Wowpedia talk:Zone category project

Some old stuff
Grrrrr, perhaps I should have just called this the category project? What do you think all, should we rename it, make separate categories for the others that need to be changed (Quest, City, Instance, etc), or just do them under this project name? -- 15:28, 19 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, it's true that this project is closely related to renaming various categories, so closely in fact that I think it should all fall under one project title. I'm thinking one main page describing the project, how to help, who's doing it, etc. etc., and then seperate pages keeping track of the progress in each area (Quest, City, Instance, Continent, Zone, etc.). So logically, we should just change the name of this project to be more encompassing. Which sucks, because I was really fond of "zeecy-pee". --Mikaka 00:15, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

True, Kirkburn was adamant about not having a ton of projects cluttering up space. Otherwise I would say make a "Category Project" and then keep this page and just make it a "subproject", and have other subproject pages such as the "Quest Category Project" (which is going to be a doozy, let me tell you). Actually, I would almost say instances and cities could be covered under the scope of this project - cities are in fact their own zones, as are instances. So perhaps we should keep this project for zones, cities, and instances; then make a separate project called the "Quest Category Project" for those, since that will be a monster of a project (all the quest pages need to be un-hardcoded, and their questboxes need to be updated). Just throwing ideas out there ;P -- 01:54, 20 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I got my bot up and running (User:Piubot) to help out with this project, and some other categorization stuff. As for project scope, I'd vote for "Category project", and things like this would be sub-projects or tasks. --Piu (?!) 00:07, 27 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me! -- 01:00, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Instance categories
While the process of renaming the instance categories certainly falls under the scope of this project, Instances are different enough that they need different sorts of subcategories then zones.

First, one of the most important aspects of a dungeon is the items that drop there. So we need a seperate category for that (possible another sub category for items that drop off bosses vs. items that drop off any mob in the dungeon, but that might be getting too specific).

Also most instances have no NPCs at all, and the few that do have one or two at most. Should we still have this subcategory for instances like Blackfathom Deeps, which only has one? Consistency has its advantages, but this might be a little silly.

Finally, should bosses just be listed in the Mobs category, or should they have a sub-sub-category? It might be nice to seperate the two, given their differences.

Let me know what you think. --Mikaka 00:23, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I was just getting them up there for ideas more than anything. Glad someone noted their presence. I would definitely agree with "what items drop there". If anything, it would be nice to add items to the category which aren't there yet, using wowhead or thottbot. As to "world drop" items vs bosses, I'd say on a per-instance basis. Some instances have a ton of world drop items in instances, some have only a few. I think, in fact, most of this is going to have to be a case by case basis. Odds are for most instances, we won't have to subcat on the NPC cats either. I would suggest on the mobs category, that we separate the bosses out by using  , which will put them at the top of the category rather than lost in the middle. --Sky (t · c · w) 00:41, 28 October 2007 (UTC)


 * An item drop category for each instance would be nice to have. I think it should encompass every item that is unique to that instance, otherwise you'd have world drop BoE item pages with 50 or so categories on it.  Those need their own "world drop epics" or whatever category. I don't think it needs to get too specific on the categories, i.e. "boss drops" and "trash mob drops" for each instance, unless there are a lot of em. --Piu (?!) 16:29, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Did Ragefire Chasm as a test run. Seems fine to me. Anyone got anything to add? --Mikaka 04:38, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Looks peachy keen --Piu (?!) 05:07, 6 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Quote:"Also most instances have no NPCs at all, and the few that do have one or two at most."
 * Um, Blackrock Depths, anyone? And Dire Maul? Some instances do have a population of NPCs, and I think it could be good to at least put them into an NPC list, like the ones zones have. However, this does seem a bit silly for those dungeons who have only 1 NPC. I was considering something like Instance NPCs, but I don't know how useful that would be with every dungeon NPC thrown together in a big melting pot list. I already made Caverns of Time NPCs, but that's kind of a special case. -- 11:31, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

New supercats
I created three new supercategories:
 * Category:NPCs by zone
 * Category:Mobs by zone
 * Category:Quests by zone

