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It's like Discussion, y'all. Anything that you might want to draw attention to can be posted and commented upon here. For now, a central location for discussions is more viable than commenting in talk pages, where it may be easily overlooked. --Snickles 12:55, 20 May 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

Familiar Hatchling layout suggestion

I posted this suggestion recently hoping to discuss it but it was archived before anyone had a chance to respond. If it doesn't belong here, just delete it but I think it's a cool suggestion:

I think the Familiar Hatchling pages should make it clearer what they turn in to. I mean, the Familiar pages have a neat bold heading at the top of the page:
Hatchling: (Pic) Wibble Wobble Egg.
However, the Hatchling page has a fairly inconspicuous entry buried in the Notes section at the bottom of the page:
Becomes a Wibble Wobble.
I vote the Hatchling pages should have an equally conspicuous heading at the top of the page such as:
Familiar: (Pic) Becomes a Wibble Wobble.
--Urutsini 09:47, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Missing Monster Metadata

Is there a quick way to see what monsters on the wiki are missing metadata? --Rinn 22:25, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Not really. Back when I was creating many data pages, I used the Monster Compendium - removing the variables so that only data pulled from data pages could be called. However, this isn't really updated any more so isn't a nice way. Almost as soon as a new monster is discovered, somebody will create a data page for it. Look at new content and check if the monsters have infoboxes. I'm pretty certain all of the old monsters have data pages.--Ryo_Sangnoir 20:53, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

  • I meant this as is there a quick way to see if a monster is missing a specific part of it's metadata, such as attack, defense, init etc. Rinn 18:21, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
    • There's no way specifically designed for that purpose. Easiest ways would be looking at location and monster pages. Location pages show some of the metadata, but not all of it (init isn't shown). I suppose we could make the metadata pages auto-cat themselves or the monster pages in Category:Incomplete or something like that. --Flargen 21:22, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
      • I'm not used to deal with working with templates, but is there a way to create a template that takes data from a monster and converts it to a row in a table, ideally with special background highlighting for incomplete data? If we can, then we can do a table that reads:
        Table header
        (format:INFOROW_monster, data:lich, etc.)
        Table footer
        You would have to look at the page to see what's missing, but it would be all of the info in one place.--Foggy 23:53, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
        • Something like that would be excellent and would make it easier on spaders to know exactly what data is missing. Rinn 01:01, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
          • Take a look at my discussion page User:Foggy#Experimenting_with_tabular_monster_data. I created a template called MonsterRow which takes data from the metadata and displays it in a single row. It's pretty much a one-trick pony as far as templates go (there's a similar template called Monster that displays name, habitat and item drops.) I don't think image would be a good thing to include here, but location might help. I left items off as they take up a lot of space, and I think for the purpose of quickly accessing numerical data, it doesn't help.--Foggy 22:01, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Monster Data now lists all the numerical data available on the metadata page. Like Monstrous Compendium, part of its efficacy will depend on how well-updated it remains. I created the page by using Category:Combat Adventures. It doesn't have much in the ways of bells and whistles, but is a sortable table, which I'm psyched worked in that format.--Foggy 14:20, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Frequency Statistics Distributed Throughout The Wiki

I posted this to the Statistics Notes talk page but I thought it would be worth discussing here.

What I would love to see is the percentage rates of encounters and item drops distributed among all the Item and Location pages on the wiki. Such as, on a Location page, list the percentage rate of each encounter listed on that page. I know it gets skewed a little depending on super-likelies etc. but these could surely be accounted for, such as giving a percentage range, or ignoring special encounters when calculating normal encounters (Whatever Yiab did when presented his data on Parseable Area Statistics). On each individual encounter page, repeat the same percentage chances.

And the most useful suggestion would be to include percentages on every Item page. In the section on the Item pages that list all the locations and monsters/encounters that drop the items, multiply the percentage chance of that monster/encounter appearing with the percentage drop of that item. There must be an easy way to do this from Yiab's Parseable Area Statistics and Parseable Item Statistics pages (I'm not hip to wiki code).

For Example, the following are some of the encounters where you will find a Bottle of tequila. The statistics are taken from Yiab's Parseable Statistics pages:

The "Fun" House
shaky clown Chance of encounter = 16.7%, Chance of item drop = 10%, Total chance of drop at this location = 16.7% * 10% = 1.67%
Menagerie Level 3
Booze Giant 33.3% * 13.6% = 4.52%
South of The Border
handsome mariachi 10% * 30.9% = 3.09%
irate mariachi 10% * 35.5% = 3.55%
mariachi calavera 30.1% 10% * 30.1% = 3.01%

So, hypothetically assuming these are the only locations that a Bottle of tequila will drop, the page would look something like:

The "Fun" House 1.67%
shaky clown 1.67%
Menagerie Level 3 4.52%
Booze Giant 4.52%
South of The Border 9.65%
handsome mariachi 3.09%
irate mariachi 3.55%
mariachi calavera 3.01%

From this example, if someone really wanted a Bottle of tequila, they would see that the South of The Border with a total drop rate of 9.65% would be the best place to adventure. I recently got to the Stone mariachis without a guitar instrument and wanted to know at a glance which guitar I should farm for but I couldn't find the appropriate statistics. This suggestion would have been useful in this instance. What do you think? --Urutsini 10:57, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

  • You can't find the guitar statistics because most of them don't exist. Most guitars were recently added. And the summary values you list aren't terribly useful for someone playing in a non-apathetic lizardman style. +Combats, +Noncombats, queue effects, queue manipulators (olfaction, poppers, etc.), can all drastically alter the analysis of the situation. The south of the border "overall" drop rate changes significantly as you adjust your combat rate, for example. And olfaction just mucks everything up, especially in zones with unequal encounter chances. And how would you propose we deal with monsters which drop multiple copies of a single item? There's the probability of getting exactly one; one or more; exactly one, exactly two, exactly three, etc.; etc. And what if there is a noncombat that gives the item as well as a monster in the same zone? It's a complex situational analysis that's made on a per-instance basis. The complete listing of things an item can be obtained from can be used by the interested party to find what they want. Otherwise, this is a matter of ascension strategy. And I'm coming to think that ascension strategies have no real place on the wiki proper. Sounds nice and all, but you're just not likely to get a good "cooperatively edited" guide, and what has made it onto the wiki rapdily becomes outdated and nonfunctional, and no real progress is ever made in fixing the ever-evolving issues. Just look at the debacle things like Hardcore Skill Analysis have become. That page is such a bother in every aspect that I often refuse to admit it even exists. --Flargen 12:10, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Hehe, yeah I see what you mean in relation to the HCSA page. I just figured that as long as the statistics are pulled from a central source such as the Parseable Statistics pages, it should be easy to keep up-to-date information. Maybe even making the location/encounter lists as a template to make entry into the Item pages easy? (Now that I think of it, you could have the Parseable Statistics pages, or something similar like a table, the main point of data entry and when a location/encounter is entered along with an Item that drops in that location then the location/encounter automatically appears on the Item page in the proposed template). And when an item is new or not spaded fully, put something in place of the statistic, such as an asterisk or a superscripted word, or just leave that statistic off the page until the appropriate numbers are added to the Parseable Statistics.
The statistic relays the chance that "this item will drop". If a monster possibly drops 2 of the same item with a 10% chance on each item, then "this item will drop" 20% of the time from this monster. Also, if a non-combat that gives you the item occurs 30% of the time, as well as a combat that occurs 20% of the time with a 10% drop rate, then the total chance that "this item will drop" is 30%+(20%*10%)=32% from this location. I considered the effect of Combat Frequency and +Item bonuses etc. when writing this, however I figured you would still get a good ratio between the zones. If you take the above example, it is calculated that Tequila will drop South of the Border about twice as much as the Menagerie and about 5 times as much as the Fun House and this will more or less hold true regardless of what bonuses you have. Maybe just include the total statistic for the location and round to avoid clutter such as:

The "Fun" House 2%
shaky clown
Menagerie Level 3 5%
Booze Giant
South of The Border 10%
handsome mariachi
irate mariachi
mariachi calavera

By the way, my analogy about the guitars happened just before the ranged weapons update, my problem was that I didn't know these statistic pages existed. Yes, it would be a different story now, but that will soon change as drop rates are spaded. The benefit of hard statistics is that it uses definite, objective numbers rather than the subjective nature of the HCSA page. And maybe a side effect of something like this added to the wiki will encourage people to keep the Item drop statistic spading up-to-date and accurate. Sorry for the wall of text.--Urutsini 15:04, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Displaying stat noncombats

The current format for displaying statgains is something like this:
"Substat Gain: 2-2.5*<mainstat> in Muscleboundness (max 140)", which is taken from the Bathroom. This is misleading. While the absolute maximum statgains are 140, the average maximum statgains are of much greater importance. How do we find the average maximum? We need to calculate that 140 stats is the upper bound for 56 mainstat, and that 2.25*56=126, and so 126 is the average maximum statgain.

It would be much more useful to either display the average maximum on individual pages (126), or the mainstat value where the noncombats stop scaling (56). Both of these values are more useful that (max 140).-QuantumNightmare 22:54, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

  • I totally agree that the average is far more useful on average (hee), but am somewhat uneasy if you're proposing cutting down the amount of info displayed. How's (<low_coefficient> to <high_coefficient>) * minimum(<stat>, <cap>); max <low_max> to <high_max>? Are the coefficients usually distributed symmetrically about the mean? If so, we'd keep the information we currently display, and it should be fairly easy for someone to calculate the halfway point between two numbers. Or if you feel minimum(<stat>, <cap>) is too technical for the average browser, maybe something more colloquial like cap<statcap><stat>. --BagatelleT/C 05:25, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Both types of caps are actually used in the game. It would be nice to standardize both of them though. --Eleron 13:47, 8 February 2009 (UTC)


Item data vs presentation

Currently, a small part of the wiki's information about items is split off into data pages, which only contain the name, plural and image for each item. For monster pages, much more information has been split off into the data pages, where they can be stored in a format that is easier to process and reuse multiple places.

