Template talk:ItemInfo

Item Info initiation
In the process of building this, I did refer to GWW's version for inspiration. Obviously I didn't copy everything directly, not just because of licensing, but because there are some things that I just feel should be done differently. These are my notes about the various things I considered:


 * Style : There are significant differences in style, mostly because our infobox styles are relics from 2005. We're probably due for a style overhaul, but that would be a huge job, and I'm not very good at graphic design.
 * Bundles : GWW uses the same template for both bundles and inventory items, but I think it would be better to have separate templates.
 * Auto-rarity : Their template goes to great lengths to set an item's rarity, if not specified, based on the item's type. I didn't see much value in doing this, especially since most of their cases ended up being "Common" anyway.
 * Auto-type : Their template does a little bit of auto-typing based on the presence of other parameters, but it doesn't seem very robust (it includes typing of alcohols but not sweets or party favors). We could include this and make it more robust, or we could simply require the type parameter to be specified.
 * Value : GWW displays "Can't be sold" if an item has a value of 0g. While it is true that you can't sell items worth 0g, displaying a string instead of the numeric value seems like a waste of text.
 * Runes/Insignia : GWW has properties in their box for runes and insignia, but we don't have individual articles for those. Maybe we should?
 * Collectors : GWW lists the collectors for trophies in the box. I couldn't decide whether this was a good idea or not, so I've left it out for now.
 * Profitability : We include a property for trophies that indicates when it is more profitable to trade the item to a collector and sell the reward than to sell the trophy itself.
 * Common/rare salvage : GWW's box does not couple these properties, such that an item with only a common salvage will not display a rare salvage property, and vice versa. I think it's important to always display both together, even when one of them is "None", so that readers know this is not simply an omission.

&mdash;Dr Ishmael 19:09, August 3, 2010 (UTC)
 * This is nice. Are you planning to roll this out to all item pages? --  Random Time  21:13, August 21, 2010 (UTC)


 * Eventually, yes. The original impetus was, of course, this, so I'd probably do an initial rollout to trophies only.  If you've got any more-specific feedback, I'd appreciate it.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 22:12, August 21, 2010 (UTC)


 * Just made one change for style: I removed the colons from the header/label cells, since my solution for including numbers with the salvage info uses a colon between the material and the number.
 * ItemInfo font-size 90%.jpg I'm thinking about advocating one further style change: a reduction of the font size. If you look at the current version of Moon Shell, the infobox is quite wide due to the line: "Common salvage - Pile of Glittering Dust: 6-8".  I used Firefox's Web Developer add-on to preview it with the size reduced to 90%, and you can see the results in the image to the right.  Jink agrees that it looks good, and much better than with normal font-size.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 03:30, August 23, 2010 (UTC)


 * Awesome stuff. I heartily approve of all of your evolutions of the GWW design (I especially agree about common/rare sal and value.) What do you need from the rest of us to help make use of these, convert?


 * Here are my comments/ideas:


 * Runes/Insignias: We don't need individual articles, but perhaps we could jump to e.g. Rune#Vigor on the page.
 * Can we use this for weapons & armor by adding their special data? Or is there a reason we have separate templates for uniques, shields, bows, costumes...
 * Can we mark the sweet, party, alcohol templates as deprecated?
 * Same for salvage items, collect drop?


 * For profitable, I'd like us to include the value/item if sold, e.g. 40/kournan pendant. The variable could accept Yes, No, or a number (that would display with the gold icon).
 * Collectors: I think the infobox could just include a "Yes" or "No" &mdash; the actual collectors are going to be detailed in the article. I don't see much value by listing their names at the top.
 * Icons (picture = 999 words):
 * whenever there's a yes/no/na/none, can we use the PNG files from ? e.g. Profitable:  instead of Profitable: No)
 * I like the 90% font for e.g. Pile of dust, but mebbe we could just use the icons?


