Topic on Forum:Wiki Talk

I like my abstract things clean and orderly. Therefore I think we should do something about that horrible, unsightly clutter at the top of every page for a work. Here is a radical suggestion, which I think would make this site a good deal better. It involves having only a few links in the header, leading to subpages which themselves may have additional subpages.

Like this:

• Analysis
• Characters
• Facts
  • Trivia
  • Recap
  • Quotes
• Fandom
  • Laconic
  • Haiku
  • Moments
    • Crowning Moment of Funny
    • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming
    • Crowning Moment of Awesome
    • (Dethroning Moment of Suck?)
    • Nightmare Fuel
    • Tearjerker
  • After-the-Fact Reactions
    • Fridge Logic
    • Headscratchers
    • Wild Mass Guessing
  • General Audience Reactions (split from YMMV, the rest of which goes to the main page)
  • Radar (Or does this belong in Moments? In any case, it should be titled better.)
  • Ho Yay (And how exactly is this different from Radar? And why can't straight pairings get in bed with the gay pairings?)
  • Fanfic Recommendations
  • Image Links
  • Memes
• Reviews
• Wikipedia

Note: All of the pages under Fandom don't need to be their own subpages. Laconic in particular could be just a short bit at the top of the Fandom page, and there doesn't need to be a page called "Moments", just a header with links to the subpages - assuming there are enough examples to warrant those subpages. Some character pages already have subpages like that.

There could maybe be a new subpage called Fan Pairings to try to solve the confusion with the romantic subpages.

I'm not married to this schema, but I really think we could use something on this level. It would also help to individuate this site from TV Tropes in a positive way.

So, "Analysis - Characters - Facts - Fandom - Reviews - Wikipedia." I think it would look so clean!

If you want, draw up a sample template in your sandbox and I'll look it over.

I have never dealt with wiki templates, but the finished template would be extremely simple.

The trick is creating new subpages and moving the links to most existing subpages to those. You'd need to use a bot to do that. It should be well possible in principle, but I don't know how capable the wiki bots are.

You may have noticed that in the lumper/splitter classification I'm a splitter.

I noticed. :p

However, as for the template, It sounds like an easier thing to do would be to make a tabbed template, like the tabs you see on the front page, but in template form.

For some reason this wiki seems to have extremely minimal instructions about making templates. Help:Templates has two links to meta.orain.org that don't work. If I could somehow get to see the code for the current header template and the left-hand menu on the main page, it should be simple enough to combine the elements from the two... But that's easier said than done, as even after a search I have no idea where the code can be found.

I think a system with fewer assumed subpages would be better in the end, as that would allow for the structure of the subpages to fit the work. There wouldn't need to be redlinks on the subpages for categories that will never be filled, as the links to those can just be skipped, and if a subpage for a subpage would be overly short, its contents can be kept inline.

Algorithmically a simple version of this sort of structure change, one in which subpages remain separate even if they are short, wouldn't be difficult to do at all. I just wonder about the bots and what they can do and how hard it is to make them do it.

As for our template documentation, that does need to be improved, and I'll add that to the to do list.

I made an example version of tabbed template on my sandbox page, feel free to look it over and copy it to your own and make improvements.

I made a version which I think has better usabilility. This tabbed box thing is fundamentally different from having sub-subpages and therefore needs a different design approach. I did a quick version that is far from perfect but should show the idea.

The basic idea is that the first tab is for general audience visiting the page, whether fans or people unaware of the work, while the second tab is for things that interest a much smaller slice of the audience and would only be visual clutter to the vast majority of the people. Various fan things would go there, especially the sort of things that only a minority of the fans care about. I did a rough, preliminary division. For example, I put the moments in the second tab, as I suspect most people unfamiliar with the work probably would consider those moments spoilers, especially the more dramatic moments like tearjerkers, and thus not bother with the pages.

Now that I think of it, Wikipedia should probably definitely be in the first tab, but Wikipedia isn't a subpage...

I think the subpages themselves haven't been thought through at all, so maybe there could be some sweeping reforms involving them. For example, could the scope of Ho Yay be expanded with material from the YMMV ghetto and Ho Yay be turned into a more general subpage called Shipping?