UESPWiki:Community Portal/Archive 19

This is an archive of past UESPWiki:Community Portal discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

Game and Lore division

I've noticed some areas in the Lore Places pages that seem too game-specific for Lore inclusion, but I didn't want to start a relatively large-scale reorganisation without talking to the community.

Take a look at Lore:Places_E#Elven Gardens District or Lore:Places_U#Urshilaku Camp. The former could be merged into the Imperial City entry whilst the latter could go into the Ashlands. At the moment, the Ashlander camp entries are (as would be expected) totally dominated by MW-related information, which isn't what the Lore namespace is there to do. Why do they need to be in Lore-space at all, especially given later events?

Now one mer's meat is another mer's poison so some people will doubtless feel that some pages should stay while others should go. My suggestion is to create a new template (De-lore? - or am I just looking for DeLorian jokes?) It would work in a similar way to Proposed Deletion: once marked, an entry can be discussed on a talk page until a consensus arises and it is either removed from Lore space or kept. The same template could be used on any Lore page - not just place ones.

I think some kind of process is necessary or we'll just get stuff moved back and forth. Is this too process-heavy or a workable idea? rpeh •T•C•E• 20:48, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Well an obvious rule would be to delete anything that isn't mentioned in more than one game, but of course this would also mean deleting a load of worthwhile lore articles. Something could always be added to the lore main page or to the guidelines about game-specific information. Other than that I don't know, removing it all seems like a hefty task with plenty of debatable grey areas. -Itachi 18:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Time travel is a serious business, rpeh...

I agree that the Elven Gardens District doesn't really warrant a place in Lore, but I do think it's the case for the Urshilaku Camp. The latter has quite a prominent role in Morrowind, even if it only appears in the game. The backstory on the Neravarine should mention at some point that the Urshilaku Camp was home to the acknowledgment of a few fulfilled prophecies. I'm not so sure about the other camps, but I would support keeping them.

The measure of distinction I've used is to determine whether a mentioned subject is directly inherent of another. You can't really name the Elven Gardens District without referring to the Imperial City. The Ashlander camps are pretty much seperate entities. They are part of a group of Ashlander camps, but you won't need to say that every time you refer to them.

So yea, I pretty much agree with the case by case approach, entries that are too trivial can be removed right away (there's always the possibility to undo) if they only serve as some sort of placeholder. --Timenn-<talk> 10:37, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Urshilaku Camp is of no consequence as a location. It is important in the game Morrowind, but Morrowind's lore makes it clear that the camp is mobile as fits the nomadic ashlanders. So while the Urshilaku tribe certainly deserve an article or redirect to the Ashlanders article, the camp itself is a temporary circle of yurts and does not.132.162.84.166 18:21, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

The Infernal City

Everybody should note that The Infernal City has been moved to a new sub-space. Its new location isn't necessarily a permanent one as many people (myself included) aren't 100% happy with the novels being in Lore, but it does mean that we can start to use our normal templates on the Infernal City pages.

Please, when making links to The Infernal City pages, can you use the {{TIC}} template? If we decide to move the novels to a new location later, using the template means a simple bot-job of page-moves followed by relinking a template, rather than a tortuous job of finding every link and changing it. Thanks. rpeh •T•C•E• 00:08, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Cleaning up "Notes" sections

Discussion moved from Category talk:Oblivion Pages Needing Cleanup.
We should start some project to clean up articles with Notes: , i just noticed that a lot of the oblivion pages have Notes that should either be removed or added to the aticle. I just see it better to have a slightly larger article rather than add endless notes. There are thousands of different ways to get things done in oblivion, which is the easiest is always debatable, what is good for a Tank type class is more or less pointless for a caster type. Now with that being said we should really cut down on the notes in these articles, I know people like to add their own tips and tricks for things but it starts to get out of hand and some of the "notes" are just pointless. Cmdr 22:20, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

It's certainly a good idea to check the Notes section from time to time, but I don't think it needs to be a seperate project. I do think it could help to start a discussion to find a specific standard for Notes (and Bug) sections. I don't think there have been any recent discussions about it. As for myself, I don't have specific ideas yet, but I'll try to ponder on this one. --Timenn-<talk> 12:21, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Ps3 downloads

can you connect your commputer to your ps3 and download Dunbarrow Cove or Kvatch Aftermath or any download. Any help is greatly appreciated 24.32.60.90 03:57, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm afraid that the only plug-in that you can download from PS Store is the Shivering Isles. Dunbarrow Cove is only available on the xbox and PC, and Kvatch Aftermath is an unofficial mod that can only be run on the PC version. The only other plug-in available for PS3 is the Knights of the Nine. --S'drassa ^•T2M 04:40, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Oh,Okay Thanks--Thedrunknord 23:29, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Maps in place articles

Discussion continued from File_talk:OB-Map-Key.png#Should_this_image_be_on_articles.3F

The issue is that map images are too small to be useful on the place articles, and they are usually given random sizes so the whole thing looks like a mess.

Ideally you would want to be able to see the map and the description (e.g. boss at location marked H, quest item at location G etc.) at the same time, instead of constantly switching between the map file and the place article. So what I propose is to use much larger images in the articles themselves.

You can see an example here (a copy of Shivering:Dunroot_Burrow). The images are enlarged to twice the thumbnail size selected in your preferences. This isn't too large with the default thumbnail size (the images in the Dunroot Burrow article are about the same size), so I'd prefer to make them even larger, but then they become a bit too large when you select a larger thumbnail size. An alternative is to use a fixed size.

Also, copy this css code into your monobook.css then go here and tell me what you think about those. The map key will appear when you hover the map or the label in the last case. -- Nx / talk 14:06, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

I definitely like the popup key idea. Having the key within each map works well. Ideally, I'd have it outside the image rather than overlaying it, but unless there's something clever that can be hacked with negative margins, I can see how that's unlikely.

My first reaction to the larger maps was roughly "Gosh! Those are very large!" and I was far from keen. I run with thumbnails at 300px so the maps on that page are big. The map for zone 1 doesn't even fit vertically on my screen. After I played around with several different maps on several different pages, though... I think I've grown to like them that size. It's a bit of a shock at first, but it certainly makes them easier to read. There are minor problems with wide maps (like this) and tall ones (like this), but then the scale param could be used to tweak as necessary. I suppose you could even use the mediawidth function to auto-tweak to some extent - something that's been at the back of my mind since we upgraded to 1.14.

In summary, I like the change. The original fixed sizes weren't random, but I agree that they don't work so well. What worked with smaller monitors a couple of years ago definitely doesn't work with the resolution I use today. rpeh •T•C•E• 18:35, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

I know the fixed sizes are based on how large the zone is, but it looks random when you open up a page. I originally made the scale 2.5, but lowered it to 2.0 because they become really large at 300px (300*2.5 = 750, that's about half the content area even on a 1680 monitor). And I agree that a single number doesn't work with all the maps. I've added some more to my sandbox and tried to tweak the scale to suit them.

Are the file sizes all relative to the zone sizes? If so we can use them to tweak the scale automatically, e.g. group them into categories based on size, with different scale parameters for each category.

BTW, I read this discussion, and both Nephele and TheRealLurlock have a point, sometimes you don't want to load the large images, though I don't think bandwidth is that much of an issue, with the default thumbnail size, file sizes of the large images are roughly twice the size of normal thumbnails, but that's still less than 50kB, with 300 px they approach 100kB. But if this prevents the user from loading the file description page, because they can see what they want on the page, then you also save some bandwidth there. And the larger images are very useful if you are printing the page. -- Nx / talk 20:01, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

In most cases, the dimensions of the image should allow comparison of the zone sizes. I grabbed most of the maps and did them all (except possibly the first couple) at 1680x1050. Nephele's maps, though, were grabbed at 1024x768 so they will be on a different scale. In SI, Vesna and SerCenKing did a lot of the maps and I don't know what resolution they used. Yeah, we just like making life difficult for you ;-) rpeh •T•C•E• 20:58, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

I think rpeh showed a good example on how the widths of the various maps can differ. I don't think we can circumvent using multiple scales for the map images. While 1:2 can be used for the large images, for some others it may not be enough. While making the map images for the Oblivion Worlds I used a 1:3 scale, mostly because maps like this tend to be very cluttered.

Would it be a good idea to add the scale (e.g. "map scale 1:3.0") to all the map image descriptions on the articles?

In seeking the balance between a readable article with enough space for text, and large enough map images to be readable, I tend to lean to the larger map images side. Sure you don't want an article with images that are too large, but usually people visit place pages to check what good loot can be found there, where the maps and details provide the best combination of info.

Using negative numbers (for top and left) should allow you to position objects outside their parent objects. --Timenn-<talk> 14:59, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Overlapping doesn't work because of this:

div.thumb,table.wikitable,table.prettytable
{
        z-index: 100;
}

In Mediawiki:common.css. Also, I don't like this part either:

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,hr
{
        z-index: -100;
}

According to the comment: "Move headings to a lower z-index so their horizontal rules are behind floating images and tables". The horizontal lines of headings are supposed to stop before the image, so this workaround shouldn't be necessary. -- Nx / talk 15:42, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

I've seen a similar discussion elsewhere. The basic dilemma seems to be page layout vs. instant details. How about we put the map thumbnails in a vertical sidebar? You would still need to click on them for the detailed view, but you wouldn't have to scroll down to get at them.

Also, there are opinions and guidelines in several places and some map issues remain unresolved. (like multi-level single-cell maps, water, levitation, bosses, connections etc) It might be a good idea to give map layout its own page and move all the info and discussion over there. And discussions that keep resurfacing could be resolved with a vote instead. (i don't know if there's a mechanism for this in the wiki) Marcel 22:13, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

New Extension: Gadgets

What do people think about asking Daveh to install the Gadgets extension? It enables a lot of useful Javascript tools to be added through the Preferences link, including things like HotCat and WikiEd. There's a good list here and you can see more if you log in to Wikipedia and look on your Preferences - Gadgets tab. One thing it includes is automatic support for a "purge" tab, which more than one user has already added manually by editing their personal JS file.

Does anybody have any objections? rpeh •T•C•E• 18:37, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Great idea. It's easy enough to add javascript for advanced users but Gadgets makes it easy for everyone. ‒ Joram↝Talk 20:42, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

It's a nice thing, though not really essential, since you can just use importScript in your monobook.js. A word of warning though: each gadget is an extra http request, and an extra page request from the server. It can slow down your page loads dramatically if you activate a lot of gadgets. And by default MediaWiki doesn't support caching for raw page views, but I think your squid cache should fix that. -- Nx / talk 22:02, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I think it would be good, barring no extreme burden on the servers. But at the same time, it is rather simple to just add it to your monobook.js. I run wikiEd with Greasemonkey for FireFox, and it slows down the site a good amount when I use it (mainly the editing pages). It would vary with connections obviously, but I don't know if the serve can hold them all up. If it can, I am all for it. –Elliot ^talk 22:40, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

It's more noticeable on the users' side, I don't think it will have such a dramatic impact on the server. WikEd is a slow beast though, and sometimes it reloads all the icons so you have to wait several seconds before you can edit. I only activate it when I need the regexp tool. -- Nx / talk 22:48, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

The majority of Gadgets' content is in Javascript, so although there will be a small increase in bandwidth (really, really small) the main delay you will experience is browser-based. If you take a look at the .js files that do the real work in the extension, they're all fairly small (2K max) so server load really isn't a factor. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:10, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

It's not just the slowdown in your browser caused by the javascript executing (usually modern browsers can handle it, except when there's a really large page and the gadget does something to the page text, like this one), the more significant slowdown is caused by the large number of requests (this isn't just a mediawiki problem). It doesn't matter if the individual gadgets are small. Bandwidth isn't a problem, latency is. -- Nx / talk 17:43, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Though I'll admit absolutely zero knowledge about the technical aspects of it, "Gadgets" are a feature I'd be happy to see available here. --GK^talk2me 18:40, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Done, but...: I've installed it and the test clock gadget I added works fine on content3 but not content1/2. I assume the issue is with the memcached since that is about the only difference. I'm going to make a few other changes and reset memcached and see if that fixes it. -- Daveh 02:39, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, reseting memcached seems to have cleared the issues. Note that I have installed the clock gadget for testing but feel free to remove it. -- Daveh 03:04, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Map keys

I made {{OB Map key}} to replace File:OB-Map-Key.png. Aside from replacing the image with this template in articles (but see also #Maps in place articles above), I would also like to ask RoBoT to put the template on the file description pages of map images, like this, because it would be useful to have the map key right there when you are looking at the map.

