Consider this article:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Absolute_Amazement:_Chance_for_ToHit_DebuffThis article is actually for two distinct items: a recipe and an enhancement. The article starts by saying "This is an enhancement..." and proceeds to display several info boxes that reference it as an enhancement. Then we get a series of info boxes that reference it as a recipe instead. Then we get to "Effects" where it is once again an enhancement. Then we get to "Recipe" where it is once again a recipe. The final paragraph of the article is: "This recipe is considered level 50 for crafting purposes. The requirements for crafting this enhancement are: ...".
The article does not make a clear distinction between recipe and enhancement. I would imagine that this would be very confusing for a very new player trying to get a grasp on things.
New players aside, I think the combination approach to these kinds of articles is starting to break. We now have
Archetype Enhancements which are
only enhancements. They do not have recipes, and thus break the above mold. This means they won't work with all of our templates and DPL queries, which are built towards the Invention System exclusively.
It's worth noting that ATE's are not the only item that break the mold. There are also
Store-Bought Enhancements, whose article presently links to the Invention System articles as if they were the same thing--but they're not. SBE's have no recipes. They are also attuned and account bound. An SBE is quite distinct from its corresponding IO enhancement.
And while it's easy to overlook them in this context, there are also Training Origin, Dual-Origin, and Single-Origin Enhancements. There are Special Enhancements: Hamidon Origin, Crystal Titan Origin, and Hydra Origin Enhancements. And we mustn't forget the
Going Rogue Pre-Order enhancements or the enhancements sold by
Mr. Yin.
None of these kinds of enhancements have their own articles presently.
So at this point, I think we need to think about how these articles
should be structured. We may even need to start from scratch and then go try to make what we have fit an entirely new mold.
Before getting into how such articles should be laid out, I think we should resolve a larger question first regarding the IO articles: do we split them or do we keep them merged?
Option one is to split the merged IO articles apart. If we go this route, I propose we add two new namespaces: "Recipe:" and "Enhancement:". For IO articles, it would be trivially easy to link between the two. If necessary, we could also transclude summary info from each into the other. We would then rework our templating system to disentangle the recipe stuff from the enhancement stuff, which are presently somewhat tangled together. It's worth noting that while we have enhancements that do not have recipes (the point of this thread), we also have recipes that do not have enhancements such as costume pieces and respecs; distinct namespaces would better reflect that separation.
Option two is to keep the IO articles merged. However, within the articles, we should make two distinct sub-articles: "Enhancement" and "Recipe". Even if the two are highly related, they are in fact two completely distinct items and they warrant distinct sub-articles. This would allow us to accomplish many of the same goals as the first option; the only difference being that the distinct articles would live in the same page.
(I can't think of any other options other than "merge" and "split", if you can, please share!)
Some additional considerations to keep in mind with respect to the above:
Categorization. Merged articles get categorized as both recipe and enhancement. Split articles obviously only get categorized for their own topic.
Store-Bought Enhancements. I believe these items are all named identically to the corresponding IO enhancements. If we have separate articles for recipe and enhancement, then do we also have separate articles for the IO and SBE versions of the enhancement? Or do we have a single merged enhancement article? For a merged article the answer is more obvious, but we'd need to decide whether the article gets three main sub-articles ("Recipe", "IO Enhancement", "SBE") or two main sub-articles ("Recipe" and "Enhancement", with the later covering the differences in a less distinct manner).
Enhancements other than IO, ATE, and SBE. Do we want to consider giving them articles? If we do, does that influence whether we want separate namespaces or not?
Migration. Whether we migrate to distinct articles in separate namespaces or to a different format for the merged articles, it is likely I can throw my bot at the problem to minimize manual work required to migrate. So by-and-large, this shouldn't be much of a consideration.
Redundancy. We want to avoid having the same information manually maintained in multiple spots. However, even if we have multiple articles, we should be able to easily set up templates to transclude details from single sources. So by-and-large, this also shouldn't be much of a consideration.
Okay, I'll stop rambling here so people can express opinions.