Talk:SDK Docs

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• 28 June 2005 to 4 Aug 2008

Restructuring the category pages

I would like to restructure the categories section from their current implementation for what I believe would be easier navigation. My two suggested changes are stated below. --brandished 05:24, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

1. Over-categorization

I feel many of the categories, such as entities and level design are covering a topic ranges a bit too broad to be useful to most users. I'd like to restructure according to these guidelines from Wikipedia:

An article will often be in several categories. Restraint should be used, however — categories become less effective the more there are on a given article.

An article should usually not be in both a category and its subcategory, e.g. Microsoft Office is in Category:Microsoft software, so should not also be in Category:Software—except when the article defines a category as well as being in a higher category, e.g. Ohio is in both Category:U.S. states and Category:Ohio

For an example, a category I feel would benefit from this is Category: entities. I would like to remove articles related to specific entities from the parent category entities and place them only in subcategories instead. My arguments for this are:

1. There is no clear delimiters as to which game engine, game, or mod certain entities are available for. Many of the articles listed in the main category will be of little to no use to users who don't own those specific games
2. The current tags groups many mostly unrelated articles together.

--brandished 05:24, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

According to wikipedia -

If category B is a non-distinguished subcategory of category A, then pages belonging to category B (directly or through further subcategories) are not placed directly into category A.

If category B is a distinguished subcategory of category A, then pages belonging to category B are placed directly into category A if otherwise appropriate.

If we were to create categories like Entities:Half-Life 2, Entities: Portal, etc. for each game, then the entities that are only in those games would NOT go into the general entities and into the game entities category. However, if an entity is shared between all games it should go into Entities. If an entity is shared between a couple games then it would go into each of the game entity categories and NOT into Entities.

For instance, info_player_start would go into only Category:Entities because every game has that. func_liquidportal would only be in Category:Portal Entities. If we have a Category:NPC Entities, anything in that category would also go into. However if we have a Category:Half-Life 2 NPC Entities, anything in that category would also be in Category:Half-Life 2 Entities because Category:Half-Life 2 NPC Entities is a distinguished subcategory of and none of the pages would be in Category:Entities. I hope this makes some sense because it's kind of a hard thing to explain. If you want, I can try to properly categorize all entities on a page this weekend for review.

--Remmiz 23:57, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

2. Splitting apart category pages from entry pages

Many of the large category pages, such as Category: Level Design, I believe have become too overloaded with content to be easily used as WiKi categories. Many of the categories with these problems are linked directly to the "SDK Docs" page. The actual categorized pages are being over looked and unused by many due to having to scroll to the very bottom of the most of the linked pages to see the actual categorized pages with their current set-up. This problem is compounded if an article in the category is not located within the first 200 results, after clicking next users are forced to scroll through all the contents again to get to the categorized pages. To be clear, I'm not saying get rid of the Category pages, but just moving the table-of-contents parts into regular articles.

For example, the lower half of Category: Level Design, starting from "Subcategories" and below, would remain along with the categorized pages, but table of contents portion above that would be moved outside of the category into an article page. eg, instead of the main page being located at: Level Design

the new location for the table-of-contents parts would be: Level Design

With a link at the top of the category page something like:

The main article for this category is Level Design

--brandished 05:24, 27 March 2009 (UTC)