The template is pretty basic right now, no fancy graphics like the image. The text in it can even be replaced with the image again in the future, if desired, although text embedded in an image has some disadvantages. Making it a template gives us more flexibility in that regard. -- Nx / talk 23:37, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I've already expressed my support for this idea elsewhere, so let me say it again here: it's a good idea. RoBoT has already done the hard work of identifying which are the images that need the key so adding the template is pretty trivial. As Nx says, using a template means that it can be tweaked later if necessary so even if people don't like the current version, we can do the addition and play with it later. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:44, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Morrowind Book Images

This is a minor question but I thought I should ask. Currently, all the books with images in them have been uploaded with solid backgrounds, as they were taken as screenshots from the game. Another option would be to convert the DDS to a PNG and upload the image with transparency instead. Compare this with this to see what I mean. Which version do you prefer? rpeh •T•C•E• 13:47, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, jpegs aren't really suitable for this kind of stuff. But one thing to keep in mind is that when MW creates a thumbnail of a PNG, it usually creates very big files. It doesn't matter if you run optipng on the uploaded image, because MW will create an unoptimized resized version for use on pages, with full 32 bit color and alpha, even if that is unnecessary for that particular image, and even if the original had lower color depth. Because of this, it might be better to use gifs. -- Nx / talk 13:57, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

I didn't know that. In this case, though, the images are used at full size. I wouldn't use a PNG on the bottom image here, for instance. We use Image Magick - does it still screw up the images? rpeh •T•C•E• 14:02, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it's actually an imagemagick bug (a feature according to the IM devs). Can't find it now, but an IM dev said that images are converted to higher color depth because as a result of scaling the image might need more colors. See also wikipedia:bugzilla:234 -- Nx / talk 14:04, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't think either one is particularly favourable to the other, since the only books which have images in them are soley made up of images (as far as I remember) - there is no seperate text, so blending the images in with the page is not an issue. In this sense it makes no difference, so the only preference would be file size. -Itachi 15:49, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Map Images

Following a discussion on my talk page about the NeedsImage tag, SerCenKing proposed the question of what maps we use for what places. There are two kinds of maps (at least, I think there are only two): the CS map and the in-game map. I would think we use the CS maps for the cities and the in-game maps for regular places, but the subject of dungeons come in too. What I also wanted to point out was that which places need maps? I think each place should have at least either a CS map or in-game one (or maybe both?). So the main questions are:

• Which places uses CS maps and which use in-game maps
• Should all places have either a CS map, an in-game map, or both

This mostly is an issue for the Oblivion Places Redesign Project, so if the discussion should be moved there, feel free to move it. -- Jplatinum16 21:14, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

As a general note, I think CS maps are pretty useless. They're low-res and don't really convey any info a good in-game map doesn't. Also, adding numbers and letters looks way better on in-game maps. Lastly, CS maps only make sense to PC Users whereas in-game maps are both what you actually see while playing and it appeals to all users. Therefore, I'd prefer not to have CS maps at all.

1. My stance on this is that every page important enough to warrant a map should have an in-game one rather than a CS one.
2. Building up on my point above, I don't feel all places are noteworthy enough for a map. Settlements with more than one house should have an in-game map (see here for a good example). But I don't see the usefulness of maps for places like ob:Greyland, ob:Isolated House or ob:Harm's Folly. Having done a few exterior maps myself I don't see the point of having a map with one building, one door and that's it. A link to our great online map is available and that should be enough. --SerCenKing ^Talk 21:25, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

SerCenKing has a good point; if we have the interactive map, we don't need an in-game one for every place. In-game maps are easier to look at, and if we dont' have any CS maps at all, we'd have to remove them from the Cities pages. I think places with distingushing features or more than one building certainly warrent an in-game map, as we can easily label the map. -- Jplatinum16 22:02, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

I definitely prefer the in-game maps, especially now we have the interactive map. The CS maps, by and large, were from TheRealLurlock and the in-game ones from me. I originally wanted to replace the CS ones with in-game ones but I couldn't convince Lurlock so we ended up with both on some pages - although the CS ones have gone from others. It begins to look like there might now be a consensus to remove the CS ones.

I also agree there's not much point in mapping a place with only one location of interest. rpeh •T•C•E• 18:33, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

The in-game maps are easier to read, and the CS maps are redundant now that we can just link to our Google map. I'd support removing CS maps and going for a straight in-game-maps guideline. --GK^talk2me 18:42, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Since there seems to be consensus on both points (in-game maps instead of CS ones + no maps for small locations) I'll make sure we get the NeedsMap and NeedsImage tags right. --SerCenKing ^Talk 16:37, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Oblivion Tamriel Rebuilt

At the moment we have both Morrowind and Oblivion namespaces for Tamriel Rebuilt and both are called, not unnaturally, "Tamriel Rebuilt". Unfortunately this causes a few problems with templates and has led to hacks like this to separate categories for the two versions.

Since the Oblivion version is no longer part of Tamriel Rebuilt, I propose that we rename that version "Stirk". To minimise the number of changes, I suggest we keep the front page at its current location and keep the template at {{TR4}}. The only changes we should have to make would be to a few categories.

The only change required to rename it would be to edit its like in MediaWiki:Uespnamespacelist to the following:

Tes4Mod:Tamriel Rebuilt ; TR4 ; Oblivion  ; Stirk ; Tes4Mod:Tamriel Rebuilt ; Tes4Mod-Stirk ; [[Oblivion:Oblivion|Oblivion]]: [[Tes4Mod:Tes4Mod|Tes4Mod]]: [[Tes4Mod:Tamriel Rebuilt|Stirk]]

Are there any comments or suggestions? rpeh •T•C•E• 18:21, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't mind having it like that, especially considering the benefits it brings. However, I'm pretty sure Stirk still is part of TR. Hammerfell isn't, but they haven't resigned ownership of Stirk to LadyN's project I believe. In any case, this is a mere formality: there isn't much sense in calling one island 'Tamriel Rebuilt'. --SerCenKing ^Talk 18:30, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

You're right - thanks for the correction. I had wondered about Hammerfell: we wouldn't want to re-do all the book pages if/when the full mod comes out, but there are ways around that and we don't have to worry about it now. rpeh •T•C•E• 19:17, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Would there be Template changes needed for the ones that check for 'Tamriel Rebuilt' and so on? I also changed your <pre> to a scrolling pre for easier viewing. ‒ Joram↝Talk 22:04, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Part of the purpose of the change would be to get rid of such changes. The reason we need them now is because two different mods have the same name - requiring the check for NS_PARENT to differentiate between them. If we can kill that, it'll make a lot of things simpler. rpeh •T•C•E• 22:17, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Done. Let me know if there are any problems or if there's anything else that needs to be tweaked. --GK^talk2me 23:42, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. There will be a large number of wanted categories and other redlinks appearing over the next few minutes and hours as things sort themselves out. I'll look at fixing those tomorrow. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:45, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

I've done all the template changes that I could find so with luck when you or RoBoT change the categories tomorrow there won't be any surprises afterward. ‒ Joram↝Talk 04:22, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks - that's one weight off my mind. Now to create the 100 wanted categories we have... rpeh •T•C•E• 08:49, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I've done most of 'em - and it was such fun to do. The last set of categories that need creating are the faction ones. Usually we'd just use {{Faction Category}} but the tweak to the namespace doesn't quite work.

I think we can make one last tweak to the namespace list to fix the problem but I'll need to talk in real-time to an admin so he or she can make the change, I can check it and then we can revert it if need be. Hopefully I'll see GK or Timenn later on IRC. rpeh •T•C•E• 12:51, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Well... it didn't really work. I ended up moving the whole Tes4Mod:Tamriel_Rebuilt sub-namespace to Tes4Mod:Stirk. It's now non-urgent, but if an admin could please make the final changes at some point, that'd be good:

Tes4Mod:Stirk ; TR4 ; Oblivion  ; Stirk ; Tes4Mod:Stirk ; Tes4Mod-Stirk ; [[Oblivion:Oblivion|Oblivion]]: [[Tes4Mod:Tes4Mod|Tes4Mod]]: [[Tes4Mod:Stirk|Stirk]]

Thanks. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:56, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Done. --Timenn-<talk> 00:05, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

(u/d) Thank you to both GK and Timenn. I think there are several lessons to be learned here. First of all, the namespace configuration is flexible, but you can't bend it too far - I was trying to break some of Nephele's (perfectly reasonable) assumptions about naming conventions and it didn't work. Second, for sub-spaces, use of a template should be mandatory. I know there's no way to enforce this, but linking direct to pages in sub-spaces (and I did it too - I'm not trying to pass off a problem to somebody else) should be discouraged as far as possible. Third, categories will be a problem unless we start using templates for sub-space cats too - which isn't impossible. I didn't do it this time because I didn't think of it in time, but it needs looking at in the future. Fourth, re-read point 2. Fifth, re-read it again. etc etc. rpeh •T•C•E• 00:24, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Padlock at top

It's huge I thought it was a metal block until I clicked it and saw it was a padlock! Oh, I'm referring to the padlock at the top right of pages which are locked from editing (: I'm using mozilla firefox btw— Unsigned comment by 86.137.191.115 (talk) on 19 February 2010

Yes, it seems that it was a problem with {{Page Icon}}. I've reverted it to an earlier version so hopefully that has been corrected by now. --S'drassa ^•T2M 19:28, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

The actual problem was with the Protection template that used '18px' instead of just '18'. There seems to be an alignment problem with the older Navimg so the Page Icon looks a little out of place right now but I'm going to test the new version with the Ingredient issues rpeh reported and then put that back in place. I'll see if there's still an alignment problem after that. ‒ Joram↝Talk 21:07, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

It seems that there's a problem (at least for me). This time the gigantic padlock at Oblivion:Oblivion doesn't appear but now the page icon is floating outside of the limits of the page. I went to check Oblivion:Shrine of Kynareth again and the problem has just re-appeared (I'm using IE by the way). --S'drassa ^•T2M 21:10, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes that's the alignment problem I mentioned. I just put the new version of Navimg back in place and it fixed the problem, at least for me. Please check again (don't forget to purge if necessary) and let me know if there are still problems. ‒ Joram↝Talk 21:17, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Bah! The new Navimg still causes problems with the Ingredients page so I'm reverting again. I'll look at the alignment problem of Page Icon with that version now. ‒ Joram↝Talk 21:21, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

The old version has been tweaked to remove the alignment problem. I'm not very confident of my changes here so let me know if there are problems. I'm going to work on reproducing the #save/#load problem so we can go back to using the much simpler version of Navimg. ‒ Joram↝Talk 21:44, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Category tweaks

Asking about this on CP might seem like overkill but it's always better to be safe than sorry so here goes: I'd like to change the {{huh}} template so that it adds pages to a new category.

At the moment it adds pages to Category:Pages Needing Verification, which seems wrong to me. That category should be for information that somebody has added and that somebody else thinks is unreliable. The {{huh}} template is more for information that hasn't been added at all. In a similar vein, I just created {{NotFound}}, which adds pages to a subcat of Category:Unused Items, because {{huh}} was also being used for that.

The long and the short is that I'm proposing Category:Pages Needing Data be created and that {{huh}} be changed to use that category instead of C:PRV. Other possible names would be "Pages with Missing Data" or something like that. Does anybody have any comments or suggestions? rpeh •T•C•E• 20:03, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Following on from a discussion in another place, I thought it would be useful to post some more details:

• Stubs are pages that contain almost no useful information. They're marker pages only fractionally better than a red link.

• Incomplete pages are ones that have most of the details included but need expansion of major sections.

• Pages Needing Data would be for pages that don't need text adding, but need factual information. For instance, until I added the health and magicka formulae to various OB pages recently, those pages would be in this category.

• Pages Needing Verification is for pages where people have added information that other editors don't believe (while Assuming Good Faith).

A new user probably won't be adding infoboxes but if they do, the page will be added to "Pages Needing Data" under my suggestion. That will flag it for further action by other editors who may choose to reassign it to one of the other categories.

My main reason for splitting things up is that I was getting frustrated on occasions when I only had access to certain types of data or wanted to fix certain types of page problem. If I wanted to see what potentially incorrect information was being added there was no way of doing so without wading through pages that needed health data or that described items that may or may not even exist. This new system will obviate that problem. rpeh •T•C•E• 22:11, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

This is definitely an important distinction, and one I think should have been made a long time ago except that apparently nobody thought of it. I absolutely support changing the {{huh}} category. I prefer having the word "missing" in the category title instead of "needing", so I'd suggest either "Pages Missing Data" or as you said, "Pages With Missing Data". ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 00:02, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

On reflection, I prefer your "Pages Missing Data". Any other thoughts? rpeh •T•C•E• 00:10, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

This change makes sense to me. I also agree with RH; "missing" sounds better than "needing". --GK^talk2me 00:17, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Place Summary

I've just rolled out a new version of the {{Place Summary}} template with a unified template intended to replace Morrowind Places Summary and Oblivion Places Summary as well. Please let me know if any problems are spotted. I'll wait a day or two before putting redirects in for the latter two in case there are. Note that there are a couple of manual changes required, I'm going through them now. These may cause redlinks or temporarily missing information for a few pages.

@rpeh: I assume if it all works that it will be trivial for RoBoT to replace the Morrowind/Oblivion Places Summary calls with just Place Summary. HotnBOThered could do it easily as well but I'd like to build up more of a framework before I get into changing pages as well as reading them. (And with no bot privileges, I think the Patrollers would be wroth with me if I did use it for a bulk update!) ‒ Joram↝Talk 00:06, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Yup, there's no problem there. Are all the parameters compatible? Shall we take this chance to make any tweaks that might be wanted? rpeh •T•C•E• 10:49, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the parameters are all compatible. I didn't look at the history closely, but just from the design, I suspect they were offshoots of a single template at some point years ago. If there are tweaks to be done, then now is definitely the time to do them, since I know what the issues are and what needs to be tested. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 18:57, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I've redirected both Morrowind Places Summary and Oblivion Places Summary to point to {{Place Summary}}, which should handle everything. As always, let me know if there are an problems. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 00:57, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

RoBoT has changed all pages to use {{Place Summary}} instead of the other two. Good job, RH. rpeh •T•C•E• 11:02, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Krusty just pointed out a problem on the Oblivion:Office of Imperial Commerce page: the Gold and Mercantile boxes are showing up as {{huh}} tags.

