User talk:Buffalkill

Categories

Please stop with these "Lost realms of ..." categories. They are unnecessary. The improper display of realms on the island pages was caused by your adding the "Realms" category to the "Lost Realms" category page. I have fixed that bug. Now all of your "Lost Realms of ..." edits need to be reverted and those categories deleted. Also, please do not remove the island categories from the region pages. The island categories belong on the region pages.

Before you make extensive changes like this, please discuss them on the forum. --Indirik (talk), Editor (talk) 04:33, 30 March 2014 (CEST)

I don't mind some clean-up on categories. The wiki could use a lot of cleanup. But when you make extensive changes to categories, especially when you add categories to other categories, you need to be very careful. Adding the Realms categories to Lost Realms and Original Realms of X broke semantic queries everywhere that people were querying for active realms. The fix to this is not to create new categories for Lost Realms of X, which caused people to also start creating categories for Active Realms of X, but to step back and think about why your change broke the query. Was what you were doing really necessary? Was there another way to do it? Was the benefit of subcategorying all those pages worth all of the extra work that was being caused by changing the categories, assuming that we could even find all the cases that were being broken? (Also, Lost Realms of X is a superfluous category. It can be queried for by using something l'ke {{#ask:[[Category:Lost Realms]][[Category:East Island]]}}. This gets you: Alara, Armonía, Avamar (Realm), Avamar Selective, Coimbra... further results. Needs a bit of formatting work to clean up the output, but not too difficult.

Having more people to work on the wiki is great. Why don't we hop over to the forum and start a new thread on the Wiki board about what needs changed, and what's the best way to accomplish it. The wiki is a collaborative effort. If we don't work together on it, then we're just going to completely screw it up. --Indirik (talk), Editor (talk) 04:02, 31 March 2014 (CEST)