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 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)