Instead of tweaking the template to fix them in this case, I'm going to suggest a better solution: remove those two params altogether. I don't know what they're doing on the Place Summary anyway as the gold and mercantile skill are related to the NPC in the store and not the store itself and they're already listed on the NPC pages. That means including them on the Place Summary template fails the relevance and redundancy tests. rpeh •T•C•E• 17:51, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

The reason behind that is because it's a Store, and stores are expected to have proprietors who have Gold and a Mercantile skill. It should probably have prompted with a {{huh}} for the proprietor as well. Having said that, however, I agree with rpeh's suggestion that we get rid of it altogether. The NPC's skills aren't relevant to the place, and this is the Place Summary after all. Following up on my own statement about prompting for proprietor, I'll suggest we leave that and similar checks out of there, since there's always some exception or the other, and it's the sort of thing I think is better left in the hands of the people editing the page than a rule in a template.

Just to reinforce this, while I can see the utility of including an NPC's gold and mercantile on the place page (in case you want to trade), by exactly the same logic we should include the NPC's stealth (in case you want to rob the store by stealth), plus health and magicka (in case you want to rob it by violence). Stores should include a link to the proprietor (where applicable) but NOT any data about the proprietor beyond their name. rpeh •T•C•E• 21:05, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

The gold and mercantile skill have relevance to the store, while health, etc. do not. The purpose of a store is to barter, sell, trade, etc. Mercantile isn't as important, but gold should definitely stay. Also, I don't really know what you are trying to insinuate with your "hidden message." –Elliot ^talk 02:33, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

You have ignored the bulk of my comment. rpeh •T•C•E• 02:59, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

While it makes sense in a way for trading-related info to be on the store page, I think simply including the link to the proprietor is sufficient and less redundant. --GK^talk2me 05:41, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

User:Example

Would anybody object if I re-created User:Example, which was deleted by Aristeo back in 2006? It would be useful for templates like {{Userlinks}} to have as an example user in the documentation rather than using a specific person. I would populate the page with something to the effect of "This user page is strictly for example purposes." and then I would suggest that we block/ban that user if it's not already and lock the page so that nobody comes along and tries to create it. (Or if you can't block a non-existent user, then I'll create the user, sockpuppet horribly which nobody will know is me ;), and then you can block it.) Wikipedia has an Example user which exists for the same reason, though I strongly suggest our page not look quite as horrendous as that one. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 05:02, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Makes sense to me. I can see that it would be useful at times. rpeh •T•C•E• 08:54, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, that makes sense. It would also be terribly confusing if someone decided to make an account named "Example", so this would prevent that :) As long as the page isn't as ugly as WP's, I'd support it. --GK^talk2me 21:48, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes, an excellent idea RH70. I agree! Fire when ready. --ModderElGrande 21:53, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Okay, it may have been a bit pre-emptive, since it's less than 24 hours, but with three people agreeing with my suggestion, I decided to go ahead. We can always delete it later if there's some pressing need to do so. If one of the admins could protect the page (and ban the user?), it should be all set to go. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 23:10, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Javascript

Okay, next community input question: Do we want to create a central page for Javascript modules, perhaps somewhere like UESPWiki:Javascript?

When I switched back from Joram to RobinHood70, I left the various javascripts I'd imported in place, since several people are linking to them. Having a central Javascript page similar to WikiProject User scripts where we could list all of them would make them easy for people to find and easier to use, since documentation of how to do so could be included on the page itself. I would also suggest that unlike Wikipedia, working .js pages be moved to sub-pages of the Javascript page instead of remaining in User space (essentially the same as Template space vs. templates in User sandboxes).

Thoughts? ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 23:45, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

That also makes a lot of sense. rpeh •T•C•E• 09:17, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree, this is yet another good suggestion. --ModderElGrande 20:35, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Again, a good idea; I'd like to have a central page to reference. I also think it makes sense to have working pages as subpages of the central, but I don't know enough about it to feel very strongly either way. --GK^talk2me 05:41, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Can I help?

Hi guys, I was on the site for a few months in '06 and I contributed a lot to the Mannimarco articles for the Lore and Oblivion sections. I really enjoyed working on them, but real life got in the way and I never got back on the site. I'm trying to find any similar pages now (little detail on fairly in-depth characters), but it's hard to search your site because the NPC projects always come up first. Is there any article I could greatly expand to? I'd really like to help. Verin Sedai 04:23, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Welcome back. --Michaeldsuarez ^{(Talk) (Deeds)} 12:58, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

I probably have a bias on this one (given my current project) but you could take a look at a SI NPC. There are plenty of complex ones, such as Relmyna Verenim, Felas Sarandas and Sheogorath himself. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. --SerCenKing ^Talk 19:56, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Templates sub-page

I just modified a template and realized that I needed to discuss a broader issue that affects not only that template but others as well. Then I realized that I had nowhere other than CP to discuss it. I thought it seemed silly to keep cluttering this page up with discussions that most people really don't care about, so I've just "boldly" created a Templates sub-page to the Community Portal page and am about to raise my first issue on it. Those of you with interest should add it to your Watchlist or whatever it is you do. :) If this seems like a dumb idea, please say so here and I'll transplant my question and delete the page, but I think it'll be a useful sub-page, and if there's general agreement, we can probably add a link to it somewhere at the top of this one. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 04:44, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I don't feel like it's "cluttering this page up with discussions that most people really don't care about", but I have no objection to the subpage. --GK^talk2me 05:41, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Live Feed Idea

I was thinking how I could make the RC changes page a Live Feed. I tried to find facebook's code and I turned up nothing. I just downloaded greasemonkey and was thinking if I made this publicly available, or DaveH even added it to the site, it would make things easier for some people. I was thinking if I could get feedback on weather or not this would even work, then maybe I could start.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 23:35, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

There are already such feeds. Look at the sidebar on the Recent Changes page and there are links for RSS and ATOM. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:39, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

A few things about those, they are both a bit behind. I found a Greasemonkey code that just refreshes every 30 seconds, 1 second or 0.1 second (the last one is overkill) just so you know about those, and me and Lukish checked and noticed ATOM and RSS may have even been several minutes off.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 23:10, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

That'll be caching in action. I doubt much can be done about that. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:20, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Etymologies

This topic has stirred up a bit of debate across various talk pages recently, and the most recent topic is the old Lore debate. Read this paragraph of the style guide - I'll wait...

Now look at this series of edits on Lore:Solstheim.

A talk page post made the very good point that neither "Old Norse" or "German" exist in TES, so the edit was removed then reinstated... then I did this.

There are many, many issues to discuss here. First, should we even bother with etymologies except where there are blatant references? Second, should we include them in Lorespace, gamespace or where? Third, how should we present them? Is my use of the OOG reference technique wrong?

Right now, I can see lots of arguments on lots of sides. Let's have some more opinions. rpeh •T•C•E• 00:03, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

IMHO issue 1- unless there is a clear reference to the etymologies from game source material then don't include it. issue 2- if it is deemed worthy of adding and it aids in a purposeful way to the wiki gamespace entry then thats where it belongs, otherwise lorespace I guess..., issue 3- not sure, plenty of you more experienced editors out there will know :)

Personally I don't like seeing the etymologies since it seems to be something along the lines or original research rather than clarifying what the game designers actually intended. I mean in the case of Solstheim wiki the question is whether the designers actually referenced the etymology definition when coming up with that name, or was it just something they "thought-up" as part of the imaginative game design process? Of course thats just my opinion. Thanks for bringing this issue to the front rpeh. Rob-nick 01:56, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't believe that we should document fan-created theories or speculation. These etymologies are borderline fan theories. Theories and speculation should be discussed on forums and not on the wiki. --Michaeldsuarez ^{(Talk) (Deeds)} 02:59, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Rob and MDS - while the etymologies serve as interesting speculation in some cases, most or all of them are just that: speculation. Unless there's clear reason to believe that the etymology is derived from our world, then it shouldn't be included. In cases where it's deemed appropriate, I have no objection to putting it on the Lore page (or game page if there is no Lore page) with the ref style that rpeh used. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 09:11, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

The innumerable "Nords are like Vikings!" comments in the Notes section are borderline fan theories in the same way the etymology is. They certainly have no in-game backup, and rely on self-evident comparisons to real-world phenomena. The difference is that the etymology is occasionally interesting and not stupidly obvious. I removed the Solstheim etymology in the first place, but left the half dozen others added by the same user. The etymology doesn't need a reference if it is worded correctly, it seems to me. "The real-world Latin word "soul" means "fiery Viking cheesburgers" and may have been adapted into the Elder Scrolls name." ...for example. This clearly isn't an authoritative statement, just an objective observation of similarity.

On a related note, in my opinion the perspective requirement for lore articles is good as a trend but crippling as a rule. It prevents the honest and clear explanation of several topics because retcons exist and devs disagree. We are completely unequipped, for example, to explain why the towns of Arena had different names that all sounded like they came from High Rock. The rest of the wiki is flooded with articles explaining 'in Morrowind goblins were dark green, but in Oblivion they were changed to light green.' Can you imagine having to invent plausible explanations for the transformation of Umbra from a two to one handed sword? This is what the Notes section should be for.132.162.84.166 20:40, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

I like it in reference style but without mark etymology that way each person will decide if was intended or not it is interesting to see possible meanings. — Unsigned comment by 93.136.30.55 (talk) on 22 March 2010

How about someone send email to Bethesda or Todd Howard and ask what they think about it http://www.bethsoft.com/eng/contact_email.php — Unsigned comment by 93.138.84.15 (talk) on 22 March 2010

I've had an idea for a kind of compromise. Let's create Lore:Etymology instead.

My main objection to the inclusion of etymologies on pages is that some of them may be accurate but are totally irrelevant. Others can be quite interesting. To pick two, we have this, which I think is irrelevant (even if true); versus this, which sounds like a plausible explanation for the word.

The idea behind a separate page is that even the less relevant ideas can be included. I'm not saying any of the recent suggestions have been wrong (well... maybe one or two), just that they aren't relevant to the NPC. A separate page purely on the subject of etymology could list those without distracting users from the important information about the NPC. Or place.

I'll suggest in advance that the page be tagged with {{quality}} - purely to indicate that it's more of a fan work than a definitive guide to TES naming conventions. Would this be a compromise acceptable to everyone? rpeh •T•C•E• 21:42, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

That sounds like an excellent suggestion, rpeh. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 22:54, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Agree, great idea. Rob-nick 05:10, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree with it. — Unsigned comment by 93.136.10.157 (talk) at 07:20 on 23 March 2010

Okay, I've created [[Lore:Etymology]] as a stub for now. Is this style fine or should there be more or less information? rpeh •T•C•E• 11:48, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Discussion continued at Lore talk:Etymology#Etymologies --GK^talk2me 20:16, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

(Subsequent comment moved to above page so we don't split the discussion.)

Interactive map

Whenever I am searching for locations with specific occupants, it would be much easier if the map had this information. As a suggestion I would like to see eg. "Fort Ruin with Marauders" instead of just "Fort Ruin" when I click on an icon. --213.130.253.61 14:44, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Actually it tells you what the name of that fort is so then you can cross-reference it with that ruin's page on the site.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 14:48, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Nephele (I think) replied to that suggestion once before on the map talk page: "Adding dungeon types to the Oblivion map is pretty unlikely. Many dungeons don't have a single easy-to-identify "type". And other readers are going to be interested in other details. There's no way to add the entire wiki page to the Oblivion map; the link to the wiki page is there so that readers can find all the details." rpeh •T•C•E• 15:28, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

If i can get that greyscale version of the map you use (for item locations and the such) i can work on getting non-interactive maps that could be placed on the dungeon pages. it would take some time though (than again i got plently of that) Mikeyboy52 15:21, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Kvatch Rebuilt

I was wondering if you all could make a page for Kvatch Rebuilt. I have been looking all over this wiki and have not found one! Mainly, I just want a Kvatch Rebuilt page. I can make pages for each of the citizens and all that. Even the quests maybe. Just an idea that I hope you all will do. — Unsigned comment by Sonicfast01 (talk • contribs) on 3 April 2010

I've always wanted to get KR on the wiki, but I've never been gotten round to finishing the whole storyline. In any case I'm in favour of the general idea; and I know rpeh has also got/played KR and he too liked the idea. While I won't be able to help in the short-term, feel free to start working on it if you wish - although make sure you'll be able to write enough stuff on it to make it viable. As an example of what to do take Stirk. --SerCenKing ^Talk 10:53, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I'd love to see us document KR as well as a couple of other mods. The difficulty is getting enough people interested enough for long enough to make it happen. SerC and I are obviously willing to help, but are you? rpeh •T•C•E• 08:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Gripes Pages

What happened to those pages? -Nesskid 23:19, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

...They were horrible so they were deleted.--75.14.9.149 23:29, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

The "formal" version of that is: there was a proposal to get rid of them, it went through the proper wiki Deletion Review process and most people voted to get rid of them, so they're now gone. But the IP's succinct version of it works too. ;) ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 23:53, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

It's kind of a shame. I agree it had no encyclopedic value, but they were kind of entertaining. -24.118.255.124 07:54, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Searching