I suggest that the base data values for items should similarly be moved into the item's data pages. I have created an example of how this might look at Test/Flute of flat champagne / Data:Test/Flute of flat champagne. (Unfortunately, using the existing item templates means that these pages were automatically added to some categories. I hope that doesn't cause too many problems, and that they can be removed again relatively quickly. It also means that I had to include a lot of unnecessary filler information just to redirect information from the data page to the template - this is just for compatibility and the clutter would be removed by improving the templates if this change is adopted.) All the item data is stored under Data:, while the content of the page itself contains other information, such as where the item can be found, notes, references etc. The idea is to match the data page closely to the values that are connected to the item in the game (as can e.g. be seen on the item spindler screenshot).

The advantage of moving the data values into a separate page is that this allows us to automatically extract and process these numbers, which can e.g. be used to calculate such things as average gain correctly, by allowing us to do the same computations as those done in the game instead of manually calculating and inserting these numbers, and trying to keep them up to date. The values can be used in any template that knows which item it's referencing, instead of the current situation where values are only entered as parameters for one specific template.

This also means that it's easy to add all the known information about an item, on the item's data page, without thinking about which template would be appropriate for displaying that information. An example of this is the quality information, which is known for many items but has not yet been included on the wiki simply because no one could agree on how it should be displayed. By moving this information to the data page, it can be added _now_, and then included wherever it's appropriate in the future. For example it could conceivably be included on cooking pages, which would not really be possible without having the information on the data page or doing some fairly extensive botting.--Eleron 11:20, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

  • Hey sorry, about going MIA for a few days. I can still push the previous changes I made, or are those changes completely off the table? I'm not opposed to adding stats to data pages, but this change can't be made without Quietust's bot (or the help of another person familiar with wiki-bot scripts). I'm curious to see what others think.--SomeStranger (t|c) 03:48, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
    • Frankly, Quietust seems to have become an inactive wiki contributor. A couple of edits here and there, maybe a page deletion or revert, but that's about it. So I'm not sure how much we can rely on QuietBot. You could push the recipe table css definitions, though! A bot is handy for that, but manual will suffice. And either way needs the definitions added first. It just makes everything so much easier once it is there. --Flargen 04:00, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
    • Don't be shy now... --BagatelleT/C 04:41, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
    • Well I think it would be good to push the change. As long as the wiki software can handle it, I think it would be best to have useitem still handle anything you throw at it at a "low level", and just make a new simple template for consumables that creates a useitem with values from the data page. The new template would then be used for the 95% of consumables where you don't need anything special. Useitem could continue to be used for everything from smashing fortune cookies to using a can of black paint without having lots of new consumable stuff added to that template. --Eleron 13:46, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
  • Just a couple of points where I think we might run into trouble:
    1. Is this for food/booze only, or all items? The level requirements, stats, etc seem reasonable candidates for the data space, but several items have multiple use results and I think this would end up making updating articles even more difficult than it currently is for the uninitiated. If it's just for consumables, we've got a small number of problem cases like around the world.
    2. On the point about including on cooking (and presumably "best food") pages, back in the day, there was a problem with pages breaking because there were too many template evaluations on it (e.g., Mad Hatrack messages, though just now testing all the messages in sandbox preview, it seems fine...). Otherwise, I would absolutely love to have S&Q and stat data automatically updated for the ill-maintained best food pages. And if we could get the Game Mechanics lists to "update themselves" that would be pretty much pure win.
    --BagatelleT/C 04:41, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
    • I would suggest that the base properties are added for all items. Unfortunately we only really know how they're organized for consumables, but at least some things like power and stat requirements for weapon/armor could be done as well.
    • Properties that are part of the {{item}} template would be easy to move automatically with a bot, but as you say converting the effects when used would be problematic. Even though it could be done safely for consumables that only have one {{useitem}}, I think it would still be better to do those parts manually. While it would be conceptually nice to convert everything at once for consistency, I'm not sure that that's the best solution. --Eleron 13:46, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
    • On your second point, I think you might be thinking of pages like The Battlefield (originally tried to include both sides of the war at once, but had to be split when it hit the template call limit) or the Monster Compendium. I think the Mad Hatrack was split off just because of size issues. Too much data for a single page. Maybe pre-emptive concerns about template call limits, but mostly to improve the readability and accessibility of the page. --Flargen 02:57, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

I'll start doing this manually for the useitem part of well-understood consumables. Whether it runs into technical difficulties when used in summary pages remains to be seen, but no information is lost and it will simply be easier to reuse. --Eleron 04:09, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

  • Looks like we've run into problems with Hell broth, which loses stats. Perhaps we need another bunch of optional fields like advtype=lose, mustype=lose? --BagatelleT/C 23:09, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
    • Do you mean because consumeitem doesn't handle it? Nothing more is needed on the data page, I just didn't add support for that yet, because I wanted to start with the easiest part and only add more if it'll actually be used. The discussion about that sorta moved to Quietust's talk page where I asked about automatically filling in the item data pages. I guess that was a pretty bad thing - the discussion about what to do should have continued here instead. Anyway, I've stalled working on it for now until it's resolved what should be put on item data pages. --Eleron 08:44, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

It's not currently agreed upon whether the item data should be moved to the item data page. I think the core question is what the item data pages should actually be used for.

Should the item data pages be used to store item data in a single place, or used as a technical tool for templates that use item data in multiple places?

  1. (++) Storing all data in one place improves consistency and convenience.
    The data pages are (arguably?) currently used as data storage for monster and location pages, and I personally really like the way that works.
  2. (+) Storing all the data is more powerful, it can be used for current templates as well as to enhance and create templates with more information.
    This doesn't actually lead to any immediate improvement in itself, only a possible benefit in the future.
  3. (-?) Currently, most of the item information is already on one page, the main page. It's just not accessible for any other templates than the one they're part of. If the data is moved, it might be harder to find for editors.
    A specific subset of the data is already split off into the data page for technical reasons, which might be just as unintuitive.
  4. (-) Increasing the use of templates generally makes it easier to change things without introducing any inconsistencies, but much harder to understand what's going on underneath, and changing the templates themselves is very difficult.
    The item pages are already built using templates, but this is at least an argument for carefully considering when template use should be expanded into other areas.
  5. (--?) Increasing use of templates also places additional strain upon the server, since more code has to run after the pages are edited. This could be one of the most important concerns(?).
    How big of an impact is this? My guesstimate is that for locations it would only update itself once, for monsters it would be itself once and location once, for items it would be itself once or twice and each drop location (less than 2 on average?) once. Are there actually many more places where item data is used? Is the main concern about how things would be if it were expanded to be used on all "best of ..." pages etc., which tend to be very long?
    Is there a reason for the item data pages to use the Data1 style instead of Data2? The Data1 style seems to only be a less powerful version that cannot be optimized, making reuse much costlier (currently adding a dozen template instantiations for each consumeitem, which is really unfortunate and I'd really like to change that). Are there any other technical adjustments that could reduce the performance impact?

--Eleron 10:48, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

  • People coming late to this thread may wish to see also related discussion here.
  • I can't speak to the load issues as that's not my area of expertise, but would setting up a separate page devoted solely to consumable stats fulfill the needs of people in general? I know when I want to see foods, it's generally to look up the best adventure gains, I'd rather have all the data on one page in a sortable table for comparison purposes. If exporting to Data: isn't workable, is it feasible to make a page like Parseable Monster Statistics and set up a template to read in row data and output table rows? This would have the advantage of not needing special handling for cases where there are multiple consumable results; each result could be its own row entered manually. --BagatelleT/C 04:25, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I set up the Test/Flute of flat champagne page using the "data2" style, which I assume should reduce the performance overhead and also makes things nicer. Are there any remaining problems with adding data in a template-accessible way if it's done in that format? Some data pages for comparison: flute in the new format, compared to brandy in the old format (and raver giant / briny deeps, both monster and location pages already use the data2 format while items and effects currently use the old format). --Eleron 20:21, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Displaying Effects in a More Convenient Way

Don't deny it. You find it annoying to have to click on a new page just to see what an effect does. Have the page describe the effect in a nutshell. Put the effect right between the name and duration. Wouldn't that be a lot more convenient?--JohnAnon 00:57, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

