User talk:Coswig

Salvatore articles
You've done some really comprehensive and well-referenced work on those Salvatore articles lately Coswig. Just want to say well done and thank you for your efforts. Even though articles like Drizzt, Menzoberranzan, Bruenor and Mithral Hall detail the settings most popular areas they have always needed a lot of work, it's good to see someone helping out with them.--Eli the Tanner (talk) 19:31, January 1, 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I've found myself with some unexpected downtime lately and am working on my "research" skills ;) --Coswig (talk) 20:15, January 1, 2014 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Fantastic work, Cos :) - Darkwynters (talk) 18:22, January 2, 2014 (UTC)

Lady Penitent
Hey Coswig, I was wondering if you've read the Lady Penitent series? It's follows on from the events of War of the Spider Queen and details Halisstra Melarn's servitude to Lolth. You've done such great work with all the War of the Spider Queen stuff that I thought you might decide to tackle that series next.--Eli the Tanner (talk) 16:57, February 7, 2014 (UTC)


 * It's on my list. I want to finish up the stuff from War of the Spider Queen first, then I'll go check it out. Thanks for the suggestion! -Coswig (talk) 20:16, February 7, 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for category fixes
You are great. Thanks for the Category:Members of House Baenre and Category:Members of House Do'Urden fixes, among others! —Coswig (talk) 03:09, April 22, 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Cos... You just made my day. Awesome work on ALL your pages, BTW... Totally proves you are a Realms expert and a proficient wiki editor :) - Darkwynters (talk) 23:40, April 23, 2014 (UTC)

Homeland
Hey Cos, it is not a big deal, but I noticed you completely changed all my "index" edits on the Homeland page... I was following the guidelines created by High admin BadCat and also the same set up as in the Featured articles City of the Spider Queen and Dungeon magazine 75... I believe BadCat used the bullets to make the pages shorter and more organized... just check out those articles... thanks :) - Darkwynters (talk) 05:24, February 3, 2015 (UTC)


 * Mainly I was adding a few missing things. The formatting would be easy enough to fix. However, I think the bullets are a very awkward format, particularly with long pages and with footnotes. Using the bullets that way does save space and look nice, I guess, but it's not very user-friendly and I'm not sure space is an issue on a webpage.... Is there a place we can get others' feedback on this? Also, if that template in fact the desired standard, it would be great to put it in Template:Book for easy reference :) --Coswig (talk) 20:51, February 3, 2015 (UTC)

No big deal... though, you removed all my page references... I guess I am bummed about that. Either way we format the book pages is cool as long as it is consistent... - Darkwynters (talk) 23:42, February 3, 2015 (UTC)


 * No worries, I can put the refs back (though I don't think they're strictly necessary, I suppose they could be helpful sometimes), but in that case I think the page should definitely be left in a vertical format -- the refs and bullets certainly gave me headaches together, so I suppose I went overboard getting rid of all of them. Sorry. --Coswig (talk) 04:43, February 4, 2015 (UTC)


 * All refs restored, plus a bunch of new ones. --Coswig (talk) 05:27, February 4, 2015 (UTC)

Ahhh, thanks, Cos :) - Darkwynters (talk) 05:48, February 4, 2015 (UTC)

Wanted Pages
Thank you for the recent articles you created from scratch off the wanted articles list! ~ Lhynard (talk) 17:35, April 27, 2015 (UTC)

Spiderkind Clarification
Which spiders are not considered spiderkind? From what I can tell, every spider ever published in the FR setting is listed on p. 30 of Underdark. Monstrous spiders and even spider swarm is included on the list, and a spider swarm is simply a swarm of normal, non-monstrous spiders, which would further confirm the intent that the grouping includes all spiders and spider-like creatures.

~ Lhynard (talk) 19:35, May 11, 2015 (UTC)

P.S.: It's been great to see you writing so many new articles, by the way.


 * You're right. It was just a misunderstanding on my part. I did go back and fix it though! --Coswig (talk) 05:45, May 12, 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, I saw, thanks. You also went and expanded scrag into a great FR article. Good work! ~ Lhynard (talk) 12:42, May 12, 2015 (UTC)

Creature Classifications
Before you go crazy with the categories, please look at Forum:Categorization system for creatures where we discussed the climate and terrain types that we want to use. Specifically note that "mountains" was split into "low mountains" and "high mountains" in 3rd edition. So if you have a creature that is found in "mountainous" terrain, would you please put it into both the high and low categories? I will investigate whether we need the Category:Creatures found in mountains category or not. Ultimately, we would like all creatures to be categorized so they show up in one (or more) of the links on Creatures by climate and terrain. Thanks! &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 12:13, July 18, 2015 (UTC)


 * I did take a look at it, thanks for pointing it. I didn't read all of it -- mostly just the stuff towards the end -- so if I'm missing anything else, please let me know.


