Forum:Uninstanced Subzones

Forums: Village pump → Uninstanced Subzones
(This is a dead topic, Please do not edit this page!)

Also see, Talk:Seat of the Triumvirate (instance)#Move/Talk:Seat of the Triumvirate#Move

Particularly talking about the two: Seat of the Triumvirate, Seat of the Triumvirate (instance).

One is a dungeon name while the other is a subzone that only half of which can be accessed by the player.

• Seat of the Triumvirate (instance) - This page should be about the dungeon itself and anything related to THAT dungeon.
• Seat of the Triumvirate - Should be about that subzone and the temple (entering the temple is only accessible within the dungeon), this should contain the lore/background/history behind the temple.

--— SurafbrovWarcraft Wiki administrator T / C 06:46, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

IMO we are doing the "(instance)" thing inconsistently here. As Sandwichman pointed out, most of the instances actually exist in the overworld as subzones, for example the Deadmines entrance in Westfall with the ghoul area, the small patio in the Scarlet Monastery or the Gnomeregan entrance, and so on. So basically at this point, almost every instance should have a subzone page and an "(instance)" page is we only followed that logic.

So basically there are two options:

• We say all instances should have two pages, one for the subzone/lore and another "(instance)" page with only gameplay-related information. This would require an immense amount of work, and I don't trust you guys anymore with this kind of thing since the TCG move still hasn't been finished despite all of you voting unanimously for it.
• We only have an "(instance)" page for dungeons where there are a major need to split, like how the Culling Stratholme lore is spread over one dungeon, one Warcraft III mission, one scenario + Chronicles info.

I prefer the second option. However, when a page is moved, all links should be updated, and I don't condone people moving around pages and expecting others to clean up their work. Xporc (talk) 08:31, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

The TCG stuff is just a work-in-progress and will be for sometime, although Bannanawaffles has always been a great contributor to that category. +1

I honestly prefer the second one as well. Although, two separate pages for instances are only needed when it makes sense such as differing between what is in the dungeon and what isn't; one being about the dungeon and the other isn't. Seat makes sense as it is talking about the subzone (which is infront of the temple and goes out and connects with the Shadowguard Incursion) that the player can access and could contain lore information about the temple itself while the (instance) would focus primarily on the dungeon, etc. — SurafbrovWarcraft Wiki administrator T / C 08:56, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

I know I've always been the most vocal in the past about hating dungeons getting moved to (instance) while the "subzone" article takes the main spot and ends up being about a paragraph long.... so yea, I'm against tiny articles taking the main spot when most times people come for the instance info. Option 2, if I had to choose one. Sssssssssssssssssssssssss For Pony! (^Sssss/_Slithered) 17:39, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

I agree with what Coobra wrote. Surafbrov is not thinking about precedent, or that any action like this will morph into a rule that we do not need. 1) The instance always is more important than the uninstanced exterior; the only exceptions are if it is a winged dungeon or if the dungeon is a location with significant backstory. 2) If the uninstanced exterior has things in it, it will probably be its own subzone with its own name. Dungeon entrances are usually empty 'dead spots' so people can be idle there as their group forms. 3) When things are in front of an instance, it is usually only enough for a footnote, so it becomes a very short page or a trivia note on a better page. A patio should not be this big of a deal.--SWM2448 21:07, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm in total agreement with both Coobra and Sandwichman. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 21:22, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Okay. — SurafbrovWarcraft Wiki administrator T / C 22:58, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure where I stand on this, although I do have a concern/issue related to this. Page content being located in the entrance subzone. For that reason alone I could see a good arguement of having two pages for these situations. That's not to say that the subzone should take priority of the main name space though. PeterWind (talk) 06:27, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Can you give an example of "content" that we are missing out on? If so, do we really lack a place to put it with currently made pages?--SWM2448 06:31, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

It exists within the game (that's all that I need to make my mind up), has a rare that spawns there (also several WQ related to that rare), contains mobs critters and others. I can understand that the dungeon to be moved without the (instance), so the subzone having (subzone) or whatever else can work. The subzone has nothing to do with the dungeon, it is just the name of the subzone that is the same as the dungeon. The dungeon is pretty much about the building. — SurafbrovWarcraft Wiki administrator T / C 07:25, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