I have noticed quite a few talk page edits asking where a certain page is an I have the feeling that the current site search is very hard to use for newcomers (sometimes for me too,darn Ashlander names!). I brought this idea up on the IRC channel and GK and Darbashi seem to have a lot of good ideas also. Something like what Wikipedia has here would be ideal. I realize there is a problem with the issue of namespaces but the possibilities to overcoming this are limitless. If you have any suggestions on what you think should be done feedback is much appreciated!--^Corevette₇₈₉ 02:42, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

One thing that I saw that could help is $wgEnableMWSuggest. The only true extension is Sphinx, which currently is in beta. Elliot (talk) 04:07, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

It needs to be able to fill in beginnings of article of you type in the end (there are those namespaces) like typing the "Draconis" would give you all the family member names with OB: in front of it.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 20:14, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, WP doesn't even have that. A simple search would help you with that. Elliot (talk) 20:33, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

One thing that bugged me when I first started visiting this site, and still does if I'm not signed in, was the search engine defaults to searching only the page titles instead of the full body of the articles. It took me a couple weeks before I even noticed that it defaults to that. Does it default because we don't want to bog down the servers or why? This is the only site that I know of that defaults to title only, even wikipedia defaults to searching the entire article.Djdelirius 14:48, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, fulltext searches are a major performance issue for the site. 99% of the database's slow queries (ones that take longer than 2 seconds to complete) are fulltext searches. Even with the fulltext searches turned off by default, the databases logs hundreds of slow fulltext queries every day. Furthermore, unlike wikipedia we don't have dedicated database servers devoted solely to handling searches, and to make matters worse, up until now every fulltext search has basically monopolized our database server. If by some miracle the day comes when there are never any complaints about the site being slow, then we could experiment with changing searches to be fulltext by default. But in the meantime I'm not willing to risk it. --Nephele^Talk 00:00, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Morrownd Character Creation

Shouldn't there be a Morrowind Character Creation page like there is for the other games? 99.237.118.215 21:04, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

If you want one, you'll have to write it. The Morrowind pages have been around for several years and nobody else has found the need, but feel free to create one yourself. rpeh •T•C•E• 09:14, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

blank/new page template mistake

"Please only create pages that will be of relevance to the our readers." [sic] — Unsigned comment by Aliana (talk • contribs) at 05:46 on 19 April 2010

I bolded the incorrect portion in Aliana's post to make it more obvious. It took me a while to find where this text appears. In order to get it, I had to jump directly to a page that doesn't exist (as opposed to searching for it and clicking on "Create" from there). I don't know if there are other ways. Here's a link to make it easy for others. You're looking at the first sentence below the bullets.

(Edit) I just looked around some more and found where Admins can change this. It appears at MediaWiki:Noarticletext and we have Aristeo to blame for the typo (which gives you an idea just how long it's been there without anybody noticing!). ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 20:32, 19 April 2010 (UTC); Edit: 20:44, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for pointing it out, Aliana! --GK^talk2me 22:22, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Unsigned Template

I don't know about anybody else, but I've always found the "Unsigned" text to be really long. Would anybody object if I shortened it from "The preceding unsigned comment was added by ..." to just "Preceding comment by ..."? (Or other wording? "Unsigned comment by" or even just "Comment by" would work, or just remove the text altogether and have just the sig itself.) ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 12:00, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm not really sure about that. The template as it is now does suggest that the editor didn't sign the comment him/herself, making it clear the editor didn't choose the signature. On the other hand, the unsigned thing is so generic that I don't think it's going to cause confusion. --Timenn-<talk> 12:05, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm in favor of just the sig: mostly because, me notwithstanding :P, Assume Good Faith. People are used to not having to manually sign every post in forums (and that's essentially how everyone views discussion pages), or emails, or IM, or any other form of net communication that I can think of. Even if they're aware of it, sometimes they're just going to forget. If (User:Blah) is what you ideally want at the end of comments (and it is, since you want Signed and that's what Signeds look like), then surely it's what you want at the end of ALL comments.

"Unsigned" has no meaning to anyone but you guys in the first place, and you re-attributing edits defeats the purpose of a "deliberately unsigned" anyway. so even if you do want keep a visible distinction for some reason, something as small and simple as "(U)RobinHood 12:00, 21 April 2010 (UTC)" would be enough, wouldn't it?

--Aliana 12:40, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

I like how it is now, but perhaps the wording can be shortened a little bit. Aliana, there is a not on every single edit page that asks for people to sign their edits on talk pages. Elliot (talk) 23:40, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

I like the idea. I am thinking something like "Unsigned Comment by, User". It is pretty long and the "preceding" part is unnecessary.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 23:48, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree that it could be shortened. I like Corevette's suggestion: ^{— unsigned comment by (user) on (date)} --GK^talk2me 00:07, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

I think it would be a good idea to see what Wikipedia does with theirs. Elliot (talk) 04:38, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Elliot: it's not necessarily visible (on my system, it's off the bottom of the screen unless I scroll the page), and it's not "usefully" placed regardless, since it's after the actual "here's the boxes and buttons you need to make an edit". --Aliana 05:10, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Never mind: it is in the "flow" for every page EXCEPT articles, which of course this one is. :P --Aliana 20:55, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

I just replied to [an edit] that was "signed" with "----". Since the only purpose of "unsigned" (from a user perspective: I have no idea what value it has to you guys) is to call out the poster for not signing the edit in the first place, what's the appropriate action for that one, where the intent was "good" but the execution was flawed? Should it get the same "omg noob you didn't sign" tagging as one that lacked that intent? (That's a serious question: I just can't ask it in a way that couldn't be interpreted as sarcastic or wisea** if you tried to).

@Timmen: Isn't the attribution of the content what's truly important, rather than the format of the signature? I mean, realistically I didn't choose MY signature either, and nor did the vast majority of users. Surely the "unsigned" sig should be the same as the default sig, shouldn't it?

Strunk and White preaches "Omit needless words". "The preceding", and "was added" are all implicit and needless even if the other parts of it are kept. Which I guess means I'm in favor of Corevette's suggestion at a minimum, and though I think it should be reduced even further you guys obviously get SOME value from the "unsigned" tag even if I don't know what it is, so yes, I'll shut up now. :P --Aliana 20:55, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

The purpose of the unsigned tag is to allow readers to follow the "flow" of the conversation, so that they know who said what and have convenient links to the users' pages. It also helps the archiving process by providing a date for the comment. I'm not sure exactly what purpose actually pointing out that it was attributed to the poster by another editor has, but it just seems logical to me to make a by-someone-else attribution look different than a by-the-poster attribution. I've personally never looked at the unsigned tag as "calling out" the poster, simply as an easy-to-use tag that helps everyone who reads or is involved with the conversation. --GK^talk2me 21:28, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

No, the purpose of the signature is "to allow ...", whether the unsigned tag is on that signature or not. "I'm not sure exactly what purpose actually pointing out that it was attributed to the poster by another editor has" is the part I'm trying (and, clearly, failing) to understand myself, and it's really got my curiousity going. --Aliana 21:57, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

There's probably not much of a reason, other than it seems to make sense that a person saying "I said this" should look different than someone else saying, "This person said this." --GK^talk2me 23:09, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

That's the main point. Signing a comment as a user normally would is a form of editing another user's talk page posts - something that is considered extremely bad form. The template needs to point out that it was added by another user after the event, purely for clarity. rpeh •T•C•E• 23:28, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

THANK you. Trying to figure out why has been driving me crazy! I don't AGREE with that argument, but at least I know what the argument is now. :) --Aliana 23:35, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

The flip side of rpeh's reason is that you're noting that the user you're signing for didn't choose the signature themselves. If you look at my current signature vs. the standard signature, they're clearly a little different. By preceding it with a quick note, it identifies this fact. I also think it serves to remind the person that they should be signing their posts, though I don't think it really calls them out for it. (It does for us regulars who already know we should, though, and just generally makes us feel dumb. <g>) — Unsigned comment by RobinHood70 (talk • contribs) at 06:11 on 23 April 2010 (UTC) :Þ

 :D

Since Rob's reminded us just how long the tag is, here's a quick comparison of the three "important" ones on top of each other (Current Unsigned, Proposed Unsigned, Default Signed) so it's easy to see the differences and make sure everyone's happy that it isn't losing anything important or desirable:

The preceding unsigned comment was added by Aliana (talk • contribs) on 07:53, 23 April 2010 (UTC).

Unsigned comment by Aliana (talk • contribs) on 07:53, 23 April 2010 (UTC).

Aliana 07:57, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Actually there's another reason for using the tag - it adds the date to comments (when used properly). That lets people see how old some conversations are, which will hopefully stop people adding stuff to conversations that have been over for months.

The "Unsigned comment by" version looks fine to me. rpeh •T•C•E• 12:04, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Recent Changes

Would it be a good idea (or even possible) to provide links that show game-specific recent changes? (On each section's main page or in the sidebar). The namespace box isn't as useful for this as I'd hoped, since "Articles" and "Discussions" are actually different spaces, and there's a lot of dependence between the two if you want to see what's really going on (e.g. "this piece of Article moved to Talk", "this piece of Article updated per Talk notes", etc). So to see what's new in e.g. Oblivion in a complete and continuity-correct way, you have to use a view that has Morrowind, Lore, etc interspersed in it. Like I say, I have no idea what's involved in it technically, but I thought it was worth suggesting in case it's easy. Thanks. --Aliana 13:20, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't believe that's possible without large changes to the underlying MediaWiki software. It's a shame, because I've always wanted better control over what gets shown/hidden too. rpeh •T•C•E• 14:24, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Game Mixing

The work Kertaw48 has been doing on Morrowind has thrown up a question that's been bubbling around for a while now: to what extent to we want cross-game links?

I mean pages like Helas Ancestral Tomb, Othrelas Ancestral Tomb and Arenim Ancestral Tomb where Oblivion pages are linked from Morrowind-space; or Umbra, which links from Oblivion to Morrowind.

My own feeling is that linking to artifacts is useful but that linking to people isn't - typically. To expand, the fact that one artifact keeps reappearing throughout TES lore is interesting and useful, but the fact that Bethesda's name generator came up with "Othrelas" twice isn't. To expand further, I think it's interesting that the Umbra artifact (to name but one) keeps reappearing across time, but that it's not very interesting that two people have the same surname across time.

Having said all that, I don't want to edit Kertaw48's good work without discussion, so let's discuss. rpeh •T•C•E• 20:00, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I quite like the mention of all family members on those pages, and I like them to be as complete as possible. For me that would mean that cross-game links are not a nuisance but rather an asset. I know that most names in Oblivion (and Morrowind for that matter) are randomly generated, and that it is most likely just a coincidence when surnames are alike, but technically they can be considered as a family member. To sum it up, I have no problem with them being there, and I like it when they stay there. ^Talk Wolok gro-Barok _{Contributions} 20:23, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I rather like the list of "family members", too. It makes it feel like the article has more of a story than just "This is what you see in the game." That said, I don't spend much time in MW-space, so I don't really care all that much either way. --GK^talk2me 20:55, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I forgot to mention my main point. By including other games in this list, it makes these pages open-ended lists that need updating every time a future game comes out. From the other posts so far, it seems as if a list of family members is wanted, but I respectfully suggest that Morrowind space isn't the right place for a list of names for TESIV, TESV and beyond. Perhaps now is the time to discuss some kind of Lore:Genealogy page and sub-pages? rpeh •T•C•E• 21:19, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I see your point there. I'm not sure if I follow your suggestion, but what I'm picturing is replacing the list with something like, "There have been several people in this family featured in other Elder Scrolls games." and linking to the page that lists "families". Am I on the right track there? --GK^talk2me 21:34, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

First of all, thanks for appreciating my work with the family sections and inviting me here to discuss it. Eventhough I have spent quite some time on it, I understand your point about not wanting to have links from oblivion NPCs on Morrowind pages. I simply saw someone else do it and just went along with it. But I am confused as how this Lore:Genealogy would work. Has there been a previous discussion about this? Kertaw48 21:53, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't really have strong opinions on this either way, but if we go for a Genealogy page, I would suggest a link or category be added to the various families' pages to make it obvious at a glance that other characters from the same family have appeared in other games. As with the Easter Eggs pages and so on, though, it'll be important to avoid speculative links, like suggesting that I might be related to Robert Morley (which I'm not...as far as I know). ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 23:11, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure how a Genealogy page would work - or even if that's the best idea. It was just something that sprang to mind. One thought, which is possibly going far too far, would be subpages for each name, maybe with very brief descriptions of each character along with an NPC image. Then you could see how the Arenim family has spread across Tamriel at a glance. GK - yes, a link from each page to some other list is exactly what I had in mind. Still not quite sure exactly what, though. rpeh •T•C•E• 07:51, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

← I apparently missed reading GK's post. Sorry for the duplicate suggestion. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 17:54, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

New Roleplaying Guidelines

I have seen this on many talk pages and over and over and I don't understand. Have we or have we not yet came up with new official guidelines for the roleplaying page. If not I would be glad to start a project on it or help out. I have a lot of ideas but I don't know who to approach to ask permission to start a project/contribute. They are very un-uniform and I have a template I think would work well. Feel free to respond on my talk page. ((Emperor Ray IV 01:15, 26 April 2010 (UTC)Emperor Ray IV))

I would like to see what this would look like first. I really don't even want the page on the wiki (like most other Dubious Quality pages) and if we are going to start a redesign, the section needs to be cut down drastically.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 01:28, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

It's pretty much impossible to regulate this page, since it is among the most often edited ones (as well as the gripes page, which got deleted). I know I'm not going to spend the time to regulate it either. Most other veteran editors have also given up on it. Check out these old discussions. However, no one can stop you (and you don't need official permission) to begin a project. This is a wiki after all. Vesna 01:41, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Bethesda Online Store DLC Not compatible with Steam versions?