  • Yay, it's the Wiki equivalent of the "let's make a zillion different threads about exactly the same thing" forum meme. </end whining about how no issues ever get resolved here 'cause no one wants to discuss things T.T> --BagatelleT/C 04:25, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
    • So, yeah, with the new effects update I now strongly (compared to mildly before) think that what's listed for an effect should be a part of its data page, which would also allow for automatically displaying it in some way on the items that give the effect. --Eleron 22:45, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
      • In this instance, I agree, though I suspect there will be difficulties in exactly how a popup description would be displayed - in particular, it would need to handle line breaks using <br /> tags as well as explicitly colored text for elemental damage bonuses, both of which would rule out using the span+hover method suggested in the above discussion threads. --Quietust (t|c) 17:59, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
        • Well, I did mention one other way of getting more complex pop-ups that could handle more intensive displays. Effect data pages could have multiple "effectX=" for each line, and we'd just have to code everything up to allow what seems to be a sufficiently large value of X. Which I'm thinking is probably going to be slightly larger then the ridiculous number that the prismatic wad effect has. I think how much browser compatibility we want is likely to be the big issue, since those more complex ways involve changes to the site CSS files that probably won't be interpreted uniformly across the major browsers. --Flargen 21:30, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
  • So instead of being able to put what a potion does into the Notes section of the potion's page -- which would be simple, and which would be something people could do right now, a piece at a time, on the items they actually care about -- we have to wait while some shadowy figures have a 5-month-long meeting about metadata in a place where no end users ever venture. How useful. Oh wait, it's been longer than 5 months now, hasn't it? -Greycat 14:24, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
    • Look. It's one click from an item page to get to the effect page. Rewriting HCO ascension strategies, updating drop rates are things people could do right now but people don't do them. The wiki already has problems updating things (i.e. four pages of best foods, of which only one is updated, lists of weapons, etc.). You could help with some existing projects instead of complaining and trying to start new ones. --CG1:t,c,e 18:59, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
      • That's not really a fair comparison. Rewriting HCO strategies requires knowledge of HCO and the ability to write guides. Updating drop rates requires a substantial turn (and a bit of time) investment and a decent knowledge of statistics. Putting effect...effects on the origin of the effect requires the ability to click a button, mentally record information, click back and retype the information. I haven't seen any complaints that the lists of weapons aren't updated - and yet, someone here was so annoyed by the lack of effect effects on potion pages that they saw fit to update it themselves. It's not so far a stretch of standards - equipment with intrinsic effects, like the mesh cap, already list the effects on the page. If people are actually willing to do it, it could be a nice feature. This project also requires less updating for each update than a new weapon or especially the best ingestables lists do - a sentence per potion, compared with all the data formatted correctly for weapons and needing the adventures spaded out for foods. If this becomes standard, it would be easy enough to update the origin page at the same time as creating the effect page - like how a data page is now created with an item or monster page. This leads to unfortunate replication of data, but I can't see an effect data page change working for this - especially the longer effects, which could just get unwieldly.--Ryo_Sangnoir 21:36, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
      • As an aside, the "current projects" page is pretty unhelpful. "Clear out the Needs X categories" is a pretty general goal, especially with most of the stuff in there having been there for ages and some being stuff that can't be done until a certain date (trick or treat candies for outfits, for example). Many articles in Needs Content are actually Spading, as well. And from the main page, the first point on the "Current Points of Discussion" has been archived and the second hasn't been discussed in months and is going nowhere.--Ryo_Sangnoir 21:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
      • And now the issue is fixed by way of a Greasemonkey script written by clump. Sending people to just go download that is a workable solution.--Ryo_Sangnoir 09:05, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
        The script was more of a proof of concept, but it certainly does make things more convenient, and makes me wonder why I didn't do that long ago. I don't consider it a great overall solution: it doesn't help non-firefox users, and in a more general sense writing external scripts to actually gather and re-present data on a wiki (as opposed to fiddling with aesthetics) feels inappropriate given data-presentation is already the main purpose of a wiki. Still, given 2 years or so of discussion at least a script avoids continuing to wait for this to get anywhere. :) --Fig bucket 11:08, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
        • Soon as I can remember how to get the template to not display, I'll be happy to take care of the derelict discussion point. That or I'll (first find, and then) change the announcement itself to ask people if they actually read the announcements, since it seems we've only gotten up to about 2 people so far who do. Add some snarkiness to the front page! And current projects is a page that hasn't really been touched meaningfully in a long time (1 year, a bit more specifically) and could use some dusting off. Or outright destruction/replacement. Non-admins should be able to edit the page, so if you've already got ideas on how to spruce it up, then by all means go ahead. --Flargen 04:23, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
          • So at the top of the Current Projects page I should put "Rewrite Current Projects", huh? Unfortunately, for the large projects nothing much can be done - I don't even know what the large projects are any more. "Find monsters without attack/defense and then spade it out" could be one - the dwarven war stuff makes things like that more accessible. After spading is updated, at least. For the small projects...more categories? There are a few "Trick or Treat item required" which obviously can't be done until Halloween and can only be done on Halloween in Needs Content. Needs Content also contains spadework. I might like a "Needs Data" category for combat item damage, adventure and stat range from consumables, and so on. Very simple stuff that's normally either in Content or Spading, or sometimes Confirm. Category:Incomplete now houses monsters without any known messages for hit/crit/miss/fumble, but no longer sorted by that like they used to be, fumble first. It's supposed to have items without IDs but people end up putting question marks in which screws up the autocat.--Ryo_Sangnoir 09:05, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

User Space Spamarama

  • recently, some users have been making a billion edits in the user space. we don't allow people to host even kol-related non-kol images on this site, should we allow them to host kol-related but non-kol content of other kinds here? IMNSHO, no-one cares about your familiars or your skillset, no-one. if they did they could look at your user page and you could host it there. if you need to keep records of your obsessive micromanagement skills, do so in a space, and on a bandwidth that belongs to you. i could be wrong, though. perhaps moderation in all things is the way to go. and more rules almost certainly isn't. --Evilkolbot 18:12, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
    • Wait, so are you saying you'd be fine with the content all being on just their main user page, and you just don't like them making things easier to edit by creating pages for each section's big ol' table? I don't quite understand the fad, either, but I know that sometimes people want to ask "what familiar/skill/etc. should I get?", and having a relatively easy to read graphical representation of what they do/don't have makes it pretty easy for people to answer that. Much easier to make sense of then someone trying to just spam their list of skills into the chat. Of course, there are offline parsers for this sort of thing. Quite a number of them made/provided by csemaj. --Flargen 02:27, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
      • than, it's "easier to make sense of than". please be more careful. --Evilkolbot 07:05, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
        • No? I've little need to be formal enough here to pay attention to whether or not I've made a common typo. Well, if I happen to notice them before I change pages I tend to correct them out of compulsion, but that's about it. --Flargen 11:43, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
          • if it were just a common typo i'd probably have let it slide. unfortunately "than" is one of those words that is going to die. people under 30 (30 seems arbitrary, but J&S are a little older than (yay!) that and wouldn't do it) seem intent on only using the word "then" in every circumstance. a tacit conspiracy to wind up the curmudgeonly. seems to work. --Evilkolbot 12:30, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
            • <ontopic>evry1 shuold b red liek me</ontopic> --BagatelleT/C 02:01, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
  • It'd be great to strongly discourage more than a few sentences about things unrelated to one's KOL edits on this Wiki. --Improv 03:09, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Purpose and scope of the wiki

What information is suitable for the wiki, and what should be moved elsewhere?

The about page currently contains the following:

  • The KoL Wiki is a site designed to create a comprehensive and comprehensible source of spoilerific KoL documentation and analysis. Our hope is that KoL players will come here and add new information, making this wiki as useful and usable as possible.
  • Feel free to edit pages when you have new information, or to correct already existing info. That's the whole point of a wiki.

However, that was written quite some time ago, and the wiki no longer has the same purpose as when it was first created. What is the current purpose? Should the above be updated or is it accurate?

Interpreting the description above, I would think that it's meant to contain

  • Documentation of what a player sees in the actual game
  • Analysis of what you see - metagame information

It would be reasonable to consider documentation of e.g. Got Milk as including "You like food; food tastes good." and noting that it makes adventure gain numbers higher when eating food items, and arguably perhaps even that it's 1-4 extra adventures per food item. However, the actual mechanic and detailed formula for how it works and interacts with other effects is clearly metagaming analysis.

The wiki currently contains a lot of extra information beyond mere documentation, such as notes for the game's pop culture references, various descriptions of game mechanics, guides, ranked lists and other analyzed and synthesized information.

Exactly what such non-KoL content should it contain, what information should be on other sites, and who decides this?

Some illustrative examples that might be debatable:

  • Game mechanics
  • Numbers seen in the game vs formulas
  • Aggregate lists comparing things for some specific purpose
  • Subjective analysis
  • Historical notes
  • Community information
  • People making/playing/discussing KoL/the wiki
  • In-game characters and clans

--Eleron 13:55, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

  • I think most of the existing information about the game software/content itself is appropriate - we're essentially making a manual for the game, and the spading/precise statistics/detailed formulæ/etc are fine. Efforts to figure out strategies are fine too, and pop culture references are about the game software/content and merit inclusion. There are some things that are a little bit questionable but are probably ok provided they stay small, like the links to mechanically generated object collection statistics and historical notes. The big area I think we need to stay out of is having much information about in-game characters and clans - that kind of thing brings a lot of ego into the wiki that we don't need and invites a lot of eventual stupidity (e.g. people feel that they own their user page, and start adding it to stupid categories, like Category:Hats, and throw tantrums when people edit *their* page to remove the category), or 15-page essays about how awesome their character or some new raffle they invented yesterday is. Avoiding significant per-user and per-clan content avoids a lot of really ugly issues. --Improv 15:16, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
    • (Just to clarify, this really isn't the same section as User Space Spamarama. If everything else should be here, then that's a policy change, not an off-hand comment.) --Eleron 15:55, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
      • Wow, that about page needs a rewrite... That was put in the day we first got the wiki running. I like your working list above, but the user/clan info has always been a touchy issue that we really can't allow much of here. Otherwise, seems fine. Care to mastermind a re-write of the page? I'll unprotect it for now so it can be edited. --jin 17:56, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
  • The status quo seems to work OK to me. The clan/community stuff is generally relegated to a small number of pages; there generally isn't a problem with people categorising themselves/making inappropriate community pages. Putting meta-gaming/mechanics off-site would make it terribly inconvenient for people who want to know what things do/how to optimise their experience. In fact, I find that too much stuff is spaded off-Wiki (e.g., clan/official fora); it'd be nice to have a paper trail for everything on this site. --BagatelleT/C 02:01, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
    • i'd have to agree that the way that asymmetric content is handled is about right. and the meta-gaming stuff, spading et al, is just a part of that. we don't host, say, J/S fiction just because it references KoL, nor do we allow player created content in the main space. with reference to the spamarama comment above, it wasn't off-hand, it was an attempt to test opinion on whether there should be a fair use policy for the user space. WillParryHDM has a gigantic user page and makes tens of tiny edits. Psy keeps everything compartmentalised, but all the sub pages add up to a huge bit of content and updating each one can be as many edits again. (these are just two random recent examples, not meaning to single them out.) i'm not against people using the wiki to show off their shinies, but this really shouldn't be a facilitator for the obsessive micromanager. --Evilkolbot 11:53, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
      • one more thing, i love rules but understand their inutility. in this case, though, perhaps a rule of thumb would be 'if you get the 32k warning, then your page is too big'. if it were up to me anything more than a few sentences, or sub pages older then a few weeks would get removed as cruft. but i'm just a ban-happy asshat so what do i know? --Evilkolbot 11:58, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
        • Not sure if this belongs here or under the spamarama heading, it was mostly inspired by evilkolbot's preceding comment. Personally, I've always kind of wondered why some people put such huge amounts of data on their pages. In a lot of cases, the quest log in-game would be simpler. In most cases, a simple word/ excel/ non-microsoft-equivalent document could easily reproduce this data. It seems some people just use the wiki as a personal webpage/repository /what have you. While I'm not necessarily saying that none of that should be allowed at all, there really ought to be a hard and fast limit, in my opinion. Whether that be the 32k because of the size warning, or something smaller, probably isn't my decision to make. Just thought I'd throw my couple pennies in.--Alabit 22:08, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
          • But display cases are the game. D:<
          • I'm sure if those 2 were here, they would have very strong opinions, but they're not here, sadly. On the topic of reducing spam, maybe you should give flargen a bot account and force him to use it, because, yeah, spam. Mar 23:19, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
  • Getting back on topic, in terms of analysis, spading, historical and community information, I'm perfectly happy with the amount of each which exists on the wiki right now. --Prestige 01:26, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Negative status effects

