Forum:Why split up the cards?

I know my opinion probably means jack on here, but I still need to ask: why are we wasting time doubling the number of pages on this wiki and confusing anyone and everyone who visits it by creating separate pages for the anime cards when there is a section on the real card templates for the anime effects? I mean it just seems like overkill, a waste of time, and a waste of data. Could an admin please try to explain why this dumb idea was a good idea? --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 15:06, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

I believed the idea to split up the cards had been suggested by User:Deltaneos back in 2013. The idea is mainly targeted at anime/manga visitors who don't care much about the card in real life. Some anime cards have been altered, modified or remade completely when they are released to the real life so when you put the anime and real card together it would contain too much information and confusing for visitors. For example, if you come to this wiki to look for the information of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX - Episode 177 and want to know more about the card Neos Wiseman that used in the anime. If you follow the link to main card article, what you get from the screen at first is a completely different cards and brunch of misleading information that totally not useful for you since the card has been remade completely different from its anime form. To check the card image and gallery of its appearance, you have to scroll through all gallery of card release in real life in different languages before you get to anime/manga gallery, which is very inconvenient for visitors who only want to look for the anime/manga card.

I wasn't around this wiki much during the time that the anime cards template is mass implemented, so I'm not sure if there are any recent discussions about any further advantages of this template. Personally, I don't think viewers will get confused with the new anime card articles as far as we can link them properly. Anime card article only linked from the anime related page and contained pinpoint information, so people who do not care about real life card can easily look for the information they want. For people who also want to look for the card in real life, there is always main card page notice on top of the anime card that they can follow. If you type the card name in search bar, it returned in separated articles with titles clearly indicated what visitors want to see. Compared to what we have before, this is definitely an improvement.

Though I do not like the route of going with D/D Cerberus (anime) and D/D Cerberus (later anime), I will discuss about them later. I hope my reply is clear enough to give you why the ideas are implemented in the first place. Blackwings0605 (talk) 17:01, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

Pardon my french, but that's a bunch of bull and malarkey. The wiki was so much easier to navigate before all this extra crud was added. Some people use the anime to find the real cards, but now that the anime pages link to these dumb anime card pages, it's so confusing. It was just so much easier to have all the information you needed on one template, but now you've got like five or six to choose from. We don't need that many pages for 1 sticking card. If making separate templates must be done, then put it all on one page separating the versions with tab, like how they're splitting the English and Japanese texts of the anime cards; that way all the damn information is kept in one place, and people don't have to frickin dig through a ton of crap to find what they want. Why didn't anyone think of that?!? --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 18:16, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

The underlying problem is that Template:CardTable2 is old and breaks. It needs to be retired. The best way to do so and not simply have another huge template that will eventually also have to be retired is to split up the card pages. Eventually, a bot run will be done to remove all the anime related stuff from the main card pages instead of having it both places.

Every anime/manga card page links back to the corresponding main card page at the top of the article, so I don't see your issue there. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 20:00, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

The main reason is because {{CardTable2}}, the template which has been used to generate the card pages for years, is being deprecated, for several reasons. First and foremost is that it's horrendously inefficient - a massive drain on Wikia's resources, to the point that edits to it have brought down, or very nearly so, Wikia's network on several occasions in the past few years, in spite of it being extensively rewritten by myself and others. Basically, we've taken it as far as we can, and if we want to be able to do anything else, we have to replace it with something built from the ground up to be more performant. Part of this is that the information has to be split across pages; we already looked at the possibility of presenting all the information separately but on the same page (this was, in fact, what I was originally pushing for), but we found it didn't work, again for a number of reasons, and again, primarily because of technical and performance issues. Second is like Blackwings0605 said above: it has never made sense to pack all the information on all the versions and incarnations of a card into a single page; frankly speaking, the whole thing is a mess. Splitting things up lets us focus on nothing but directly relevant information in a given article.

