User talk:Rexert

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Again, welcome and have fun! — Fleanetha (talk) 00:38, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Great start, Rexert, and thanks especially for adding a brand new page to the wiki with Tamily Tanderveil. It's clear you know what you're doing. I have just reviewed the page and just made some changes to align it with our standards, so please take a look and let us know if something is not clear. I noticed you'd not used the latest template, so here's a link to them: Help:Templates. Also, are you aware of our article spawners that help a lot with creating new pages and should pull in the latest template, suggestions, and page structure to help you? If you open a red link the spawners should be offered in the pull-down box top right. If you cannot see them, you may have disabled them in your personal preferences - under Gadgets and then under Editing gadgets - uncheck the box. Finally, I had to tweak one sentence with a whole phrase cut and paste form the Paizo text, as we cannot do that: PathfinderWiki:Plagiarism. --Fleanetha (talk) 14:43, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

January 2025 questions

Use of pipe symbols

Q: Why does the automatically created category, and sometimes categories edited by admins, end with a pipe symbol followed by an empty space?Does it provide different functionality, act as a placeholder, or serve any other purpose?

You, of course, ask the least technical of the admin team, but I do know the answer if not the deep technical reasons here. The '|' pipe symbol is often added to categories simply for sorting purposes and it is certainly not an admin-only capability. To help understand it, let's use the images categories, which are written Category:Images of something. So, in the category to which these are all collected, usually Category:Artwork by subject, if we were to make no changes, everything would be alphabetized under 'I' for 'Images'. A pipe can be used to alter how the category is sorted, so instead, we could write [[Category:Images of something|something]], which would now file the category under 'S', which is more useful. I have used images purely as an example for how a pipe could be used; for this category tree, we actually use DEFAULTSORT to handle sorting, as there can be many categories in an image category and DEFAULTSORT handles them all neatly, for instance like this for Category:Images of jabberwocks: 

{{Main|Jabberwock}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jabberwock}}
[[Category:Artwork by subject]]
[[Category:Images of dragons]]

Both methods are achieving the same desired result.

One of the perennial jobs of the admin team is to regularly correct what has been accidentally sorted wrongly in the category tree and, as I look now, I can see six under 'I' in Category:Artwork by subject in the wrong place between Ilverani and Imara that I can tidy shortly:

  • Images of Ilverani (2 F)
  • Images of champions (mythic path) (6 F)
  • Images of insects‎ (14 C)
  • Images of lumber‎ (4 F)
  • Images of religious symbols in use‎ (14 F)
  • Images of Sakuachi‎ (2 F)
  • Images of Sewer Dragons‎ (4 C, 6 F)
  • Images of Imara‎ ‎ (2 F)

What about 'pipe and a space'? This allows us to pull elements out of a list to the front and out of the alphabetical subcategories. Take a look at Category:Taldor. Here, everything not under 'T' in the subcategories section has been sorted using '| '. You can see this defined in Help:Creating category pages.

For a more complex situation and likely better description, take a look here: PathfinderWiki:Sorting the years.

I hope this helps. --Fleanetha (talk) 15:30, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

So the reason Taldor isn't under letter T in Category:Taldor is because this category in the Taldor page ends with '| ', pulling it out of the default alphabetical sorting system of categories and bringing it to the top of the elements within the category. Got it, thanks. --Rexert (talk) 17:24, 6 January 2025 (UTC)
Correct and that is the usual sorting for self-categorization of a page, so the main page is more easily seen in a potentially long list. Again, the work is never done and I can see Category:Taldor needs modernizing to align with Help:Creating category pages, as it's not been touched since 2009. --Fleanetha (talk) 17:40, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Summary pages

Q: I've noticed some pages, like Poisons of Golarion, list a large number of items that could have their own pages. Should I be doing the same with items like talismans instead of creating an individual page for each item? Or should the items from pages containing such lengthy lists be slowly transferred to their own individual pages?

Some of these pages, Rexert, are quite old now, and long, but well-established: poisons, curses, books, etc, but they may not be the best examples of what to do, as some of them need a good spring clean. Furthermore, there are no hard-and-fast rulings about this, but it is touched upon here: PathfinderWiki:Scope of the project. So, take the following as my opinion rather than a definitive ruling please.

In a perfect world, everything would have its own categorized wiki page, plus there is still value in these summary pages to discuss the concept in general and act as a useful 'nexus' page for the subject to link to all the associated pages. So, the talisman page could have a list of all the talismans known, each with a quick description, so it's not a raw list. Additionally, a navbox collecting everything together would be useful and could be added to any individual talisman pages. Any significant talismans, where we have more information, could have their own page, but be linked from the summary page using the {{Main}} template, while the individual page itself would contain the navbox.

Preferably, any element on the summary page that has no page itself should have a REDIRECT page fully categorized instead. That redirect page can then be later made up to a full page if Paizo were to produce more info. --Fleanetha (talk) 17:40, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Sisyphus

Q: Each new page seems to require many additional pages to be updated or created, such as categories, redirects, navboxes, the documentation for the navboxes, other related pages, as well as finding external images from Paizo and links from AoN. Should I be tracking and handling all of these changes myself, or can I leave that in the hands of admins? Feels like I'm creating a lot of extra work for others.

That's often correct, Rexert - that's a good checklist, and you could add updating pages for 2E and ORC too. Anything you can do to help is very much appreciated, but we don't expect someone whose been on the wiki one month to do all of this. If you just want to edit and add pages, that is valuable. However, please consider how people edit your work and subsequently amend the wiki, try to understand why, (by all means question when it is Stub idiocy), and follow suit if you can. That will be helpful please. Your use of the article spawners saves a lot of work, as pages conform to standards straight away, for instance. We have a number of help pages that guide you through some common tasks like categorization or moving pages, so following these will also help. --Fleanetha (talk) 18:52, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

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