the only thing left is to straighten up the WotLK instances, but that's not my area of expertise. (See my notes on the project talk page for more info on my confusion.) Would be great if someone could finish this up! -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 16:33, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Category tree cleanup

I'm thinking about starting a project to cleanup the categories and give them a hierarchical structure instead of the sloppy mess they are in right now. I'm starting with the Mobs category since it seems relatively innocuous and shouldn't overlap with anyone else's projects. If it goes well, I may start an official project to clean up the entire category tree, but I don't want to set my sights too high at the moment.

I will be keeping notes on User:Mordsith/Sandbox1. Please feel free to comment here or on my talk page if you see any problems with what I'm doing. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 20:52, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

You're clearly going in the right direction and should be commended for starting on these projects. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 1:32 PM PST 16 Jan 2009

Thanks =) That's a bit of a relief. -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 20:39, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

By tree were you thinking "Mob" - "Neutral Mob" - "Ogrill'a Mob" kind of thing? But in general, yes thanks for starting the project. -Howbizr (talk) 22:39, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes. From my sandbox page, this is the tree I'm working on starting from Mobs (I included some higher categories to get a sense of where Mobs fits in the grand scheme):

Category:World of Warcraft NPCs

Categories for various professions of the interactive NPCs
Category:Mobs
- Category:Mobs by instance
- Category:Mobs by zone
- other categories?
- Category:Creatures
  - the 10 creatures types
    - subcats of the types

If anyone else is interested in this, I'd move my work to an actual project page. Or you could just pitch in when you feel like it. I wasn't sure I could structure it into an actual project when I started, and I figured there wouldn't be too much interest anyway since categories are kinda boring to most people. ;) -- Mordsith - (talk|contr) 10:58, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Links on Page Priest

I think the link in the page Priest need some fixes. The link to http://www.priesthaven.com seems to be a dead link, at leasst it is not working for me since long time. And i found another page with lots of information about priest, maybe we add this 1. its http://www.timboas.es

Since im i pretty new editor of WoWWiki i put up this comment instead of direclty start editing the page :D

-- Powerdk (talk) 17:48, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

I removed the dead priesthaven link. Go ahead and add the link you suggested. You could practice using the {{elink}} template with it, but it's up to you. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 12:53 PM PST 19 Jan 2009

Can someone help me make a page for my guild in wowwiki?

Moved from the Warcraft pump.

I've been poking around the US/Aerie Peak guild info and noticed that a few guilds had their own pages. I'd like to have one too but can't figure out how to go about getting it started. I saw the info about copying stubs etc... but really have no idea what this means. Can anyone help me?

Thanks, Gorgonis

PS: This is my first post here so I hope I'm in the right place and not breaking any rules.

-- Gorgonis (talk) 20:54, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Assuming you know a little about creating pages and editing a wiki, you can start here: Help:Guild articles. --

Fandyllic (talk · contr) 4:07 PM PST 23 Jan 2009

The Name's "Passive"..."Racial Passive".

Greetings, fools! I'm back from my four month exile imposed by HughesNET! I found a solution that WORKED! HOT DIGGITY! Guess Wikia won't be needing that secure server after all! Alright, on to the meat...

Rolandius recently brought to my attention that Racial Passive abilities such as [Hardiness] or [Quickness] are lookin' a little...well...redundant. ~~As you can see by the table on the right here~~ (removed due to the issue being fixed), it doesn't say just "Passive", it doesn't say just "Racial", it doesn't say just "Racial Passive"... No...it says "(Racial Passive) (passive)". Maybe this was someone's silly idea of a joke ("Passive racial is passive"), but it does seem a bit redundant...
Now, normally I'd just fix this myself. However, I'm not at all sure what to edit and what NOT to edit in order to make it not do that anymore. I tried changing the Cast Time variable, but it not only changed "(Racial Passive)" to "(Racial)", it also changed "(passive)" to "(Cast time: 0)". So...yeah. Just thought I'd mention this.

As always, thanks for reading! ~ Doc Lithius [U|T|C] 07:27, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. g0urra[T҂C] 15:41, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Awesome! Thanks, Gourra! ~ Doc Lithius [U|T|C] 16:03, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Wowrp

This might not be the right place to ask this, but I started WoWRP.com a couple of years ago, and it grew quite fast. But then it died due to a couple of server moves, exploits and the like in the WikiMedia software. Anyway, what I was wondering was, would anyone be interested in helping me get it up and running on Wikia? The wiki has been approved and I'm looking for sysops to help get everything on its feet. It can be located at wowrp.wikia.com and any and all help would be much appreciated.

As it's stated in the wowwiki article for the site, it's not there to compete with WoWWiki, but to let users post their stories and characters and build upon the lore (without ruining it of course). The old site already linked to a lot of wowwiki content, and so will the new site.

Thanks for reading this, and like I said, just give me a holler on Wikia site if you want to help. -- Eluna (talk) 10:21, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

@@ Line 1,427: / Line 1,427: @@
 :: Awesome!  Thanks, Gourra!  ~ <font color="#00BF00">Doc Lithius</font> <nowiki>[</nowiki>[[user:Doc Lithius|U]]|[[User talk:Doc Lithius|T]]|[[Special:Contributions/Doc Lithius|C]]<nowiki>]</nowiki> 16:03, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
+== Wowrp ==
+This might not be the right place to ask this, but I started [[WoWRP]].com a couple of years ago, and it grew quite fast. But then it died due to a couple of server moves, exploits and the like in the WikiMedia software. Anyway, what I was wondering was, would anyone be interested in helping me get it up and running on Wikia? The wiki has been approved and I'm looking for sysops to help get everything on its feet. It can be located at [http://wowrp.wikia.com wowrp.wikia.com] and any and all help would be much appreciated.
+As it's stated in the wowwiki article for the site, it's not there to compete with WoWWiki, but to let users post their stories and characters and build upon the lore (without ruining it of course). The old site already linked to a lot of wowwiki content, and so will the new site.
+Thanks for reading this, and like I said, just give me a holler on Wikia site if you want to help.
+-- [[User:Eluna|Eluna]] ([[User talk:Eluna|talk]]) 10:21, 25 January 2009 (UTC)