{{wip}} thoughts, musings and hopefully dialogue

[taosin]

I'm wondering if a dialogue on {{wip}} is worth having? I've been doing a lot of work updating content, and while looking at the Work in Progress link on the front page of the wiki am running into some issues.

Firstly: I use {{wip}} when I am actively working on something, and when finished I remove the {{wip}} tag. If I can't finish the page I'd put a note in the Discussion page.

When I look at the Work in Progress list, I'm finding a lot of the pages seem old, and would've had the wip tag up for a long time. This goes against the 'in progress' concept I think wip should have. I'm also finding pages where it is not clear what is missing — the page looks fine to me.

For example: what more do the first two pages in the Work in Progress need (Ian and Archvillain)?

There's also examples of pages that are missing significant content and don't have any marker or tag on them. For example, I just played through and documented many missing missions for Maxwell Christopher; he didn't have a wip tag but wow a lot of content was missing.

We're also saying "Want to contribute to the Paragon Wiki but don't know where to start? One good place to start is by editing articles that are designated as Stub articles and Work in Progress articles. These articles need anything from minor tweaks to major overhauls, and anything you have to add would be appreciated! " Now, if I was a new contributor (yes they do exist!) and went to the Work in Progress list, the sheer number of pages and lack clues as to what is wanted or required would put me off.

So I am thinking a wip audit might be useful? Going through all the wip pages and removing the wip tag wherever appropriate.

I am also wondering if it would be possible to have different sorts of wip? For example: wip legacy (pages where wip has been on for a long time; almost all existing wip pages ? ); wip content (missing significant ingame content, specifically for NPCs and contacts and missions); wip obselete (content has become deprecated via game updates and needs to be updated).

But even this if fraught, perhaps. Because if a page isn't under active management, then a {{wip}} tag may not be appropriate. (Because the page is not 'in progress'.) Perhaps more of a {{missing content}} or {{needs work}} tag.

In any event, if there was some way to date-stamp a page when the wip tag was added, and then sort wip pages by age of wip tag, that would be useful too.

Also, I've been using the {{Missing}} tag when content is missing from a page, most often where missions have success as well as failure content (most often replacing 'need data' in the process). To my way of thinking, a page that is complete except for one or two minor {{Missing}} tags does not need to have the {{wip}} tag present. Thoughts on this?

Anyway, enough of a rave for now!

[Aggelakis]

Archvillain: there is no missing details that I can see. Removed wip.
Ian: it's not a wip, it's a stub. Removed wip, added stub.

You can change the designation from wip to stub if you feel it's not actually "WIP" and more "stub" (missing significant information/formatting).

Regarding expansion of wip/stub, I think it's a good idea.

For an example, [http://www.wowpedia.com Wowpedia] has "item stub" "quest stub" "NPC stub", etc., etc., along with similar "wip" categories/templates. I wouldn't recommend their zillions of templates with fancy images and stuff to do something so simple (each of the above items have their own separate template!). I would more recommend a single wip template and a single stub template, with #if or #switch formatting.

Examples:

{{wip|item|REASON}} would put PAGENAME (automatically filled in) in the "Item Works In Progress" category with "REASON" as the reason in the article's "header flag"
or
{{stub|NPC|REASON}} would put PAGENAME (automatically filled in) in the "NPC Stubs" category with "REASON" as the reason in the article's "header flag")

This makes it fairly simple to add new wip/stub "types" without creating the huge amounts of chaff that Wowpedia has (they have ***23*** unique stub templates!)

[taosin]

You can change the designation from wip to stub if you feel it's not actually "WIP" and more "stub" (missing significant information/formatting).

Can you clarify my understanding here? I'm assuming that in some cases a stub is fine and complete and nothing more needs to be added for an entry to be complete. Examples would be various non-contact NPCs and also "Lots of High Explosives" and other simple things that are psuedo-contacts (which became more common with the rlelease of Going Rogue).

