PathfinderWiki:Semantic Data Initiative

TLDR

A change to the biggest templates and how they are used. Introduction of the Facts: namespace. Making things easier to edit.

Reasoning

The wikis (Pathfinder + Starfinder) have had a lot of technical upgrades in the last year. These allow us to improve many parts of the wiki to make them more friendly to editors and readers. If we use these features we can make editing the wikis easier and give readers a better experience. The main advantage will be that we can generate indices much simpler. These are used basically everywhere on the wiki, e.g.:

• Artists have tables of the credits of their work as well as a gallery of their images in this wiki
• Authors have a list of the books they contributed to
• the new products slider shows the newest products released
• the release calendar is a list of all product releases
• the portal pages are lists of their respective things
• adventure paths contain a list of the products belonging to the adventure path

All of these require us to update information in multiple locations, which often does not happen.

Goals

• Split of facts from the articles themselves to create a solid knowledge graph.
• Make editing this knowledge graph easy to understand and edit.
• Use the knowledge graph to fill infoboxes and index tables.
• Add the ability to add sources to facts. (e.g. references)
• Keep the ability to add arbitrary information to infoboxes outside of the facts system.
• Make it easy to use knowledge graph facts within texts.

Non-Goals

• Change the fundamental workflow of editing articles.

How will this look in the future?

The article itself

The article itself will smaller since the infoboxes will be much reduced in size. This could look something like this for Absalom:

{{Badges|featured}}{{Infobox City|Absalom (City)}}{{Infobox Nation|Absalom (Nation)}}
For more than 4,000 years...

The facts page

Since the Absalom article concerns itself with the nation and the city there would be two corresponding facts pages. Facts:Absalom (City) and Facts:Absalom (Nation). We will use the City facts page for this example. It would look something like this:

{{Facts:City
| name= Absalom
| title={{Facts:City/Title|City at the Center of the World}}{{Facts:City/Title|Patchwork City}}{{Facts:City/Title|City of Buried Treasures}}{{Facts:City/Title|Jewel of the Inner Sea}}{{Facts:City/Title|Facts:Absalom (Nation)}}
...
}}

There will also be an effort to have a form for editing facts pages instead of editing the wikitext directly to make it easier.

Steps

This is the step-by-step plan. Further substeps will be added when new steps are started.

1. Set up the general facts system
   1. Set up facts namespace
   2. Check feasibility of using forms for fact pages
2. Book + Book Content
   1. Create the fact properties/forms
   2. Copy existing knowledge to the facts pages
   3. Create infobox based on facts system
   4. Replace infoboxes in articles with fact based infoboxes (this is the moment where user facing changes happen)
   5. Replace content within articles with a new template
   6. create credits templates that can be used on any author/artist page
   7. Change the new products slide and release calendar to be based on the facts system
3. Accessory
4. Audio
5. Video game

• Other existing infobox types
  • There has been no decision if these should or could be part of this initiative. They are included here for completeness sake.
    • Abyssal realm
    • Adventure
    • Alchemical item
    • Arcane school
    • Biography
    • City
    • Class
    • Company
    • Cosmos
    • Creature
    • Deck
    • Deity
    • Domain
    • Hellknight Orders
    • Help
    • Item
    • Magic item
    • Map
    • Miniatures
    • Nation
    • Organization
    • Person
    • Planar vehicle
    • Plane
    • Prestige class
    • Region
    • RPG Superstar
    • Ship
    • Spell
    • Spell2e
    • Technological item
    • Vehicle

Fixing the releases

Most of the work of creating the Facts pages was automized. There is one step that does need manual intervention. In the old Infoboxes multiple fields could contain multiple values, each split by the release type. For a clean datamodel these should be split up into releases which then have the corresponding fields with a single value.

The category Category:Facts page needing manual fix shows the 1,259 pages that need manual adjustment.

Please use the "Edit source" function to help fix these problems for now. Typically the automatically generated releases will look something like this:

...
 |Releases={{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=Hardcover
}}{{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=deluxe hardcover
}}{{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=softcover pocket edition
}}{{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=PDF
}}{{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=TODO
 |Release date=Print, Special Edition, & PDF: August 1, 2019<br>Pocket Edition: December 2021
 |Isbn=Print: 978-1-64078-168-9<br>Special Edition: 978-1-64078-169-6<br>Pocket Edition: 978-1-64078-319-5
 |Price=Print: $59.99<br>Special Edition: $79.99<br>Pocket Edition: $29.99<br>PDF: $19.99
}}
...
[[Category:Facts page needing manual fix]]

The goal is to have it look like this:

...
 |Releases={{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=Hardcover
 |Isbn=978-1-64078-168-9
 |Price=$59.99
 |Release date=2019-08-01
}}{{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=Special Edition
 |Isbn=978-1-64078-169-6
 |Price=$79.99
 |Release date=2019-08-01
}}{{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=Pocket Edition
 |Isbn=978-1-64078-319-5
 |Price=$29.99
 |Release date=2021-12
}}{{Facts/Book/Release
 |Release type=PDF
 |Price=$19.99
 |Release date=2019-08-01
}}
...