Navigation in this new system is a major concern, but then navigation has always been a concern. The primary goal needs to be making sure that readers stay in the same type of content as they move between articles (the obvious example is that they need to be able to stay on anime-related articles as they move between episode, card, character, etc. articles), but we also need to make it trivial to move between, for example, anime, manga, and real-life content, and to that end, if you have any suggestions, we'd love to hear them! One possibility would be a control allowing readers to choose where links point, though that would require Javascript expertise that I don't think we have available to us. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 20:01, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

First, Chessedude, if you don't see my point, you obviously weren't reading what I said closely enough. Second, Dino, I do have a suggestion. Look here (specifically under "Gokai Change) and here (under Kamen Rider OOO). Taking under consideration your fact of needing a new CardTable for the real cards, is there a way to implement this kind of large-scale tabbing to go between Real, anime, Manga, and VG cards rather than having them confusingly spread over multiple pages? --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 20:50, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

Those are horribly presented; the Power Rangers link features a massive block of tabs and the Kamen Rider link features tabs nested way too deep. They're both accessibility nightmares; in particular, they both utterly fail on mobile devices.

As I already explained, we already tried having everything on the same page. It doesn't work for us. First off, even though the new templates are far more efficient, they are still weighty by themselves, and the end result would have been even heavier pages than we're dealing with from {{CardTable2}}. Second, we make extensive use of SMW (which adds significant burden of its own and is part of the efficiency problem), which allows us to automatically generate most of the lists on the wiki; keeping everything on one page would have complicated the coding of these lists to the point that it would almost be better to go back to manual lists. We are not going back to unified, singular articles, so there's no point in you continuing to ask for it. If you have any other suggestions, we'd love to hear them, but if all you have is your complaint about multiple articles, there's no point to further discussion. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 21:41, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

Look, you've more or less already did like I suggested with the Ranger and Kamen Rider wikis with what you're currently doing with the anime card pages. Why not just use that to include the real and manga cards? --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 23:21, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

As I already explained, twice, technical considerations mean it won't work. To help protect the servers, MediaWiki (the software the wiki runs on) has hard-coded limits to the amount of complexity a single page can have, and we are already hitting some of these limits on a few card pages with CardTable2. While the new templates are, individually, less complex than CardTable2, they add up to more (potentially much more) when all used together on the same page. There is no way around this that doesn't end with a slightly newer version of CardTable2. I said before, I was originally pushing for a single-page solution myself. I have given this a lot of thought, and so has everyone else involved. If I still thought a single-page solution was viable, I would still be pushing for it. But there is no way to make it work. This isn't a matter of what we want to do, it's a matter of what we can do given the constraints of the software. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 23:27, January 25, 2015 (UTC)

Then if it must be done, can you at least put the links at the top of the page rather than the bottom? I think it might make it a little (very little) less confusing if they know of the multiple pages immediately. I know if I have the wrong page, I back out with looking at the whole page. At least this way if what they have is not what they want, they can change it right away. --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 00:02, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

I would also like them to be moved to a more obvious place. The navbox was a quick throw together. -- Deltaneos (talk) 00:23, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

I started writing this comment before Dinoguy's last comment, so sorry if I'm covering anything that's since been addressed.

It's not just OCG/TCG, anime and manga. There's the Toei anime, Labyrinth Battle Game, Bandai Carddass, Bandai Sealdass, Konami's Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, Capsule Monsters, Capsule Monster Chess, Dungeon Dice Monsters (real world, anime, manga and video game) and numerous video games, including but not limited to Forbidden Memories, Duelists of the Roses, BAM, Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule: Breed and Battle, some of which feature multiple versions of the same card e.g. "Blue-Eyes White Dragon (BAM)" and "Blue-Eyes White Dragon (BAM Fusion)".