So if a stub is complete with all required information, does it still require the {{stub}} tag?

[eabrace]

Nope.  If the article is complete, the {{stub}} can be removed.

[Sekoia]

So I am thinking a wip audit might be useful? Going through all the wip pages and removing the wip tag wherever appropriate.

WIP and Stub both tend to linger on articles long past the point where they're no longer needed. Please do feel free to remove {{wip}} and {{stub}} where you think they're no longer appropriate. If someone else disagrees with you, then a discussion can start to figure out *why* the wip or stub is necessary.

There's also examples of pages that are missing significant content and don't have any marker or tag on them. For example, I just played through and documented many missing missions for Maxwell Christopher; he didn't have a wip tag but wow a lot of content was missing.

Sometimes, it's not clear that content is missing. You can't necessarily tell by looking that a contact is missing missions, so it may not have been realized that WIP was needed. Feel free to add the tag when you come across such cases. :)


I did some extensive changes to {{wip}} and its related category. I added a date= option, though it won't work for existing articles unless you go add it. I also added a note= option. You can see how these are put to use in the category page.

I don't think we need to subcategorize. The notes on the category page will probably be sufficient. In any case, I think we should start there (adding notes/dates and cleaning up) and see where it takes us.

If these changes are liked, I can apply similar to the {{stub}} template. If they're hated... well, they can be reverted. ;)

[Aggelakis]

Can you clarify my understanding here? I'm assuming that in some cases a stub is fine and complete and nothing more needs to be added for an entry to be complete. Examples would be various non-contact NPCs and also "Lots of High Explosives" and other simple things that are psuedo-contacts (which became more common with the rlelease of Going Rogue).

So if a stub is complete with all required information, does it still require the {{stub}} tag?

As I said (note emphasis):

You can change the designation from wip to stub if you feel it's not actually "WIP" and more "stub" (missing significant information/formatting)

A. "WIP" means there's editing comments, incomplete sections; there's still information to be added/updated/removed.
B. Stub means the article can stand alone (all the basic details are there), but is not actually complete (whatever minutiae applies is not there).

From here marks how I have been working:

1. If something is marked with {{wip}} but is no longer actually "in progress", can stand alone, but is not actually complete, you can change it to {{stub}}.
1a. If it still has editing comments, don't remove wip unless you clean out the comments (preferably by fixing what the comments are calling on :) )
1b. {{Missing}} and the various {{Missing ...}} (Missing Store, Missing Too Low Level, etc) don't count against removing stub unless there's way too much missing to be considered "complete".

2. If something is marked with {{stub}} but has a lot of editing comments, remove stub and add wip.
2a. Or fix what the comments are calling on. Can remove stub if the results make a complete article.

3. If something is complete (not missing significant information/formatting), you can remove wip or stub, as applicable. After all, it's neither a work in progress, nor is it a stub.

4. For completeness sake (I'm sure you know this already): Never use both stub and wip on the same article.

[Sekoia]

4. For completeness sake (I'm sure you know this already): Never use both stub and wip on the same article.

Hmm... DPL says Agge will want to visit these articles. :)

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/City_Sights
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Clockwork_A87952
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Combat_Attributes
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Demo_Editing/Demo_How_To_Info
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Demo_Editing/Demo_Problems_And_FAQs
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Desdemona
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Justice_Costume_Pieces
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Sinister_Costume_Pieces

[taosin]

Wow! You're all legends!

I've reviewed the wip documentation and the excellent replies above, will start processing a small number of wip articles each day.

Also there's a fair number of Wanted artciles which are simple to do — they proliferated after Going Rogue, I think, especially whenever I used a Mission Briefing template for a pseudo contact (which I did a lot), a Wanted link was added.

Countdown: as of today:
• between 400 and 450 436 wip pages (I just found Category:Work_in_Progress)
• around 210 stubs
• 1045 Wanted links (interesting: many of them just have one link pointing to them, I'm keen to drill down on this)

Let's see where we are in a month :)

[Aggelakis]

Hmm... DPL says Agge will want to visit these articles. :)

Visited and fixed. :p

[Aggelakis]

I added a date= option, though it won't work for existing articles unless you go add it.

