GuildWiki talk:Style and formatting/Materials

Currently we use various formats for common and rare crafting materials. I plan to go through all of the materials over the next days, and before I do that I'd like to agree on the formating. To kick of the discussion I created Bone, with a formating that I think covers all the information we need. Please review and comment. --Tetris L 04:01, 6 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * The list "What salvages into it" can become quite lengthy and hence very hard to maintain. I've come to realize that category:contains_bone maybe isn't such a bad idea. At least not for materials like iron and wood, 'cos those are in every second item. --Tetris L 04:04, 6 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * How is this? I organized the salvage and crafting sections in columns for a more compact design. My wousewheel finger got tired from scrolling. ;) --Tetris L 23:34, 6 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * id prefer another sorting:
 * general
 * use
 * where to buy/sell
 * what drops it
 * what salvages into it
 * else it looks good, and yeah, the lenght of the what salvages into it may get pretty long, but it may be useful if u wanna farm a special material, so i think its needed.
 * --HJT 23:44, 6 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * About the "contains xxx": as mats also get dropped by creatures, u have also in the info bar of a creature "contains xxx"????
 * another category may be created, like "drops xxx"...
 * --HJT 23:50, 6 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * I like the bone page, very useful. I think the whole category:Contains Iron and Category:Contain Vitamin C is a bit absurd. But I have no solutions myself. --Karlos 00:03, 7 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * I agree with HJT that the Use section should be above the acquisition details. I'll modify it.
 * As for the contains bone category: I don't mind at all to create the list manually. But that's redundant information again, which requires additional maintainance and increases the risk of errors. By GuildWiki policy we're trying to avoid that. --Tetris L 00:30, 7 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * I modified the design again. Please review. I'm quite happy with it now. If nobody objects, I'll go ahead and update all other material pages (rare and common), using the same design. --Tetris L 02:33, 7 Oct 2005 (EST)
 * It looks a little messy, but it's probably all of those edit links sitting in the tables. Maybe fix the location of the image box, too. - Lunarbunny 03:13, 7 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * Please make the tables transparent (see example I did with one section). The white looks awkward --Karlos 15:44, 7 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * I had experimented with transparent background while testing various formats and have to say I prefer the white background. IMHO the page looks even messier with transparent background listings than with white background listings. If we use transparent background then I'd prefer that we get dump the column design alltogether and switch back to the old list design, even if the page becomes a lot longer that way. --Tetris L 00:10, 8 Oct 2005 (EST)


 * This is a style point and a point of taste, so I won't even bother to debate it. In general, a change of background that is borderless looks unprofessional, like we made an error or something. That's why I have category listings with the white background. If you want to have the while BG then put a border around it, even a single bevel is fine. --Karlos 13:56, 8 Oct 2005 (EST)

salvage info
Some rare salvage materials, such as Spiritwood Planks, can be salvaged. Where do we put the salvage info? -- Gordon Ecker 23:50, 25 August 2006 (CDT)

Category: contains (blah)
We have all these shiny categories- how about we change the materials pages so that they use them? Right now, it's kind of messy, and lots of materials are marked as stubs (possibly related to that? I'm not really sure). &mdash;Aranth 13:28, 26 February 2007 (CST)


 * I agree. I recommend we remove the 'What Salvages into it' section from this template and all materials pages, and replace that data with a link to the Category: contains (blah) list.  Currently this information is being maintained independently in 2 separate locations (i.e. the Materials page and the Category listing) which is a huge waste of effort.  If no one objects I will implement this action.  Ahsen74 11:37, 23 August 2007 (CDT)

Reviving this 2+ year old topic, I'm going to again suggest that we clean up the material articles by replacing the "What salvages into it" and "Use" sections with "Category:Contains " and "Category:Requires ". Many of the lists are pretty badly out-of-sync with the categories anyway. &mdash;Dr Ishmael 14:01, February 3, 2010 (UTC)


 * Or we could used collapsed categorytrees. That way, a single click would display it on the page itself, linked to the pages of the materials. -- ◄mendel► 01:54, February 4, 2010 (UTC)


