Neverwinter Wiki talk:Categorization

An extensive category tree is a good way to make it so people can navigate the Wiki without page jumping. What are people's thoughts on categorization. Should we be creating extensive trees or are large overarching categories sufficient for people.

For instance, which is the preferred tree structure for locations. Would people prefer something simple like

Category:Locations

or something more complex like

Category:Locations with the subcategory Adventure Zones which contained a subcategory for each Adventure Zone which then contained a subcategory for each type of thing within that Adventure Zone as well as the pages for each Instance, within that Zone.

Ex. Category:Locations --> Category:Adventure Zones --> Category:Blacklake District --> Category:Blacklake District NPCs --> (list of NPCs)

These category structures would be overlapping such that there would also be a category NPCs which would contain the subcategories for all the Adventure Zone NPC categories.

Is that too much in people's minds or does that sound like something that would be good. Shaudius (talk) 04:57, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree with botn, to be honest. I explain a bit more below in the general approach I advocate for wikis. In fact, I have been intending to go back through the infobox templates and add automatic categorization based on things like location and such, but I'll wait for more input here. &mdash; oOeyes  [[Image:User-OOeyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:OOeyes]] 05:23, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

A purist approach to categories
My thoughts on categorization is that we try to maintain a more purist approach to categories than typical at most wikis, i.e. Category:Races containing only the race pages themselves and not pages about races, Category:Classes the same way. List pages like Race would be in the category above in the hierarchy or at the category root.

The reason for this is that if we should decide to use any kind of data extensions like Semantic MediaWiki at any point, a purist approach helps keep queries simpler. I can query Category:Races and get only races; I don't have to add some extra condition to keep other pages from showing up.

That means we'd have to avoid certain typical practices common on many wikis. For example, it's common to do something like adding   on the Class page so it'll show up under * in the category. I'd propose we instead add a link to Class from the category page itself and avoid what really is a mild hack, no matter how common it might be.

Another thing is generally we should try to stick with categories containing either only pages or only subcategories. This wouldn't be a hard rule because it's really only important for categories where the topics have a very strict scope, classes and races again being good examples of this, but this wouldn't really matter for lore. As an example, we could have something like Category:Locations that just includes all location pages, and Category:Locations by category or more specific categories like Category:Location by region that includes the relevant subcategories. Again, this helps keep things simpler if we ever use certain extensions. I agree that a stricter system will be harder to keep intact, but it really could benefit us in the future. &mdash; oOeyes   05:23, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

I think this is a good way to do things for certain things, provided that it allows for the following example to work:

Category:Races              --> (sub)Category:Racial Traits exclusive list of all races      exclusive list of all racial traits

I'm less inclined to think the second thing is a good idea. This is kind of what I was envisioning:

Category:Classes(which contains a list of classes, no other subpages have pages just the root) --> Category:Guardian Fighter --> Category:Guardian Fighter Feats --> Category:Guardian Fighter Heroic Feats Category:Classes --> Category:Guardian Fighter --> Category:Guardian Fighter Powers --> Category:Guardian Fighter At-will Powers

I started to do this on NWOwiki somewhat, and I think it looked like it had promise. http://nwowiki.co/index.php?title=Category:Classes Shaudius (talk) 19:45, 23 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Considering that most types of pages that would be queried will likely have an infobox performing automatic categorization, we could add pure categories later. So I won't object to following this more conventional approach for now. &mdash; oOeyes  [[Image:User-OOeyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:OOeyes]] 00:24, 24 April 2013 (UTC)