I don't see how that's possible. You get the exact same game. I own both the PC game on disc and the version on Steam and I don't see the difference. -216.49.220.19 00:51, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

It's straight from Bethesda's mouth, but feel free to test it if you like. --GK^talk2me 01:00, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Quest Header Template

I've made some changes to the Quest Header template. Since this template is used on every quest page on the site, I'd like to get a consensus before I implement the changes. (Which is also why I'm bringing this up here and not on the Templates page.) While the changes are fairly significant underneath, they should be entirely cosmetic on the surface. The main cosmetic change is that the text in the middle is now in a table, so everything after the colons will align. As you can see in the Morrowind example in my sandbox, this does very nice things for columns of text like the Disposition field. It has the drawback, however, of narrowing how much space is available for longer text, like in the Reward section of the Oblivion example, and making the right-side a little more distant from it's heading for most entries.

It's difficult to simulate the TOCs, so if you'd like to compare it on a real page, just edit the page and substitute "User:RobinHood70/Dalet" for "Quest Header" (without the quotes) and do a Show Preview. Obviously, don't save it that way! :)

Personally, I think the revised version looks a lot nicer (obviously, or I wouldn't have designed it that way), but my visual preferences may not match other peoples, and it definitely looks a lot less impressive at narrow widths like 800×600 (where they both look really ugly!), so I'd like opinions on which you prefer. It's not particularly hard to go back to the inline style instead of the table style if that's preferred, since I can just reinsert most of the old template code for that section. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 11:38, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I think I slightly prefer the table version. I seem to remember trying something like that myself ages ago and ultimately rejecting the idea. I've also got a shadowy memory of there being a discussion on this topic with such luminaries as TheRealLurlock and Nephele chipping in, where the final decision was to keep it as it is now. That was also a long time ago though (if it actually happened!)

With the two specific examples in your sandbox, I'd agree the MW one looks better, but the way "Prerequisite Quest" splits onto two lines in the second example is ugly (fixable, I know). If you're using a table, how about losing the bullet points in front of the headers, since they're no longer really necessary. That will free up a few precious pixels.

The worry is, as you say, with narrower widths. I'd be interested in hearing if any users are working at less than about 1200 pixels screen width. rpeh •T•C•E• 14:32, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I made the headings non-wrapping at one point, but later removed it again due to the narrow width issue. I've removed the bullets and restored the non-wrapping headings now. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 14:49, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I think that's better. And I'm less worried about narrow screens since I realised that such users won't have the thumbnail width set to 300 pixels... rpeh •T•C•E• 16:58, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I just tweaked it to not reserve space for the image, allowing the middle section to expand as much as it can, and with thumbnails set to 120px at 1024×768, both pages look quite acceptable. At 800×600 the Oblivion one didn't look so hot, developing super-thin-column text, but I don't expect too many people browse at that resolution at this point unless they're using a cell phone.

Any thoughts on the icon vs. "Quest Giver" text? I removed the sizing on the icon column as well early on, since it had no noticeable effect, but I'm thinking a little horizontal space might be a good idea there.

Update: I had an idea and changed the style of the icon so that the table info aligns left under the icon of the icon being off to the left. That makes the pages look very acceptable even at 800×600 but I'm not sure I like the look of it quite as much at "normal" widths, and of course it looks a little less like the quest log in Oblivion, which I think may have been the original intent. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 17:36, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I'd thought about that and didn't think it would work... but it does. The only other tweak worth looking at would be making the TOC space smaller - there aren't that many quests with huge section names. Otherwise, I definitely prefer your new version. Let's see what other people think. rpeh •T•C•E• 19:55, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I like almost all of the changes suggested here, but there's one major con to my eyes: there's a huge ugly empty space between most parameter titles and the info. Is there any way to adjust that? Perhaps instead of aligning all of the info for every title, instead only align the rows of each individual title? ...so that, with Morrowind:Report to Caius Cosades for instance, there's no space between "Quest Giver" and "Sellus Gradius" etc., but the several rows for "Disposition" would be aligned similar to the suggestion? --GK^talk2me 23:37, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

The easiest way to get rid of the space would be to just right-align the headings. Doing it the way you suggest is possible, but I think it would require a separate table for each line. I remember seeing another way using only HTML, but I don't remember exactly what it was or if it would be usable here. It was somewhere on one of DaveH's old pages, so I can track it down if really necessary and see what it was. (It was Newsitem and that would not be a useful technique here since it forcibly indents.) ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 07:45, 3 May 2010 (UTC), Edit: 14:11, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Setting the text-align CSS property of the local variable innerhdstyle to right should do the trick. --Timenn-<talk> 14:28, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I added that local variable just for situations like this. How do we all like it now? ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 15:08, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

It is heavy to the right, which makes it look weird. The spacing between the TOC and the table needs to be decreased, and the spacing between the table and image should increase a little (similar to the original spacing). Elliot (talk) 15:17, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

That's because the TOC isn't present in these examples. I think that's perfect now. The only other change that might be worth making is to remove the colons from the row titles, but I'm not sure if that will be better or worse. rpeh •T•C•E• 15:20, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

No, rpeh, it is not because they aren't there. I looked at it on live pages and came to the conclusion. Elliot (talk) 17:35, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Oh I do apologise. Presumably your long and detailed investigation included quests such as this, this, this, this, and this, where there are long section titles? Perhaps not. Maybe a small adjustment in the TOC space is in order, but not much. At the moment, the description of the quest is centred roughly on the page. Any change to the layout will start to make that look odd. rpeh •T•C•E• 20:20, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

See, the funny thing is, you once again decide that everything I do is just incorrect. Or perhaps it is out of habit that you think everything you believe is eternally right and everything I believe is eternally wrong? You also assume that I did not actually test it out, presumably because it is an argument made by me. I never indicated that such changes needed to be drastic. Elliot (talk) 20:36, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

No, I said that I assumed you had tested fully and thoroughly before reaching your conclusion, and that your conclusions were the result of a long and detailed investigation. Please don't put words in my mouth. Again. I note you didn't reply to my point about the centring of the description, something I consider very important to the pages that use the template. This is a discussion about changes to a major template. Your personal remarks have no place in it. Take them elsewhere. rpeh •T•C•E• 21:12, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Wrong, rpeh. When the base of your argument includes the belittling of my credibility in order to substantiate your own, then yes, they have a place. "Perhaps not." Perhaps people aren't as stupid as you imply they are. I have stated what I believe should be done, and I will leave it at that. Elliot (talk) 21:18, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree on the TOC space being too big when looking at it on the "real" pages, but I'm not sure of the best approach. I'm not sure it's a big concern, but the benefit of having the TOC width set is that barring unusual circumstances, the middle section will appear in the same place on all pages if, for example, you're going from one tab to another. Still, I've tweaked it down to 25% from 30% for now. Alternately, we could just get rid of it and allow everything to auto-size and not worry about the middle section not appearing in the same place on all pages.

On the right side, I've allowed it to go pretty much flush to the image (or edge of the page if there's no image) for the benefit of smaller window widths. It's easy to add padding if we want to put some extra space; just be aware that the padding may be inordinately large for small window widths. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 15:49, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I think it looks really good as it is now. A little more padding between the middle section and the image would probably look better, but it's not a big deal. --GK^talk2me 17:05, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I've been playing with various layouts for something like the last hour or two...far more time than I probably should have spent on it...and I've finally found something that I think works well in most cases. It adapts really well to various screen widths, but that strength is also its weakness since the middle section will widen to use most of the screen if there's wide text on a wide screen. I personally don't think that looks quite as nice as when it was more compact, but it's not really all that bad, either. On the other hand, when there isn't any wide text, I find it looks really good and everything is roughly balanced (I can't quite get perfectly even spacing between the TOC, mid-section, and image...CSS/HTML just doesn't seem to support that). So...is this good or should we go back to fixed-percentage column widths. I'm good with either.

Oh and if anybody has any better ideas and wants to try them out, feel free to...errr...play in my sandbox. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 13:58, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Hmm.... I prefer the previous version. The new spacing does strange things on several quests: check out this and this with the new template, where the layout just goes... odd, then this and this where it causes rather ugly wrapping in the TOC. rpeh •T•C•E• 16:46, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

I didn't see anything wrong with A Better Mousetrap, but I definitely see what you mean with the others. Would the table look better centered under the title (or icon + title), do you think? As for the TOC, we're probably better going back to fixed-percentage width, but another option is to not allow the TOC to wrap at all. I'd be worried about having a really long or deeply-nested heading make it look really ugly, though, so fixed-percentage may be the best choice. I'll wait for more input before I make any other changes, just so we're not jumping around quite so much with layout changes that are more significant. (I plead guilty to prior offences, your honour.) ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 18:48, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The TOC wrapping doesn't look all that ugly to me, but I don't like that the info isn't centered under the quest description. It looks strange when the info is all on the left and the quest description stretches way out to the right. --GK^talk2me 18:49, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

You can see how the Better Mousetrap page looked for me here - odd that the main table is squeezed when there's so much free space. I'm guessing it's because the description is so short? That was taken at 1680x1050 but then the s/shot was resized. rpeh •T•C•E• 19:04, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

@GK: Centering probably would look better now that the titles are right-aligned and it's easy to do, so I'll get that tomorrow when I address rpeh's issue.

@rpeh: That may be a Firefox problem. I don't get what you get, but if I size the window down, it does start wrapping much earlier than it does in Chrome. I'll play around tomorrow and see what I can figure out. Were you zoomed in or using 120 dpi or anything abnormal like that? ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 21:55, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

(←) Gah! No matter what I do, something looks odd. I think I'm gonna go back to fixed-percentage widths and take it from there. Not very clear-headed today, so it'll wait till at least tomorrow; may need to wait till the weekend cuz my parents are coming in from out of town tomorrow. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 21:54, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I went back to a fixed 25% for the TOC and 25% for the picture with an additional 5% padding between those and the Quest Header. What do we think now? I'll have a look at a bunch of pages this weekend...expecting company any second so can't test extensively right now. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 21:12, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I had a look at it on a bunch of the pages mentioned above, and it looks pretty good on all of them now—at least in Chrome. I'm going to put the new version in place and we'll see how it goes. I haven't checked the Firefox issues, but once it's in place, I'll have a look at a bunch of those same pages across all the browsers and see if there's still a problem, and then see if I can figure out what's causing it. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 17:38, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Looks good to me! rpeh •T•C•E• 18:13, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Quick checks look okay in all browsers except IE, which seems to want to leave a large gap between the TOC and Quest Header, and in turn, allows text to overlap the image on the other side. I'll play around a bit and see if I can find a solution, but while distracting and a little ugly, it's not so bad that I'd suggest reverting just for IE's sake. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 18:32, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Update: Fixed the IE problem. It didn't like having padding specified in percent, so I just added blank columns on either side with the same width. It now behaves properly and looks roughly the same in all browsers. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 18:47, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Proxy List

I was thinking a few weeks ago, since we block open proxies on site, why not just borrow Wikipedia's proxy and TORlist? I think it would slow down vandals like the Fury incident we had earlier. (For those who may not know, Fury was using TOR to change his IP address) I also understand there will be certain downsides to this like users editing from china that may have to use a proxy to edit the site. Any other suggestions?--^Corevette₇₈₉ 19:38, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Preemptive blocks for all open proxies might seem like a good idea, but the truth is that there are simply too many open proxies to block them all. The list you see at Wikipedia is only a small part of the likely amount of IPs that are used for open proxies. Considering the amount of IPv4 addresses, and the amount which are "shady" IP addresses (assigned to "shady" ISPs and companies) I think there could be well over a few hundred thousand of them. In short, performing such a long task as blocking all IPs WP has listed, it would still not help that much. I fear by the time we're done with blocking them all IPv6 has already been implemented everywhere, and we'd have 2¹²⁸ IP addresses to cope with.

Furthermore, checking the list of Wikipedia, I'm not sure if we should trust that list. When I see an address like 10.237.44.144 (10.x.x.x is reserved for NAT) appear in the list, I'm starting to doubt its integrity.

Blocking all TOR exit nodes would be something else (as there are less of them, you could verify them all), but I believe Ratwar has already been successful in blocking all the faster exit nodes. --Timenn-<talk> 08:49, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Navbox Color

Since it affects multiple templates, I figured I'd mention here a minor cosmetic change I made to {{Navbox}}. Nearer the bottom of the page, you can see in the examples that tables made with the template now have an outline color more coordinated with the rest of the wiki; the bright white seemed to clash. I thought I knew which color to use; once I saved it, I realized it was too dark... and now I can't seem to find which color it is; I'm looking for the one we use for TOCs, category boxes, image thumbnails, etc. I think the color I changed it to is still a little off, but you get what I'm saying with my suggestion. Anyone a little more tech-y than me know what it should be? --GK^talk2me 03:10, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Not entirely sure whether you're referring to the border-color or the background-color; the border-color used by TOCs etc is #AAAAAA and the background-color is #FDF5E6. Hope that helps. 77.191.154.85 08:12, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Yup, 77.191.154.85 beat me to it. The colour is indeed FDF5E6. I took the liberty to modify the template, see the results for yourself ;). --Timenn-<talk> 08:51, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, it's not THAT much of a difference, but I did see that it's indentical to the category box, so if matching the color with the rest of wiki was your plan as you said, then I say it's ok... --Kertaw48 13:22, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree, it looks better with the cream-colour instead of pure white.

