Guild Wars Wiki talk:Requests for technical administration/WantedpagesModification

I, personally, am in support of this idea, as I occasionally check the Wanted Pages, but find the first hundred hits all guild pages. Calor - talk 01:30, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Request passed along

Hi guys! I've passed this request along to IT today. -- Emily Diehl (talk) 01:34, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Emily. :) --Aspectacle 02:44, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Concerns and a suggestion

I brought this up to the IT team, and they mentioned that they would prefer not to make changes directly to MediaWiki's source, since these kinds of changes will ultimately lead to the team having to remember to modify the source in a variety of ways whenever we upgrade versions. Instead, they wondered if it would be better for you guys to run a bot to automatically create Guild: pages that are empty? Would there be downsides to this (other than the fact that these pages would no longer be red linked)? Would that pose a problem? If you can give me your thoughts on this, I'll pass them along to the team again. -- Emily Diehl (talk) 19:43, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, stub pages are an option. I do not fully understand the capabilities of bots so I can't comment on the technical side. Assuming that it can be implemented there are a few things which makes me reluctant to accept a stub solution to this issue. A guild page which does not meet formatting requirements is currently deleted with a few days notice. There is also a policy of expecting editing activity to confirm the continued existence of the guild in the game (a bot is used to mark inactive pages for deletion). Creating blank pages which conform to neither of these requirements (because we have neither the information or interest in maintain guild pages for guilds we know nothing about) will require that we revisit and rewrite aspects of the guild page policies, will increase the complexity of the bot(s) which currently run over the guild pages and will create additional manual work for sysops whose task it is to delete pages created by the bot when the leading guild page expires.
The solution I suggested I liked because it was the most elegant & simple solution to the problem I could find. :) My feeling is that any other solution requires more time and effort from the community than I am willing to commit to such a trivial issue. That aside we'll see if there are any comments from the known bot makers or people with interest in guild page policies on your suggestion. --Aspectacle 22:17, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Imho it would be better to forget about the WantedPages and keep the wanted Guild articles as they are.. poke | talk 22:24, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, let's not create a bunch of empty guild articles, especially since that would require modding our guild page poicies quite a lot. -- (gem / talk) 22:28, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I think the general thought was that it's possible to just skip past the blank Guild pages, and there is concern that if we remove these pages from the list that we'd run into having to do it each time the software is upgraded. This can end up being a slippery slope if too many changes are made to the general MediaWiki source, especially if there's a long laundry list of changes that need to be made after each upgrade. Are you guys OK with not doing this change, or are there strong arguments as to why you'd like it (so I can pass those along to IT again for consideration)? -- Emily Diehl (talk) 23:24, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

I guess we can manage, although the wanted pages is pretty useless as is. It's not the most used tool anyway. -- (gem / talk) 01:40, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

I understand your concerns about the slippery slope & ongoing upgrade. While it seems like an isolated case, I cannot see the future and do not know how often you intend to upgrade so cannot argue for or against it.
Working on alternatives, another option I can think of is to create a custom duplicate of the wanted page which lives with the extensions as described a bit here. However I am profoundly ignorant of the upgrade issues for extensions (in fact largely ignorant about all things wiki apart from adding content) so I don't know if this works out to be same upgrade problem obtained through more work.  ;) If you make encouraging noises about this option I can do more to investigate.
Either way, wanted pages working well is firmly in "nice to have" so it is back to IT to decide what they'd like to do. --Aspectacle 03:03, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

OK guys...thanks for your feedback about this. I'll pop down to IT tomorrow and discuss the topic again and see what they have to say about your suggestions and thoughts about the current state of the WantedPages. -- Emily Diehl (talk) 03:13, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Erm, I don't see the trouble with bots creating empty guild pages with just {{guild}} and {{guild-stub}} template tags. It might require an extensive policy change, but think of the work it would save in weeding through the list by being able to see what is really needed instantly without having to wade through thousands(literally) of guild namespace pages. Changeing the policy can't be all that difficult and huge in comparison. --Hawk Skeer 22:34, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

No longer required

Due to efforts of a couple of people (Fighterdoken, Brains and Poke - thank you. :) the navigation template which was causing the issue to the wanted pages has been modified to no longer link to pages which do not exist. The Special:Wantedpages now looks sane again. Thanks for the time you spent on this Emily. --Aspectacle 00:49, 15 February 2008 (UTC)