Badges and Side Switching

[Supa Troll]

So, I had a big long post typed up about the reality of badges now all being accessible from either side and extolling the virtues of combining the separate pages for ones that have a different name red/blue side into a single page and using redirects.

Then I ran the numbers.

Of 1,342 "well formed" badges in the system (all of these may not be actually obtainable, just counting ones that have names, a category, and artwork), it turns out only 180 have different names depending on which side you're on.

I thought it would be more than that. With only 180 extraneous pages is it worth combining say, Positron's Ally and Positron's Betrayer into a single page? It still might be handy to have the information but it's less of a redundancy issue than I thought it was.

Thoughts? Opinions?

[Blondeshell]

I think it could be helpful to have them combined into the same article from an update standpoint: You wouldn't have to remember to change the opposite-named badge.  However, I don't know if, from a historical standpoint, this has already been debated and decided sometime in the past before I started on PWiki.

A couple questions: Would the naming convention be something like "Lobbyist / Crooked Politician Badge?" How would you handle badges that have different faction and gender names, like "Security Expert / Inside Man / Inside Woman?"

[Supa Troll]

Naming was something I considered in the long post that I ended up deleting. Options include:

• Always use a certain form of the name, from the male/female hero/villain options. This isn't ideal, but is at least consistent, and the other variations are covered by redirects in any case. This is how it's currently handled for female variants on badge names -- the male name seems to always be used for the page.
• Use the "Name 1 / Name 2 Badge". I admit I don't like this one. It seems overly long, has a special character, and requires the creation of two redirects instead of just one.
• Try to divine what the "usual" name of the badge is, by which side it's more likely to be obtained on, use a redirect for the other. This is a bit of a judgement call and isn't very clear on some of the defeat badges.
• Use something else entirely, like internal name (PositronTF) or badge ID (Badge 62). While this guarantees that the page name won't have to be changed and is a neutral option, I don't really like having user-unfriendly page names. It also has the problem of having to create 2 redirect pages anyway.

Anyway, I did see some discussion about it in a few talk pages, but there didn't seem to be a consensus, and the discussion was spread out and hard to tell if I'd found all of it or not. Hence the forum post

[eabrace]

I don't think we ever had a specific discussion about whether to create separate articles for badges with different names depending on alignment.  If we did, it would have happened way back when the first PvP zones were added to the game.  I don't think it even occurred to any of us to look for a way to combine articles like Lobbyist and Crooked Politician.

Honestly - and this is coming from someone who spent quite a bit of time updating badge pages when alignment changing was introduced - maintaining pages for badges that change names isn't all that bad.  A lot of the time (I would dare to say most), if the badge names are different, the text and icon are also different.  So, changes to one badge often do not affect the other.

On the other hand, combining some of the badge pages seems to me like it could get relatively complicated pretty fast.

Take, for example, the accolade badges with associated powers.  Each has a traditional method for earning the badge (collecting a series of thematic badges) and and alternate method (by earning the badge with the corresponding power on one side, and then changing alignment.)  We would have to figure out how the combine the information in those two articles without people getting confused about the fact that they have to be one of two specific alignments in order to actually earn the badge, and you would have to be certain to note exactly which of the two badges you were pointing to for the alternate method could be earned traditionally prior to switching alignment.

Just some quick thoughts I figured I'd toss out.

[Supa Troll]

It makes perfect sense that it wasn't even conceived of before GR. No one would care that Lobbyist and Crooked Politician are the same badge, after all. The only way anyone would even notice is by comparing the settitle number.

Now it's a different story, since switching sides turns one badge into the other. It's still only about 15% of all badges that actually change names, however, so it may not be worth the effort.

Good point on the icons. I was wondering about that, so I did a quick spot check. It turns out that only 33 badges with different names per alignment also have different icons on each side. On the other hand, there are 109 with the same name but different icons.

For quick reference, I threw together a spreadsheet listing the badges that have different icons depending on which alignment you are.

Accolades present an interesting challenge. I'll have to look at how the pages are set up, but I would think we would simply outline the steps for a hero/vigilante to get the heroside ones and for a villain/rogue to get the villainside ones. At most we'd provide a link to the corresponding accolade that grants the same power for the other alignment, and leave it up to the reader to deduce that they can get it easier by side-switching if they want.

[Sekoia]

We current use DPL to look stuff up for badges, in particular via {{BadgeBox}}. Changing the naming scheme is likely to break that. (And redirects won't fix it.)

That's not in and of itself a definitive reason to say "nope, can't do that", but it is a factor to keep in mind.

Personally, I prefer to keep things as they are. I'm not understanding why you want to combine pages. The only benefit I can see in that is that it might make updating easier, but a given badge's information only rarely changes so that doesn't seem like enough of a benefit to warrant the change to me. Plus, as Eabrace points out, the text for each side is typically different anyway.

Now, I would see a benefit in making the link between the two different names of a badge more explicit in the articles. Right now, it's only mentioned as a minor footnote in the article under Notes. I'm not sure how we can give it a stronger presence, though.

[Aggelakis]

I am going to also put my two cents in for not combining the articles. I kind of like how uncluttered badge articles are, and if we're going to add more icons, descriptions, etc., it clutters things up. (You might see a lot of my edits going toward uncluttering things on the wiki...I hate visual clutter... :p )

[Supa Troll]

It's not a huge deal, just thought it might be cleaner to have a "one page per badge" ideal.

It sounds like there's good reasons not to do it though, and a number of people opposed to the idea, so in the words of Gilda Radner, "never mind".