As you said, listing them all on one page, but properly separating out one medium from another is one solution. The problems with this are:

• It's still a lot of extra page content. Chances are the reader is only looking for one, not all. This is especially much for mobile devices.
  • You said previously that a lot of people don't use mobile devices on wikis, but a lot do. In November 2013, mobile devices accounted for 26% of Wikia's traffic (as opposed to desktop and tablet). That's 7% higher than the global Internet percentage at that time. The current global mobile traffic is about 32%. Wikia's is probably higher.
• Data cannot be stored separately. e.g. if a card is a Normal Monster in the anime and a Fusion Monster in the OCG/TCG, we can't get it to appear in automatic lists of Normal Monsters. We can set up things like "Anime Level::6", instead of "Level::6", but then we wouldn't be able to generate lists between mediums.
  • Similarly creating lists displaying details from the media in question like Template:Manga card list and List of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses cards are much easier.

You mentioned that it's a waste of work and data creating the extra pages, but it's the same amount of page content, to putting them in tabs or a list on the same page. Less data on the user's end, as they only load the one they need. Maybe more on Wikia's end, but not enough to cause problems (or not moreso than the current setup, at least).

And it is still possible to include the details from other pages onto the main page. Either by transclusion, like how templates work, or JavaScript. Maybe, just the important ones like anime and manga, rather than everything. Here's an example of it done via JavaScript. Before people start pointing out the various oddities, it's not finished.) And in that version, the page content won't load unless the user requests it, reducing unnecessary page content loads.

-- Deltaneos (talk) 00:20, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

Uh, Deltaneos, you've lost me. Could you please re-explain with simpler sentences? --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 00:27, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I may have gotten a bit carried away.

• Putting everything on one page gives users way more than they're looking for.
• That affects smartphone users the worst.
• A very big amount of people view Wikia on smartphones.
• When we make automatic lists of cards like List of Normal Monsters and List of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses cards, in the current system, it is very difficult/messy to separate information from things like the anime from the OCG, both in terms of narrowing it down to what cards appear and ensuring the details from the right game/medium are shown.
• There's not a lot more work involved in putting everything on separate pages compared to putting it all on the one page, ensuring everything is separated into tabs/sections.
• Even with having them on separate pages, we can still get content from one page to appear on another.
  • e.g. we can have it set up to just load the OCG/TCG information. They can then hover over something (preferably something noticeable) that says "Anime" and it will show the table from the anime page. This way everything isn't loaded on the initial page load. They only load the parts they want to see, saving them page load time and data usage.

-- Deltaneos (talk) 01:13, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

First off, thank you for actually explaining things to me rather than give me the same half-assed excuse over and over again. You percentages on mobile devices proves my personal point that the majority of the world still uses desktops, and that a phone should only be used to call or text, but that's another argument entirely.

On the current topic, again, thank you for explaining some things, and I hope you admins and programers can figure out something better than this current mess we're wadding through. In the meantime, can I restate my suggestion to move the "Other 'insert card name here' page" table template to the top of the pages rather than having them on the very bottom? I feel like until things are put in a relatively better place, that might help the confusion somewhat. --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 01:28, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

You percentages on mobile devices proves my personal point that the majority of the world still uses desktops, and that a phone should only be used to call or text, but that's another argument entirely.

Congrats, you scored an internet point. --UltimateKuriboh (talk • contribs) 01:56, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

I'm OK with those splits, but like Blackwings0605 said, I don't get why having (anime) and (latter anime) pages, so if a card appears a third time in the anime with a different effect it will have another page? --Missign0 (talk • contribs) 03:31, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

I'm with both Missign0 and Blackwings. Can't we just say that the effect was always there, but wasn't mentioned until it was used? I mean you do for ATK, DEF, Level, and Attribute if they aren't stated on first summon, why not do that for the effects? --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 04:05, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

That's not the cases we're talking about. These are cases where the written Japanese anime lore shown in the anime is changed. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 05:15, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

Then why not go with an errata-esque section like the OCG/TCG cards have ? HPZ - O.N.E. (talk • contribs) 05:54, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

That... actually sounds like a good plan. --Taylor Gorrell (talk • contribs) 06:10, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

