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Could someone take a look at these articles a figure out which ones actually need to exist: Abeir-Toril, Geographical index of Toril, List of Forgotten Realms nations, and List of regions in Faerûn? I feel bare bones, in-universe lists of locations are completely unnecessary, but I'd imagine some kind of general article on the setting of that campaign setting would establish notability. There is certainly no way all of those need to exist at once though. TTN ( talk) 15:56, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.
We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma ( talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm boldly beginning some badly overdue maintenance on this topic space. Because there are so many articles involved, my first stop was to look at the navigation templates supporting them. Which are horrifying. Template:D&D topics is currently the "master" navigation template for D&D articles. Without even addressing what articles might need to be merged, reformatted, deleted, or otherwise tidied up... that template is, to be blunt, a travesty. Any time we have multiple panels of auto-minimized template navigation inside our auto-minimized navbox, that's a sign there's a problem. Also, some of the content in the master template duplicates or otherwise conflicts with the content in other, more specialized navboxes. Navboxes are supposed to make navigation easier; these are failing at it.
But that's an immense job that will require coding suites of new templates and updating dozens to hundreds of pages. It's no surprise that it hasn't been done. So, I'm doing it.
Done so far: New video game template. New franchise media template -- albeit as a work in progress. All affected articles updates.
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Here's what I have planned as "phase 1"
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Still to go in what I consider "Phase 1" of this process is dealing with the rest of the franchise media. The board games need a list article written to hold them; all we've got right now is a category that's painfully incomplete anyway. That's going to take me a little while, because I need to source stuff. I'm also very strongly tempted to write a parent article for the D&D periodicals and then force the individual titles into a child template (like video games). There are ... quite a few more than we have, and that lets us handle notable fanzines and second-party stuff like Pegasus that currently fall through the cracks. It's more work for me, but I'm clearly a masochist. Squeamish Ossifrage ( talk) 20:46, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
In Phase 2, I intend to restructure or replace Template:D&D books, which isn't any better than the master template. There are a couple different ways to approach this, and I'll be a little less bold about some of those choices. It's a little while off, regardless. But once that's done, navigation for all of the "physical real-world stuff" articles should be well in hand.
That leaves us with the remaining material in the master template. Stuff like campaign settings, in-universe concepts, notable characters and monsters. How to address all of that is not straightforward, and I'll strive not to do disruptively. But there's still quite some time to go before I get there.
If you have questions about what I'm doing, or why, please ask. If you want to actively help in the cleanup process, I'd rather other people not do the template work at the same time I'm trying to do the template work... but there's a LOT of articles that are going to need attention (especially some further sourcing). Feel free to drop me notes here or at my User Talk. Squeamish Ossifrage ( talk) 17:41, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Your plans all sound good to me so far. My personal feeling is to retain as many topics as reasonably possible – although trimming and merging may very well be a good idea in many cases. I am definitely in favor of a reasonable compromise (the approach of "delete, delete, DELETE it all!!!" is neither reasonable, nor a compromise, in my opinion) on how to handle content. Fictional elements have long been a challenge, not just for D&D articles but for all of Wikipedia, but I am no proponent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and I believe there is a way to handle that sort of content without jettisoning it all completely (and it is not impossible either; see Drizzt Do'Urden and Dwarf (Dungeons & Dragons) for example). Meanwhile, focusing on more tangible elements like video games and books seems like a good idea, so we will cross the bridge of the other stuff when we come to it. :) Some people may find merging and trimming to be controversial... but I feel that is far less controversial than deletion! Whenever possible, we need to add development and reception information to any and all articles, which will help overall. BOZ ( talk) 22:41, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
The "easy" stuff isn't done yet, but I need to get ahead of this. I'm simultaneously trying to track down viable RS for the various comic issues (our coverage is wretched) and for the litany of board games that we have nil information on. But looming ahead is the first big challenge (ha! like the rest of this is easy): Template:D&D books. That template consists of seven nested autocollapsed panels. It's nothing like a policy-compliant navbox. So, as with the other products stuff, we're going to need to break it up. At some point, too, there needs to be a determination which navboxes the main Dungeons & Dragons article gets. It can't get all of them. So I'm tempted to say the "core" template (whatever is left of topics at the end), plus the "parent" template for each subtheme. So ... franchise media and rulebooks, but not comic books or 4E rulebooks?
