Taxonomy is a waste of time

[Antrad 37]

It says on the home page "PCGamingWiki aims to list fixes and workarounds for every single PC game."

How is writing that Escape From Monkey Island uses "cinematic camera perspective" help anyone ? In my opinion everything not related to getting the games fixed or improved is a waste of people's time and spreads the project and community thin. Even if it is done with a bot it just makes it harder to keep track of all the constant changes on your watchlist. This site is slowly creeping into Moby Games territory adding stuff like this, the ratings or whatever comes next.

[Andytizer 269]

Actually having a 'Cinematic camera perspective' is quite a valuable piece of information - it tells you that the player has no control over the camera. Some players may prefer games with fixed camera angles, some cannot stand them. 

I don't think adding genre, camera perspectives etc can in any way hurt the 'fix PC games' project of ours, it can only help. I've always maintained that the addition of additional information is always going to be helpful for lots of reasons - for rich, descriptive lists of games that no one else has. Like 'Singleplayer games with microtransactions' or 'Adventure games that support controller' or 'Horror games that support LAN'. Additionally, taxonomy will have benefits for our SEO and lays the foundation for a new 'Introduction' section I'm going to be working on next.

I respect that you feel it's a waste of time, however it's something we are going ahead it and I reserve the right to waste my own time 🙂. I would suggest turning off your watchlist for the next few weeks because there are going to be a lot of changes to every single article, taxonomy is just the beginning.

[Mirh 103]

25 minutes ago, Antrad said:

In my opinion everything not related to getting the games fixed or improved is a waste of people's time and spreads the project and community thin.

I agree that the benefit/bother ratio is quite abysmal.

Though, you can see how and why, if it isn't us to be able to offer queries for "games that can be hacked with local coop with a 3rd person perspective", nobody else could. 

Of course there should be some thought behind, and not "let's just put in everything and the kitchen sink"...

25 minutes ago, Antrad said:

This site is slowly creeping into Moby Games territory adding stuff like this, the ratings or whatever comes next.

Lol, that has actually already landed in some pages.

 

[Antrad 37]

8 hours ago, Andytizer said:

Actually having a 'Cinematic camera perspective' is quite a valuable piece of information - it tells you that the player has no control over the camera. Some players may prefer games with fixed camera angles, some cannot stand them. 

I don't think adding genre, camera perspectives etc can in any way hurt the 'fix PC games' project of ours, it can only help. I've always maintained that the addition of additional information is always going to be helpful for lots of reasons - for rich, descriptive lists of games that no one else has. Like 'Singleplayer games with microtransactions' or 'Adventure games that support controller' or 'Horror games that support LAN'. Additionally, taxonomy will have benefits for our SEO and lays the foundation for a new 'Introduction' section I'm going to be working on next.

I respect that you feel it's a waste of time, however it's something we are going ahead it and I reserve the right to waste my own time 🙂. I would suggest turning off your watchlist for the next few weeks because there are going to be a lot of changes to every single article, taxonomy is just the beginning.

The whole thing basically makes the "Infobox" look like a copy-pasted page from Moby Games, plus the cover often comes from there too. That is why I suggested to link to Moby Games in the first place, if people want all that additional info they can find it there.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Escape_from_Monkey_Island

https://www.mobygames.com/game/escape-from-monkey-island

I'm not going to fight it, I just wanted to express my opinion. I will continue to focus on the classic sections on the game pages.

[Waschbär 3]

I mean, I see some value in this information, but as it looks now I spend more time on the infobox than the whole rest of a page. Looking at the Taxonomy page and this huge list of variables is kinda overwhelming and confusing. Especially when a game can have multiple categories in a single section (I do wonder what the final infobox for a GTA game will look like with all its gameplay systems and different vehicles for example).

 

And with all the recent changes I also find there is a lack on updating/improving the editing guide.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/PCGamingWiki:Editing_guide/The_infobox

The reception part is still missing the part of which IDs to provide.

 

 

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/PCGamingWiki:Editing_guide/Microtransactions

Here it refers to an empty page to look for the terminology: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Microtransactions which I guess should actually be this https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Category:Microtransactions

In reality however all that information should be on the same page.

And why not feature an example directly on the page like in other sections (video editing guide for example). Instead I have to jump between different tabs all the time just to figure out how I'm supposed to fill in everything.

Then there is the link to the Taxonomy page as it must correspond with that but when visiting it all I see under "Instructions" is a changelog where I somehow have to piece the information I need together myself on this huge and unwieldy page.

 

Same applies to the Monetization section

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/PCGamingWiki:Editing_guide/Downloadable_content_(DLC)_and_expansions

Again: No examples, have to jump to different pages for all the info, the "Please refer to Monetization article" link leads nowhere and again that link to the Taxonomy main page which isn't helpful at all.

 

What I'm trying to say is: If that taxonomy stuff isn't ready or properly presentable yet, it shouldn't be part of the editing guidelines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Andytizer 269]

27 minutes ago, Waschbär said:

What I'm trying to say is: If that taxonomy stuff isn't ready or properly presentable yet, it shouldn't be part of the editing guidelines.

Thanks for pointing this out, there's a lot of work left to be done on documentation. I'll try to work on this over the next couple of days to make it clearer for everyone on what to do next.

[Waschbär 3]

On a sidenote: Is it really necessary for the "series" table to be replaced by the taxonomy link? Not only does it give a quick overview but also allows one to jump quickly between the titles. Now I have to visit another page - which also doesn't offer much more valuable information.