We shouldn't consider dungeons the same as subzones, especially if it is at the least partially accessible. — SurafbrovWarcraft Wiki administrator T / C 07:33, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

I still disagree, I am not saying it does not exist, and that does not answer my question about what PeterWind wrote.--SWM2448 20:42, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Whatever is there is good enough so called "content" unless you have a different meaning for that. — SurafbrovWarcraft Wiki administrator T / C 22:26, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

I am not saying that the "content" does not exist. It existing is not a good enough reason to split the page.--SWM2448 22:37, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

1. I don't see any relevance to the two as one is just the patio that does however exists in the dungeon, but the content there isn't related to that dungeon so why list them on the page about the dungeon.
2. I can understand moving the dungeon back and moving the subzone to a (subzone) page as the dungeon is definitely more popular. — SurafbrovWarcraft Wiki administrator T / C 22:48, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

List of dungeons and proposals

Currently we have splits (aka an "(instance)" and a normal page) for the following dungeons and raids:

• Gnomeregan
• Scarlet Monastery
• Karazhan
• Battle for Mount Hyjal
• Azjol-Nerub
• Culling of Stratholme
• Icecrown Citadel
• The Nexus
• Ulduar
• Utgarde Keep
• Grim Batol
• Zul'Aman
• Zul'Gurub
• Well of Eternity
• Hour of Twilight
• Firelands
• Siege of Orgrimmar
• Emerald Nightmare
• Eye of Azshara
• Nighthold
• Tomb of Sargeras
• Seat of the Triumvirate: This is the only one in the list I am not sure about
• Freehold

Besides the Seat, I believe all of these are legitimate and should stay as is.

Now, these dungeons have a split or move template currently on them:

• Dire Maul: I really don't know. Ironic considering Eldre'Thalas was merged into the Dire Maul page not that long ago.
• Black Temple: Don't know. There was a proposal to merge the Temple of Karabor page in it and not to move the Black Temple page because it doesn't have all that much lore.

Now, these are dungeons who have no demands but that I could see split or moved:

• Naxxramas: it's starting to have enough lore IMO
• Dragon Soul: the name is confusing, people are linking to the raid instance when they want to talk about the Demon Soul instead
• Shado-Pan Monastery: Existing subzone
• Highmaul: Exists both as alternate universe and main universe cities.
• Black Rook Hold: Existing subzone
• Siege of Boralus: Since the Horde and Alliance see it as two different battles, we might have to do a split here.

Opinions? Xporc (talk) 12:14, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

• If a dungeon page gets too big, the lore gets split off. If it has wings, the hub gets a page.
• We already have Culling of Stratholme (disambiguation) and Hyjal/Battle of Mount Hyjal/Battle of Mount Hyjal (disambiguation). We do not DO need to make it more complicated.
• The subzone "Seat of the Triumvirate" is a patio with the only interesting thing being one rare mob. Similarly, most Mists of Pandaria 5-mans are visited for about one quest ( [15-35] Broken Dreams comes to mind). Highmaul is also fully built and can be visited if you can fly, but is full of idle mobs and a lot of nothing.
• Related to the last point, you can talk about what an instance looks like from the outside on the instance page. It is extremely pedantic to count the uninstanced lobby of dungeons as separate locations. If it has anything decent going on, I can almost guarantee that it will have a separate subzone in front of it (Ravencourt, and my previous comments).
• The effort of researching actual technicalities was dismissed when I brought it up on Forum:Subzones and policy. All that came of that was Trilliax's room losing its page.

