Hey everyone,
As some of you may have noticed, over the last few days I've kinda taken it upon myself to reformat the pages on the wiki. I'm not making any content deletions (for the most part, more on that later), I'm simply changing the presentation of the pages to be more standardized. As of writing this I am around 100 out of 427 DBC pages in.
Obviously I am not in sole control of the wiki, and a lot of people contribute to it. Therefor I'm writing this post to try and explain my thoughts behind my changes and, more importantly, to get feedback about what I could do better, other users thoughts, and anything else you may have to say about the wiki.
Tables of Contents
I've been adding a Table of Contents to each page in the DB section. I know this may seem superfluous on pages with one entry, but for most pages, to me at least, it's about quick and easy navigation, and for the pages with one entry it's about standardization and presentation.
DBC Information
Directly under the TOC I like to include any short information that would relate to the DBC regardless of the version. This is information such as when it was added or removed, and a short explanation of the function of the DBC if necessary.
Version Sections
One of my major problems with the wiki is the randomness of a specific builds information within a page. I've begun to rearrange into a new setup. It goes something like this: Expansion (Oldest first) - Build - Table/Struct. Specifically formatted as follows
==Version==
Version number and build number, i.e., 3.3.5.12340
===Type of information===
Depending on who wrote it it's either ===Struct=== or ===Table===. Sometimes we have both.
Addendum: On this note, this will probably be the most controversial statement to some people in this thread: I prefer both. The wiki, in my opinion, should not be able helping one type of person versus another. Programmers would prefer it in struct form, content developers probably prefer it in table form. I prefer to have both types of information, it takes nothing away from the page. I'm not a programmer, I'm a content developer, and it helps me far more to have the table for quick referencing. On the flip side, the guy who writes the tools my server uses is able to easily copy/paste the struct. Everyone has their way and need of presenting information. I say let the users decide how they need it, it really isn't about us.
Extraneous Information
I try to keep extraneous information at the bottom of the page. This type of information includes any information that explains the information contained above. Usually this is information like Flags and what they do. I try to separate them based on version, usually by placing some sort of stop notice between expansions. Whenever something is added that takes up a value in a previous list (for example, in Wrath only values 1-25 work, then in Cata add 26-30, but also go and add value #3) simply note it for that value.
Categories
There seems to have been some different ideas of how the category section at the bottom should be handled. It looks like the prevailing theory ended up being listing the DBC category, then the specific expansion DBC category we have information on that table for, and specific version category. So, we're going with that. The style I'm using is Expansion - Build, so for example a page with information for 3.3.5.12340 and 6.0.1.18179 looks like this:
Category: DBC | DBC WOTLK | 3.3.5.12340 | DBC WoD | 6.0.1.18179
Other Information
Schlumpf prefers DBC information added in a structure style, I add information in Table form. Each one serves a purpose. Feel free to add either, only Schlumpf will judge
This post is for discussion about my changes, your ideas, things we can do in the future, and anything about these changes. Thank you for reading.
Edit: Removed expansion headings. Back to just by version
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