User talk:Abedecain

Welcome!
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Again, welcome! Happy scribing!

— Ir'revrykal (talk) 15:25, July 19, 2019 (UTC)

Template:RaceInline
Hi. Who are you, and why are you breaking our infoboxes? — BadCatMan (talk) 10:48, August 12, 2019 (UTC)


 * Hi, Abedecain, bit unfriendly, but okay... it wasn't intentional, didn't account for the refs, works otherwise. Any suggestions on a fix, could use a bot to move the references to the basicrefs variable Abedecain [[file:Abedecains Cake.png|32px|link=Special:Random]] - Talk  and maybe you'll get cake! 10:55, August 12, 2019 (UTC)


 * Templates are closely integrated with vast swathes of wiki; breaking them disrupts a lot of pages. Normally only experienced editors work with them, and they do so safely in a sandbox page, and only after discussion with other editors about what is needed and how it should work. When you pop up and mess with the code without explanation, it looks like vandalism, and it's natural for us to be suspicious. So, let's try again: what are you trying to do, and why? — BadCatMan (talk) 11:06, August 12, 2019 (UTC)


 * Hi, fair enough. I am a programmer, and I have a history of wiki editing, but not much on fandom itself. The addition is simple, hopefully one of a few, just making the infobox more dynamic. You can see the code in Template:RaceInline with the examples within. As mentioned above, it should deal with refs with the delink module, but doesn't seem to, unfortunately, one option could be to find out why delink isn't dealing with refs, the other is to use a bot to move refs in race to basicrefs. The latter is better in my opinion as the basicrefs is there and it is its function. I promise I won't touch the infoboxes, but what is the platform here for announcing proposals, I am unfamiliar with this communities etiquette? Abedecain [[file:Abedecain_Cake.gif‎|alt=Cake|32px]] - Talk  and maybe you'll get cake! 11:49, August 12, 2019 (UTC)


 * You could start a discussion in the Forum or on the Template Talk page to make your proposal, actually explain what issue that needs fixing and how you'd resolve it, and let others give their thoughts and feedback. It's a collaborative effort. In particular, Moviesign is our template guru and usually handles or corrects template work.


 * So, what, were you trying to auto-categorise for races? We do do auto-categorisation for other infobox entries, but the sheer number of possibilities for races, subraces, and templated race, such as half–shadow dragon liches, and the need to form plurals from "dwarf" to "dwarves" and so on, seems like it would make this prohibitively complicated. Some things are better done manually. — BadCatMan (talk) 12:06, August 12, 2019 (UTC)


 * Partially that, partially formatting, so your half–shadow dragon liches, for example, would be something like race=Dragon|subrace=half–shadow dragon|extrarace1=lich or if you think thats a problem I could have a var called altrace which would override race/subrace but link to race or subrace and not catergorise. This would then categorise these under Dragon and Lich. I don't think there is a need for plurals, you could just have category:Dragon or category:Dragon (Race) or category:Creature Dragon or something, whatever the prefix or affix you want. Abedecain [[file:Abedecain_Cake.gif‎|alt=Cake|32px]] - Talk  and maybe you'll get cake! 12:19, August 12, 2019 (UTC)


 * We already have a well-established system of categories for races that we are not changing under any circumstances, because that would be a huge mess. And half-dragons are not true dragons, so they should not be categorised as dragons. This can all be done manually with less effort and disruption. — BadCatMan (talk) 12:25, August 12, 2019 (UTC)


 * Ah okay, doesn't mean it can't be automated :), so looking at it you have all the subcategories of the categories in Category:Creatures_by_type, that's doable, just need to take a singular and give the correct category, if none match, no category, I'll make a version and make a talk page when its ready, sound good? Abedecain [[file:Abedecain_Cake.gif‎|alt=Cake|32px]] - Talk  and maybe you'll get cake! 12:43, August 12, 2019 (UTC)


 * Hello, Abedecain,


 * I am a huge fan of auto-categorization, and I agree with you that complexity does not always mean that something cannot be automated. I've managed to automate many things on this wiki, and I have considered trying to automate races myself, but have made it very low priority, because, as has already been noted here, it is one of the most complicated of the categorizations.


 * The bigger issue is that your categorization scheme does not match with our current policies regarding race categorizations. Some things to note:


 * Subraces are races. We do not have nor do we want a field for subrace in the Person infobox. We consider it over-categorization to list an individual as both a moon elf and a half elf. Category:Moon elves has Category:Elves as a parent. This could be changed, in the same way that we do categorize with "Inhabitants of…" all the way up the heirarchy, but we do not auto-categorize this because it would be impossible without a massive graph of all possible locations encoded into the system. But we absolutely do not want an intermediate categorization system; we want either a single race category or every possible race categorization up the chain.
 * Capitilization is important. In an infobox, the race field needs to be sentence case. In the categories, this means that it needs to be lowercase. Races are not proper nouns.
 * As already noted, categories should be plurilized. It doesn't make any sense to have a category "Dwarf".
 * Everything needs to be unlinked properly.
 * References need to be handled properly.
 * We do not yet have a firm policy on half-races—though we should. First, there are many ways to link them. Second, do both "halfs" also get categorized. Whatever was decided on for this would need to be discussed with the whole community first.


 * Lastly, something this large could not be implimented without first preparing the thousands of articles using Person before making the template changes. This is especially true because of how you've currently written your new RaceInline template, which requires the use of additional parameters, when Person has only one Race field. Any sort of RaceInline-like helper function would have to only include parameters that could be passed from the already existing Person fields, unless, again, you were to go add literally thousands of new field entries manually to every article about individuals.


 * ~ Lhynard (talk) 16:24, August 12, 2019 (UTC)