 * I did see that mountains were split into low and high (under a main Category:Creatures found in mountains category, it appears to me), but the problem is that with the information I'm using, I don't know whether the creatures live in the high or low mountains. Quite honestly, I'm not quite sure what sources would make that kind of distinction, unless they referred specifically to mountain glaciers, but there's already a category for glaciers. In any case, even if a distinction was made, the creatures would certainly fall under both the parent category and the child category: Category:Creatures found in mountains and Category:Creatures found in low mountains (which as you can see, doesn't exist at this moment), etc. If we classify all mountain-dwelling creatures as living and high and low mountains, it's pointless to have the distinction anyway. So I really think that the mountain categories should be merged on Creatures by climate and terrain If there happens to be a distinction between high and low mountains for a creature, we have a separate category for that (not appearing on the chart at all and appearing only as a subcategory to Category:Creatures found in mountains, which is my vote; or appearing on the chart but as a subtype). --Coswig (talk) 15:51, July 18, 2015 (UTC)

16,000th Article
Your article Snowflower was the 16,000th article on this wiki. Congrats on hitting the milestone and thank you for all your contributions! &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 01:30, August 10, 2015 (UTC)

I was trying to post the 16,000th article, but you beat me by 4 minutes. :p ~ Lhynard (talk) 04:53, August 10, 2015 (UTC)


 * Oops, sorry, haha. I didn't realize you were working on it. Next time I'll let you have the 17,000th :P --Coswig (talk) 14:43, August 10, 2015 (UTC)


 * :) ~ Lhynard (talk) 16:39, August 10, 2015 (UTC)


 * Woho! Congrats! Another milestone! Terrorblades 's Far Realm logs dated  16:58, August 10, 2015 (UTC)


 * Cos, keep up the great work :) - Darkwynters (talk) 17:56, August 10, 2015 (UTC)


 * Lucky you! — BadCatMan (talk) 13:14, August 11, 2015 (UTC)

Snowflowers made an appearance in my campaign on Thursday. :) ~ Lhynard (talk) 21:45, November 22, 2015 (UTC)


 * Nice! I love any little tidbit of Realmslore like that making an appearance :) —Coswig (talk) 16:20, November 23, 2015 (UTC)

Novels
Great job on cleaning up all of the novel pages! :) Artemas (talk) 18:54, August 14, 2015 (UTC)

You are the Appearances Queen
Thank you for going after so many of my creature edits and adding Appearances sections / removing unrelated tags. I think it's quickly making a huge difference in the usefulness of our wiki. ~ Lhynard (talk) 11:52, September 22, 2015 (UTC)

Image trawl
Damn, Coswig, that's a heroic trawl of the images and categories. You're a champion. :D — BadCatMan (talk) 13:11, October 2, 2015 (UTC)


 * Hey Cos, great work on organizing the images, but why did you add image categories to the Reth page? - Darkwynters (talk) 19:46, October 12, 2015 (UTC)


 * Accident, sorry :/ I meant to put them on that image. Thanks for fixing that for me! —Coswig (talk) 20:16, October 12, 2015 (UTC)


 * No prob :) - Darkwynters (talk) 03:10, October 13, 2015 (UTC)

Terrain categories for images
So, complicated-ish thought brought up by your recent edit that I will try to express. I saw that you took off the Category:Images of seas and oceans from Category:Images of the Moonsea because you said it should only be used on individual images. (I disagree for reasons I will explain in a moment, but that's not my main point here.) I agree that images such as the lovely Image:WailingDwarf2.jpg should definitely have Category:Images of mountains attached. However, I don't think that that every images tagged with Category:Images of the Troll Mountains (Amn) should also be tagged with Category:Images of mountains. I think that's 1) redundant, and 2) hides all of the beautiful illustrations of terrain in a jumble of maps, many of which are just different views of the same map. However, I think it is also useful to have all of the mountains we have any pictures of listed somewhere. That was my reasoning behind tagging the categories of specific geographical features, such as Category:Images of the Troll Mountains (Amn). That way they can be easily accessed in a list but the actual illustrations of mountains (as opposed to maps that show mountains, which is just about every map) are easy to flip though. See the current Category:Images of mountains (which has a few maps that have been added in the last few days, but otherwise I think you can see what I mean). Um, anyway, thoughts? —Coswig (talk) 04:51, October 24, 2015 (UTC)