Pages for negative status effects, such as A Little Bit Poisoned for example, contain notes that state "Can be removed by using an anti-anti-antidote or casting Disco Power Nap." However, the recent additions of All-purpose cleaner, the Bandersnatch and Vermincelli introduced things that can remove all negative effects. It seems silly to continue updating the notes on each negative effect's page with an ever-growing list of things which can remove the effect. Perhaps there should be a separate article describing all mechanics around removing negative effects, then the notes on each effect's page replaced with a link to that article. That article could also specify categories of effects that are "injuries" removed by Tongue of the Walrus and "poisons/diseases" removed by Disco Power Nap. --Prestige 01:26, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

  • Hm, sounds like a good idea. My first instinct, though, is to keep stuff like power nap removing poison on the actual effect page, as that, to me, is more of an exception case than a "global rule you can learn about on the consolidated article." --BagatelleT/C 22:29, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
  • My issue with removing, say, naps is that it jars with the natural course of action for someone looking something up on a wiki. The first instinct for a user should be to look up the status effect first. And I imagine we'll get a number of people griping about how they have to do an extra click to figure out what, if anything, can remove the effect that's messing them up. Now the wiki has a policy of not listing the SGEEA on a status effect page unless it can't remove the effect. And the SGEEA page itself contains such a list of unremovables. At this point it would seem a mechanics page might be warranted for generic effect clearers (which would probably contain the more limited ones, as well, in some form or another); something like "Effect clearers" maybe. But I think, like Bagatelle seems to, that items/skills/etc that only remove a limited set of status effects can continue to be noted on the pages for those effects. --Flargen 22:57, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
  • May I suggest we start a "Negative Status Effect" category?--Urutsini 09:25, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Crafting Subsections

After trying to look for "Tex-Mex" in the Wiki, and NOT finding it, I thought that there should be a page for the sub-sections in crafting that list all the items in the section, kind of like the Oyster Egg days that have a list of where to find the eggs. Where you have the item and what it's made of. It could be:

==Tex-Mex== The title of this food category and all the foods have a resemblance to Mexican foods.

Insanely spicy jumping bean burrito: spicy jumping bean burrito and jabañero pepper

etc...

--TheSuperNerd 15:08, 5 April 2009 (Aust. WST (GMT +8:00))

Sounds like the Tex-Mex section in the the cooking discoveries page. --Fig bucket 08:32, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Then why doesn't it show up when you use the search thing on the left? --TheSuperNerd 20:39, 5 April 2009 (Aust. WST (GMT +8:00))

The searching certainly isn't very sophisticated. In many cases a redirect page is required to get a search term to go to the correct place. I added one, but note that redirects won't redirect to page subsections, so it only goes to (the top of) Cooking Discoveries. --Fig bucket 13:06, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

  • as far as i can tell, the search doesn't actually search the text, it does a lookup on an index. only four-letter words are indexed, and both tex and mex are only three. --Evilkolbot 18:13, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
    • Case for a Tex-Mex category, then? --Club (#66669) (Talk) 22:34, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Items that Grant Skills

Is there a fast way to search for those? If not, how about a category? Right now I'm thinking more about stuff like Let Me Be! which teach you a skill and not stuff like crotchety pants which have skill intrinsics, but a category for them might be good, too. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 22:34, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

  • Is this page what you're looking for? --Fig bucket 22:51, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
    • I still kind of dislike that page's existence. But I guess this means there's at least one other person who wanted to find such a thing. --Flargen 02:07, 16 April 2009 (UTC)
    • That's the sort of information I was looking for, but not the formatting. If all it does is list items and skills, that should be a Category, not a page. I'd expect a page to have more detail. Checking history, I see it is only a month old, which is why I've missed it. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 17:06, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
      • Yes, it is kind of a vacuous page. And upon a bit of further searching it's also really just a subset of Skills By MP Cost. A category makes more sense, but is the important property being a skill granted from an item or whether it is permable or not? --Fig bucket 21:28, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
        • Yes. I would be forever grateful if we could reduce the number of list articles that get more and more out of date when one article with a complete list and appropriate columns or notes will do. Nightmare that is the weapons lists, anyone? Four separate pages of best food analysis, only one of which gets updated with any frequency T.T Not sure a category would solve the problem--wouldn't people then be clamouring for a table comparing them at a glance? --BagatelleT/C 03:21, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
          • New items cause inconsistency in the food tables, but a lot also comes from the volatility of early data (which also makes adding new items to multiple places unappealing, since it means multiple updates will be required as spading evolves). I don't imagine it's actually feasible at this point, but ideally item data would be expressed as templates like the monster data, with other templates then used to extract the item data needed on a given page from a central location. --Fig bucket 14:48, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
        • I'd be okay with a category. The page at least shows that there's more of that kind of skill than I would have thought. I've long been something of a category-trigger-happy guy, long as they actually see use, since they have built-in auto-update capabilities. Any naysayers? And for the yaysayers, how would we like the category (categories?) to be added? We/I can always add the ability for the {{skill}} template to auto-perform the task, provided you pass in a simple parameter like "fromitem=1". --Flargen 04:04, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
        • I like the template idea---flexible and it keeps relevant data together. --Fig bucket 11:51, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
        • Second the template category method. Here's the categories I'd suggest adding: Acquired From Item, Acquired From Equipment, Cannot be Permed. I think that takes care of many of my interests in skill grouping, and as categories it is auto-maintained. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 18:51, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
        • Six months, nothing happened, so I did it myself. I'm still learning how templates work, though, so I started with the simpler one -- permable vs. non-permable skills. I may tackle "items that grant skills" in the future if this works out. -Greycat 17:25, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Check these out:

They use the {{#ask:[[Category:'cat']][['propertyname'::'property']]}} parser function (part of this extension to generate lists which update automatically as pages are created or updated. It would require a major botwrite of all current data pages, though. --Raijinili 21:15, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

  • Interesting. We'd have to bring that up with Jinya if we wanted to do that. The concern, if any, would be the extra server load that would cause. A change to a single page could conceivably generate 1000's of queued events as it proceeds to update something that dynamically generates a table from, say, items. We've got thousands of those, after all. It's a different kind of beast compared to Yugi-Oh!, which only has on the order of a few dozen for any given monster type, and probably only a few hundred of more broad card types. I believe that's always been the primary barrier to us having such automation on this wiki; there's an extra order of magnitude or two of things to deal with than on most wikis. --Flargen 21:55, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
    • One option is to host the wiki at Wikia, which would give you the opportunity to use these features without needing to worry about cost or server load. As well as the extra functionality, logged in users don't see ads at Wikia (except on the home page). I can be contacted by email (angela at wikia dot com) if this is something the community would like to do. There are no costs, and we'd be happy to make a donation to the game if you do join us. Angela 07:52, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
      • I would like to recommend against this - on some wikia wikis (e.g. the Dofus wiki), there has been "direction from above" to avoid many types of templates for performance reasons. Retaining independence is a good default - unless there is compellingly better green grass elsewhere (and I don't think Wikia has that), the status quo on arrangements is pretty good (I mean nothing personal against Angela (whom I know from my past involvement with Wikipedia) or Wikia). --Improv 19:45, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
        • Hi Improv. Thanks for your comments and for sending me the Dofus link. It looks like it was just guidance from a helper on optimising the use of DPL. There's no problem with template use, and the Semantic MediaWiki extensions mentioned above are running well on some fairly large wikis like Yu-Gi-Oh which has more than 30,000 articles. I hope I can reassure that you that you wouldn't need to worry about performance at Wikia. Angela 07:23, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
      • Wouldn't wikia's licensing preference conflict rather dramatically with how this wiki functions? A large percentage of the text here is copyright Asymmetric, whereas I always got the impression wikia content was supposed to be freely licensed. --Starwed 07:14, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
        • Hi Starwed. Wikia prefers freely licensed content, but we have always made exceptions for wikis that did not start at Wikia, so nothing would need to change if you did move. Angela 07:23, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
        • Not that I support the Wikia move, but Assymetric's basically given <some word starting with "i"> approval for the use of content, and they would probably put in direct approval if asked (which would then override copyright). This might change with a Wikia move, though, I dunno. --Raijinili 02:56, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

zodiac signs

throughout the wiki, the phrase 'if you have ascended' is used. for me, this is kinda confusing, as it suggests that the effect will apply if you have 'ever' ascended, rather than have ascended for this run. if this isnt just me being weird, i suggest changing this to 'are ascending', or something, to get rid of the ambiguity Twiggie 11:54, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