I think this would be one case where a duplicate information is acceptable. And if it's about the number of titles for some series becoming longer and longer, maybe just make the table collapsible and only show a handful until someone clicks "expand" or something.

[Rose 273]

45 minutes ago, Waschbär said:

On a sidenote: Is it really necessary for the "series" table to be replaced by the taxonomy link? Not only does it give a quick overview but also allows one to jump quickly between the titles. Now I have to visit another page - which also doesn't offer much more valuable information.

I think this would be one case where a duplicate information is acceptable. And if it's about the number of titles for some series becoming longer and longer, maybe just make the table collapsible and only show a handful until someone clicks "expand" or something.

One of my suggestions to incorporate both ideas was to look at the way music album chronology is done on Wikipedia, as seen here:


It's not as much information at a glance as there used to be but it's also not as bad as having to always go to the series page to navigate the articles. The code for the template is here. I would not say I see it as the perfect solution or one I would personally enjoy the most but it's an option to consider.

[Mirh 103]

On 5/7/2020 at 5:48 AM, Antrad said:

I'm not going to fight it, I just wanted to express my opinion. I will continue to focus on the classic sections on the game pages.

Feature creep of the infobox is absolutely a thing though imo. From mobygames (there would be a point for that on wikipedia if any) to the official website (which really did nothing wrong on general information).

On 5/9/2020 at 12:22 PM, Waschbär said:

What I'm trying to say is: If that taxonomy stuff isn't ready or properly presentable yet, it shouldn't be part of the editing guidelines.

I think this is more a problem of the style the editing guidelines are written in, then really "the background stuff".

I had told ThatOneReaper he was being overly "solemn" while writing them, but to no avail I guess. You shouldn't really feel obliged to complete every field, if you cannot be bothered.

[Andytizer 269]

On 5/10/2020 at 3:52 PM, Waschbär said:

On a sidenote: Is it really necessary for the "series" table to be replaced by the taxonomy link? Not only does it give a quick overview but also allows one to jump quickly between the titles. Now I have to visit another page - which also doesn't offer much more valuable information.

I think this would be one case where a duplicate information is acceptable. And if it's about the number of titles for some series becoming longer and longer, maybe just make the table collapsible and only show a handful until someone clicks "expand" or something.

If someone would like to write code that hooks into {{Infobox game}} so that a small collapsed seriesbox (max-length say 4 rows) could appear in a limited way then I'd look into implementing it. 

[Aemony 142]

On 5/9/2020 at 12:22 PM, Waschbär said:

And with all the recent changes I also find there is a lack on updating/improving the editing guide.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/PCGamingWiki:Editing_guide/The_infobox

The reception part is still missing the part of which IDs to provide.

This is simply because I lost track of it after having spent a couple of days reworking the template documentation among other things.

I have, for a while now, intended to essentially move/replace/merge the Editing Guide with the actual template documentations so the same stuff is present on both places. This is easier said than done though, as I need to go through all existing information on both pages and consolidate them as they have had a few years to drift away from one another in terms of what they document or the degree of information they provide. While also doing that, especially when dealing with new stuff, there's often cases that I notice that other surrounding elements such as the Sample article or the Game or Game (multiplayer) templates, or even the JavaScript WYSIWYG editor, needs to be updated to reflect changes I make in one place.

This all means that occasionally minor stuff gets overlooked or isn't fully updated in one place when a larger change is pending that will overwrite it anyway.

So while such things might occur, they are not because of a lack of engagement from the staff.

[Aemony 142]

An hour later and I've finally, hopefully, mostly, finished consolidated the information and replaced the Editing Guide sections on the infobox game and infobox non-game with their underlying respective documentations.

Casualty of war was details pertaining to Infobox game/row/date as that is just too much to properly showcase in the table in either docs, and so details are now placed on its own documentation instead.

 

Note to future self on this particular subject:

• Replace infobox non-game with infobox software entirely?
• Infobox controller, company, and console needs to be updated to the same documentation format.
• Move Cover section further up the editing guide page?
• Evaluate need to move to per-template docs for the rest of the rows such as Infobox game/row/engine, Infobox game/row/developer, etc.
  • Pro: Everything standardized using what is arguably MediaWiki basics. Makes it easier to expand each template docs as deemed necessary.
  • Con: Nothing easily consolidated in one place -- new editors would have to visit multiple subpages to properly get all the gists of the templates.

[Waschbär 3]

2 hours ago, Aemony said:

This all means that occasionally minor stuff gets overlooked or isn't fully updated in one place when a larger change is pending that will overwrite it anyway.

So while such things might occur, they are not because of a lack of engagement from the staff.

I didn't mean to imply that of course. Just that things may move a bit too fast at times so things get overlooked, like you mentioned. So thank you for updating those pages.

[Alexrd 5]

I just want to say that I completely agree with the OP. I wouldn't necessarily pick on perspectives, modes and controls (even though that's information that's usually alread covered in each page), but info like genre, art styles, themes and ratings are pretty useless. Most people come here to learn how to fix a problem they have with a game they already own. All of this is noise that makes what was meant to be simple only more convoluted.

Same for the hundreds of wiki entries dumped at the top of each page. It's not technical info. It's usually story or lore info, something outside the scope of this wiki.

Just my 2 cents...

[SirYodaJedi 14]

While I agree that the way we had series hindered pages in large franchises, I definitely would like something verbose like this at the bottom of the page to be able to quickly navigate between pages:

https://tcrf.net/Category:LEGO_series

It helps SEO, too.