I have a suggestion that I played around with but couldn't get figured out how to do.

For the date option, have the default be {{subst:today}} if you leave date= out of the template? That way its current functionality is maintained, where you simply slap {{wip}} on the article, but is expanded with the optional use of date= to mark a specific date in the past and note= to give a reason why it's wip.

(Same with stub if it gets updated.)

[Sekoia]

I have a suggestion that I played around with but couldn't get figured out how to do.

For the date option, have the default be {{subst:today}} if you leave date= out of the template? That way its current functionality is maintained, where you simply slap {{wip}} on the article, but is expanded with the optional use of date= to mark a specific date in the past and note= to give a reason why it's wip.

(Same with stub if it gets updated.)

Let me rephrase what I think you're saying to make sure I understand:

• Let existing articles with {{wip}} render without mention of the missing date.
  
• Support adding date= on existing articles to put in an specific date in the past.
  
• If I add {{wip}} to a new article, automatically use today's date without manually supplying the date= option.

If I've understood you correctly... then no, it's not possible.

"subst:" simply replacing a template call with its current value. So whenever you save an article with {{subst:today}} in it, it'll save as "2011-01-25" instead of "{{subst:today}}". So if we put {{subst:today}} in the template somewhere, it'll get stuck on the date when it was added. If we put {{today}} in, it'll always show today's date. Basically what you're asking the template to do is automatically change {{wip}} to {{wip|date=2011-01-25}} when you save it into the page the first time. There's no mechanism for that.

So basically, we need to decide how important the date field is. If it's something we want to strongly encourage, then we should include a notice in the box when it's added encouraging people to supply the date. If we don't want to have that notice, then we should be prepared to accept that the date will often not be provided.

Alternately, I could have my bot chew through all instances of {{wip}} and fix them somehow. I could tweak the template so that date=0000-00-00 results in the date line being suppressed; that'd also let the old instances sort well in the DPL output. Then we could keep the "include the date" notice in new uses of the template. When/if we phase out all instances of 0000-00-00, that special case can be dropped. Thoughts?

[eabrace]

For the date option, have the default be {{subst:today}} if you leave date= out of the template?

That part would be pretty simple.  You could just change this part:

Code Select Expand

{{{date|No date specified. <span style="font-size: 75%">(Use <nowiki>date={{subst:Today}}</nowiki> to specify today, or date=YYYY-MM-DD to specify an arbitrary date.)</span>}}}

To this:

Code Select Expand

{{{date|{{subst:Today}}}}}

But you'd lose the note about the WIP needing a date in existing templates that don't have dates.

[eabrace]

Could we borrow from the {{welcome}} template?  We use the ~~<noinclude></noinclude>~~ to keep it from parsing the signatures before substitution.  Any way to do that with the {{today}} template or maybe with the ~~~~~ date?

[Aggelakis]

Let me rephrase what I think you're saying to make sure I understand:

• Let existing articles with {{wip}} render without mention of the missing date.
  
• Support adding date= on existing articles to put in an specific date in the past.
  
• If I add {{wip}} to a new article, automatically use today's date without manually supplying the date= option.

If I've understood you correctly... then no, it's not possible.

"subst:" simply replacing a template call with its current value. So whenever you save an article with {{subst:today}} in it, it'll save as "2011-01-25" instead of "{{subst:today}}". So if we put {{subst:today}} in the template somewhere, it'll get stuck on the date when it was added. If we put {{today}} in, it'll always show today's date. Basically what you're asking the template to do is automatically change {{wip}} to {{wip|date=2011-01-25}} when you save it into the page the first time. There's no mechanism for that.

Yes, and drat.