Meanwhile, currently, my thought is to set up a "parent" level rulebooks template with two internal groups. First, a "by edition" section, which will point to lists of rulebooks by edition (Original / Basic* / Advanced / 2nd / 3rd [incl 3.5] / 4th / 5th). And then a "by type" section that is mostly to point at ... however we clean up List of Dungeons & Dragons modules / List of Dungeons & Dragons adventures. More thoughts on that ... um, later. Yeah. Later.
My thoughts are that we do include the modules / adventures in the rulebooks navbox. Sure, it'll make some of the navboxes bulky, but that's fine. They'll still be better than they are now. Listing order is going to be a challenge, but I'll burn that bridge...
Any thoughts? Anyone? I'm also really hoping that BOZ and I aren't the only folks active here. I could use a lot more hands as we start getting past template cleanup and into article development. Squeamish Ossifrage ( talk) 20:46, 1 November 2019 (UTC)
Someone has been putting some work into the earliest D&D video games this week: [1] BOZ ( talk) 20:29, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
My thoughts for {{ D&D books}} is that much of it's contents are better suited to be navigated by list article or category that the tremendously large navboxes. The core books, that is the main game books like the Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Masters Guide, belong in the main template, but a template trying to moist every single game book we have an article for is not a good use of navboxes. (As an aside, thing like novels and comics are not the intended contents of that navbox, which is about guidebooks for the game, not spinoff media, so I would not worry about how to integrate them.) In short, I'm not even sure we need a separate navbox here at all, let alone a series of them that would each contain redundant links. Meaning that a series of navboxes for each edition would all contain links to the PHB article, as there's only one such article, not one for each edition. Some of the books (especially modules) we have articles for probably don't really rise to the level of independent notability that allow for articles anyway, and can probably be merged into some list article somewhere. (Reviews in specialist publications are essentially WP:ROUTINE and don't really speak to independent notability. Then again, some are very well covered and commented on classics. That's where the ability to discern the difference between a routine review and genuine significant coverage is important.) oknazevad ( talk) 01:24, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Is there an easy way to retrieve a list of D&D articles that have been deleted? AugusteBlanqui ( talk) 18:02, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
@ S Marshall: has suggested that it would be useful to craft a RfC on RPGs. This could be narrowed down to Dungeons and Dragons. It seems to me there are two main issues: 1) the poor quality of articles 2) interpretation of notability guidelines which exclude official sources. An RfC cannot address the first issue (except perhaps to express cleanup as an alternative to deletion?). However, it could address the second. In particular, WP:PRIMARYNOTBAD potentially offers a way forward regarding the high quality official sources such as Dragon Magazine but also third-party publications that are reputable--I'm thinking of Kobold Press and Goodman Games. For example, Faerie dragon looks like it is headed for deletion based not on the quality of the article (which could be improved) but because of the rejection of multiple sources (some independent, some 'official') as primary. I am not sure a RfC is a worthwhile endeavor from what I've seen in the various deletion debates/closes; given my limited experience in AfD or RfC this is not something I would consider doing. However, I would be happy to help draft the RfC here and do additional research if someone else wants to shepherd it through the process. AugusteBlanqui ( talk) 13:01, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
I think the scope of the RfC should be "pen and paper roleplaying games", i.e. it should exclude CRPGs.
I haven't previously been involved with this WikiProject and I'm hardly well-informed about the subject, but from a quick look at the topic area earlier today, I've formed the view that our current coverage of RPGs looks like a Wikia site. Is that fair? A large number of short, low-quality, semi-sourced articles with lots of in-universe material? I suggest that we need a way of grouping these many short articles into much fewer, much longer ones. We'll still need lots of redirects and disambiguation pages because the search terms that readers use seem to be quite specific. There seems to be a wish among the crusaders to delete all the redirects; this should be resisted.— S Marshall T/ C 15:35, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
Enworld published a nice article that has links to half a dozen or so secondary sources on D&D: https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-in-the-mainstream-again.668560/ AugusteBlanqui ( talk) 17:56, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Religions in play: games, rituals, and virtual worlds has a chapter on D&D. I am working through the small part about monsters on p. 282 at the moment, but there would be much more worthwhile of pursuing, about alignment, clerics, cosmology and the like. Daranios ( talk) 15:03, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
I get that the idea for a list of RPG products might be a good idea for an article about the product line, but... is this kind of a bit much? 208.47.202.254 ( talk) 01:35, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 35 | ← | Archive 39 | Archive 40 | Archive 41 | Archive 42 | Archive 43 | Archive 44 |
Could someone take a look at these articles a figure out which ones actually need to exist: Abeir-Toril, Geographical index of Toril, List of Forgotten Realms nations, and List of regions in Faerûn? I feel bare bones, in-universe lists of locations are completely unnecessary, but I'd imagine some kind of general article on the setting of that campaign setting would establish notability. There is certainly no way all of those need to exist at once though. TTN ( talk) 15:56, 17 September 2019 (UTC)
Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.