I dislike using fixed colours for things when we're trying to emulate site colours, so I went looking for a way to have it follow your skin preferences, and unfortunately, it wasn't easy as I could've wished. Largely, this is because our CSS files have semi-conflicting entries in that there's a "toc" class (and several related ones) in monobook/main.css, but these then get overridden by the "toc" ID entry (#toc) which there can only be one of on a page (i.e., the real TOC). So the main TOC is the only thing that's guaranteed to look like a TOC site-wide. Technically speaking, the category links follow the same style, at least in monobook, but that doesn't help us much, since there will normally be one of those on every page as well. As far as I can tell, the only way to make the navbox follow the defined TOC style for any given skin would be to ask Dave to add a "#navbox" entry along with the "#toc" entry for each skin. As a less-desirable option, we could use the wikitable class, which uses the same colour, but then we end up overriding a bunch of other things to restore the formatting to what it is now.

Long story short, it's simpler just to leave it hard-coded to that colour, but if we want to have it follow the skin preferences, there are options. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 20:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Sorry RH, that's just one of the shortcomings of CSS. You can't declare constants that remain the same for an entire project, so I guess we are stuck with defining the same colour over and over again. Be glad the mighty Daveh was wise enough to pick sensible colours for the default stylesheet of the wiki. ;) --Timenn-<talk> 02:24, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

If the same colour had been defined for the TOC class as it was for the TOC id, then we'd be okay I think...but they're different! ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 03:23, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Quest Walkthrough Legend

The {{Quest Walkthrough Legend}} template is used only on the Main Quest page for each different game. There are a few issues I can see with it:

1. The entries in the {{Quest Header}} seem pretty self-explanatory. Do we even need this template? (If the answer is "no", then the remaining points are moot.)
2. Putting it only on the Main Quest page seems rather out of the way. I'm not sure I'd even seen it before today, except in passing when I didn't really notice it. Would we be better off having a small "Legend" link somewhere in the Quest Header template and then simply link it to a Legend page instead of using the template?
3. Alternatively, would we be better off using {{Hover}} text over each heading in the Quest Header template and then removing the legend from the Main Quest pages?
4. In any event, the legend is badly out of date and there are entries in the header that aren't in the legend. If we're going to keep it, regardless of the format we keep it in, it should be updated.

Opinions? ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 19:26, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Seems pretty unnecessary to me; the entries in the Quest Header are self-explanatory. --GK^talk2me 03:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I suppose that's what I get for making assumptions. I'd always assumed that because nobody else ever commented on it, people must be finding it useful. Personally I think it's a waste of time. rpeh •T•C•E• 12:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Yup, agreeing with the rest here. Even if one doesn't understand the headers, the content itself next to them should make it clear enough. --Timenn-<talk> 08:53, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Okay, it's been 5 days and there's unanimous support, so I'll delete them where it's used and then prod the template. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 17:09, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Internet Explorer Accelerator/Search Provider Add-on and iPhone/android apps?

Has anyone ever discussed releasing an accelerator or search provider add-on for Internet Explorer and also an app for the iPhone and an app for the android phone O/S? I could easily make all four and I've been tempted to before and put them up open-source...I won't do it without the blessing of the uesp community though, which is why I haven't so far. I'm still surprised no one has done this yet. What do you guys think? --Djdelirius 15:04, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

wiki-bug

Tribunal:Dark Brotherhood Attacks

Looks like:

Database error

A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

(SQL query hidden)

from within function "Database::deleteJoin". MySQL returned error "1213: Deadlock found when trying to get lock; Try restarting transaction (70.38.12.115)".

Apparently, it only happens to a few people (someone on Bethesda's forum reported it first), but Corvette said it wasn't a bug. --66.81.51.97 01:47, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

It's not happening to me, what browser are you using?--^Corevette₇₈₉ 02:01, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Talked this out with corvette on the IRC, made a minor change to the page, seemed to fix the problem. That was weird. --66.81.51.97 02:13, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Fact / Citation Needed Template

I'm afraid I'm getting impatient with people adding unsupported statements to Lore pages. Way back in the almost civil war of discussion about Lore, the one thing that everybody agreed about was that statements should be supported by references, but unfortunately we still get people adding random information that may or may not have any kind of grounding in the games or the supporting fanfics.

I'm always loath to simply delete information so I've done what I've been trying to avoid for some time and created a WP-like template for such statements. Please everybody give a big welcome to our version of {{Fact}}, also known as {{Citation Needed}} and {{Citation needed}} - and feel free to add more redirects according to your wiki preference.

From now on, I would ask that all important unsourced statements found - especially on Lore pages - should be tagged with this template, and that if you have a few spare minutes you use them finding out what the source for a particular statement might be. At the moment our Lore pages are a horrible mix of in-game sources, out-of-game sources and fanfiction sources. I've spent some time cleaning up but there's far too much and it needs more time than I have to do well.

Finally, yes I'm aware I'm presenting this in the form of something like an instruction when this is a site based on consensus, but I'm afraid I can't anticipate any argument whereby unsourced, unsupported material would be welcomed on this site. If anyone can supply such an argument, I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, I am as ever your obt. svt, rpeh •T•C•E• 22:11, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

"obt. svt" = ... ummm ... "obtuse savant"? ;) (Sorry, those were the first words that came to mind for each set of letters outside the obvious.)

As for the Fact tag and the "instruction" thereabout, you won't hear any complaints from me. While we've had disagreements in the past about the need for references (c.f. the Knights Templar discussion), when it comes to pages that are strictly game-related, to me it just makes sense that anything presented on them needs to come from the games themselves or the official supporting material (apart from third-party bug fixes and the like). If there's anything that derives from fan fiction or similar unofficial sources, it definitely needs to be removed if we're sure or tagged if we're not. So yeah...I guess this is the long-winded version (what else is new with me?) of "I agree". ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 00:13, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

"Obedient Servant", although I prefer your version ;)

Good. I'll wait to see if there are other comments before sprinkling the template over the Lore namespace, but we definitely had to do something here. rpeh •T•C•E• 06:29, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

I know what you meant, silly! ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 16:13, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

In two words: me likes. I'd always been surprised that the Lore articles, which I supposed should be scholarly and all, didn't have a proper "Citation Needed" system. So, yes, I'm in favour of this. --SerCenKing ^Talk 20:35, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Cheats

i would like to create a page entitled oblivion cheats or something like that where everyone could add the cheats they know anyone agree? disagree? Stealthilizer 03:46, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

There are no cheats for Oblivion.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 03:49, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes sleeping in free beds that you don't own and that kind of stuff — Unsigned comment by Stealthilizer (talk • contribs) on 24 May 2010

First of all, yes there are cheats. Secondly, no a cheats page would just grow into a massive, and terrible, page. Many "cheats" are already documented here and here anyway. --SerCenKing ^Talk 07:06, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

We usually document cases of beds you can sleep in on the NPC or location page. I agree with SerCenKing - a cheats page would be a bad idea. rpeh •T•C•E• 07:26, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Oh thanks i didn't know that there was a glitches page Stealthilizer 20:24, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Random question

can argonians mate with other races? working on some fan fiction for a DnD group. — Unsigned comment by 75.236.123.40 (talk) at 21:15 on 28 May 2010

i don't wan't tto get into details but i don't see why not--GUM!!! 21:20, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

now comes the question as to whether or not the offspring comes from an egg or not(im pretty sure thats how they work) — Unsigned comment by 75.236.123.40 (talk) at 21:22 on 28 May 2010

I honestly never thought anyone would ever ask that question so bluntly. Nevertheless, it's still a valid question. I think these notes should answer it. But, I believe this question should have been asked on the forums instead. --Kertaw48 17:21, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Morrowind Map / Tamriel Rebuilt

Having given up trying to work out what was causing my problem with the CreateMaps command, I reinstalled Morrowind from scratch and have now generated a full map for Morrowind including the areas added by Tamriel Rebuilt maps 1 and 2.

This raises an important question: what do we do with the results? The option of simply including Tamriel Rebuilt on our current map is something I have previously rejected, but I'm now not sure. The alternatives are doing a separate map or doing nothing at all. Call those options 1, 2 and 3.

1. Pros: TR is the preeminent mod for MW and having an interactive map will be a huge hit with the TES community. Cons It's non-standard. What if other modders want a similar map for their own mods?
2. Pros: Makes it clearer what goes where. Cons Disk space and caching - it's a whole new map and it's a biggie.
3. Pros: Easy to do. Cons It's a bit of a cop out.

I'm obviously not in favour of #3 but I'm not sure which of the other two possibilities is going to be the best. Please let me know your opinions. rpeh •T•C•E• 01:55, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm glad someone is finally doing this.

1. While I don't think any other modders could ask for their mod to be added to the map (basically because no other mod is that large, is that much professional and so lore clean), I also don't think this should be done this way. The truth is that (unfortunately) more people still play Morrowind without Tamriel Rebuilt, and I'm sure those people would prefer that there is an unchanged map of the original game.
2. I'm not sure that I'm familiar with the problems of "disk space and caching" (I'm not familiar with the magnitude of these problems, that is). But a seperate map would be better in my opinion, with the Vvardenfell section of that map left blank or at least something along those lines.
3. Well, I'm not sure we should even be considering this an option, since if we do, this discussion is futile. Something should be done, even if it takes us some time to figure out what. --Kertaw48 09:52, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. Actually, I just checked and this might not be such a big issue after all. All the map tiles (currently) total about 250 Mb, which isn't that much. That figure will probably increase a bit as new maps are added as more-complex map tiles won't compress so well.

As for "finally doing this", there's still a long way to go so I wouldn't expect to see anything too soon! rpeh •T•C•E• 10:55, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Don't worry about the disk/caching size. Disk space on content servers is fine unless you're talking about 10s of GBs. Similarly with caching (I'm guessing it should have no effect anyways). -- 11:48, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

I've been waiting for this since I started playing TR3! I think we definitely should have a map, but I'm leaning towards having a separate one. As Kertaw said, most MW players don't have TR and adding it to the map would generate confusion (e.g. "Why can't I swim for Sadrith Mora to that land to the east?"). --SerCenKing ^Talk 12:23, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Okay - looks like that's the preferred option and with Daveh's assurance that there's no disk problems, it definitely sounds like the way to go. I've still got some work to do but hopefully we should be able to get it up and running before too long. rpeh •T•C•E• 13:12, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Home Page Picture

If this is partially equal to wikipedia, could you add the option of "Image of the Day" to the home page, or of the week, depending how often this page is updated? It sounds for me like a good idea — Unsigned comment by EDGARHOUSE (talk • contribs) at 04:21 on 30 May 2010

Look at our FA noms, We don't update much.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 04:27, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Ohh, that's to bad, well thanks anyways, this page helps me a lot with quests :D — Unsigned comment by EDGARHOUSE (talk • contribs) at 20:44 on 30 May 2010

expand the Oblivion glitches page

i think we should expand the Oblivion glitches page and add EVERY bug and glitch throughout the wiki (quest specific bugs, for example) to create a single massive page of bugs, making it easy for people to read ahead at problems that may/will appear while they play,and not have to look for bugs in each individual quest — Unsigned comment by 75.194.151.25 (talk) at 00:23 on 31 May 2010

so essentially just copy and paste all the glitches that aren't in the glitches page and put them in the glitches page.I think its a good idea. — Unsigned comment by Triaxx Menethil (talk • contribs) at 00:44 on 31 May 2010

Honestly, that would take a lifetime my friend, cause Oblivion is full of bugs and glitches on every place. You could find thousands in just one cave. Maybe you would want to specify exactly what kinds of glitches or bugs you want on the page, something not so general. — Unsigned comment by EDGARHOUSE (talk • contribs) at 01:05 on 31 May 2010

no sorry it's already two big and if we put every glitch i don't think my computer could handle it any more and by the way please sign your talk page posts with four of these ~~~~--GUM!!! 01:10, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

That would also be a nightmare to maintain. Even if we created the page today, by tomorrow, someone would have added a bug to a page somewhere on the wiki and the page would already be out of date. What's more, the Glitches page already sees a lot of one-off glitches (things that only happen in one specific instance, or at least that are extremely rare); if we opened it up to all glitches, it would quickly degenerate into a complete mess. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 01:23, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

well,at least find the most problematic ones that aren't already there. i was working with Bethesda to try to patch the more problematic ones, and it would be easier if they were all in one place. Triaxx Menethil 16:45, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Characters, Fanfiction etc. Our (Nonexistent) Policy.

