I'm new here and I have a question to Lord of the Rings online. I started a Epic-Quest and I had to defend a guy against some bird. But eventually there was just one bird coming and no more, but the quest wasn't over. So I canceled the Quest. But now I notice that I cant do anymore Epic-Quests... How could I be able to restart the canceled Quest?
Thanks in advance.

MAx

Overall I'm OK with whatever is done. I strongly dislike liquid threads myself and don't read nor reply to pages using them. But I don't use the forums much either and should be fine without this platform.

I think not having to log into two different locations would be a great benefit, plus having the ability to receive notifications on the wiki account. I think I'm not the only one who has on occasion simply forgotten that I wrote something once upon a time in a forum thread. The Recent Changes clutter is a bit annoying, but it's probably worth trying - it can be reevaluated if there's a big problem. Sometimes it would be very helpful to have a central discussion place, rather than going to the talk page of a certain person, as long as people don't start going there and neglecting the relevant talk pages.

(Not sure if that answered any of your questions, Steve, but you can take a look at the Talk pages of Lotroadmin, Magill, and RingTailCat, who are among the intrepid few who have already enabled LiquidThreads on their talk pages. It's a format that is enabled on a per-page basis. It's a recent change, so don't feel bad.)

How exactly will this work? Why would we need to enable a talk page? This is kind of new to me, hate to sound like a newb...

Steve

Recreating a forum structure with the topics we have here should be simple enough - we could use a namespace for it, but even that much isn't necessary. Just set aside a few pages, add a link from the main page, and - boom - we're set.

Drawback might be what RingTailCat mentioned on Lotroadmin's talk page, though, about wiki Recent Changes getting cluttered, but the forum's not too terribly busy as it is, so it shouldn't add much more traffic to the wiki except for those rare moments when official boards are down and everyone falls back to us. :-P

If this works out, I think it would be best to retire forums.lotro-wiki.com. This does a few things. 1) No longer need a second user account, 2) one location to fight spam, 3) LT offers notifications when you log on to the wiki.

Feel free to use my talk page to discuss this and try out LT.
http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/User_talk:Lotroadmin

This topic is not about the past nor the current, though it cannot be ignored completely. This topic is also somewhat related to the subject "Visionary thinking" ( http://forums.lotro-wiki.com/topic.php?id=222 ), or rather the other way around ;)

We all know what categories are meant for, but I repeat the Wiki-guidelines:

1. An article must be added to at least one category.
2. An article should be in the most narrow categories that make sense.
3. An article should exist just once in a particular branch of categories; see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Categories#Over-categorization
4. A category should be contained by at least one other category, up to Category:CommonsRoot (which is invisible or may have another name, in our case Category:Lord of the Rings Online)
5. Categories must not form cycles (i.e. a category should not contain itself, directly or indirectly)
6. The category structure should reflect a hierarchy of concepts, from the most generic one down to the very specific.
7. Create new categories slowly and with thought, they must justify their existence on their own merit.
8. Split large categories if that is possible and makes sense.

Comments on them one by one:

1) We do that very well. Only 9 results in http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Special:UncategorizedPages but a bit worse in http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Special:UncategorizedFiles

2) We break this .. consistently. The quest template breaks it via questgroup which adds to a high level but the editor follows this rule and add quests at the narrowest scope. The location templates does this by adding everything below region to their region, but many articles should rather go into settlement, area, and even sub-area (in Moria, Barrow-downs, instances, etc.), which then link "upwards". This is mainly a template issue, not category, but will be discussed further down.

We break 2) in some other ways by disallowing certain categories. One example that comes to mind are creatures, most creatures exist in just one or a few areas (some as narrow as a landmark) but we categorize them by region. This is done also for creatures that never roam all over a region but stick just to their limited corner. For a very small region it would be OK, otherwise not. Any similar occasion would better be thought through once again.

3) We do seldom do this manually but templates consistently cause this, see 2). When it is done manually it is because of ignorance; for example, somebody does not realize that a Book-quest becomes included in Epic Quests via the Book-category.

4) All categories are within another one up to the root. Good.

5) Do we have circular category inclusions? If so it will be fixed :) However, there is a risk that we make it happen because of articles being "over-categorized" and if they transclude...

6) We have a good hierarchical structure.

Our problem is that we at the same time have some old category branches that are not yet emptied and done with. It would be great if each of these were tagged with "obsolete", from a top-node and all the way down the tree to its leaves. That would alert anybody that wonders to not use them in an article.

7) This is not really a problem. We tend to delete new categories quicker than we create them ;)

Our problem is rather connected with 2) since we (or some) disallow more precise categories even if they justify their own existence very well.

Personally I believe that with good communication and doing the suggestion in 6) we would have less of a problem with new or narrow categories. But again, I certainly do not suggest going from one wild-grown jungle just to quickly till and grow another one. The uttermost important thing is to communicate the overall idea, then patrol that it is implemented as thought. Not too rigid or square, because things change, but with sense.