The idea is to place any new category such as Category:Teldrassil NPCs in to Category:NPCs by zone, and so on. --Piu (?!) 18:06, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I should clarify this a little bit: I popped into Category:World of Warcraft NPCs and saw a whole mess of articles and subcategories. That category is sufficiently high up on the heirarchy that is should probably by cleaned up and consist of mostly subcategories and only very general articles. Huge, general categories aren't very useful. Same goes for Category:Quests and Category:Mobs. --Piu (?!) 18:13, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Proofread me?
I'm still kind of new here, so I'm not entirely sure I'm doing things right. I started with Redridge Mountains. Most of it I'm pretty confident about. But I'm unsure of a couple.
 * I left some items in the main category - they only drop in this zone. Not sure if that's a reason to keep them here or if they should go somewhere else.
 * Quests - I started cleaning up the quest pages after fixing the categories, but most were already decent. So now I'm wondering if I'm changing things that shouldn't be changed.
 * I wasn't sure how to do the renaming portion (only an admin can rename and/or delete the old one right?). Should I go through all the pages that link there and fix the category now? (This would leave a broken link to the new category until it was created.)

Let me know if there's anything wrong, and I'll happily go back and fix it. Once I'm a little more confident that I'm doing this right, I'll help tackle some of the other categories. -- 00:53, 6 January 2008 (UTC)


 * For the renaming, you can create the new category by copying everything from the old one to the new one. Then do exactly as you said, just change all the subcategories to be in the new category you created. Finally, check the old category to make sure nothing is in it and nothing links to it (use the "what links here" option in the toolbox on the lower left of the page). If nothing links to the old category, add the sd tag at the top of the page as follows:


 * This will tell an admin to come and delete the page, and explain why they are deleting it as well as signing your name to let them know who requested the deletion.


 * I hope this is helpful, and when I have the time I will add it to the project page so others will not have the same question. -- 03:19, 6 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I'll work on the renaming part. And if anyone has the time to glance over the other parts I've completed, I'd appreciate any input.  --  03:33, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
 * One suggestion I'd have is to move the subcategories last, rather than first, as that way you don't have to edit them twice. But to each his own. Don't worry about actually cleaning up the quest pages, unless you're absolutely driven to that type of thing (see Jiyambi. ;P). Otherwise, everything looks fine. Do ensure that you are properly categorizing the subcategories, though. I'm not sure if it was your or another contributor, but someone wasn't adding the obvious category of "Mobs" to the categories. Either way, keep up the good (boring!) work. --Sky (t | c | w ) 07:31, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Quests
Quote :"Any hard-coded categories on quest articles should be removed. Make sure the quest box is present and completely filled out to assure proper categorization."

I made Category:Quests:Stormwind Stockade but had to hard-code the dungeon category in each quest because they're listed as being quests for the zones they start in. Any way to put something into the questbox to autocategorize the quests into the dungeon cat without hardcoding? -- 11:37, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Something similar, but maybe less important and harder to implement: I've been leaving Category:Cooking Recipes or Category:Alliance-Only Recipes or the like.  11:43, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I've had thoughts on this regarding questbox; I've been thinking of adding |altcat as well as a |classcat parameter to it, which will also allow better auto-categorization (really, so I can change how that part of categories goes to go along with deprecation of C:Quests: for C: quests). Mordsith, this should partly answer your query below, though see below for rest. --Sky (t | c | w ) 07:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Cleaning up the leftovers
I've been going to the Special:Categories page and clicking on the last page to find all the Zone: categories too see what's still left that needs to be renamed. Occasionally, new articles are ending up in the old category names, so this is a good way to catch them and find out who's doing it (usually a bot or old template that needs updating). --Piu (?!) 21:03, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I added something about this to the bottom; I forgot we had Special:Categories, though I did list Special:Prefixindex. Good that someone's double checking. =) --Sky (t | c | w ) 07:17, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Ahn'Qiraj
I'm finishing up Zone:Silithus, but I wanted to make sure it gets noted that the quests here are a jumble. I'm moving them all out of the main zone category, but I'm sure they're not getting to every category that they should be in. For one thing, Category:Quests:Ahn'Qiraj holds quest for both Temple of AQ and Ruins of AQ - this should probably be split since we have a seperate category for each instance. Also, some AQ quests have no doubt ended up in Category:Quests:Silithus. And some of the quests should be categorized by class as well. The questbox doesn't automatically do that, and I didn't want to take the time right now to figure out what the class categories are.

And lastly, there's also a Category:Gates of Ahn'Qiraj which is supposed to hold everything to do with the gates opening I believe. I've tried to put relevant articles in there, and I've been trying to add the WorldEvent tag to the articles that needed it.