We need a policy on whether these are part of the wiki or not since at present User A can decide that Users B and C need to discuss these off-wiki but User D says they can talk about this on-wiki causing problems, especially if Users E F and G jump in with conflicting viewpoints. So basically what I'm saying is that I think we should get a consensus on what the majority of users think our policy should be.--TheAlbinoOrc 19:45, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

I beleive it should be allowed, not going into great dicussions, but an occasional compliment, suggestion, comment, etc. has always been allowed, I don't see why we should stop. --Arch-Mage Matt^Talk 19:51, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Let's go into what's in that etc., because I'm not quite sure what all we should cover. Characters are not really ok. That's a person's roleplaying identity, and it's not really "Wiki material". We do not need sample characters for any of the games, because the character creation process is simple enough in all (except perhaps Daggerfall, where we have a custom class creation page which should suffice). Fanfiction is another story (pun!). It seems to me that while these aren't wiki material, they could be integrated in as a part of the community and I think that the policies are already in place that makes it so, whether explicitly stated or implicitly accepted. --Tim ^Talk 20:13, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Just a point of clarification, Tim: when you say "sample characters", are you referring to all characters, even in user space, or just having a separate page in the appropriate game namespace? I'm assuming it's the latter that you're saying is unnecessary, but the original question might include the former. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 20:38, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

When I say sample characters, I mean a page in the namespace that is a character, outlining the skills they possess and what birthsign they use (or in Daggerfall's case, what class features they selected). In some games, it is a useful tool, for instance, D&D (all editions) benefit from having sample characters lying around out there because it helps newer users understand how to use their character sheets and where to put features that they have chosen. But in TES, the character creation process is simple enough that having sample characters would be unnecessary and unencyclopedic. As for whether we should allow users to have their characters on their pages, sure, we can't prevent them from doing that as long as it's not on a separate page or spamming images or some other reasonable complaint. And again, I'd ask for more clarification on what the original topic was meant to be before going further. --Tim ^Talk 23:27, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't think anybody objects to fanfics, information about characters or other such stuff being added; the problem comes when people make dozens of such edits in short periods of time. If you're writing a fanfic, write it offline then post it - don't post two lines then make another five edits correcting things. If you're including information about your characters, don't update it every time you switch to a new shield or gain a rank in a guild. Lastly, back-and-forth conversations about fanfics and characters are just annoying for patrollers - email is the best option here. rpeh •T•C•E• 06:06, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I think rpeh has explained the general principle that should cover it; "don't overdo it". Meaning you can write some irrelevant stuff, but keep it related to the editors, the wiki or the games. Keep the amount of edits in a good balance with your regular work.

A while back I tried to introduce a What UESPWiki is not guidelines article, which raised some conflicting concerns. The intention was to provide editors some guidelines on what content is permitted on the "meta" pages in particular (everything besides the content articles, e.g. talk pages and userpages). --Timenn-<talk> 12:52, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

(in reply to rpeh...timmen cut my comment off)yeah but for people who don't have email on the site(like me) or they don't know what it is(like me. i know what email is but not on the site) so i dunno...sure i think it would be ok but i don't really know--GUM!!! 12:54, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

You don't have to have on-site e-mail, GUM, you can use regular e-mail, forums, a chat client like IRC or AIM, Facebook, or whatever other means you find convenient. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 15:06, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

oh...it's just that all the people i need/want to talk to don't have a forum account ecept arach mage matt(yes i was ojne of the people who got the fourm message)--GUM!!! 15:17, 31 May 2010 (UTC)--GUM!!! 15:17, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I never thought the Fanfiction was much of a problem. Things like "My Characters" can be on userpages but constantly updating them can be a stupid to patrol. Things like those may be better off in the Forums.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 16:54, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Hmm. I'm not sure about the e-mail thing; I only have one e-mail account, which I use for Google Sketchup, and one Yahoo Group which after recent events I'm really not comfortable having on here.--TheAlbinoOrc 23:54, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

im guessing that you are wondering if fan fiction should be allowed or not. i suggest a new section (similar to lore) called fanon (fan fiction that's not entirely canon) that could be added, and people can post whatever the hell they want there (as long as its "kosher"). I think it would be a worthy addition, and a perfect place for people to share their ideas and imaginations.Triaxx Menethil 16:51, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

we already sorta do...it's called the forums...--GUM!!! 17:19, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

No it's called General:Fanfiction the forums are for other things. But that doesn't answer my point about not being comfortable with discussing these over e-mail.--TheAlbinoOrc 14:59, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

New Features on Recent Changes

Hopefully on the way here some of you already noticed the newest site features. If not, check out the top of the RecentChanges page, in particular the new options to "Hide most userspace edits" and to "Turn on custom list" of namespaces. These options only appear if you are logged in, and (for the moment) are only installed on two of our three content servers, which means they might unexpectedly appear and disappear. The link above takes you specifically to content1.

Both features are controlled by a bunch of new options on the "Recent changes" tab of Preferences. Hopefully the custom namespace list is fairly self-explanatory. The "hide userspace edits" feature might take a bit of getting used to... and the number of options may be slight overkill. But the basic concept is to make it possible for people watching recent changes to avoid seeing most edits to user pages and user talk pages -- but yet still see specific types of edits. The hope is that this feature will go a small way towards resolving discussions such as Characters, Fanfiction etc. Our (Nonexistent) Policy. -- if some editors think such edits clutter the recent changes page, now they can clean up the clutter.

Another related idea that I thought I'd quickly throw out there while I'm on the topic is: how about creating a new class of patrollers who are only able to patrol user page edits and user talk page edits? The criteria for patrolling userspace content are much easier to handle than other content -- primarily just no vandalism/obscenities, plus checks that people aren't editing others' user pages. IMO, nearly any regular editor could be trusted with the responsibility -- and then those editors' userspace contributions would be auto-patrolled. Logistically, it requires some more custom coding, but I think it's doable.

Anyway, take some time to experiment with new Recent Changes features and let me know if there are issues. One note: if you have 'User' turned off in your custom namespace list, the userspace options are irrelevant. If there are more userspace exemptions people would like to be able to turn on (or some that you'd rather just get rid of), or other suggestions, post them here. --Nephele^Talk 04:49, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Wow! Great stuff. Unfortunately the only namespaces I can really turn off are Arena and Daggerfall but that should still make life a lot easier. Trimming the fat from the User namespace will be the major benefit, and it definitely will be a benefit. I've turned the options on and I'll keep an eye out for anything that looks odd. Thanks for doing this. rpeh •T•C•E• 08:14, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

The first thing that I would suggest is to split the User and User Talk up, because most of the time what goes on the User pages aren't important, whereas User Talk can have some important discussions starting. Also; perhaps watched pages should be on the list regardless of whether they are on a blocked namespace. Otherwise, I like it. --Tim ^Talk 18:16, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Still no "Hide Patrolled Edits"?--^Corevette₇₈₉ 20:35, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

I've got it - third from the right, but once I logged out I didn't, so it's obviously visible to patrollers only (and we don't really need it). I do recall hiding patrolled edits back in the day when I was first getting a taste of RC so has this changed recently? --SerCenKing ^Talk 21:10, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Really? I use it all the time! And yes, having been a regular user for a bit, I can confirm that even non-anonymous users won't see "Hide Patrolled Edits". Anyway, I'm outta here! I really am away now, honest! ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 21:19, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

The option disappeared during the last big update. I too can remember when it was possible to see un-patrolled edits and it was quite useful. --Krusty 21:28, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. I've added Timmeh's suggestions, and I'll upload the revised code later today.

But first, Corevette brings up an interesting question: do we want to make "Hide Patrolled Edits" available to all registered users? It used to be available to everyone, and I thought it was useful, but then mediawiki decided to take the option away from regular users. It would take me all of about 5 seconds right now to turn it back on: either for all registered users or for everyone (including anonymous editors). My preference would be to make it only available for registered users (guessing that mediawiki turned it off in part because it confused casual visitors; furthermore, there may be subtle complications such as caching and processing time that come into play for anonymous editors).

The other alternative is to implement the "Userspace Patroller" idea I mentioned above. I've actually been able to write up the code for such a feature already (once I started researching the details I realized it was actually pretty easy). The relevance to "hide patrol edits" is that I've made the option available to Userspace Patrollers -- and chose to make it so that all patrolled edits (not just userspace patrolled edits) become hidden. So if people are concerned about making the option available to everyone, there is an intermediate possibility.

However, I see that in the meantime it seems like there is support for simply turning it on. Unless there are some objections in the next couple hours, I'll go ahead and upload new code that makes "Hide Patrolled Edits" appear for all registered users. (Given that it's how things used to work, and there was never a decision to change, I don't think a formal week-long review is necessary first). I can always undo it again later if that's what's decided. --Nephele^Talk 21:39, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the recondition Nephele! I think that Userspace Patroller idea would be a good idea to give the Patrollers a bit of a rest from patrolling everything. Also, the Hide Patrolled Edits button will be great for users like me, who are not yet able to see the !'s and still help out.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 21:55, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, the changes are live (well, only on content1/content2 again... so some flakiness possible).

I've also included a minor tweak to full-text searches that should improve overall site performance. It shouldn't produce any noticeable changes in the search feature itself, but if there are any unexpected oddities, let me know. --Nephele^Talk 23:36, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

I am trying to use the button, and I have confirmed this with another user also, your edits should be Auto-patrolled and they are still showing the same way they were before. I have tried this on Content1 and content2.--^Corevette₇₈₉ 23:46, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Oops, that's what I get for assuming the edit was so simple I didn't even have to test it ;) This time I used NepheleBot and confirmed that it's more than just a box on the page -- it really does something! --Nephele^Talk 00:36, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks a ton Nephele, working great!--^Corevette₇₈₉ 00:43, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Fixing My Helpfull Addition

I was browseing the pages and on this one: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Arrow_of_Extrication

I added an addition to it a while ago this was the addition:

Alternate Entrance There is another entrance for the Wizard's Grotto, this one doesn't require the castle. To take this route you are going to want an underwater breathing spell, one can be obtained for free in one of the recommendation quests for the mage's guild. First go outside of bravil and swim directly to the right of the word "Bravil", the entrance is located on the "o" in "Nibien Boy". It is a trap door hidden in between some rocks, it leads you right into the underwater part of the Wizards Grotto.

It is very helpfull, I posted it the same day I discovered it, but when checking it I noticed it was removed, so I checked the guidelines and I beleive it was removed because it isn't encyclopedia grammer. How would I change this to make it proper.

Thank you

Team Xlink 23:13, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

I was rereading and it was properly interegrated thank you for whoever did that.

Team Xlink 23:15, 1 June 2010 (UTC

As explained in the edit summary, it was already mentioned just below. --Arch-Mage Matt^Talk 23:20, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Unable to register in forums

No matter how many times I click the "Re-send activation e-mail" I am unable to receive the account confirmation e-mail to activate my forum registration. The e-mail has not appeared in my inbox or spambox, and I am positive that the e-mail address entered was correct every time. The username is Prophet, and if an administrator can activate my account, delete my account so that I may re-register using alternate e-mail, or change my e-mail address it would be greatly appreciated. — Unsigned comment by 68.57.238.67 (talk) at 03:41 on 5 June 2010

Did you checked your "junk" box?, maybe it accidentally ended up there ;) City-Swimmer knows it everything 15:14, 5 June 2010 (UTC)EDGARHOUSE !!!

I have already checked, the message not received in the inbox or spam/junk inbox. Perhaps someone who is registered on the forums can contact an administrator or provide me with an e-mail address that I may contact them myself? If you're willing to do either, please e-mail me at cstewart_at_programmer|dot|net

I've e-mailed one of the forum administrators to draw this to her attention. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 23:42, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

I've activated the account. I'm not sure why you didn't receive the confirmation email. If you're still unable to login, post another message here. --Nephele^Talk 04:41, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

After I was able to login to my account, I sent an "I forgot my password" request, which was also unable to reach my inbox (or spambox). I suspect this is because my mail server (mail.com) has for some reason blocked your mail server (sympatico.ca). I have changed my e-mail address and all is now well. A huge thanks to Timmeh, Robin Hood, and Nephele, all of which were crucial in setting this problem straight. I look forward to talking with you folks in the future!

I know AOL blocks all emails from UESP at the server; it sounds like your ISP is doing the same thing. If you could contact them and find out why, it might help us to find a proper solution for this. But trying to get a useful answer from an ISP can be difficult ;) --Nephele^Talk 05:51, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Talk about it, I didn't notice your last post until just now, but on the day the error occured I sent a notice to my e-mail provider (mail.com) with all of the necessary details, and I received back one of their generic "we value your input, please provide details" crap notes. Their service has always been shoddy at best, especially their filters, and I do not find this surprising. Oh well, just glad I was able to get this all worked out. Thanks again all.

Available Languages

Maybe this would be a huge work, I don't know, but wouldn't it be awesome if the page was available in other languages? Because there exists Oblivion in many languages, I think this page deserves more City-Swimmer knows it everything 15:25, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

While I can see a lot of benefit in that, I don't think we have enough people to make it work. There might be some low-level issues on the wiki too, given the way we use namespaces here. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 16:37, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Well I'm sure that there are more than enough people wit accounts here that speak other languages. We can try in making it as a little project, adding little things once in a while, then it will start building up, and in some months, this page will be available on more languages, bringing more people to the site. City-Swimmer knows it everything 18:58, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

I found an easy solution. We could use google toolbar to translate the page, then just check the minor grammar errors and the names, and then publish it. I can help, I speak both English and Spanish. City-Swimmer knows it everything 23:11, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

IRC Staff Channel

There is an ongoing discussion here in regards to the advantages or disadvantages of establishing an IRC channel for the "staff" of UESPWiki. Since not everyone watches Recent Changes or the IRC page, I thought I'd mention the discussion here as well. Please post on that page if you're interested in contributing. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 05:03, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Moving User Content to User Namespace

(The following proposal is only semi-complete, but I thought I should post what I have put together so far in light of the recent deletion review for Oblivion:Roleplaying. Hopefully this will provide at least some idea of a possible alternative to continuing to simply delete all of these articles.)