--SWM2448 20:39, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Besides the fact that I personally think the dungeons that are already split are legitimate (including Hyjal and Stratholme), these points you make are reasonable to me. I have no hard opinions on the Seat of the Triumvirate and the Shrine of the Storm, I basically know nothing about what's happening in Stormsong Valley. Wouldn't oppose merging them back into one page, or keeping them split. Should we start voting individually for each page? Xporc (talk) 09:25, 27 April 2018 (UTC)

Tabs proposal

I don't know if I am an intruder here but meh. I'm thinking, maybe we don't have the resources but, there are wikis that have different pages in a single page like for example http://onepiece.wikia.com/wiki/Monkey_D._Luffy. What if we did the same? Have a single page, but in that page have one sub-page about the history, the uninstanced version and everything about it, and then another sub-page about the dungeon and its mobs. Then almost all the problems would be over imo --Ryon21 (talk) 21:57, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

I wasn't around on the wiki when the discussion took place, but around Warlords of Draenor's announcement the community did try to do something like that with WoD characters, but due to it proving more of a hindrance than a help from both an editing and viewing standpoint (particularly on mobile), that idea ended up being abandoned. See Forum:Warlords of Draenor Characters. -- DeludedTroll (talk • contribs) 21:49, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Too bad. Maybe there's something that can be done to fix it since a lot of years have passed. Like, maybe Wikipedia has found a way so you can see tabs in the mobile. If we can manage to do it, it will be a great way to manage pages, mainly the Instances. I have no knowledge about how this can be done though... --Ryon21 (talk) 15:31, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

is there any way to make text that only appears on mobile? if there is, we could simply have the mobile version of each page contain links to the other tabs, e.g. "For the instanced version, see [[Place Name#Instance]]" --Eithris (talk) 20:41, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

Sure (by the same token, we could also make the tabs appear on mobile). This isn't really a technical problem, but one of getting a consensus regarding what the problem we're trying to solve is, and how we want to address it. If that consensus exists, it's a relatively simple matter to ambush someone capable of implementing it, and say "That. We want that! Make that!" while pointing at the discussion; if it doesn't, you get the uncertain chorus of "I don't really know what went wrong, there was that one tweet saying something didn't work and no follow-up." — foxlit (talk) 21:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

The perfect thing would be that in a single page we have two tabs. One for the history and possible subzone and the other tab about the instance itself and everything in-game related. This way there is no need to split pages which sometimes causes a lot of trouble. If this could work fine with mobiles and cause no problems it'd be amazing.
The problems that happened are Forum:Warlords_of_Draenor_Characters#The_Test, from "The Test" downwards. Since we are dealing with instances there shouldn't be any major problems like they had with the different alternate characters. --Ryon21 (talk) 18:32, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Hey now, no proposing perfect things before it's clear what the problem we're trying to fix is. :)

• Why is there sometimes a need to split pages in the first place?
• Why does splitting pages "cause a lot of trouble"? What sort of trouble are we talking about there?

Some discussion of why tabs are preferable, and what they need to do, would also be interesting:

• Aren't tabs just a different styling of the "For X, see [[X]]" text that already appears on the split articles? [1] in particular just seems to use styled styled links to separate articles, somewhat like this:
  This Forum Topic Anduin Shadowreaper Anduin
  (i.e., do we need or want anything more fancy than a template to show multiple disambiguation links in a single line at the top of an article?)
• Do the individual "tabs" exist as separate wiki articles, or is all of their wikitext contained in one article?
• Do we expect incoming links to open a particular tab? What should people link to to achieve that? Is it realistic to hope that when someone clicks an internal link, they get to the right "tab" most of the time?
• Are there articles which would have more than two tabs? more than five? more than ten?
• In some cases, it is not obvious what the "main" tab should be (mainly those pesky instance/zone/lore/alternate zone splits) -- what should be shown to the reader if they simply type in the name of the article into their address bar or search box?

I apologize for the rather excessive amount of questions. My imagined point is mainly that while the answers might appear obvious, they can also vary greatly, and this affects what sort of solutions people might be happy/unhappy with.

Skimming Forum:Warlords_of_Draenor_Characters yielded no particular enlightenment regarding what went wrong last time: there are a bunch of seemingly-solved problems and a generic "doesn't work" on mobile. I think that the quest and item tabs worked on mobile around that time, and no test cases of the mechanism they attempted to use for the timeline stuff seem to remain, so I can't tell what went wrong there.