Didn't realize this zone was so complicated or I might have skipped it. ;D  07:05, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Most of the quests should have been C:Quests:Silithus as they're labeled in the WoW DB sites. However, see above for my thoughts on that. The obvious solution for this is to make C:Quests:(R)AQ a subcat of C:Quests:Silithus for the time being. I would definitely suggest splitting them, though I'm not sure about what to be done when you end up with a quest that involves both (if there are any; it's been a while). Good job on tagging quests for Gates of AQ; that was probably needed. In an answer to your unspoken question, the class quests categories are the same: C:Quests:; I would suggest against adding those for the time being (again, see above). --Sky (t | c | w ) 07:21, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Quest categories
So I think I brought this up on IRC long ago, quest categories would probably look better as "Category: quests" rather than the current "Category:Quests: ". The difficulty with a change like this is that it pretty much has to be done all at once. Most quest pages are using a template that auto-categorizes into the Quest: categories, so changing that template gets most of the articles moved. The categories then become scattered until the remaining articles are moved and the new categories are created. So, before doing anything drastic I thought I'd post a heads up and get some input. I can handle most of the cleanup using the bot I'm running to move categories. --Piu (?!) 19:23, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
 * This is exactly what I had in mind, as above, which is why I'd like to add new catting options to questbox. Of course, I'd really like to get this particular project done, then we can go after the quests. --Sky (t | c | w ) 19:35, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree with everything said :) The altcat field for questbox is a great idea, Sky :) -- 04:19, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Caverns of Time
So I was wondering why we are still using the weird convention of naming the caverns of time instance categories and articles after the events taking place in them instead of their in-game names... the wings are called Old Hillsbrad Foothills, the Black Morass and Hyjal Summit in-game, both in the chat, in /who and in title when you enter.

To me, that's like naming Shadow Labyrinth Battle Against Murmur or Karazhan Ascending Medivh's Tower or some random title that describes what happens rather than just using the proper zone name. -- 00:38, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm hesitant to address this; I'll probably bug Zeal to come post here, though I'm not sure I'll end up with what I want to say... xD. Maybe tomorrow. --Sky (t | c | w ) 06:29, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

"x"  article
I'm not sure we need them when there's only 5-10 to be had in that. Probably safe to relegate them to a section on their main page. Thoughts? --Sky (t | c | w ) 23:36, 15 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Um, I don't know what you are talking about? -- 06:07, 16 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Yeah... that looks like it makes sense. =) Um. I don't see a reason to create a page with the information that Stratholme NPCs does (all of 2 NPCs(?)). Perhaps, where we would create pages like that, we should just leave it on the main instance / zone page? (did that make more sense?) --Sky (t | c | w ) 06:22, 16 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Okay, that makes more sense. So if a zone/instance/whatever only has a few mobs/NPCs/whatever, then don't include a full article with a list. Fine by me! -- 06:33, 16 January 2008 (UTC)


 * A list is still fine, just not on a different article's page. Again, just my thoughts =). --Sky (t | c | w ) 06:48, 16 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I think a list like Gnomeregan NPCs would clutter the main page. That's why they were moved to seperate articles in the first place, and I've been striving for some consistency across the board. For the bigger ones like Dire Maul NPCs and Blackrock Depths NPCs, I've made seperate categories too. -- 08:42, 16 January 2008 (UTC)


 * All those seem reasonable to me. - 00:17, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Boilerplates
I was just looking at Help:NPC articles and under possible categories, it doesn't even list the Zone NPCs category. Shouldn't we update the boilerplates to comply with our changes? -- 16:05, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Good catch. Feel free to =). --Sky (t | c | w ) 20:42, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Image requests
Category:Instance image requests is kind of messy at the moment.. the Outland winged instances are kind of all over the place. -- 22:43, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Feel free to fix as you go, though I'd prefer that images of npcs and mobs be left in only one of the image requests categories. Follow the same naming structure as is already outlined. =] --Sky (t | c | w) 10:24, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Black Temple?
Revamped the way the table looks on the Black Temple loot page and went to look for a Black_Temple_items cat. Non-existant, as of now. So went to see if it was in progress here, and as far as I can see, it's not listed. So in case I wasn't blind, heads up? -- 03:44, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Innocent. The category should be created and added to Category:Instance:Black Temple (which should eventually be changed to Category:Black Temple), and the loot from that instance should be added to the new loot category. If you want to do that, it would be great, otherwise someone will get around to it eventually. -- 05:10, 29 February 2008 (UTC)


