Forum:Merging Skill articles with related pages
I'm thinking of merging skill articles with their related pages. For example, Alchemy (Skill) & Alchemy would be merged together into Alchemy, and Sword (Skill) & Swords would be merged together into Sword. All merged pages would redirect to the new location. You can see my first stab at it here: User:An Adventurer/Sandbox 2.
Basically, all information on a skill and its uses would be merged into one place. All skills would have the basic skill information table. Crafting skills would list items and recipes. Weapons would list all the quest weapons (and all the rest of the content on the current weapon listing pages). Magic skills would list their spells, and possibly any casters specifically for that school (i.e. war to activate, item to wield).
Pros
- All information relating to a given skill would be on a single article. So for example, someone looking up maces would immediately know that Gear Knights/Viamontians can get the skill trained for free. Or someone researching whether or not to take alchemy can immediately see all its uses.
- We'd get rid of the (Skill) suffix which can cause linking issues (at least on the official forums) due to the article title ending in ).
- We could create a section to describe skills in more detail. For example, currently the only place that describes and compares the weapon skills is in the Beginner's Guide to Playing a Warrior article. This information could be added to the skill articles.
Cons
- Page would have a lot of information, would increase load time.
- It could be hard to get all the information organized and clean looking for some skills, like weapons, or cooking which has hundreds of recipes.
- There would be a lot of links that need to get cleaned up eventually.
Thoughts?
--An Adventurer 04:12, 29 November 2010 (EST)
I like the idea for weapons, but for crafting you're gonna be including TONS of stuff, i mean look at Food, there is a lot of stuff there. Alchemy is even worse with craftable prot gems and alchemy grenades etc. Also, there are a lot of recipes in cooking and fletching that also require alchemy. I suppose giant pages aren't so bad since all skills will be uniform. --Immortalbob 05:19, 29 November 2010 (EST)
Good point. The pages for the original 3 craft skills would be a huge mess. And after working on my sandbox test page for sword, I think most weapons would as well. So I think I will start by first dropping the (Skill) from skill article titles, and improving the information on the pages, but I will leave the other pages un-merged. I believe the only conflict I will have is with Thrown Weapons, so I will move the weapons listing page to Atlatls and Thrown Weapons.
Really, I just want to get all the skill pages in better shape before the patch. If we do any merging, that can happen later.
--An Adventurer 06:00, 29 November 2010 (EST)