On a side note, Wowpedia's mobile site is TERRIBLE and largely unmaintained (a random issue: for the last several years, common item links appeared as white text against a white background on mobile). As there do not seem to be daily complaints about this, I can only assume that nobody actually attempts to browse Wowpedia on mobile devices, and so maybe we shouldn't even care whether tabs work on mobile or not. — foxlit (talk) 02:11, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm not convinced of the need for tabs.

And yeah if you browse Wowpedia on mobile, use the Desktop version. -- MyMindWontQuiet 11:40, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

" Why is there sometimes a need to split pages in the first place?" >>> this is the only point I am adamant about: just because a raid and an event are about the same thing (the battle for mount hyjal) doesn't mean they should share the same page. Xporc (talk) 12:13, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

In this specific case I am talking about instances and in-game subzones.

• When we create a page about an instance, sometimes as time goes on, we decide to split it because we find out it is also a subzone in the world or the article is big enough to split, i.e. The Nighthold. So the main problem is that we have to change a lot of links because of it.
• My suggestion is, having tabs, but in one article. Like if it was a section of that article but it goes into a tab. For example, in the same way it is done in http://onepiece.wikia.com/wiki/Monkey_D._Luffy/History.
• If we did this, the only changes we should make is point links to that "Instance Tab/Section" in the article when we are dealing about items, mobs, etc of that instance.
• About how many tabs, I doubt we'll ever use more than two or three at most.
• The main page, in this case, I think it would be the subzone since it will have all the lore.

But this may be too much, so maybe it would be better if we instead have all instances with a "Name (instance)" and if someday we decide to split that page, we shouldn't have any problem (of course we should properly link when we are talking about the "Name (instance)" or when about the possible uninstanced "Name"). This is the easiest and less problematic solution imo. --Ryon21 (talk) 14:39, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

But one of the issues with using tabs is the linking from other articles, just like foxlit said. Linking to the Lore tab wouldn't be an issue, but what if a certain paragraph is talking about the same name but has a totally different meaning behind it. Such a thing for an example would be the Dragon Soul raid and artifact. Yes the artifact is named the Demon Soul, but before during Cataclysm... how would it be handled? And if we did manage to implement a way to link them to the proper tab... what about new users and current users that haven't seen these changes and learned how to link the article properly to the correct one? I'm not convinced of the need for tabs. — SurafbrovWarcraft Wiki administrator T / C 15:14, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Tabs, if they start existing, are not completely replacing disambiguations.--SWM2448 19:41, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Just to be confirm we're talking about the same thing: on http://onepiece.wikia.com/wiki/Monkey_D._Luffy/History , the tabs are the Introduction / Gallery / Personality / ... / Misc. links at the top of the article, and clicking e.g. Gallery causes the browser to navigate to http://onepiece.wikia.com/wiki/Monkey_D._Luffy/Gallery ? Outside of link styling (and possibly us giving up on listing disambiguated alternatives past the first two), this is somewhat similar to what we already do: Siege of Orgrimmar (instance) includes a link at the top going to Siege of Orgrimmar (and vice versa); in onepiecewiki's styling, the pages would be named something like Siege of Orgrimmar/Battle and Siege of Ogrimmar/Raid, with "Raid" and "Battle" tabs linking between the pages, but the concept (and the inherent problems of getting the incoming links to point to the right thing) seems virtually identical. — foxlit (talk) 17:10, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

On the other hand, we do (I think) want to minimize the amount of wrong internal links. Keeping closely-related content on one page, unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise, seems like a good way to achieve this. In general, it might be nice to have either the WoW game content or a disambiguation page hold the primary, non-disambiguated article name, as it is the sort of thing we mess up most easily: in-game stuff has a large volume of automatically generated cross-links, which only sometimes get corrected for disambiguated pages; in contrast, most of the lore/event/battle/war/biography/stuff pages are written by humans who probably checked where exactly they're linking. — foxlit (talk) 17:10, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, I think I'll will back down for now. As I said, I don't fully comprehend how this works so I don't want to push it. But thanks for being comprehensive and for your suggestions. I hope if we all work together we will find something that everyone can agree on. Ugh, too cringy but yeah, thanks for everything. --Ryon21 (talk) 17:46, 17 April 2018 (UTC)