We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma ( talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
I'm boldly beginning some badly overdue maintenance on this topic space. Because there are so many articles involved, my first stop was to look at the navigation templates supporting them. Which are horrifying. Template:D&D topics is currently the "master" navigation template for D&D articles. Without even addressing what articles might need to be merged, reformatted, deleted, or otherwise tidied up... that template is, to be blunt, a travesty. Any time we have multiple panels of auto-minimized template navigation inside our auto-minimized navbox, that's a sign there's a problem. Also, some of the content in the master template duplicates or otherwise conflicts with the content in other, more specialized navboxes. Navboxes are supposed to make navigation easier; these are failing at it.
But that's an immense job that will require coding suites of new templates and updating dozens to hundreds of pages. It's no surprise that it hasn't been done. So, I'm doing it.
Done so far: New video game template. New franchise media template -- albeit as a work in progress. All affected articles updates.
|
---|
Here's what I have planned as "phase 1"
|
Still to go in what I consider "Phase 1" of this process is dealing with the rest of the franchise media. The board games need a list article written to hold them; all we've got right now is a category that's painfully incomplete anyway. That's going to take me a little while, because I need to source stuff. I'm also very strongly tempted to write a parent article for the D&D periodicals and then force the individual titles into a child template (like video games). There are ... quite a few more than we have, and that lets us handle notable fanzines and second-party stuff like Pegasus that currently fall through the cracks. It's more work for me, but I'm clearly a masochist. Squeamish Ossifrage ( talk) 20:46, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
In Phase 2, I intend to restructure or replace Template:D&D books, which isn't any better than the master template. There are a couple different ways to approach this, and I'll be a little less bold about some of those choices. It's a little while off, regardless. But once that's done, navigation for all of the "physical real-world stuff" articles should be well in hand.
That leaves us with the remaining material in the master template. Stuff like campaign settings, in-universe concepts, notable characters and monsters. How to address all of that is not straightforward, and I'll strive not to do disruptively. But there's still quite some time to go before I get there.
If you have questions about what I'm doing, or why, please ask. If you want to actively help in the cleanup process, I'd rather other people not do the template work at the same time I'm trying to do the template work... but there's a LOT of articles that are going to need attention (especially some further sourcing). Feel free to drop me notes here or at my User Talk. Squeamish Ossifrage ( talk) 17:41, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Your plans all sound good to me so far. My personal feeling is to retain as many topics as reasonably possible – although trimming and merging may very well be a good idea in many cases. I am definitely in favor of a reasonable compromise (the approach of "delete, delete, DELETE it all!!!" is neither reasonable, nor a compromise, in my opinion) on how to handle content. Fictional elements have long been a challenge, not just for D&D articles but for all of Wikipedia, but I am no proponent of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and I believe there is a way to handle that sort of content without jettisoning it all completely (and it is not impossible either; see Drizzt Do'Urden and Dwarf (Dungeons & Dragons) for example). Meanwhile, focusing on more tangible elements like video games and books seems like a good idea, so we will cross the bridge of the other stuff when we come to it. :) Some people may find merging and trimming to be controversial... but I feel that is far less controversial than deletion! Whenever possible, we need to add development and reception information to any and all articles, which will help overall. BOZ ( talk) 22:41, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
The "easy" stuff isn't done yet, but I need to get ahead of this. I'm simultaneously trying to track down viable RS for the various comic issues (our coverage is wretched) and for the litany of board games that we have nil information on. But looming ahead is the first big challenge (ha! like the rest of this is easy): Template:D&D books. That template consists of seven nested autocollapsed panels. It's nothing like a policy-compliant navbox. So, as with the other products stuff, we're going to need to break it up. At some point, too, there needs to be a determination which navboxes the main Dungeons & Dragons article gets. It can't get all of them. So I'm tempted to say the "core" template (whatever is left of topics at the end), plus the "parent" template for each subtheme. So ... franchise media and rulebooks, but not comic books or 4E rulebooks?
