Forums: Index > Watercooler > New "title" catergories
I really don't like page titles for characters that include the character's title, which I think won't surprise anyone. I have been meaning to make categories for "sorting" characters by their titles for a long time and have finally started the process. I eventually intend to rename all pages for characters that start with a title to remove the title; if anyone objects to that, please let me know.
I also think that the Professor "disambiguation" page can now be removed. Any objections?
I think one advantage to my approach is the fact that some characters, e.g. Tarsus Beetle, have been referred to by more than one title in the story which is captured by this metadata outside of the article.
I welcome any comments or questions. -- William Ansley (talk) 21:45, June 13, 2018 (UTC)
- I like it. Thanks for making it happen.
- I'm not sure why you think removing the Professor page would be useful. I think you are going to make searching for "Professor" less useful. Argadi (talk) 00:45, June 14, 2018 (UTC)
- I'm not dead set on removing the Professor page, I just think it is redundant when compared with the Characters with Title Professor page. The one line summaries on the Professor page are useful, but this page has to be updated separately and isn't currently quite up to date, while the category page automatically "updates" if the proper categories are applied to new character pages. I could move all of the text from the Professors page to the category page. -- William Ansley (talk) 03:18, June 14, 2018 (UTC)
- I don't think removing the text would be good. My scenario: Someone thinks "I want to find that professor" and types "professor" in the search box. If names no longer have Professor and the Professor page is removed all they see is all pages with the name Professor--not very useful. If the Professor page is just a list of names that's a little better, but they have to check all of them. The current Professor page (or something like it) makes it easier to figure out who they want.
- Some context is needed in the Professor page, but not too much as it may change. When you are finished with the page renamings the page should be updated with the new links and then either alphabetized or split into groups (like some Wikipedia disambiguation pages) with the groups alphabetized. Argadi (talk) 09:31, June 14, 2018 (UTC)
- You've convinced me that the Professor page should remain in some form and be updated to include all the professors, including the new ones. Since I am the one who decided to remove the title "Professor" from the page titles, I will take care of updating the Professor page at some point. -- William Ansley (talk) 03:00, July 2, 2018 (UTC)
- Fine with me. (Except that you're going to have an unbeatable number of recent edits! ☺) Bkharvey (talk) 03:13, June 14, 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks! I forgot about that option. I'll do it from now on. -- William Ansley (talk) 12:14, June 14, 2018 (UTC)
- This is just outside the scope of your changes, but I notice that Sergeant Zuli is in Category:Characters and Category:Characters with Title Sergeant, but Sergeant Scorp isn't in Category:Characters. What should our policy be about including pages in categories which are parents of a category the page is already in? Argadi (talk) 09:41, June 14, 2018 (UTC)
- Yes, I was under the impression that pages inherited all of the parent categories of any subcategory applied to them, but that seems not to be the case. Bummer! I'll have to read through the help pages on categories to see if this is an option that can be activated. If it isn't, I'm not sure what to do; my immediate thought is to apply the character category to all character pages where it is missing, but I also wanted to be able to see all pages in the "Characters by Academic Title" together, as well as the pages in each of the subcategories under it. I'll think about it. -- William Ansley (talk) 12:14, June 14, 2018 (UTC)
- By asking in Wikia Community Central I have confirmed that pages in a child category don't get put in all of that category's parent categories by "inheritance". I have also come to realize that, overall, this is a good thing. However, I also think that all of the GG character pages should definitely be in the character category, so it should be added to the ones that are missing it. A good way to do this easily could be to add the character category to the Character template. What do you think? -- William Ansley (talk) 03:00, July 2, 2018 (UTC)
- Well, I've modified the "Character" infobox template as I indicated, using Wikia documentation and trial and error (a good deal more error than I would have liked, in fact). I have added documentation to the template and have started to remove the "Characters" category on pages where it is explicitly applied. I think this is a win-win project. Wikia guidelines recommend that we do not place pages in both a category and one of its sub-categories. I feel quite justified in making an exception in this case. However, once all of the explicitly applied "Characters" category "tags" are removed from the character pages, it will be fast and easy to remove all of the character pages from the "Characters" category, if a different decision is made in the future. -- William Ansley (talk) 14:54, July 3, 2018 (UTC)