User talk:Ryan W

Hey! Welcome to the Doom Wiki. Good work on all those cleanups, keep up the good work! Make sure you read the style guide if you haven't already. Fraggle 08:49, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

disambig. pages
Last we discussed, you were asking about automated tools. Any luck? Or are you doing them by hand? -- Jdowland 14:33, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I did do them one at a time, although I avoided retyping all the level names by cutting and pasting back and forth from an OpenOffice spreadsheet. It actually didn't take very long.


 * Now we just have to wait for somebody to add a new list of levels for a megawad, and see if they remember to update the disambiguation pages. :D Ryan W 23:52, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * would it not be better to have e.g. E3M8 as the disambiguation page, with a template inserting something like for other maps occupying the E3M8 slot, see E3M8, rather than hand-writing a paragraph to the same effect on every map article? -- Jdowland 08:46, 23 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * Actually I've just tried this. See E1M8 and Template:map. I'm now not convinced if this is the best approach, perhaps a category for each map slot? I certainly don't like the idea of manually assembling lists of articles for each slot. -- Jdowland 08:53, 23 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid I don't see how this is any improvement over the way I did the MAP## pages. (I would have done the E#M# pages the same way, if any large PWADs from that era had complete articles yet.)  It still involves hand-compiling a list of the level names.
 * A category for each map slot would be even more unwieldy, since each level's entry would need to be edited in addition to updating the disambiguation lists.   Ryan W 06:07, 25 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of a category for each slot. The category page would become in effect an automatic disambig page; there would be no disambig lists to manually update.  (The MAP07 page could be a #redirect to Category:MAP07.)  The only problem is that the game/megawad name needs to appear on the category page in addition to the level name.  This could be solved by renaming all the level articles to include the game/megawad name, such as for example "MAP07 (Doom II): Dead Simple", "MAP07 (TNT: Evilution): Prison", etc. radius 13:08, 25 Sep 2005 (UTC)


 * So, if I understand you correctly, you're saying:
 * [a] 132 68 new categories with names like "E2M3" and "MAP25" would be created.
 * [b] Articles about individual maps, such as E2M3: Refinery and MAP25: Desecration (respectively), would be in those categories.
 * [c] The current E2M3 and MAP25 pages would be replaced by redirects to Category:E2M3 and Category:MAP25 and so forth.
 * [d] Articles about individual maps would have their names lengthened to include the name of the game/megawad.
 * I think the first three items together are a better solution than what Jdowland suggests above (as exemplified by both of our attempts, disambiguation pages tend to be clumsy things). I'm not sure about the fourth part because I've learned to be suspicious of extremely long URLs, but if you really think people are going to be typing "E2M3" by hand rather than clicking on "Doom" or "Heretic" from the main page, then I'll go along with that too.   Ryan W 01:02, 26 Sep 2005 (UTC)
 * I've started to construct this system. I apologize in advance for some links being broken whenever the changes have been applied to only part of a given episode &mdash; everything should end up okay in the end.   Ryan W 20:52, 2 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * The way you're doing this at the moment, the pages like E1M1 are simple pages with one line giving a link to the corresponding category. Wouldn't it be better to make it a redirect? Or is there some reason for doing it this way? 84.92.173.189 00:35, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * Automatic redirects to categories do not work.   Ryan W 00:38, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * Wow, lots of editing! But I think the plan worked out well. Credit to User:Jdowland for coming up with the category-per-slot idea. Too bad the hard redirects to a category are not yet implemented; maybe someday soon the wiki folks will get around to it. radius 05:43, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * There's one other bug I thought of, which is that existing links could be broken by a map which had the same name as its counterpart in an IWAD (or, more likely, in an established and well-done megawad that we already had large and immobile articles about). Hopefully that won't happen; level designers have many qualities, but consensus usually isn't one of them.  :D     Ryan W 06:11, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)


 * Well done with this, by the way. I like the way the level articles are a lot more consistent now, and the way it's been implemented (with the template that gives the header at the start and sets the category) is really elegant. Fraggle 09:19, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * It needs to be said that after Jdowland had written the template and radius had sort of distilled this conversation, there was absolutely no creativity involved. :>   But let's hope it keeps working &mdash; I see some new Scythe 2 pages already using it.    Ryan W 19:43, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)
 * Yup, I included it in the WAD skeleton template. Ducon 19:57, 3 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Stats for IWADs
I think the "Appearance statistics" version is better, because it 1) explains what kind of stat it is, and 2) doesn't have a link in the middle of the title. Fredrik 14:09, 2 Oct 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I'm starting to think that too, now that I see how that revision actually looks.  :7    Ryan W 14:14, 2 Oct 2005 (UTC)