I like it. It'll solve a few problems, I think. --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 15:03, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

The thing about that is, sometimes effects are changed as to make them be fundamentally different cards with the same name. Take "Future Fusion". Its anime effect is completely different from the real one and the anime later adopted the real one. Not having separate articles makes a mess of the card search categories. Heck, from yesterday's episode, take "Covenant with the Swamp King". That's a pretty powerful modification. Its an additional effect on top of what was there. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 15:32, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

Cheese, Dark Strike Fighter has been changed to a card with FTK/OTK possibilities to a simple burn effect usable once per turn, preventing it from being broken. That's a pretty powerful (in the sense of "game-changing") modification, right ? We didn't make an other article for this errata alone, did we ? As for the case of Future Fusion, why not make a section with tabs for each of the series it has appeared ? One section for GX and its effects, etc.. With the most recent one as the first tab to appear on the page ? HPZ - O.N.E. (talk • contribs) 16:03, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

That sound viable, especially since, like I said in a rage rant earlier on in this forum, if people want to see the wording in another language, they can hit the link with their language on the main page. We don't need to create tabs for each language, do we? --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 17:20, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

It's hard to argue against consistency and the "Dark Strike Fighter" comparison makes total sense.

But one of the main reasons for splitting is because cards do different things in different games/mediums. For cards with very distinguished effects like "Call of the Haunted", which later get replaced with their OCG effect, it seems to defeat the purpose to show the OCG-esque one in the context of Duelist Kingdom.

Putting both on the same page does seem like a good idea to me. But it's practically impossible to store semantic data for two cards on one page. So, if we wanted to create an automatic list of cards used in Duelist Kingdom, cards like "Call of the Haunted" and "Copycat" would be listed with the wrong details. -- Deltaneos (talk) 21:33, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

I get it, there are some special cases, like the aforementioned Call of the Haunted, Copycat, and even The Phantom Knights of Shadow Veil, but I don't think those cases fully apply to cards like the aforementioned Covenant, or Barian's Force and the possibly soon to be coming Half Unbreak anime pages, right? --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 21:47, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

Fair warning: this is a massive wall of text, but there's no way around it because there's a lot of ground I need to cover, and some explaining I need to do.

To approach this discussion from another angle, having all the information on a single page hurts pageviews. Having a lot of information on a page makes it harder for readers to find the information they're looking for, and search engines may penalize websites that have pages with a lot of random information crammed together. Using tabs does not solve either of these problems: search engines don't see the tabs, so they still see a huge glut of information, but it's worse for readers because they have to find the tab that contains the information they're interested in; their browser's Ctrl+F search functionality can't search content that's currently in an unopened tab, and when a reader clicks a link there's no way to show a particular tab's content on the new page with the current tab system. In addition, the tabs don't work on the mobile skin, with all the information instead presented as though tabs weren't used at all. You may be enamored of the tab-based presentation used on the Power Rangers and Kamen Rider wikis, Rocket.knight, but I can guarantee that casual readers hate it.

To revisit your statement about mobile - "You percentages on mobile devices proves my personal point that the majority of the world still uses desktops, and that a phone should only be used to call or text, but that's another argument entirely." - your personal feelings on the subject do not change reality. A significant portion of people who own smartphones use them to surf the web, and this proportion is only going to grow as time passes. I browse the internet with my smartphone, though I don't do it very much (and a single data point should never be treated as anything other than an anecdote). Sticking your head in the sand and pretending mobile traffic doesn't exist won't make it go away. So whether you like it or not, mobile traffic is a vital and fundamental aspect of readership that we have to take into consideration when designing pages.