So basically, we need to decide how important the date field is. If it's something we want to strongly encourage, then we should include a notice in the box when it's added encouraging people to supply the date. If we don't want to have that notice, then we should be prepared to accept that the date will often not be provided.

Alternately, I could have my bot chew through all instances of {{wip}} and fix them somehow. I could tweak the template so that date=0000-00-00 results in the date line being suppressed; that'd also let the old instances sort well in the DPL output. Then we could keep the "include the date" notice in new uses of the template. When/if we phase out all instances of 0000-00-00, that special case can be dropped. Thoughts?

I don't think the date of the really old wip articles is very important at all. Most of them are so old that their wip dates are fairly irrelevant. Sending the bot after non-date= instances of wip sounds like a good way to update the existing templates while still allowing an update to the wip template to function, by default, as if supplying the use date's day, e.g. {{wip|date={{subst:Today}}}}, using Eabrace's suggestion re: Welcome.

[Sekoia]

That part would be pretty simple.  You could just change this part:

Code Select Expand

{{{date|No date specified. <span style="font-size: 75%">(Use <nowiki>date={{subst:Today}}</nowiki> to specify today, or date=YYYY-MM-DD to specify an arbitrary date.)</span>}}}

To this:

Code Select Expand

{{{date|{{subst:Today}}}}}

But you'd lose the note about the WIP needing a date in existing templates that don't have dates.

If you did this, the template would be hard coded to always display 2011-01-25 as a default for the date. This isn't what we want.

Could we borrow from the {{welcome}} template?  We use the ~~<noinclude></noinclude>~~ to keep it from parsing the signatures before substitution.  Any way to do that with the {{today}} template or maybe with the ~~~~~ date?

That only works because we're subst'ing welcome, as {{subst:welcome}}. When you do that, the user's page doesn't contain {{welcome}} anymore, it contains the whole welcome text.

The equivalent here would be {{subst:wip}}, which isn't at all what we want. That wouldn't put {{wip}} in the page. It'd put the whole block of code that the {{wip}} template contains into the page. That'd be a huge mess.

We could create a new template {{addwip}} or something that we use as {{subst:addwip}} which spits out {{wip|date={{subst:today}}}}. (I'm not sure we can do the welcome subst trick on a template call containing a subst, but let's assume for the moment we can.) But that won't stop people from using {{wip}}.  I suspect {{subst:addwip}} will be forgotten and the date will still get omitted more often than not. And really, is "{{wip|date={{subst:today}}}}" (or doing it manually {{wip|date=2011-01-25}} etc.) so much harder to copy/paste or remember than "{{subst:addwip}}"? And if you forget it, the template currently will remind you.


Tonight when I get home from work, I'll update the template to suppress the date line for 0000-00-00 and sic my bot to update all the old instances of {{wip}}.

[Sekoia]

The date= option on {{wip}} just isn't being used. Sometimes it's omitted, but it's also common for people to dummy it out with date=0000-00-00 (which frankly astonishes me; is it really that much harder to put in the actual date instead of a dummy one?).

Either we need to start poking people with sticks and insisting they put the dates in when they use wip, or we need to just drop the date= option from {{wip}}. If it's not going to be widely used, then there's really no point in having it at all.

Personally, I don't much feel like poking people with sticks and am doubtful that it would really change habits long-term, so I'm inclined to just remove date=.

[TonyV]

Personally, I don't much feel like poking people with sticks...

Get me some addresses, I've got a full tank of gas and some really sharp sticks.

[Sekoia]

Look through the page listing at Category:Work in Progress. Any article that had {{wip}} added to it after January 2011 should have a real date, but many do not. It's hard to determine exactly how many that is, since you have to browse through article histories to determine when the {{wip}} tag was added.

[Felderburg]

I know that I used to put the date in only if the WIP template had that info included - I didn't know how to format {{wip}} with a date until I saw some articles with a WIP date.  People may not know that it's possible to modify the WIP template with a date, plus it's easier to just use {{wip}} instead of anything else.

[Aggelakis]

Look at what I found!