 * Wow, Cos, you and BadCat sure like to leave long messages :) Also, your edits have become insanely high in the last month (Congrats, ye mad editor, you!) Hmmm, my only concern is that we do not have the Location specific categories under buildings, for example, Category:Locations in Luskan are not under Category:Buildings or Category:Inns... yet the Cutlass (inn) page is linked to both categories... though I am not completely against your idea either... let's see what other editors think :) Darkwynters (talk) 15:24, October 24, 2015 (UTC)


 * That's true. But not all locations in Luskan are buildings, whereas everything in Category:Images of the Troll Mountains (Amn) is intrinsically of (or, in rare cases, related to) mountains. (Also, relating to buildings, I just added Category:Images of buildings to Category:Images by terrain.) —Coswig (talk) 01:35, October 25, 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm not in favor of calling buildings a type of terrain because we decided on the terrain types for Template:Creatures by climate and terrain, but I don't really have a better idea. Category:Images by type might be a good place for things like Category:Images of buildings. Thoughts?
 * As for mountains, seas, and oceans, I think your main objection is that it mixes maps with illustrations. I recommend that all Category:Maps be categorized similar to how we do Category:Locations and remove all categories that start with the words "Images of". That way, you can look at maps, or you can look at pretty illustrations, and never the twain shall meet. Given that, I would put Category:Images of the Troll Mountains (Amn) as a subcategory of Category:Images of mountains and mark the image with both categories so people can look at all images of mountains or just the Troll Mountains. I suspect that after you remove all Maps, you'll have very few reasons to have categories as specific as Category:Images of the Troll Mountains (Amn) (at least I hope so).
 * As a general rule, keep categories as fundamental and archetypal as possible, and use Template:Category intersection to generate more specific category lists. If you need more than "Cat1 AND Cat2", I can give you other combinations involving AND, OR, and NOT logic functions. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 15:13, October 25, 2015 (UTC)


 * You'll notice that the terrain types for images are not the same as those in Template:Creatures by climate and terrain. That's mainly because based on an image you can't tell whether a picture of a generic marsh or lake is saltwater, freshwater, etc. Sometimes you can't even tell if it's a marsh or swamp, etc., so the two are categorized together as Category:Images of swamps and marshes.


 * Movie, I like the idea of separating out maps and illustrations, but I'm not sure I follow how to do that. (P.S. Currently, most maps are tagged in Category:Maps, but illustrations are not tagged in any way, though I think that could be done pretty easily.) —Coswig (talk) 21:40, October 25, 2015 (UTC)


 * I think a better name for Category:Images by terrain would be Category:Images containing terrain or even Category:Illustrations containing terrain, and then carry that on down to Category:Illustrations containing mountains, etc. This way, you can categorize each illustration by what thematic elements are being represented. The image of the giant fighting a man-sized person with two silhouetted mountains in the background is a bit of a stretch for "Illustrations containing mountains", but different people will emphasize different thematic elements, so it's all good as long as you don't get carried away. I hope to never see "Illustrations containing grass", for example. Along with "Illustrations containing buildings", there will probably be many other "top-level" categories that would all be subcategories of Category:Illustrations by content which would be a subcat of Category:Illustrations which would be a subcat of Category:Images. This does presume we add the category "Illustrations" to quite a few images :-/


 * As for maps, I would remove all categories that start with "Image of..." to make a clean break from Illustrations. Then use the geographical part of the Locations tree to organize the maps. Something like:
 * Maps&rarr;Maps of Toril&rarr;Maps of Faerûn&rarr;Maps of West Faerûn&rarr;Maps of the Sword Coast
 * and then stop at a reasonable level of detail so it doesn't get cumbersome. Categories having to do with political divisions can be tacked on at whatever level of the hierarchy seems appropriate. "Maps of Cormyr" would probably go under "Maps of Interior Faerûn" but "Maps of Amn" might go under "Maps of the Lands of Intrigue". How does that sound?