  • Do you have an example in mind? I'm not really sure what you mean. --TechSmurf 18:46, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
    • Going by the subsection name, maybe he's talking about zodiac sign pages? I haven't looked just yet, but I would think the actual phrase is "if you have ascended under the Wallaby", which is perhaps slightly ambiguous but not as much so as simply "if you have ascended". --Flargen 21:56, 26 April 2009 (UTC)
      • For example, on The Gnomish Gnomads' Camp page, it says you need to have ascended with a Moxie Zodiac sign to see it in the northeast of Desert Beach, which implies (to me, anyway) that once you have completed an ascension with a moxie sign, you can go back there. Twiggie 15:20, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Wednesday: Updates

Tuesday is dead, and for a good reason. However, it served a useful purpose: anyone who wanted to know what's new in the Kingdom (or what has changed since the last time they logged on) could go there first to see what significant changes had been made. The wiki needs a page for this kind of thing. To avoid disputes of the meaning of significant, it might make sense for all functional changes to be included. Whatever is decided, though, I think it's important to have a page tracking "Recent Changes" but excluding the copy-editing, reorganization, and other things that occur in the wiki but do not reflect changes in the Kingdom itself. --Killerrabbit

  • You mean the History of Loathing pages? They only thing they suffer right now is a lack of consistent attention. I used to update it religiously, but then I remembered I'm a devout Lazyite. There's also all of the Template:DATE pages (which are displayed on the main page on the corresponding date). --Flargen 19:30, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
    • That page is not used the same way the Tuesday page was. History is an exact copy of the game announcements, whereas Tuesday would provide a quick summary of the actual changes, and links to all new content pages. It was useful to get an actual summary of what had been added/changed, and the wiki really does suffer from the lack of a similar page. --Starwed 07:21, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
      • This is precisely what I meant. --Killerrabbit 12:57, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
    • Starwed is right. The Tuesday page was useful because when new items were added, it told you which items. If a new zone was added, it linked you to all relevant information in that zone. It would be nice to have a "New Content" page which follows the model that the old Tuesday page created. That is rather different from simply repeating the announcement page as History of Loathing does. --Bale 07:42, 29 April 2009 (UTC)


Location templates and class-specific adventures

Do you think it might be worth adding in some fields into the location templates for Infernal Seals, Eau de Tortue and Summonable Pastamancer Combat Entities adventures in the same way we have a space for Semi-rares and similar? Probably unnecessary, but I think it seems similar enough to the other fields we have in there to warrant an inclusion. --Melon 09:31, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

  • Hmm...I don't think the PM stuff would be noted (it's not an adventure, but an item drop of some monster), but the seals and turtles might be worth mentioning. Turtles are somewhat complicated because there are "default" turtle adventures, and I forget if we ever observed a distinct pattern between the zone's ML range and the turtle it defaults to. That and it's not too hard to get to a complete listing of turtles from the pheromones page. --Flargen 04:14, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Math formulas

A lot of the formulas on the wiki are hard to read, especially because the exact method of rounding is given in a lot of places. (Take a look at Clobber, for instance.) I was thinking that it might look better to use the actual symbols for floor and ceiling (⌊X⌋ and ⌈X⌉) where required. So instead of

ceiling(sqrt(Bonus Weapon Damage))

we'd write

⌈√(Bonus Weapon Damage)⌉

I think that the symbols should be clear enough to anyone who actually knows what the floor/ceiling functions are in the first place.

If this were implemented there could be floor and ceiling templates so that editors didn't need to enter the HTML entities manually. Thoughts? --Starwed 23:32, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

  • Even better would be proper MathML support, though that could possibly be difficult (as Coldfront already disabled ImageMagick on the site, which is what prevents us from resizing images on the Trophy page). --Quietust (t|c) 23:41, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
  • Those don't render as the ceiling symbols for me at all. I presume this is because I'm currently in Japanese language settings, though. And your template idea might run into a slight problem with the existing {{floor}} and {{ceiling}} templates used for actual calculations. --Flargen 23:48, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

It would be nice to have MathML support, but unless something's changed since last time that idea was brought up I guess we'll have to make do without. I'm pretty sure Flargen's symbol issue is font-related, since they're normal HTML entities. (Does anyone else experience this?)

If there aren't any strong objections I'll slowly change the syntax as I use the wiki. Any opinions on using template names of fl and cl? --Starwed 02:18, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Spading Tables

Is there any interest in automating some of the work done in creating spading tables such as this or or this? The code below added to common.js would enable the percentages and total to be automatically calculated, removing some of the tedium and human error. 

function spadeTable_init() {
	var tables = getElementsByClassName(document, "table", "spadeTable");
	for (var i=0;i<tables.length;i++) {
		spadeTable_do(tables[i]);
	}
}

function isOfClass(n,c) {
	if (n.className && n.className.indexOf(c)>=0) {
		var cns =  n.className.split(' ');
		for (var j=0;j<cns.length;j++) {
			if (cns[j] == c)
				return true;
		}
	}
	return false;
}

function spadeTable_do(table) {
	var firstRow;
	var rowStart;
	if (table.rows && table.rows.length > 0) {
		if (table.tHead && table.tHead.rows.length > 0) {
			firstRow = table.tHead.rows[table.tHead.rows.length-1];
			rowStart = 0;
		} else {
			firstRow = table.rows[0];
			rowStart = 1;
		}
	}
	if (!firstRow) return;

	var collCount = -1;
	var collPercent = -1;
	for (var i = 0; i < firstRow.cells.length; i++) {
		var cell = firstRow.cells[i];
		if (isOfClass(cell,'spadeTableCount'))
			collCount = i;
		else if (isOfClass(cell,'spadeTablePercent') )
			collPercent = i;
	}

	if (collCount>=0 && collPercent>=0 && table.rows.length>rowStart) {
		var total=0;
		var totalCell;
		for (var i=rowStart;i<table.rows.length;i++) {
			if (table.rows[i].cells.length>collCount) {
				var c = table.rows[i].cells[collCount];
				if (!isOfClass(c,'spadeTableTotal'))
					total += Number(c.innerHTML);
				else
					totalCell = c;
			}
		}
		if (totalCell)
			totalCell.innerHTML = '<b>'+total+'</b>';
		if (total>0) {
			for (var i=rowStart;i<table.rows.length;i++) {
				if (table.rows[i].cells.length>collCount) {
					var c = table.rows[i].cells[collCount];
					if (!isOfClass(c,'spadeTableTotal')) {
						var x = Number(c.innerHTML)/total*100;
						table.rows[i].cells[collPercent].innerHTML
						= '<b>'+x.toFixed(2)+'%</b>';
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

(and call spadeTable_init() from somewhere, e.g., at the end of sortables_init()).

Tables are then constructed by adding class specifiers to two columns to indicate which column has the counts (spadeTableCount), and which should receive the percentages (spadeTablePercent). A cell in the spadeTableCount column with the further class of spadeTableTotal receives the total count. Here's a minimal table: 

{| cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" border="1px" class="spadeTable"
|- style="background-color:#EFEFEF;"
! Outcome
! class="spadeTableCount" | Total 
! class="spadeTablePercent" | Percent
|-
| Some entry
| 10
| <!-- cell will be overwritten by 25.00% -->
|-
| Another entry
| 30
| <!-- cell overwritten by 75.00% -->
|-
! Total
! class="spadeTableTotal" | <!-- cell overwritten by total count 40 -->
! 100.0%
|}

It might be possible through templates instead, but that would require one of the looping extensions. --Fig bucket 13:35, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

That seems excessive for something which is not really that hard to do by hand. --Starwed 20:17, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
In theory, sure, but not in practice. The first table I referred to still does not have percentages, and hasn't/won't for a long time since I expect no one wants to keep them up to date as data is being added. If you look through the change history you can see people repeatedly make errors, mainly in updating the totals (in fact the second table I referred to still has an incorrect total (and should have a more sensible number of significant digits in the percentages)). --Fig bucket 10:37, 28 May 2009 (UTC)
Then how about this: that seems excessive for something which is only going to see use on a couple of talk pages. I do understand that people are frustratingly incapable of correctly updating totals and following bolded, colored directions, but that's just going to come with the territory I think. If you want some of these auto-calc functions, you might try creating a google spreadsheet or something with the data in it, and link to it from the talk page. On a tangent, your script-fu is impressive and I hope you continue to think of ways we can improve aspects of the wiki; fixing the sortability of tables with row/column spans was awesome, for example. --Flargen 12:15, 28 May 2009 (UTC)


Fast forward a few months and I see it has been implemented and is in place on the deluxe Mr Klaw talk page. It makes adding the observations much easier and I must say I like it. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 18:42, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

I like the data entry that way too, but it's actually from a different, javascript-free solution, so none of the above code applies :). It uses a (unique) template to construct the table instead---it would be easy to apply the same idea elsewhere, although it does require a new template in each case (which is not hard to make; it's basically just the original table with appropriate expressions to insert the values and calculate percentages. It only gets messy because every time the total is required it's represented as a big sum-expression). --Fig bucket 20:02, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Splitting Choice Adventures by number

Take a look at Choice Adventures by Number. The list was fine in its format 2 years ago, when there some 100 odd choice adventures. Now we're almost up to #400. Would there be any objection into splitting it into 100 adventure chunks? It'll probably require some change to Template:Adventuretop and it's num field though.

