Forum:Turning old item pages into redirects

Forums: Village pump → Turning old item pages into redirects
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I've noticed that, in the process of converting the old tooltip template, many of the items that were removed in Cataclysm are being replaced with redirects. Specifically, those situations where a group of items is condensed. Gems, vials, poisons, etc. Why are were not preserving the original item page with a "removed from game" tag? Just because players had their now-useless items replaced with ones that weren't useless doesn't mean we should pretend the item never existed in the first place. As with anything else that is removed or replaced, isn't it important to keep a historical record of the item? --Dark T Zeratul (talk) 18:57, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

A patch note should be added, if not already done.

Loremaster A'noob, Arch Druid of the Noobhoof Clan (^talk/_contribz) 18:59, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

To clarify, I'm not talking about situations like Accurate Huge Citrine being changed to Accurate Shadow Crystal, because there all that's changed is that the gem is a different color. It's one item being changed into a new, slightly different item. I'm more referring to things like Bright Scarlet Rubies (+AP) being replaced with Delicate Scarlet Rubies (+Agi). One gem was removed entirely and a completely different, already existing gem was used to compensate players who were using the old one so they didn't have empty gem slots. Bright Scarlet Ruby should get a removedfromgame tag, not be made into a redirect. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 19:43, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Any further thoughts or comments on this? -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 08:38, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

So as a result of no solid decision ever being made on this issue (or even any discussion), the gem pages are now a giant clusterfuck of differing systems. Some of the gems that merely changed colors now have two pages - one for the "removed" item and one for the "new" one. Some have one page and a redirect. Some of the gems that were removed entirely and replaced with similar gems have a redirect, and some have a removed page. Some haven't even been touched at all. It's a mess, and the longer we go without any consensus the more convoluted and messy it's going to get as people get their own idea about what should be done and make sweeping changes to some of th gem pages. And, therefore, the harder it's going to be to make everything consistent.

Personally, the idea I've always favored is that gems that merely changed colors should get redirects, while gems that were removed entirely should be marked "removed from game." All with appropriate patch notes, of course. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 09:13, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Be bold; it doesn't seem like anyone is objecting to what you're proposing, so you might as well go ahead and do it. — foxlit (talk) 18:03, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

I'll endeavour to follow this with the rest of the gem edits I'm doing. It's taken so damn long already. I'm up to grand master recipes now, at least. At the time i noticed some were redirects and some were deprecated pages so I opted for the redirect solution as simpler and cleaner. The tricky part is discriminating between a rename and a removal. It's not always immediately obvious. In fact I found a number of existing page renames that were for the object id of a gem that was actually removed from the game. And sometimes when Blizzard renamed a gem to one where another gem already existed by that name, the original gem was the one that was removed and the rename became the live version! In brief: you always have to check which version is still live. --W.woods (talk) 05:03, 2 June 2011 (UTC)