"In the meantime, can I restate my suggestion to move the "Other 'insert card name here' page" table template to the top of the pages rather than having them on the very bottom?" As Deltaneos said, the current presentation isn't final. However, at this time, we don't really have any good alternatives. Simply moving the box to the top of the page isn't acceptable because those boxes are explicitly designed to be placed at the bottom of pages. This is how they are used on all major wikis and that means readers now have an expectation that they come after content, not the other way around. In addition, with all due respect, you are the only one we have any evidence of having a problem or being confused with the current presentation. You keep speaking on behalf of other readers, but we don't have any evidence that any other readers actually share your confusion with this.

"if people want to see the wording in another language, they can hit the link with their language on the main page" This doesn't work. Each version of a card needs its own set of language tabs, because the tabs are used to present the card's image in that language. The images are always specific to that version of the card. In addition, if the card's name or effect/lore is different between versions of that card, translations of the specific versions of name/lore have to be presented alongside the English version of that card version. I also find it somewhat ironic that you're arguing against the use of tabs in this case even as you champion their use as a solution to the overall problem of presentation.

"As for the case of Future Fusion, why not make a section with tabs for each of the series it has appeared ? One section for GX and its effects, etc.. With the most recent one as the first tab to appear on the page ?" As Cheesedude explained, this causes problems with the card search categories. I mentioned above that the wiki uses something called Semantic MediaWiki (or SMW for short) and that it's part of the performance problems that helped to spur the redesign in the first place. SMW is basically a tool that lets us store information about pages and then access that information to build lists, like the examples Deltaneos linked to. The information gets stored in something called properties, and each property has to have a unique name, but one page can store several pieces of information in the same property. So if we have several versions of a card on the same page, this means we have two choices of how to store the information when it differs between the versions: we can store it all in the same property, or we can have different properties for each version. As an example, let's say there's a card "Foo Fighters" that was featured in the anime and the manga. In the anime, it was a Level 3 monster, but in the manga it was Level 2. If we document both versions of the card on the same page, we can either store both Levels in the same property, Property:Level, or we can have separate "Anime Level" and "Manga Level" properties. Unfortunately, both of these methods make it harder to set up the lists: if we have both Levels in the same property, they will both show on the list, unless we limit it to showing only one, but in that case we can't choose which one gets shown. So if the list shows manga cards, but the anime Level is shown, we can't do anything to fix that. On the other hand, if we use different properties, it complicates lists where we want to show cards from several different releases (for example, if we want to show cards from the OCG/TCG, anime, and manga): we suddenly have a bunch of different properties storing different versions of the same type of information, so we have to figure out how to be able to show all of these. There are no good solutions to any of this, other than splitting the versions up to separate pages. That's what's going on with the separate articles for different versions of the same anime card. As I said before, we are limited in what we can do by the software we have to work with, and I can promise you, no one feels these limitations worse than those of us who actually design and create all the templates and other tools we use to create and display the pages here.

I can promise that we are not splitting pages unnecessarily where we can help it. In particular, there are over fifty Yu-Gi-Oh! video games that have been released, and it would be completely unworkable for us to have a separate page for every single game a card appeared in. So where possible - where the information did not change between games, and the games themselves are directly related - we are going to have a single page for the games in question, instead of one page for each game. This whole thing is complex - much more complex than I think any of us were aware of when we started - and we're making the best we can of a situation with no truly good, satisfactory answers.

「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 22:06, January 26, 2015 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I barely even read half of this because it just sounds like you're talking out your backside with more excuses. I've given you several viable suggestions much better than your current operation that could work on any other wiki in existence, including the Yugioh Custom wiki which uses a similar if not the same CardTable2 you complain about. Whether it's just a lazy attitude or a lack of care in your work, I don't care any more. Do whatever the hell you want, because it sounds like you just gonna do it anyway. --Rocket.knight.777 (talk • contribs) 00:46, January 27, 2015 (UTC)

I barely even read half of this because it just sounds like you're talking out your backside with more excuses. Or, you could just admit you don't have sufficient, specific rebuttals for Dinoguy's explanations, which Dinoguy just did for what you've said. --UltimateKuriboh (talk • contribs) 02:45, January 27, 2015 (UTC)

There is no point to continuing this discussion if you refuse to take the time to read through everything I have said. I have given you the benefit of the doubt throughout this, reading and taking into consideration the entirety of each of your and everyone else's comments, even when those comments have consisted of inane, uninformed, or bullheadedly ignorant statements, and have responded to each point raised, even where those points were in all honesty not worth engaging, and even where I had addressed those points in my previous comments; the very least you could do in return is to read my comments and give them the consideration they're due. In addition, I have been nothing less than civil throughout this discussion, and do not appreciate being accused of laziness or carelessness as a reward for my efforts.