In addition, I might suggest we split Choice Adventures out of the Category:Non-combat Adventures. They take up nearly a 25-30%.--Toffile 00:27, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

  • Both suggestions sound fine. We can deal with the num field issue in the same way that {{item}} handles links to Items by Number pages. And creating a sub-category for choice adventures would be fine, and easily auto-cat'd. --Flargen 04:05, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
  • And it looks like we've got that done now. Just need to go through and fix the formatting on the adventures with multiple choice numbers. The sub-category will propagate in time as the wiki churns through the queue. --Flargen 05:04, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Maximizing Your Familiar Weight

With the advent of the Slime Tube, I believe there is enough +FamWeight effects to warrant a Maximizing your familiar weight page? --Urutsini 23:31, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Item Price

Not sure if this is possible, but it would be nice if a specific page could display the marketplace's price range for the object- say what they're currently going for in the mall, or the average over the past week, or something like that. When checking out the GGG, for example, it would be nice to know the ballpark price to buy one of these things.--Cheese Loaf 13:15, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

  • Wow- almost 2 years of gameplay, and never noticed that little gem. Thanks! --Cheese Loaf 14:04, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

PRE Formatting

Would it be possible to add <pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> to the site's CSS (this works in Firefox, not sure about other browsers)? People don't preview, and it's irritating to have to make nuisance edits to fix sidescroll. --BagatelleT/C 21:30, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

  • I'd actually mentioned the same possibility back when I also proposed using ccs to make the reciple tables simpler. As I mentioned then, that method doesn't work for IE, and possibly other browsers. There are a few other browser-specific style parameters that could be used as well, but I must confess that the one that was supposed to be IE-specific never worked as specified for me. And I'm not sure if adding it would be good or bad. Might cause the slightly attentive users that it works for not to notice their formatting faux pas. I otherwise share your pain. --Flargen 21:39, 12 July 2009 (UTC)


PvP

The PvP page states that spading is going on using the talk page, but that page has not been updated since 2007. Similarly the actual PvP page has barely changed since 2007. Does someone want to work on this or can we abandon the pretense that it will be updated? --Club (#66669) (Talk) 19:09, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Fractional Item Drop Rates

  • yiab's item hunt is entirely awesome.
  • it always struck me as odd, however, that we would show his exact results on the item pages. for example, if his testing showed a 29.4% drop rate that's what we'd report.
  • it has been known for a very long time that jick likes integers a great deal, and multiples of five even moreso.
  • to my mostly non-asperger's brain it seems entirely unlikely that jick would code fractional drop rates. (the cursed items discussion suggests that it is not even possible.) i'd suggest that in all cases greater than 1% it's the integer that's the coded rate.
  • i've held off rounding the rates to the nearest integer for three reasons.
    1. this is yiab's item hunt
    2. it's freaking ridiculous amounts of work
    3. i seem to remember that the last time this was mooted a lot of t-shirts blacker than mine got very sweaty at the idea of reporting something that would be at best a, *speaks very quietly* best-guess.
  • i see from this edit that the reign of those more spectrum than that is about to come to an end.
  • or is it? any ideas? --Evilkolbot 11:26, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
  • "it's freaking ridiculous amounts of work" - sounds like a case for a bot to do it? Or round in the template. Personally I don't care if the wiki shows 29.6% or 30%, there's never a case where that level of precision affects me. Here's a suggestion: leave the "precise" figures in the Data: pages and have the templates round to the nearest 5% multiple for numbers above 4. Someone who wants to know if something drops at 11% instead of 10% can check the data page, and the rest of us get a good ballpark figure. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 17:18, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
    • Rounding to the nearest 5% won't work out well. Drop rates are quite frequently not multiples of 5%, and percentage points make a noticeable difference as you start increasing your +items. Furthermore, Yiab's data often have significant error margins. He may have done a lot of encounters, but he did them at such small item drop bonuses that the error margins frequently remain large enough that there is no unique integer in the 90% CI for the data (there are frequently 3 or more, in fact; indeed, often his average values are a percentile or more away from the true rate). In my own data (such as the W Imp), when I post an exact integer instead of a decimal value it is because that was the unique value in my CI, or there wasn't a unique value but that was the average, respectively. Without a unique integer in some reasonable CI, it is in fact a "best guess". Even at the higher drop rate bonuses I run in my data collection it can be hard sometimes to get that unique value; sometimes items just love to hover around the half percentile values in the average for a large number of observations. And eventually I grow tired of the prospect of needing another 600+ encounters just to get that one item's rate to even out enough to get me a unique integer. Also also, Yiab hasn't been active on the wiki in a long time. --Flargen 21:16, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

New categories proposal: Untradable and undiscardable

I'm currently trying to study black cat swallowing up. I wanted to test it with untradable and undiscardable items but I didn't know any common undiscardable item to make my test with. Because there isn't such category on the wiki, I've look all items to know which are untradable or undiscardable. Other studies maybe need those lists. If it's possible, I would like to share this work. Is it possible to create new categories on the wiki? How can I do? --Foman38 20:50, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

  • You can search for "notrade" or "notrade=1" for untradables and "autosell=0" (with quotes) for undiscardables. It would, however, be very easy to auto-categorize in the item template based on the item fields. --Fig bucket 21:17, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Second this call, especially since it can be easily updated for all items through the template. --GalenKemensen 18:45, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Tidy up / rewrite of Cooking

Call for comments on a draft rewrite posted at User:GalenKemensen/Drafts/Cooking, cross-posted here from Talk:Cooking for visibility. The intention is to remove the superfluous and repeated information from Cooking - which is to say, most of the page - replacing with links to appropriate pages, and transplanting information about food in general to Food. --GalenKemensen 18:45, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Wiki extension versions

What's the wiki's situation regarding updates to the wiki software and installed extensions? Is it something that the admins can change easily given a sufficiently persuasive reason, or is it at the mercy of the hosting provider's software setup?

I ask because I'd very much like to use a recent version of ParserFunctions, one with support for #iferror and operator keywords in #expr. And maybe the #min / #max functions in ParserFunctions/Extended if that's not too much of a stetch! :)

I also have some queries / suggestions regarding custom extensions and their performance advantages over complex wikitext templates, but I'll save that pending the answer to the first question. Thanks. --GalenKemensen 18:45, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Display of Effect Duration Range

I noticed the duration of effects granted by Sauce potions is displayed in multiple ways. For example, eyedrops of the ermine says it gives the effect for 5-15 adventures. However, Ermine Eyes shows it is granted for 5/10/15 adventures. (Of course, the actual duration depends on knowledge of Impetuous Sauciness and being a Sauceror.)

To me, 5-15 looks a little cleaner, but 5/10/15 is more accurate in the information it provides -- there are just 3 distinct possibilites, not a continuous range.

Going broader, I just thought to look at AT songs. Having only checked a few, the skill seems to have the duration listed as X, with a note that duration depends on the accordion used, while the effect page for the buff lists the range as 5-15. The possibilities

I guess, the issue is: What is the best standard for the display of multiple possible results that aren't a continuous range? Do we give the start and end, like 5-15; or the possible outcomes like 5/10/15; or an X with a Note about the possible outcomes? --Terion 20:35, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

  • The trouble with the 5/10/15 type is that it can get ridiculous - as far as I can see, the complete list of AT buff lengths would be 5/7/10/12/14/15/20/21, depending on the base accordion used and the presence of either a jewel-eyed wizard hat or opera mask. The start and end was used because the list itself gets rather long, but I suppose isn't accurate any more. In this case, using X and having a template in Notes to explain the system would probably be the best.--Ryo_Sangnoir 21:37, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
    • Alternately, have a link to a "buff duration" page giving a rundown of all the different things that affect them (EW/LEWs, JEW hat, Opera mask, Impetuous Sauciness, etc). Having a list on each buff page would get unwieldy-- actually, not "get". It already would be. It could be template'd, but having a linked page would accomplish the same thing, but with much less space consumed on every buff page. --TechSmurf 05:41, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Standardizing Mr. Store items

I just finished updating all of the pages of items-of-the-month to use the new IotM Description template. I did this because there had been some terrible inconsistency across these pages as to how the date, description, and such were presented in the notes. It was messy, and I don't like messy. Now we can easily change the way that information is presented by editing the template, should we feel the need.

There is more that could be standardized from Mr. Store. For instance, notes regarding spellbooks are incredibly inconsistent:

The pre-Bookshelf books' notes leave the reader wondering, "What about after January 3, 2008?" Other notes don't actually specify that the item grants the skill, but that the skill itself is Hardcore Permanent. And we need to settle on parlance: do these books still grant skills, even though they go on the Bookshelf?

More standardization in phrasing could also be used on the pages of the annual hybrid familiars (Volley-Lep and Fairy-Chaun).

I'd like to reach a consensus, at least regarding skill books, as to what information is worthy of inclusion and what isn't, as well as how we will phrase certain things. This sort of congruity could be used in future templates, but also just creates a more coherent resource.

Let's start with skill books. What's important? What's not? How can we standardize their information?