 * Thanks for making this happen. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 18:23, August 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Response:
 * Runes/insignia: I think you misunderstood me. I mean that GWW's infobox includes code for rune-specific information to be displayed on the individual rune articles (similar to alcohol- or sweet-specific info); there's nothing that would link to runes from other articles.
 * Weapons aka equipable items: While it would be possible to expand this template further to include equipable items, I would recommend maintaining separate templates for a number of reasons.
 * Other than campaign and salvage info, the other parameters they would use from this template would always have the same values &mdash; rarity: varies/unique; value: varies; stackable: no. With their own infobox, we save space by omitting this "common knowledge" completely (like we currently do).
 * The additional parameters they require wouldn't be used at all by non-equipable items &mdash; linked attribute, damage type, PvP reward level, skin (for uniques).
 * The primary infobox image for equipable items should be a screenshot in .jpg format, but this template is designed for an icon in .png format. On GWW, their boxes can include both, but in opposite positions: equipables have a render/screenshot at top and the icon at bottom; non-equipables have an icon at top and a render at bottom.
 * Armor/costumes: See above.
 * Deprecating other templates: Yes. This would replace Alcohol, CollectableDrop, CraftingMaterial, PartyInfo, QuestItem, SalvageItem, and SweetInfo, as well as the horribly old-fashioned Item box and Salvage box template sets.
 * Profitable: I'm not sure how practical that would be to implement, and it certainly wouldn't be intuitive to read. For many of them, you'd have to explain which collector to trade with (Frigid Heart) or explain which item to trade for (Kournan Pendant) under Notes anyway, so I'd rather leave that out.
 * Collectors: Eh, including it as a boolean would seem pointless. With the sell value and salvage info absorbed into the infobox, the articles for most trophies are going to be short enough that you could immediately see if there are any collectors listed or not.
 * Icons:
 * Ticks: Why? I'd be worried that the bright colors would be too distracting.  They're useful in tabular data where a colored identifier is easier to pick out than a purely textual one, but I don't think there's really a need for them here.
 * Materials: Eh, I dunno. They work in crafting tables because we use them at 25px, they mirror what you see in-game at the armor crafters, and because they're used throughout the table.  Here, they'd have to be smaller, especially if we go with 90% font size (which I'd really like to do now), probably about the same size as in the Material Storage pane, which I find somewhat difficult to use.  The in-game "proof" that you salvaged something is a text message that says, "You salvaged X Materials from..."; you don't really notice the material in your inventory, unless it creates a brand new stack.  Finally, they'd just be a handful of icons in an otherwise textual infobox (the gold icon is ubiquitous enough that it gets exempted).
 * While I disagree with most of your ideas, I thank you for making me think about some of the implicit decisions I'd made when developing this. &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 20:32, August 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Hey, that's my role as a gadly :-) &mdash; to make sure we've thought through rather than accidentally decided.


 * I'm fine with all of above except for three things:
 * Profitable &mdash; I doubt that would be hard to do (the data is already avail). Naturally, ppls are going to have to read more; the point is to let them know if it's worth doing so: people would be less likely to investigate if the item only nets 5 after all the farming/storage/transactions.
 * Collector boolean &mdash; same idea; there are lots of collector-less items &mdash; it would be nice to know if it's worth scrolling down to take a look.
 * (if we included both, that information can be used to present lists/tables elsewhere in the wiki)
 * You didn't mention how we can help.


 * And, I don't think it can be said often enough: nice work. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 20:47, August 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Doot-doot-doot.
 * Profitable: I was talking about the practicality of making your idea work within SMW, not the practicality of collecting the data. (I was the one who initially compiled it 3 years ago, so I know it exists :P ) As a boolean, the values for this property are standardized: SMW can understand yes/y/true/t/1 for true and no/n/false/f/0 for false, all case-insensitive.  This makes it simple to include the property in a query to filter the results by  .  If we change it to a string, the standardization is lost, and the semantics of the name are somewhat diminished: when you ask, "Is this profitable?" you expect a yes/no answer, not a number.  When querying for profitable items, you'd have to do , which isn't as obviously logical (why use a double negative?), and since it's not standardized, you can't be certain that someone didn't set the value to 'N' or 'no' or even 'Nope'.
 * However, it might be useful to create a separate property for the profitability value... but someone else is gonna have to come up with a semantically sound name for it, I can't think of anything that sounds good. This would let you filter queries by exactly how much profit you can make on the item, which might be useful for someone who's really bored and feels like making money by farming trophies.
 * Collectors: But you won't have to scroll to see that, is what I'm saying - the article will be short enough that, on "usual" resolutions, the Collector section will already be on-screen when the page loads. [edit] Oh yeah, and you can also see in the ToC if there are any collectors listed.
 * Help: Um... I don't know. Feedback from more people would be great, of course.  I've already tabulated all the data for trophies in a spreadsheet, and I'll be rolling that out on my bot account to avoid RC spam.  I guess if someone really wanted to double-check all the data, I could email them the spreadsheet.  Or you could start compiling data for other item types.
 * Thanks. &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 21:53, August 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Collectors: ok, I'm (almost completely) convinced.
 * Profitable: ah, I didn't understand it was a boolean/booleanish choice. I'm sure you considered, profit per item for a variable name. My imagination says it would display:
 * Profitable: Yes (10/item)
 * Taking a cue from collectors, an alternative might be to add a separate section (when relevant), == Profitability: 40/item ==, which would be seen from the ToC. Does anyone else have an opinion? Care?
 * re: Help. Feel free to email me a macro-less excel (or display it in Google Docs). I can compare it to the data I've collected from GWW.
 * As an aside, I've kept the data b/c of my interest in things like, "is it worth the storage slot b/c I can get a useful collector's weapon? make book on holidays? should I sal or expert sal? It's not 100% complete or accurate, alas.
 * Re: Help. Should I start marking up the docs for the above templates to note that they are deprecated? (Won't matter much, but that is one task I can take off your hands.) &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 22:45, August 25, 2010 (UTC)