Forum:Should we have appearance lists like at Wookieepedia?

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Sorry, because I know we all got over this one. But I was just looking through the Star Wars wiki and realised how greatly Appearance lists benefited them. I think they'd benefit this wiki too and if you've forgotten, you can visit all my reasons here. In order to show you how I'm right in that forum, see my list for An Unearthly Child here. Couple of redlinks here and there, but this is a new reason of mine. The lists will draw people towards pages and redlinks, meaning more articles and more comprehensive ones too. SOOOOOO, you're probably not gonna like it, but worth a try. I'm A Hydroponic Tomato! Bigredrabbit (talk to me) 10:27, March 26, 2010 (UTC)

The indenting on the locations is terrible. I get the logic, but it looks dreadful. -- sulfur 13:55, March 26, 2010 (UTC)

As I've in the previous forum post a list is a list it's not really useful in giving context to the references that are in the articles.

The references already draw people with information, and any redlinks there are people can go ahead and create pages following them (and there's already contextual information on the page that the redlink is on). --Tangerineduel 14:09, March 26, 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't think I'm quite so staunchly opposed to the notion of this, but the proposed execution, as sulfur said, is currently dreadful. I think there are times when I wouldn't mind having a list of references as opposed to reading the text. If done in a stylish — and collapsible — way, I don't think it'd hurt anything to have it on board. But we're very far from that now, and a simple copy of starwars.wikia's code won't do it for me. If it could be made to match the look of the infoboxen (and, far as I can tell, we're still in a state of flux over that issue), then maybe. On the other hand, the creation of these little boxes on every single page would detract from the work of providing the reference section with well-written material, and that's surely a higher priority than creating context-less lists. So, I wouldn't say I'm a firm no, but it's definitely not something I see as "important" in any way. And I wholly reject the notion that the list would be good for page creation. They wouldn't. The only thing they'd improve is navigability — and even then, only by giving a secondary navigation path. I know these things are on a lot of media wikia pages. But personally, I get frustrated when I'm on the DC wikia or Wookiepedia and there's a reference to a character without any explanation of how they fit into a story. And that hapens a lot on those two wikia. A tiny bit of knowledge is more vexing than not having that knowledge at all, really.

Another thing you have to think about is how complicated this actually is to code properly. In order to give us long-term flexibility (something, sadly, we've not been so good at in the past), you'd have to make it — at least — a template within a template. You'd need one template for the outside look of the box, that could be put on every page. That one you'd make collapsible and design to match the look of the infoboxen. Then you'd need another that would be a subpage of the main box that would actually contain the information displayed within the box. So, you'd have Template:References, then you'd have Template:References/The Girl in the Fireplace. You'd include a li'l edit link somewhere that would allow users to easily edit that particular sub-template. You might even need it more complicated than that to make it easy on the user. So it might be that you'd create Template:References/The Girl in the Fireplace/Technology, and so on for each category. And you'd require a fairly detailed knowledge of how to use conditional phrasing in wikicode to really make it run super-smoothly. IF you don't have that level of knowledge, please drop this project. If you do, make up some samples and I'd be happy to look at them. At the end of the day, if we're going to proceed with this, I personally would insist upon extreme flexibility with the design, so that if 5 years down the line we want to make-over the site with a new color scheme, it'll be possible without hand-editing every single page. Your current design philosophy, aside from being visually, um, toxic, can't be implemented with templates, and that's an absolute must.

But beyond that, the real question you have to ask yourself is whether you're actually willing to initially implement this idea on every single story page on the site? Not just the 220 TV story pages, but all the books, CDs, comic stories, and short stories. Cause if it's not universally applied, then it's not worth doing at all. From the perspective of the casual user of the site, for whom we all effectively "work", once they see it on one range of stories, they're going to expect them on all ranges. So if you're not personally committed to adding your creation to thousands of pages, please don't bother. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:18, March 27, 2010 (UTC)

For collapsible, check out this script here. It requires some CSS and some .js changes, but might do what you need it to be. -- sulfur 00:27, March 28, 2010 (UTC)

On the dedicated side I am one of those dedicated people, who has of late been going through all the articles (for the production errors...thing) and fixing up the references sections and other small issues and everything. It takes a while and that's not considering all the coding CzechOut has mentioned that would be required.

That said and having been through practically all the story pages on this site at least once (maybe not some of the TV21 and short story pages) I don't think I'd be willing to go through them all in aid of this idea, as far as mind-numbing processes go this would rate very high amongst them (I find the current things I'm working on interesting because of what information I'm writing, editing and researching) but this would be mind-numbing in the extreme, writing lists is something far from interesting let alone the coding involved.

Getting people to accept and add to the references section has been a long process, which is now seeing people add to those sections and build information, which is what this site is all about redlinks and all.

I'm still firm in my opinion that information and information in context rather than lists is what we should be about in terms of story pages. --Tangerineduel 13:40, March 28, 2010 (UTC)