 * No need to do anything about that yet, unless you do it the right way. I'm about to start on BC raids soon anyways. -- 12:10, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

"The" zones
I'm getting a real headache now with zones that begins with "The". For example there's the Nexus and The Nexus (instance), where the latter is a sub-instance of the former. Would their categories be "Nexus" and "The Nexus" respectively, or don't give Nexus their own category (see Auchindoun) and give The Nexus (instance) the "Nexus" category? I'm all confused now. 11:03, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Instance Split/Merge
This question was asked in Village Pump, but I don't think it was ever answered. I thought it would be less likely to be overlooked over here. Wowpedia talk:Village pump The categories are all intermixed at the moment. For instance, Category:Azjol-Nerub refers to the zone while the subcategory Category:Azjol-Nerub quests refers to the instance. Should they be combined or split? If nobody responds I'll decide when I have time to move forward with this. -- 18:20, 6 January 2009 (UTC)


 * The category is, in my opinion, fine as it is. We've had the discussion before about instance categories and it looked very ugly to have "Category:Nexus (instance)" for example. The Azjol-Nerub sub-categories refers to the instance, while articles can also refer to the general area; Azjol-Nerub is not only the instance but does also include Ahn'kahet. 18:29, 6 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Hmm... I think AN was a bad example since I haven't been there in game yet. Is it actually even a zone? From Azjol-Nerub it sounds like it's actually just a winged instance. So the Zone category project page should move it from the zone category into the instance category.


 * Still, as it is, AN is done differently from Nexus. There is a Category:Nexus, which encompasses all of the wings. Then the wings each have their own subcategory such as Category:The Nexus and Category:The Oculus. This way quests for The Nexus won't be mixed into the same subcat as quests for The Oculus. So if we continue with that format, there should be a Category:Azjol-Nerub, which contains a Category:Azjol-Nerub(instance) and a Category:Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom.


 * I'm not sure that's the best way to go, but I don't like the way it is now either. And this change would be consistent with Nexus. -- 18:51, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I can clarify the question. There are currently several different models for winged instance categories:
 * ex: Nexus Category:Nexus - Main category for group of instances with subcategories for each wing and subcats in each wing for mobs/quests/etc
 * ex: Dire Maul Category:Dire Maul - Main category for group of instances with all wings combined in the subcats
 * ex: The Eye Category:Netherstorm - No main cat for the group, but subcats for each wing in the zone category and subcats in each wing for mobs/quests/etc

Other instances that would be effected (This list is probably not complete, please add any):
 * Azjol-Nerub - This one is currently a mix of all three examples
 * Auchindoun - This mostly follows The Eye example
 * Caverns of Time - same as Nexus example
 * Blackrock Mountain - same as Nexus example
 * Hellfire Citadel - same as The Eye example
 * Scarlet Monastery - same as Dire Maul example
 * Ahn'Qiraj - same as The Eye example
 * Coilfang Reservoir - same as The Eye example

I think I like the simplicity of the Dire Maul example best, but I'm not sure it would hold up for the newer dungeon wings. Maybe we could settle on a model for each expansion? Not sure it's best to be inconsistent like that either. I'm going to stay away from instance categories at the moment since I'm not feeling bold enough to go through and standardize them without anyone else's input. -- 20:28, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Almost done?
I think this project is almost done. Looks like the last thing to do is cleanup the WotLK instance categories. I don't think the main project page even contains a complete list of them. Ulduar? for one. I have not had any experience thus far with instance categories/articles, so I'm going to leave this alone for now. Hopefully someone else will pick this up and finish off this project. -- 16:01, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Stratholme Past
I don't like "Stratholme Past" as a category name and would prefer "Culling of Stratholme" as the name. Is there a particular reason "Stratholme Past" was chosen? It seems inconsistent and arbitrary. -- Fandyllic  (talk · contr) 1:20 PM PST 16 Jan 2009

Complete
I doubt this is complete, Varghedin, you couldn't complete every zone, npc and instance. BobNamataki (talk) 01:13, November 21, 2009 (UTC)


 * What do you mean? -- 18:30, November 22, 2009 (UTC)