Meanwhile, currently, my thought is to set up a "parent" level rulebooks template with two internal groups. First, a "by edition" section, which will point to lists of rulebooks by edition (Original / Basic* / Advanced / 2nd / 3rd [incl 3.5] / 4th / 5th). And then a "by type" section that is mostly to point at ... however we clean up List of Dungeons & Dragons modules / List of Dungeons & Dragons adventures. More thoughts on that ... um, later. Yeah. Later.
My thoughts are that we do include the modules / adventures in the rulebooks navbox. Sure, it'll make some of the navboxes bulky, but that's fine. They'll still be better than they are now. Listing order is going to be a challenge, but I'll burn that bridge...
Any thoughts? Anyone? I'm also really hoping that BOZ and I aren't the only folks active here. I could use a lot more hands as we start getting past template cleanup and into article development. Squeamish Ossifrage ( talk) 20:46, 1 November 2019 (UTC)
Someone has been putting some work into the earliest D&D video games this week: [1] BOZ ( talk) 20:29, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
My thoughts for {{ D&D books}} is that much of it's contents are better suited to be navigated by list article or category that the tremendously large navboxes. The core books, that is the main game books like the Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Masters Guide, belong in the main template, but a template trying to moist every single game book we have an article for is not a good use of navboxes. (As an aside, thing like novels and comics are not the intended contents of that navbox, which is about guidebooks for the game, not spinoff media, so I would not worry about how to integrate them.) In short, I'm not even sure we need a separate navbox here at all, let alone a series of them that would each contain redundant links. Meaning that a series of navboxes for each edition would all contain links to the PHB article, as there's only one such article, not one for each edition. Some of the books (especially modules) we have articles for probably don't really rise to the level of independent notability that allow for articles anyway, and can probably be merged into some list article somewhere. (Reviews in specialist publications are essentially WP:ROUTINE and don't really speak to independent notability. Then again, some are very well covered and commented on classics. That's where the ability to discern the difference between a routine review and genuine significant coverage is important.) oknazevad ( talk) 01:24, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Is there an easy way to retrieve a list of D&D articles that have been deleted? AugusteBlanqui ( talk) 18:02, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
@ S Marshall: has suggested that it would be useful to craft a RfC on RPGs. This could be narrowed down to Dungeons and Dragons. It seems to me there are two main issues: 1) the poor quality of articles 2) interpretation of notability guidelines which exclude official sources. An RfC cannot address the first issue (except perhaps to express cleanup as an alternative to deletion?). However, it could address the second. In particular, WP:PRIMARYNOTBAD potentially offers a way forward regarding the high quality official sources such as Dragon Magazine but also third-party publications that are reputable--I'm thinking of Kobold Press and Goodman Games. For example, Faerie dragon looks like it is headed for deletion based not on the quality of the article (which could be improved) but because of the rejection of multiple sources (some independent, some 'official') as primary. I am not sure a RfC is a worthwhile endeavor from what I've seen in the various deletion debates/closes; given my limited experience in AfD or RfC this is not something I would consider doing. However, I would be happy to help draft the RfC here and do additional research if someone else wants to shepherd it through the process. AugusteBlanqui ( talk) 13:01, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
I think the scope of the RfC should be "pen and paper roleplaying games", i.e. it should exclude CRPGs.
I haven't previously been involved with this WikiProject and I'm hardly well-informed about the subject, but from a quick look at the topic area earlier today, I've formed the view that our current coverage of RPGs looks like a Wikia site. Is that fair? A large number of short, low-quality, semi-sourced articles with lots of in-universe material? I suggest that we need a way of grouping these many short articles into much fewer, much longer ones. We'll still need lots of redirects and disambiguation pages because the search terms that readers use seem to be quite specific. There seems to be a wish among the crusaders to delete all the redirects; this should be resisted.— S Marshall T/ C 15:35, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
Enworld published a nice article that has links to half a dozen or so secondary sources on D&D: https://www.enworld.org/threads/d-d-in-the-mainstream-again.668560/ AugusteBlanqui ( talk) 17:56, 16 November 2019 (UTC)
Religions in play: games, rituals, and virtual worlds has a chapter on D&D. I am working through the small part about monsters on p. 282 at the moment, but there would be much more worthwhile of pursuing, about alignment, clerics, cosmology and the like. Daranios ( talk) 15:03, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
I get that the idea for a list of RPG products might be a good idea for an article about the product line, but... is this kind of a bit much? 208.47.202.254 ( talk) 01:35, 14 January 2020 (UTC)