 * Still the same basic idea - replacing a static list with a dynamic category - but yeah, that would be even better. &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 04:15, February 4, 2010 (UTC)


 * I've updated the two example pages with a new format using categorytrees. I also modified the infobox slightly to display the rarity and insert an autocat based on it.  Comments or ideas for further improvement?  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 17:51, February 17, 2010 (UTC)
 * Looks ok. -- ◄mendel► 09:28, February 18, 2010 (UTC)


 * One additional change I'm considering is creating "Drops " categories to further reduce the need for manual upkeep. It would require adding said categories to a LOT of bestiary articles, but I'll be able to bot that for the most part using the existing lists on the material articles.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 21:57, February 18, 2010 (UTC)
 * If no one objects within the next couple days, I will go ahead and create those categories, using AWB to add them to item articles. &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 03:43, February 23, 2010 (UTC)
 * Would this be for direct drops only, or also for items that can be salvaged into these materials? -- ◄mendel► 22:13, February 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * Direct drops only, since that's all that we currently record in the "What drops it" section. The other way would be counter-productive, in any case: for any given material, you've got a wide variety of items that can salvage into it, and then those items are in turn dropped by a wide variety of foes - you'd basically end up with half the bestiary in most of the categories.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 22:54, February 23, 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent) I have run my process in AWB for Category:Drops bone. I will double-check it myself tomorrow to make sure there's nothing there that shouldn't be (e.g. some monster's article links to Bone somewhere other than the Drops section for some reason). Then I'll go on to the other materials. &mdash;Dr Ishmael 04:44, February 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * I've checked the category, and everything looks good. I updated the example page to reflect this new category.  I also had the idea that instead of just putting the drop and salvage lines in a linear list, we could use a two-column format, so I put that in as a possible alternate style.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 00:37, February 26, 2010 (UTC)

Almost ready
I've completed the bot-mode creation of Drops (material) categories, so I guess it's finally time to update all the material pages. I've updated the example pages to show the new style, and I created a third page to demonstrate an artisan-craftable rare material. If there are no objections in the next few days, I will go ahead and implement this new style.

Also, if anyone wants to double-check my work on the creatures the drop materials categories, I would appreciate it. &mdash;Dr Ishmael 02:14, March 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Ninja'd the third example page link :P
 * Looks neat. The list for bone (ex.) is huge though; would it be possible to force it in several colons? --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG]] -- (contribs) &emsp;(talk)  12:57, March 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Columns, you mean? :P And yeah, that would be good, that thing is looong. RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.png]] 13:02, March 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, there's no easy way to do that, although I did just discover a kludgy CSS hack that kinda works:

.CategoryTreeChildren .CategoryTreeSection { float: left; width: 33%; /* for 3 columns; can be 50% for 2 columns, 25% for 4 columns, etc. */ }


 * The only problem with this is that it fills across-then-down, the way that Special:PrefixIndex does, instead of the standard down-then-across ordering that category pages have. &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 17:00, March 25, 2010 (UTC)
 * Also, we'd have to wrap each categorytree on these pages in an additional div with a special class in order to make this CSS rule apply only to material pages. That's not a big deal, but it would be more kludgy code on the page.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 17:05, March 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, columns :P I had about 30 seconds to write that, which (for me) is really short ^^ Kolom got caught in translation, and was subsequently butchered.
 * I wouldn't mind the fill personally, but can see it's pretty annoying to others (not really intuitive). So, votes? --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG]] -- (contribs) &emsp;(talk)  18:24, March 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Bummer. I think this way would be more confusing than helpful. :/ I don't think it's a huge deal that they're so long, because they're hidden by default. RoseOfKali [[Image:RoseOfKaliSIG.png]] 19:28, March 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, it's been almost a week, so I'll go ahead and update them tonight. I agree that the list size won't be a serious problem.  Most of the Drops and Requires cats are fairly small, as well as the Contains cats for rare materials.  The only real problems are Contains iron, wood, and steel (sizes of 407, 227, and 371, respectively), since categorytree only displays up to 200 results.  Still, it should be intuitive enough that interested readers will know to click on the category name for the full list.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 02:00, April 1, 2010 (UTC)