Arachnos (and several other faction pages)

Started by Aggelakis, July 20, 2009, 09:56:00 AM

Aggelakis

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Arachnos

This page was 115ish kilobytes when editing it. That's almost four times the recommended 32kb, though honestly that number is a little low nowadays (folks' computers in general are better at loading wiki edit pages).

I made an edit, removing the bulk of the Archvillain power lists, similar to when the subfactions were separated out to other pages (Wolf Spiders, Mu Mystics, Night Widows, etc.). I kept the links to the main articles, and the "short bio" from in-game info lookup on the main Arachnos page.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Arachnos_Archvillains

After removing the bulk of the AV details, it's shrunk practically in half to 60ish kilobytes.

Maybe or maybe not removing the EBs as well. Probably can leave the named enemies section in there though.

And I recommend doing this with 5th Column and Circle of Thorn as well, creating subsections for the basic enemies (Human, Spirit, and Demon for CoT, for example), then separating out the AVs into their own "___ Archvillains" page. Not EBs, not enough to make a big impact on file size.
As is, both are over 100 kb.
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Special:LongPages
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ParagonWiki
OuroPortal

Yakovlev


Agge:

"I made an edit, removing the bulk of the Archvillain power lists, similar to when the subfactions were separated out to other pages (Wolf Spiders, Mu Mystics, Night Widows, etc.). I kept the links to the main articles, and the "short bio" from in-game info lookup on the main Arachnos page."

  I understand the point of this, but I don't think this is the solution. The Enemies section raison d'etre is just that: the powers. Removing the powers leaves the section with no meaning at all, IMHO.


"Maybe or maybe not removing the EBs as well. Probably can leave the named enemies section in there though."

  If the AVs' powers are gone, the EBs powers must leave as well. or it will create confusion: some critters will have a power list, some others won't. That means a new page for EBs.  ???

And what to do with the nameds? It's the same case...


"And I recommend doing this with 5th Column and Circle of Thorn as well, creating subsections for the basic enemies (Human, Spirit, and Demon for CoT, for example), then separating out the AVs into their own "___ Archvillains" page. Not EBs, not enough to make a big impact on file size.
As is, both are over 100 kb."

  After Arachnos my next stop will be the 5th, whose AVs' powers and pictures I've already added. I want to go after the Praetorians and Longbow after that. Once those are done, it's CoT time. I plan to divide it into cultists, demons and spirits, leaving EBs and AVs in the main page, following Arachnos model.

I like to first have the info and then arrange it. I do it this way because thus I know what I'm working with. Since they released AE it has been much, much easier. My God, it's a new world today  :D


  Arachnos is an extreme case. Putting together the faction's critters could probably create a page longer than ten other factions combined. So the info should be divided, I completely agree with you there, and that's why I did the Subgroups pages, but the AVs are a different song: those guys are completely unique, so there's no easy way to create an Overview;  there's nothing common to them to create a sense of cohesion, a sense of group (in the case of Patrons they even fight among themselves), and their powers aren't even related, so there's no sense of progression like you can see, for example, in the Council's Galaxies or Arachnos' own Bane Spiders. While all of this can be overcome (more or less), I don't think these are good bases to create a subgroup.
The most logical option would be adding the powers to each AV article and be done with it. But again, the Enemies section is for powers. Background, quotes, appearances and all have their place in the AV articles.


  Just to clarify, I understand the point and I agree with you: this page is too long. But my vote goes for leaving it as it was -it hasn't caused any trouble so far, no one has complained- then create a sandbox and start experimenting, to see if we can come up with a good solution to this issue, because if there's something sure is that the Arachnos page is not going to become smaller with every CoH issue they release, that's for sure.  :)

Yak

Yakovlev


Ah,a minor issue: now the powers sections in the AVs articles would have to be redirected as well, since they take you to the Arachnos' main page...  :-\

Yak

Zombie Man

Actually, I find that too often there are too many tiny articles with only a few lines of text on topics that have no real hope of growing that could have easily be subsumed with some like topics. Especially when they get created with a WIP tag and stay that way for ages. There's too much an eagerness to divide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style#Avoiding_unnecessary_splits

Given how awful the Wiki's own search engine is, I like long pages on a subject so I can simply use my browser to search for the terms I'm looking for on a single web page. When the information is fractured into dozens of tiny pages, the Wiki search engine doesn't find them all, or, I'm opening up dozens of web pages to find the information I'm looking for.

Now, I wouldn't mind the fracturing if the fracturer created a long page transcluding all the subpages. Then you can have a link to 'exhaustive list pages' with a warning next to the link, "Warning, link to large web page."

An example of this is the Arachnos page. I wanted a list of all names of all the various minion, lieutenants, and bosses and had to cull that from five different web pages. Another example is..

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Empowerment_Station_Buff_Recipes_and_Ingredients

Which at one time was reduced to a page with just a listing of the buffs with each entry linking it's own page that had the recipe and effects. That meant that the easy-to-read table, which had all the information in one view, was discarded in favor of the atomization of information. I recreated the exhaustive table and made it an additional page in addition to the atomized pages.

Even the official Wiki pages are leaning toward larger pages since the legacy browsers that required the 32KB limit are very legacy at this point. The only caveat today is too be concerned for the limits of smart phone browsers, but we need to ask ourselves: Is it necessary for the Wiki for a MMORPG to be concerned with smart phone browsing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_size#A_rule_of_thumb