Forum:Proposed Changes to the Wiki

Changes we would like to make to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia

Hello!

Myself and a few administrators of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia (to date, Deltaneos, Cheesedude and Dinoguy) have been discussing the future of the Wiki, and in particular to how we are perceived by the community at large. Some changes have already been agreed, and some we have felt important enough to put to the community, because they directly impact what we information we offer to people. First, let's discuss what we want to get rid of.

Tip Pages
Tip pages have morphed from something designed to explain strategies, to being a catch-all article that, in many ways, covers either nothing significant, or covers the bleeding obvious (such as what a card can be searched by, etc).

We are of the opinion that tips should be explained within the greater context of an actual Deck or Strategy Page, rather than explain piecemeal potentially across many cards.

Trivia Pages
This is a section we get a lot of stick over from many players and readers, because the quality of the trivia we have is so poor, and in many cases, completely unproven. We want this to disappear, and save the 'worthwhile' trivia (usually Trivia related to a card's place in the universe of Yu-Gi-Oh!) within the main card page itself.

The following should be going ahead, barring any major objections.

New CardTable
Dinoguy and Deltaneos have been hard at work creating a new table to house card information, using Tabber and JavaScript to allow us to space more efficiently. This has the advantage of allowing us to include a greater depth of information on the card itself, while allowing for 'neater' way of presenting information at the moment. A preview version can be seen here.

Namespace Condensing
We have a lot of namespaces, so we want to focus on how best we can store information without duplicating where users can find it. Our plan is to merge Card Gallery and Set Card Gallery to Gallery, merge Card Errata into Card Lores (because Errata is within the focus of examining Lores), rename Set Card Ratios to Ratios, and delete the articles made so far, remaking them when we have a better way to implement them, and renaming Set Card Lists to Lists.

New Semantic Database Section
One of the things we're also coming across is how we can best create semantic databases of cards by set. As readers are aware, this is one of our most lacking and sorely needed functions. Before I go further, I want to say that this would in no way affect card articles as they stand, I would not want to remove their current place in the Wiki. However, what we'd like to do is create separate pages for each card ever released.

Articles would be formatted like "Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon (EN-JMP-UR-LE)". These would also be placed into a separate namespace, "Cards", to prevent them being searched in the same vein as our normal card images. This would allow us to generate dynamic lists for each and every set in each language, list alternate rarities easily, allow us to accurately tell how many images of each card (either by name, category, language, or other criteria) we physically have on the Wiki. These card articles would still also include Type, Attribute, Rank/Level, ATK, DEF, Number and Lore information, because this information will potentially be used in future semantic applications.

These Articles would also distinguish if the name has changed since release (important for HERO cards, and others), and they would also directly include Edition, Rarity, Set, Language, and the language-appropriate name for the card.

This would, in effect, be an ongoing side project alongside our normal operations, but the benefits this could bring could be immense in the long run. This would bring the Wiki almost up to par with Netrep, with the only obstacle left to tackle being Rulings, but that shouldn't be too difficult. For now, having the ability to search by set and by language would be immensely useful.

Card Names
In the medium-to-long term, we could like to move the visibility of non-official names of cards (specifically, languages other than English, French, French-Canadian, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese) to a Card Names article; they would still be documented on the main card page itself, and would remain semantically searchable, but they would only be visible to users on the Card Names page.

With languages like Chinese and Portuguese, where only a handful of cards have names in these languages, the visibility would be toggled, so unofficial names could still be listed, but these unofficial names would be, like above, only viewable in the Card Names articles.

Summary
We hope users will work with us on these proposed changes, we realise that this may potentially upset a lot of people, but we ask that users accept why we feel that such changes be necessary.

Just to also let users know, we also have a Twitter account for the Wikia. Simply follow TheYuGiOhWikia to get updates on what's happening!--TwoTailedFox (My Talk Page) 22:35, March 2, 2013 (UTC)