Nowhere in my last comment did I make any excuses. Everything I said was clearly explained, though I will be the first to admit it may not have been simply enough explained, and you dismissing my statements as excuses is nothing more than an excuse on your part to avoid having to actually address any of my comments.

Do not try to lecture me on what other wikis do with their versions of CardTable2. Our CardTable2 is the progenitor of every such template in use on all other wikis, most of which have simply copied it with minimal modification. This is something I have researched myself, with the explicit goal of looking for new ideas and optimizations to apply to our own template. Nowhere else does anyone understand how it works as well as I and the other editors on this wiki who are responsible for maintaining, upgrading, and, currently, replacing it, which is exactly what you would expect of the editors who wrote and rewrote it in the first place. In addition, we are not any other wiki in existence, and we have our own considerations that no other wiki has. Edits made to our CardTable2 have been enough in the past to very nearly crash Wikia's entire network. No other Wikia wiki can lay claim to this dubious achievement even once, and we've managed it multiple times in unconnected incidents. This is therefore a huge concern for us in any system that seeks to replace it, and none of your suggestions would be sufficient to prevent it from happening in the future.

I have shot down your "viable suggestions" in every comment I've made in this discussion. You continue to refuse to acknowledge my arguments, choosing instead to dismiss them and in so doing show that you're not interested in an honest debate, but instead in only screaming at everyone else with the hope that we'll all give up and you'll get your way. This is not going to happen. Until you show you are willing to give proper consideration to everyone else's comments here, instead of only those comments that support your position, there is nothing further to discuss and nothing else you say will be taken into consideration. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 16:33, January 27, 2015 (UTC)

After creating the (anime) and (manga) card pages, shouldn't we delete the info from the (real) card page (the anime/manga lores and the episodes/chapters that it appears)? --Missign0 (talk • contribs) 02:47, January 29, 2015 (UTC)

Yes. While I'd definitely prefer people remove the info as they go, I'll have to do a bot run once all the pages have been created or converted anyways, so ultimately it doesn't matter if anyone takes the time to do it. I would point out, though, that I will be removing all anime/manga-related parameters when this happens, so editors working on these splits need to make sure all info is copied to the new articles (in particular, the non-English/Japanese anime/manga names and lores many cards have). I will not be able to automatically check to make sure these have been copied during the bot run, and would never be able to check the 6-8 thousand cards by hand. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 05:15, January 29, 2015 (UTC)

I've actually been actively discouraging their removal. Having some articles have them and some not have them is going to make navigation more difficult. I don't want someone clicking on two links to cards from the same episode and have one page have the anime effect and the other not have it. Yes, they'll all be removed in the end, but I'd greatly prefer not to remove them until we're 100% done with the splits. Cheesedude (talk • contribs) 05:52, January 30, 2015 (UTC)

I'd like to share my 2 cents on this as well. Im suggesting a larger split. Manga/Anime/Video Game content of yugioh to be splited from the OCG/TCG card game in its own separate wikia ?--Gigarex2 (talk • contribs) 06:05, February 3, 2015 (UTC)

We are hardly going to stop someone who wants to start their own wiki - or join/adopt one that already exists - which focuses on one of these things, but it's extremely unlikely that we'll modify this wiki's coverage just because a more specific wiki exists. We would be more than happy to consider linking between wikis, though. 「ディノ奴千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 08:35, February 3, 2015 (UTC)