--Southwest 19:28, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Clans

Is Otori really appropriate here? Do we want to leave the door open for clans to have detailed information about themselves on the KOLWiki? --Improv 00:19, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

  • How about Warehouse 23, The Ninjapiratezombierobot clan and Noblesse Oblige then? IMHO clans with a significant role in the history of the kingdom and/or an ingame item should have their own page here. --scheijan 09:49, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I've never been terribly fond of the main-space clan pages, but Scheijan's argument is the main reason they were originally there and remain there today: they actually had a substantial role in the Kingdom's history. --Flargen 16:43, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
  • At the very least, such pages should not be written from a promotional or first-person perspective, should not contain fan-like material (like slogans), and should be kept brief and to-the-point. A link to off-site websites (if they exist) can satisfy the curious. --Improv 16:25, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Whoa. Whoa. I'm not an Otorian, but I imagine you're going to get a very pissed off notification from someone when they realize almost their entire page has been blown away. I don't know about how accurate these things need to be, but these shouldn't be treated like Wikipedia. Case in point: The Rye. If possible, maybe a clan namespace should be created? --Shoptroll 18:03, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
      • The fact that they might be upset is not an indication that it's the wrong thing to do. They can dig through the history for the old text if they like, and ideally host that stuff in a more appropriate place. If we are to document the few clans that are a big part of KOL, we should keep our coverage of them brief, focused on why they're a big thing, and third person. The clans don't own their pages. As noted, they can (and probably should) find places for their clans to talk about themselves (and/or amongst themselves) on their own site. --Improv 07:02, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
      • I oppose a clan namespace. Clans are welcome to have their own off-wiki webpages. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 18:35, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Well, not "pissed off", although it was quite some work to update the page a few weeks ago... Anyways: If we are going to handle it like that and the other clan pages are "shortened" as well I am not going to bitch around. --scheijan 07:24, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    • I agree that the old article contained too many minor details of questionable interest to most players. However, Otori does have an impact on the community, and I've expanded the article to better reflect that. --Itsatrap 18:44, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Looking at the N.O. and Warehouse 23 pages, they should probably be compressed a bit, because things like member-lists don't seem very useful. The stories are interesting, but those should probably be rolled into some sort of unofficial history of the kingdom, or maintained off-site by individual clans. --Itsatrap 18:51, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
      • I like the idea of having a "central" place where people can read about the history of the clans. Of course every clan can have its own external site. But why not have a "clan history" in the wiki as well? --scheijan 07:24, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Clan histories, mentioned on Clans: Here (mirror 1, mirror 2), and Here. And oh boy, do not get me started on clan pages! And just for the record in what was it 2005 or 6, I deleted ALL clan pages, and created the Clan Directory transcribing all links found within those hundreds of pages (oh the wasted youth). More or less, the wiki was young, had bandwidth problems, and player/clan pages were being created and edited like a hundred times a day making it difficult to notice anything (like spam/vandalism/mistakes, etc.) on the Recent Changes page, and made it hard to even constructively edit or view pages b/c of lag and fails. Player pages were moved to User: space if an wiki user existed, KoL already has a profile system, so why just dupe it here? It was the wild west on the wiki then ;) The current clans which exist were undeleted by Jinya (wiki founder) and have been around ever since, most coincidentally getting in-game items). Any clan can create a (free) webpage with their history and member list and link to it to their heaven's content, and use the Clan Directory. I never thought an exception needed to be made for those clans, and had no problem nuking 'em but that's me ;) The current consensus is that they have in-game items so can exist. They aren't really hurting anything, besides a few other clans egos, so they stayed. And don't get me started for people turn their User: page into an exact copy of their in-game profile, I mean you can show skills and familiars in-game already. Or use it as their own personal notepad and update it everyday. Ick, vanity pages. Nobody ever sees it but them ;) I mean even mine is just enough, nothing fancy, short but sweet. I know and check in only for a moment once a day round rollover and make minor changes now, but (for those who may not know) I became the 4th wiki admin on July 25, 2005 (but was contributing since the wiki's birth on May 6, 2005) and am currently the second longest active wiki admin. Pin a rose on my nose, right? But my point is that if you are not sure why something is the way it is on the wiki, I probably know why and have a long story about it. Heh. Oh and clan pages... I'd nuke 'em again. Ka-pow! P.S. I'm strange :D --JRSiebz (☎|§|‡) 08:22, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • For the clans that are culturally significant, I don't think we want to entirely "nuke" them - a mention of their significance and a pointer to their site would help random KOLers to get "in the loop". The middle ground of minimal+pointer is better than either nothing or everything. --Improv 14:58, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    • I rather like what Improv wrote on Otori. It's enough to get the significance across and isn't excessive. --CG1:t,c,e 00:58, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm perfectly happy with you to reduce Otori's page to 3 or 4 sentences, and an external link to a detailed history.. But only if you do the same for NO, W23, NPZR and every other clan on the Wiki - Psyko —Preceding unsigned comment added by BasicForm (talk • contribs) on 21:37, 12 October 2009

  • That was the original goal. --CG1:t,c,e 03:43, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Let's get started on that - I think we've settled on a workable notion, using the topic of Otori as the guinea pig (nothing personal) - now that we have the idea pretty much right, it's time to apply it consistently. --Improv 18:45, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

CG.. I'd like to point one thing out.. I'd much rather be reading about major Kingdom Community events (such as NO's Week of Drunken Lovin' and Otori Week) on the Wiki than yours, or anyone else's personal ascension history. Jick found these noteworthy enough to take the time to create a custom item for them.. Yet you feel they aren't worth more than a brief sentence on the Wiki, which is meant to detail major KoL events? I fail to see the logic - Psyko —Preceding unsigned comment added by BasicForm (talk • contribs) on 21:37, 12 October 2009

  • So why don't we create a template for the clan pages? Then every page would have the same structure and could be of the same length (more or less). We could discuss here what this template should contain and how long the texts should be and what they should contain and what not. I understand your point of shortening the texts but IMHO Psyko made a valid point here as well. And I still don't really understand why you are against "history" on the wiki. Of course every clan can have its own website and there are external sources of "clan history". But the advantage of the wiki is that lots of people could edit that page and it could be more accurate and more up to date than any external site maintained by a single person....--scheijan 08:20, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
    • There's a diference between a site being accurate, and being advertising. Personally, I'm against pages like that, not because I'm against "history", but because "historical" is such a abusable term. Who's to define what's "historical" and what's not? Yes, an event should get some kind of nod if an item was made about it, but such a nod should be a mention on the item's page, not an excuse to make an overblown clan page. On a side note, I am inclined to agree that similar standards should be taken for people's User pages. I'd bet that the dozens of pointless ascension histories and permed skill charts are taking up more space than the small handful of long-winded clan pages. --LegendaryBard 17:32, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
      • We can manage to make it accurate and appropriate without it being advertising. That's mostly a matter of tone and keeping the content minimal and to-the-point. Anything first-person is probably out. I don't think user pages are as crucial - they're not in the main mainspace and we can give people a lot more leeway because of that. --Improv 18:05, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
      • First person may be out, but not in credos. A credo is pretty integral to a clan. --Azeltir 19:10, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
        • Let's just mark it as a credo then, so it's attributed rather than spoken with the voice of the wiki. Having it centred and unattributed is probably inappropriate, but having it as just another fact about the clan might be kosher. Note that what is integral to the clan is not necessarily integral to the page about the clan. The page about the clan is not the same thing as a homepage you might make elsewhere for it. --Improv 21:17, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Important question: Is bandwidth still an issue for the Wiki? If not, then what's the harm in leaving things as they are? I also agree that the dozens of "pointless ascension histories and permed skill charts" are not relevant... But. For clans that are still relevant today, it's worth keeping their full pages and records. Okay, pages such as those on the Elite Ones or Tricky Tricky - both of which ceased to be relevant several years ago, and contain no active players - could productively be culled. But if it's a clan with a major history in the game - over years - or a major present, also as shown over years (not a "half a dozen noobs' vanity clan"), it deserves a wiki page in my opinion. Hell, for better or worse I'd accept the existence of a wiki page for Senam's - which for all its faults is at least active, numerous and has a certain degree of current prominence, however regrettable or not this may be - than many of the "past-it" clans who have been there for ages but have little to their name apart from a history of rampant bug exploiting in 2003-4 and not a single remaining active player. But Otori deserve, in my opinion, to retain their FULL history page because they've been part of the Kingdom for such a long time and actually achieved stuff including their custom clan item. Not to mention keeping Otori Week going for five years running: they're a clan of major and regular social achievement. --JLE 02:06, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
      • Over many years, the "is bandwidth/disk space an issue?" argument has repeatedly been proven bad for any wikis where it's dominant - the point of keeping things appropriate is a cultural/content maintenance issue, not a technical one (otherwise, we would not be using a wiki to begin with - every change we make adds another revision and more content for spiders to rummage over). We don't want mission creep - we need to maintain what the project is about, and prevent ego from distracting us from our goals. People and organisations often have a tough time learning how to be good wiki citizens - they have an urge for self-promotion and to effectively advertise themselves and their interests, regardless of the purpose of the site, and when wikis don't regulate that, one ends up with a lot of cruft, a lot of decent content handled inappropriately, and a site that has purpose-drift to the extent that nobody knows what it's about anymore, serving as the homepage for every person, group, and bit of trivia under the sun. I think we should firmly reject that, and restrain our argument to "what do we want the wiki to be about", ideally keeping that fairly narrow. --Improv 22:29, 15 October 2009 (UTC)
        • First and foremost, this IS NOT Wikipedia, and I'm sure a lot of people aren't going to care for all the academic stuff you just rattled off as a defense. You can cite everything you want about policy and theory about how to run a wiki or wiki-community but most people aren't going to care about it. Second, the community aspect of the game is important to a very significant amount of the playerbase. If you want to strip important aspects of the game's history from the wiki, that's your prerogative as a user. However, you're not going to get a ton of sympathy when an angry mob shows up at your door with pitchforks and torches. Just sayin'. --Shoptroll 00:55, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
          • If people are getting personal and angry about it, that's a sign that they have the wrong attitude and we've let them have the wrong idea about the Wiki for too long. --Improv 18:45, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
          • Guys, I understand why ya'll are so peeved, but is any of this info not maintained on your own site? For stuff like this, the point of the wiki (in my opinion) should give the quick and dirty answer for those with a basic question, then link to deeper information if the person wants it. By having the deep info here, you sabotage yourself twofold: You overwhelm the person looking for a quick answer, who will turn away from a complex page simply saying "tldr", and you give the person looking for real info no reason to visit your actual website. I mean, unless you really don't want people going to your website... :P --LegendaryBard 19:44, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
  • If you guys are going to start tweaking clan pages wholesale, it would be a very good idea if someone would be smart and notify the clans with pages that you're auditing them and tweaking stuff. Otherwise this drama is going to keep repeating itself. Keep in mind that most of these pages were written years ago and have not been updated. It shouldn't be hard to find someone in these clans who can direct you to someone in charge so that whoever is editing can work with the clan to make sure that the page is acceptable to them. While these are not supposed to be advertising as you all say, they do reflect on what the clan is/is not and they may have certain aspects they want highlighted. In short, contact someone before you start making drastic changes to these because people will get even more pissed about it. The majority of this drama-fest is due to the simple fact that the change came completely out of the blue without even so much as a notice sent to the Otorians before or after the changes were made. And before anyone says "it was posted in the Discussion page"... do you really think the average KoLWiki user checks here to see what's going on? Do most people even know this page exists? --Shoptroll 18:37, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
    • On a side note, maybe it's a good time to just branch the wiki so that we have a community oriented wiki to handle clans, cons, and vanity pages? --Shoptroll 18:37, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
      • The clans do not own their wiki pages. It does not matter what they find acceptable. The basic idea that what they think matters is what is wrong here. --Improv 22:43, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
        • Likewise to yourself and then some. If you can't have the common decency to even toss something in the discussion page for the article like most people you shouldn't be the one wielding the eraser. It would've taken you less than 30 seconds to simply say "Hey go look at the discussion page since we're discussing clan pages and your's doesn't meet the standards", and it would've saved everyone involved a ton of time and headache. Admins notify users via their talk page when an edit is incorrect or if a major change is needed. Why couldn't you have the common sense to do the same for a simple clan page? Whether you like it or not, clans are a group entity. They belong to the group of individuals. How would you like it if I went ahead and shredded your user page? --Shoptroll 04:54, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
          • I agree with Improv with most of what was said except for the last one. Shooting the admins at the clans a quick kmail to tell them what's going on (possibly linking to here) doesn't take much time, and isn't going to start edit wars. That said, it might be a good idea to keep your hippy stone unsmashed for a while, because those leaders may not be extremely happy about this. Also, a community wiki isn't a good idea. Already, people ignore standards and edit their own User pages multiple times in the span of 5 minutes. The Recent Changes page would be extremely bogged down with edits, and it would also be hard to moderate for vandalism. --16:30, 18 October 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Coolguy00001 (talk • contribs) on 16:30, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
            • Vandalism is exactly what you are committing, and proposing. (Coolguy and Improv, in particular). We are the players. We are the community. We are the history. This is NOT like Wikipedia: it is NOT like a normal game where the mechanics are divorced from the players and the community. Custom items have been made players. Mundane items have been named after players. Custom items have been made for clans. Contests and in-game events held by clans have been given "Official Sanction" by Jick. As far as I'm concerned, the bad attitude is yours: We, the players and clans, DO own our own pages, player and clan pages. When we are part of the history and community of the game over a consistent period of years, this SHOULD be noted in the wiki because it is public information, that players actually LIKE to read and know. And the wiki IS where this information belongs. --JLE 15:17, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
              • Some clan-specific content is obviously relevant---it's the scale of detail that's in question. The previously-large Otori page had a long, detailed, and kind of rambling history: reading recommendations, who donated money for their clan stash, the succession of leaders, etc.. I never got past more than a few paragraphs of that. Perhaps it is interesting to actual Otori members, but to outsiders it's a lot of irrelevant detail---as LegendaryBard describes above, it is in practice more off-putting than informative, and would be much better hosted by the clan itself. Until the current version of their page I didn't even know they had a game-item made for them. --Fig bucket 21:04, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

