Topic on Forum:Short Term Projects

The Theatre/Theater categories were a mess. They have been cleaned up.

I just stumbled across this one. "Theater" has 127 pages and 1 sub category; "Theatre" has 384 pages and 2 sub categories. Both contain a mix of Theater Tropes and Theatrical Productions. ("Theater" tends to be more tropes; "Theatre" more shows.) We need to rename them accordingly, and do a Maxwell's Demon between them so the tropes all end up on one page, and the shows all end up on the other.

While we're at it, we might want to give all the shows which start with "The" a SortKey so they get properly alphabetized.

I tried SortKey with The 7th Guest and it doesn't seem to work when I check Category:Puzzle Game.

Edit: I remember {{DEFAULTSORT:[x], The}} working.

Yes, DEFAULTSORT and that syntax is the way to do this - that way, we don't need to put the sortkey on every category.

If we're going to put sortkeys on "The foo", we should do the same with "A foo" and "An foo" as well. Should we also put sortkeys on non-English titles that match the rule (e.g. "Les Miserables")?

EDIT: Just looked at Special:All Pages - there's far too many of these pages to add DEFAULTSORT to them manually

Back to the main thrust of my original post, I've just gone through and done a rough sort, putting creators, works and work-like pages into Category:Theatre, and all tropes and trope-like pages into Category:Theater. The only one I'm not really sure about is Turn of the Millennium/Theatre -- while the parent page is a trope, this specific page is a list of works from the era in question, so for the moment I've left it with the other works in Theatre.

The next step is renaming the categories to be a bit more distinctive from each other. I'm proposing renaming Theater to Theater Tropes, and Theatre to Theatrical Productions as noted above. Given how many creators are tagged with Theatre right now, I would also like to propose a new Category, to be called Playwrights or something similar (suggestions are welcome), which will become their new home, to keep them separate from productions.

Finally, we need to standardize on one spelling of Theater/Theatre for use as the media type. We have both scattered at random through both work names and subpages for tropes. Unless someone has strong feelings otherwise, I'm going to use "Theater".

Comments, suggestions, brickbats?

EDIT: And I've just discovered we already have a both a Theatrical Productions page and a Theatrical Productions category. Geeze, this is a mess.

Merge the index into the category.

Yeah, that was my first thought. But I'm waiting a bit to see what other folks have to say before I bulldoze through with my intentions. <grin>

This may just be an Ottawa thing, but around here, a Theater shows films while a Theatre shows plays. Just saying, and I won't mind being outvoted on this.

Okay, I've gotten a start on this, but it's going to take me a while. I'm leaving creators out of Theatrical Productions for obvious reasons.

And... almost done.

Okay, I've got the productions side done, I think. I set up a hierarchy with Theatre at the top. It (currently) has Ballet, Choreographers, The Musical, Playwrights and Theatrical Productions as subcategories, and 8 pages that really don't fit anywhere else as its own contents, though this may change.

Next task is turning "Theater" into "Theatre Tropes".

And done. And as an extra bonus, I stashed all trope example subpages which shared one of these original categories into Theater, to keep them separate, and annotated most if not all of the various categories just to explain what the hell's going on.