 * I see it has been almost two years since your "unexpected downtime". I hope you recovered from it by now. We're certainly glad you stuck around to lend a hand :-) &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 02:51, October 27, 2015 (UTC)


 * I've been thinking for a while now that all maps should be categorized as "Maps of Foo" rather than "Images of Foo", but I was afraid to share this opinion, because I know it means a lot of work. ~ Lhynard (talk) 17:20, October 27, 2015 (UTC)


 * Hmmm, I agree with Lhyn... more work, but Maps of Icewind Dale are different from Images of Icewind Dale. :) - Darkwynters (talk) 04:30, October 28, 2015 (UTC)


 * Couldn't have brought that up while I was categorizing things? :P Well, I just had surgery and I have another one coming up, so once I'm a little less woozy I'm sure I'll be able to go back and work on it. Now that most things are already sorted, it will be a lot easier, at any rate! My plan will be to change map images to Maps of X, and maybe add Category:Illustrations (not to mention Category:Photographs) categories. Or is it redundant to do both those things? (It's hard to think about this too much when on drugs :/) Also, is there any way to "rename" categories or does it all have to be done by hand (replacing the old with the new)? —Coswig (talk) 22:06, October 28, 2015 (UTC)


 * Don't feel that you have to do it all. Ask for help :) Divide the task up into smaller chunks and ask for volunteers. I think it's a good idea to add Photographs to distinguish them from Illustrations. Those three (Maps, Photographs, and Illustrations) should be mutually exclusive. I don't believe you can rename categories, sorry. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 00:35, October 29, 2015 (UTC)

Picture Sorting Progress
Hey, Coswig,

Hope your pain medicine is either still working or no longer needed!

As everyone has been commenting, you've been doing some great work with picture sorting and categorizing.

I've had a project going for a while doing the same or a similar thing. Thus far, our tasks have been very complimentary, I think, (yay!) but I wonder if it would make sense for us to share a common project page. I have one set up already here: User:Lhynard/Projects/Photo Sorting Project

You seem to be focusing on images of people and places, but I'm not sure I know exactly what your goals or project is. Would you like to add your own To Do items to the list there and being tracking your progress? I find having a central spot for keeping track of what's been done and what's left to do very helpful, especially on a collaborative project. It will also help me not to step on your toes.

My initial plan is to sort all creatures by 3e type, and while doing that, tag things that aren't sourced. I'll later go back through and deal with the unsourced stuff.

Anyhow, let me know what you think.

~ Lhynard (talk) 18:29, October 31, 2015 (UTC)


 * That looks great. I haven't ever worked with a project page before, but I think it would be very helpful. I've been working on categorizing people and places, but right now I'm trying to add image type categories to everything (Category:Illustrations, Category:Photographs, and Category:Screenshots—Category:Maps seems to be done, for the most part) and cleaning up/adding source categories. Hopefully I haven't stepped on your toes in that—feel free to let me know if I ever get in the way! If you could start adding image type categories as you go along, that would be very helpful as well :) I'll try and add my tasks to the project page; let me know if you have any questions. Thanks! —Coswig (talk) 19:06, October 31, 2015 (UTC)


 * What do you folks think of my suggestions made above? If you agree, I can start removing "Images of" categories from maps and/or start putting them in a hierarchy. Any sweeping renaming of categories is better done by a bot because I think it can be done unattended. Let me know. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 20:07, October 31, 2015 (UTC)


 * Sounds good, Movie :) - Darkwynters (talk) 20:19, October 31, 2015 (UTC)


 * Actually, since so many of the categories already exist, most of what I suggested would be best done by a bot, I think. :-/ I'm not going to do anything rash until Coswig and Lhynard approve a course of action. I should probably see about getting a bot registered. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 20:35, October 31, 2015 (UTC)


 * If you mean, replace all Images of Foo, where Foo is a location and the image is of a map, with Maps of Foo, yes, then I am all for automating that. I'm not sure how you'd automate that, but if you can, I say, go for it! Coswig has added Category:Maps and begun the process, so that would help. ~ Lhynard (talk) 20:41, October 31, 2015 (UTC)


 * If you want to do that, by bot would be great. Sure make things easier — like you said, the categories exist: everything categorized under Category:Maps; the Images categories are there as well. I do wonder if, now that we're categorizing image types (illustrations, screenshots, photographs), it's still necessary — maybe we can set up something like the relationship between Category:Locations and Category:Settlements? Anyway, I don't really care either way, so bot away if you'd like :) ——Coswig (talk) 22:32, October 31, 2015 (UTC)