One factor behind several of my recent code changes has been to enable a new approach to handling all of the site's subjective / opinion-based content. I'm talking about pages like Roleplaying, Useful Spells, Useful Enchantments, Mod Ideas, etc., etc. I'd like to propose that we explore moving all of it into the user namespace. The primary reason for the change would be that it better reflects the nature of the contributions: for the most part, they are people's individual suggestions, so why not make that clear, and let the editors take ownership of their ideas?

Of course, editors are already free to add whatever ideas they like on their own user pages, so what I'm really proposing is that we create a way to keep track of the user ideas -- that we have templates used specifically for user content, which automatically add the contribution to a set of categories. The categories would be advertised in a few relevant places on the wiki, so readers interested in the information would be able to browse through the categories to find everything that's been submitted on a given topic.

In case that's all a bit too vague, here's an example of how it might work if I wanted to add a roleplaying idea:

• On my user page, I'd insert something like:

  {{Roleplaying|Orc Warrior|Fighter}}

  Be an orc and run around and kill lots of enemies!!

(NB we'd probably suggest that users create subpages for their contributions... so to set a good example, it would be better for me to create a page such as User:Nephele/Orc_Warrior, and put everything there. But realistically I think we have to anticipate that most editors will want to start by just filling stuff in on their user page).

• The template would create a header on the page (e.g., == Orc Warrior (Fighter-type Roleplaying) ==).
• It would add my user page to the categories [[Category:User Content-Oblivion-Roleplaying]] and [[Category:User Content-Oblivion-Roleplaying-Fighter]].
• My user page would be listed in those categories as, for example Nephele: Orc Warrior (Fighter)
• The bottom of Oblivion:Roleplaying would have a section like:

User-contributed ideas for how to roleplay are listed at the [[:Category:User Content-Oblivion-Roleplaying|Roleplaying category]].

If you would like to add your ideas to the site, you must first create a wiki account. Then see the instructions at [[Help:Roleplaying|]] for details on how to add your contribution.

Addendum: I have also now put together a live example of the above idea. See User:Nephele#Roleplaying Tests for what gets put on a userpage; see Category:User Content-Oblivion-Roleplaying for the resulting category. (The template that does the work is at Template:Roleplaying).

I don't anticipate this being a change that happens overnight. Rather, I think we'd start by setting up some of the tools, testing it out in a few cases, then gradually expanding the scope. I wasn't anticipating that we would try to immediately re-re-reorganize all of the Roleplaying subpages. Rather, we'd try to first focus on making sure any new content is added on user pages.

If initial trials show that this is possible from a technical point of view, we can then work out the details of how to move the existing content. Perhaps:

• See how much of the existing content has a single recognizable author, and simply move any such chunks to subpages in that editor's userspace -- whether or not the person is active.
• However, most of the existing content has been anonymously created, or has been reorganized so much that identifying an author might be impossible. So for the rest of the content, one option would be to put it all up for "adoption": encourage users to transfer any pieces they like to their own userspace.
• Make it clear that after the adoption period (3 months?) is over, any remaining content will be put up for deletion. In other words, anything that's left on the pages is presumably of such low quality that nobody thinks it worth keeping. I think this effectively leaves the responsibilty of deciding what stays and what goes up to those editors who are most interested in the pages.
• In the end, I think we would want to keep the main roleplaying page (which is basically community-written, and contains general ideas that we don't want to force editors to reinvent all the time). Some parts of the subpages might belong on the relevant category pages (general info about the types of ideas included in the category). But overall, we'd get rid of all the subpages and instead have a link to the categories at the bottom of the roleplaying page.

I've waited until now to bring up this idea because it's critically dependent on some of the new tools I recently added to the site. First, the category system has to be able to support the types of categories we need -- in my above example, the link to my userpage has to state that my idea is for an "Orc Warrior" -- if it just shows my name, it's basically useless. Furthermore, the link has to point to the correct section of my user page. Those features aren't available with standard wiki categories, as I learned (or rather, Eshe learned, since she did all the work) when this idea went through its first iteration with Custom Classes. What's changed now is that I've added a catpagetemplate feature that I believe has all the features necessary to create useful categories.

The other important component necessary, I believe, is making it so that people who want nothing to do with the roleplaying/etc pages can effectively ignore them. Otherwise, moving the pages doesn't do much to change the situation -- in fact, potentially makes it worse by encouraging more contributions. This where the ability to hide userspace edits on recent changes comes in. It's also why I think having userspace patrollers is important. This would make it possible for all the work associated with userspace content to be taken care of by editors who want to have the content on the site.

That's an overview of the basic idea. Some of the things that I haven't had time to write up yet are:

• Reasons why I think we should promote adding this content to the userspace, instead of simply deleting it outright
• Other implications and possible uses of such a system, and/or ways to enhance the system.

Nevertheless, I think it's enough of an outline to start a discussion about the idea, and provide some sense of a concrete alternative to just putting all these pages up for deletion review. --Nephele^Talk 21:58, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Well thought out. I like it a lot! I think it very nicely handles all those subjective-contribution pages you mention. If we make use of the adoption system, the long-time editors, particularly those who patrol regularly (either officially or unofficially) could go through the respective "adoption" pages towards the end and adopt anything that they feel is suitable if nobody else has yet. For example, I tend to be magic-heavy, so I'm unlikely to initially adopt a pure fighter concept. However, once the adoption period is close to the end, if I found a "leftover" fighter that I thought was really worth keeping, I would adopt it. If we all do that, I think we'll ensure that nothing important gets deleted. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 01:08, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

I like it, I'd support it. But wouldn't this suggest that we do support "userpage" forums? The only person that I've seen be against "forums" is Rpeh. Another thing I just thought of, having a redirect (when you search "roleplaying") to a page that states its supposed to be on a userpage.Mikeyboy52 02:37, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

This sounds good to me. Two slightly related questions are: Is it supposed to be Nephele:Meteorologist instead of Nephele:Meterologist ? Also what do you define interest in userspace patrollers as ?--TheAlbinoOrc 16:40, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

So is this being put into effect or not? just for clarification. MikeTalk 15:20, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Notable people

You might of seen it on the skingrad or leyawiin or chorrol page is a bunch of people i belive notable however since this is just my oponoin i would like to know what every one thinks is or if it is a good idea at all and hopefully with the admins permision crete a list for each town thanks!(Scorpio 18:40, 10 June 2010 (UTC))

Since Scorpio is "no longer with us" I'd like to "restart" this subject. On this page I've laid a foundation for this idea. Should you want to contribute to this "foundation" you have my full permission to edit it. I should note however, that its for Chorrol only. Mike/|\ 20:41, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Aren't merchants and anyone with unique dialogue or items notable as well? --Michaeldsuarez ^{(Talk) (Deeds)} 21:15, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

If these sections go ahead, I would suggest that they be written like a guidebook rather than a bullet list. In other words, sort of like Alessia Ottus' guides but without the patronising piety. I would limit it to the local ruler and guild heads... maybe the shopkeepers. Before doing it for real, however, I would suggest that somebody sandboxes a proposed change so people can see what it would look like. rpeh •T•C•E• 21:48, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

use the sandbox i already have if you want. Local ruler+guild heads sounds good, maybe a merchant here and there. But how about people that play a major role in one of the longer questline? should they go on as well or not? Mike/|\ 21:59, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I just added the complete Chorrol page to Mikeyboys sandbox. The Notable People section is loacted underneath the Chorrol People board and can now be seen as it was supposed to be. --Krusty 23:24, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Since i am back with us i would like to tell you guys i have also made some sanboxes on my page (Ranger 16:56, 18 June 2010 (UTC))

Archive Table

For those of you who are creating archive pages, I've created a new template to standardize the archive tables and make them easy to create. For 99% of cases, just follow this pattern:

{{Archive Table
|Archive 1||Start Date - End Date
|Archive 2||Start Date - End Date
...
}}

Archives that don't exist will not appear in the list, so if you don't see an archive that you expect to, look for typos or other oddities like archive pages not being where they should be. For more complex variants of the template, see the documentation page, or look at the Administrator Noticeboard to see an example in action. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 21:38, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Is there any way to use a template to automatically add things from say November 1 - November 30 of a year when that archive is created? Also is there a category of archived pages?--TheAlbinoOrc^{Got_a_question?} 22:47, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

1. No. That would require a bot, like Wikipedia's MiszaBot or similar (there are a couple on Wikipedia).
2. For those pages that use {{Archive Header}}, there might be, but for most talk pages, no. I'd be open to changing that, personally, but that should be under a new topic.

‒ Robin Hood↝talk 23:10, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I think I'll start the Archive Category discussion then. That should be useful if another change to the archive header or something is made.--TheAlbinoOrc^{Got_a_question?} 23:37, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

(←) Update: I've just finished converting all the archive tables that I could readily find. Please feel free to leave a message on my talk page if I've missed any and you're uncomfortable changing it yourself. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 00:21, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Second Update: While it's only partly related, I didn't think it warranted a whole new topic. {{Archive Header}} will now auto-detect the correct source most of the time. The source parameter should almost never be required any more. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 20:12, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Archive Category

I propose that we create [[Category:Archived Pages]] so that we don't have to manually look through every single page just to find them if there's another change like the one above.--TheAlbinoOrc^{Got_a_question?} 23:42, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

You mean this page? The category hierarchy will lead a person to the discussions related to the topic they're interested in. Vesna 02:10, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out I did a search but it didn't work for some reason (probably human error on my part). Also can you (or someone I don't really care who) take a look at the archive by date section? It shows that all sections have 0 pages in them but there actually is content inside them.--TheAlbinoOrc^{Got_a_question?} 17:57, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

It seems to me that the parenthesis refer to the number of subcategories in a category, not pages in that category. It is a little misleading though. -- Jplatinum16 18:26, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Yep that's whats going. See here for more information.--TheAlbinoOrc^{Got_a_question?} 19:09, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

As far as the Archived Pages, until a few moments ago, pages that had {{Archive Header|none|date=2010 June}} weren't being categorized anywhere. Now they will (by date only), but I'm not sure if we want that or not. It might be useful to have Archive Header always categorize pages that it's used on into an "Archived Pages" category or similar, though I suppose when you get right down to it, the "What Links Here" for Archive Header might serve almost as well. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 20:08, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

E3

hey i cant watch e3 this year can anyone keep me posted on anything thatmayed be said on tes5 rumors? — Unsigned comment by Oblivionfanatic1 (talk • contribs) at 15:34 on 16 June 2010

If there's any news, it'll undoubtedly be posted to UESPWiki:News and the main page. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 15:56, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, there was absolutely no announcements with regards to the Elder Scrolls. Jadrax 09:08, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Nothing at all. I was glued to all the RSS feeds, and Bethesda's releases were about Fallout: New Vegas, Brink, etc. Looks like the rumor was incorrect; maybe there'll be something at QuakeCon instead. rpeh •T•C•E• 09:59, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Enchant Simulator

As seen here, I've posted a proposal that a link to the Enchant Simulator should be added to the article about Morrowind:Enchant. After a week and still no response it has been suggested to me that I bring this up here. Although I've provided a link to the proposal I will post it again:

"It's a usefull tool (here is more about it and here it actually is) and I think a link to it should be added to the article. There are several links to useful tools at the article about Alchemy, so why not here? It's completely virus-free and almost bug-free (I'm still working on some details). If there is anything about it that makes it unsuitable for the wiki tell me what alterations you think I should do and I'll do them. Also, I know it's not the best recommendation for this to be proposed by me since I made it (however, there's at least one good review, in a discussion on this page)."

Any response from someone knowlegable about enchanting in Morrowind is appreciated. --Kertaw48 10:40, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Prototype Roleplaying Template

Hi, I have been working for a while on this and I know I'm in over my head trying to regulate such a frequently edited page but it bugs me it's not orderly so here gose. I have made a prototype template for roleplaying articles and want to you to look at it [below], and tell me what you like and dislike preferably on my talk page Emperor Ray IV 05:49, 30 June 2010 (UTC). I didn't write the article, I just tested my template it on it because I thought I would be too picky if it was on one I wrote. I know I put a lot of info in but that was to see what people liked. I thought it would be nice if all roleplaying article began with basic info about race, skills, and so forth, so tell me if I should add, delete, or if this all is just plain stupid and I can't make a template to save my life. Thank you for taking the time to help, (and listen to me ramble:) p.s. please, if u can, try to reply to my talk page but here is fine too. --Emperor Ray IV 05:49, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

This is what I wrote, to see the whole article see http://www.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=Oblivion:Roleplaying/Ruler&diff=583680&oldid=583420

Count/Countess of Bravil or leader of a newly found republic

Race: Being that you are a revolutionary, any however Imperial is recommended for the Count[ess] version.

Specialization: Any.

Attributes: Personality, and another of your choice.

Skills: Spacecraft, Blade/Blunt, Destruction, Restoration, Athletics, Merchant., Sneak, and any other.

Personality: If Revolutionary, Impatient, Honest, Compassionate, Brave, Robbin Hood-like personality. If Count, Violent, Arrogant, Greedy, Lustful.

Hometown: Bravil.

Financial Status: Rich/Middle Class.

Primary Source of Income: Varying.

Inventory: Upper/Middle Class clothing, Blade/Blunt weapon, and Lock picks.

Guild/Faction Membership: Varies.

Fame to Infamy ratio: Varies. [continues]

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