A Historical Tag?

Looking over some of the Needs Work pages and such, I think it would be helpful if we replaced some of the Needs Work/NS13 tags with a Historical tag. Ideally, the art would be the museum from the town, and text could read:

  • "Information of this page is no longer accurate or relevenat in the current version of the game, but is being kept for historical purposes."

(I'm explicitly not saying NS13...who knows if they'll some day go up to NS15).--Foggy 16:49, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

  • There's always Category:History. Not sure if we need to keep things specifically oriented towards NS11, though. In which case there's always thekolwiki:Pages for deletion. --Flargen 21:13, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Looking over the other items in that category, that makes perfect sense. I've removed the NeedsWorkNS13 tag for any article I felt a) was still accurate in terms of content but b) that content applied to NS11.--Foggy 00:43, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

jicknerfed us, nerfed

Through the wiki there are a lot of links to the old HCO website. In some places, the link has been updated to forums.hardcoreoxygenation.com. Is there anyway to have a bot go through and update these links?--Foggy 18:08, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Best Foods/Booze

As some of you may know, I recently created better tables for the best food/booze, and put the food one here and the booze one here. I think that there is zero reason for the Best Foods With Got Milk (adventures) page to be around anymore, and may not even be a reason for the Best Foods / Best Drinks (adventures) tables to be around on their respective pages either. Maybe just have redirects, or links to the Consumables sub-pages? Some people may be used to the strange color scheme on the Best Foods/Drinks pages though, so I don't really know what people want to do about that. --MindlessGames 18:35, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

  • The amount of duplication on the Wiki has always been a pet peeve of mine. I'd vote to nuke 'em, with extreme prejudice, from orbit or otherwise. --BagatelleT/C 22:21, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
  • The new info is very nice. But before tossing out the old pages (except maybe with got milk) could the level requirement and fullness be added somehow? Being able to sort by those has been very handy in the existing/previous pages. --Fig bucket 22:42, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Added the Size column for both tables. I'll add the Level Required column later, I wasn't including that information in the data files I have for these consumables, so I have to go through every single one again, which I don't relish the idea of doing. --MindlessGames 02:00, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
      • The KoLmafia data files have a lot of consumable data in tab-separated format. Depending on whether those files agree with the data currently on your new tables, it may be quicker to just generate the tables from a computer program looping through each consumable. --BagatelleT/C 02:23, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
        • No, the kolmafia files are incorrect for the same reason that the "Best Foods/Drinks" pages are incorrect. Thanks though. --MindlessGames 04:31, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Ok.. So. I added level requirements and stat gains to the Food table. It's sort of ridiculously huge at this point. Should I just cut out the stat gain stuff? that'd reduce the table size immensely. I put them all in the same table in order to have everything all in one spot. --MindlessGames 02:22, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

  • I reckon the size could be cut down immensely using templates accepting a few parameters. See {{MonsterRow}} as an example. Alternatively, you could remove the colouring--since everything has three rows anyway, the colouring doesn't make it any easier to use the table. --BagatelleT/C 03:12, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Monsters

Would anyone else find it useful to have a page summing up all aspects of a monster? Right now, info on their stats is on Monster Level. Monster hit chance is on Hit Chance. Monster damage is on Weapon Damage. Only one of those pages is where I'd think to look immediately. --TechSmurf 02:38, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

  • I'd be supportive of a page called Monsters that detailed Monster Level, Attack, Defense, Hit Chance, and Damage. I'm not sure if item drops or meat drops should be included on that page, but could be links.--Foggy 02:45, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Sounds good to me. If/when that gets done, the Monster Compendium should properly link to that, as well. --Flargen 03:27, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Alrighty.. I started this beast. It's at Monsters. Any information that is relevant to generic monsters, we should toss there. --MindlessGames 04:50, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Links to Redirects

I dislike having links to redirects, but there's often no way to tell if this is happening in a page except if you check every link manually. Is there some way to have the wiki itself detect these and flag them as such? --MindlessGames 04:24, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

  • Sure is! --TechSmurf 04:32, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
    • Actually a double redirect, is a page which itself is a redirect to a page which is a redirect. It doesn't point out links which are to redirect pages. I think there used to be a Special Page called "Links to Redirected Pages", but I think that was more than a few mediawiki versions ago, maybe too processing intensive and got nixed from the distro? I thought at one time there was a "Links to Disambiguation Pages" special page, too, but I could be mistaken. --JRSiebz (☎|§|‡) 04:44, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
    • There is in fact one, however its not a report generated by the MediaWiki software. There's no way to make the software generate it automatically, aside from using a category. It's just because dabs aren't given a special namespace like Templates or Files, and are lobbed in main space with everything else. (Technically, Discussion should probably be in the KolWiki namespace since its meta)--Toffile 04:55, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
    • That's not what I mean. What I'm talking about are links like.. Stream Of Sauce which links to the redirect to Stream of Sauce. --MindlessGames 04:40, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
      • There is a way to do this, however this only works for a single link. (If a page were to link to the redirect, it would show as such.)--Toffile 04:55, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
      • Blast, and here I thought I had a snappy reply. In that case... Well, no pages I can think of, either. Perhaps Quietust could set up QuietBot to go through Special:ListRedirects and fix the links. --TechSmurf 04:56, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
  • There's a convoluted workaround that tags things with below a certain page size with a special CSS class. It'd be pretty simple to whip up a GM script to make the class more noticeable (just testing it now, it changes the display colour, which isn't all that great for highlighting visited links). --BagatelleT/C 05:01, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
    • Had some time today and set something up, on the assumption the original request was for a page-level way of detecting this kind of stuff. Apparently, we've had two redirs on the main page for ages >.> --BagatelleT/C 21:29, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
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