8) This is not applicable today because we have so many higher-level categories that are bloated by flawed templates which do not use the narrowest categories. Once templates are updated and we have come to some agreement, would there really be categories with massive amounts of articles? I do not think so. At least none that we could think of being split.

Templates and categories

This subject is better discussed in forum-topics per template, because each has its own issues to deal with. There is a topic running about quest templates: Quest template discussion ( http://forums.lotro-wiki.com/topic.php?id=224 ). Most of its parameters do a proper job and add to narrowest possible category, but "questgroup" does not and is most often flawed, but occasionally it works, more by chance than design though ;)

Over time the different location-templates need to be discussed, perhaps the creature template, the NPC template, and some more. These discussions would all be about templates versus categories.

This is another lengthy wall of text, I know. On the other hand, if we do not discuss then nothing will happen. Also, discussing just a narrow part of a problem and solving it, not seldom that just moves the problem a bit, out of one's sight, but into two's room. This is probably not intentionally but because the issue was not penetrated in the full context it is not resolved but moved.

Moving On -- Suggestion

The very first thing I would love to see happen is the suggestion in 6).
* Somebody amends {{Obsolete}} with support for type=category.
* Then, somebody with great knowledge of which categories are considered obsolete, please walk over them, and their child nodes, and add {{Obsolete|type=category}} to each of them.
* Then, any editor may help empty the generated Category:Obsolete Categories. Often this means a bigger bit of editing, perhaps to apply a missing template, conform to our current style, etc. And as a result remove the obsolete category-tag from the article.

Having that behind us we enjoy a cleaner wiki, and new editors will have a lot less to jack-in-the-box about :D

Cheers

Zimoon

Recent weekend I simply tried to play the newcomer and using the create-new-X pages and the help-pages. Together with several editors, including you M, I hope the "helpfulness" has improved and become more consistent. Plus that some obsolete boilerplates are now archived and one or two will be pandered to soon enough.

However, this subject is specifically posted under the subject of "Quest Template Discussion" and how to improve that particular one.

I absolutely agree with "For me, the basic question comes back to ... what is it that people are looking for, and how do they look for it?"

Categories are per definition not there to in any way reflect how Turbine has labeled quests (if Turbine is the probe-stone we would need to rip up quite a few categories and start over from scratch with some large chunks of articles we have ;) ). Thence, it is up to us to define their purpose, and then to design a system from that. Not the other way around, to apply a pattern onto something where it does fit.

That is why I feel "questgroup" is completely wrong. It adds quests randomly to categories for "location quests", "special quests", "festival quests", etc. And I mean randomly in the worst meaning because quest editors now have to manually add what is missing. I could list a few examples based on real quests:

Some quests are only available during Yuletide. However, they are labeled as Festival, hence they will end up in the Festival Quests category. Hence the editor amends the proper information and adds the Yuletide Quests category, which is a sub-category of Festival Quests. The editor also correctly adds the quest to a location category for where it starts. Should the quest be timed, escort, etc., also these must be added manually.

Loads of quests are labeled for a region, which is fair enough on a higher level. But for search-ability on a smaller scope this ain't the best approach. Neither for casual visitors (those that know how to use the categories) nor editors* Hence quest editors now adds a category for the most narrow start-location (except if that is the one quest at that landmark I hope, then it could go into the area). Eventually all quests end up in the region category anyway.

There are several more examples like this, the questgroup adds to a category that is either too broad, and it must almost always be complemented manually.

The only logical (if that "is" logical?) would be to have a category directly under C:Quests that is named C:Quest Groups, which contains the possible "groups" as read in the quest log. But they should not be part of location-quests, festival-quests, or anything else, that is just for the "group" label ... which is a completely different animal than location, event, class, etc. I do NOT suggest this, I just wanted to point at the anomaly with questgroup that we have today, when it randomly adds to location, festival, etc., but at a too high level.

But more important, since the "questgroup" adds the quest to a random category and the editor must yet again remember to add the missing items. Or he forgets it. Which leads to less accurate information elsewhere.

That is why I suggested the addition of one or more parameters that if set overrule the "questgroup" parameter.

I am not bitter nor angry, just a bit frustrated (but not pointed at any identified individual, mind you :)) because it adds sooooooooo much of extra time to meaningless edits. I hope to get this sorted soon, which together with some other templates would make this wiki great.

* Footnote: As you know I have mainly been working on Category:Locations, to "empty" it. As a side effect I have tried hard to add missing NPCs, quests, deeds, etc. Can anybody of you imagine how much time is wasted on that ONLY BECAUSE the category system is less than pristine? Minutes? Fifteen? Half-an-hour? Forget that, often it is way over an hour .. for one location .. and if it a settlement or area we speak several hours. Mainly that is because I do not find what I look for in the category tree!!!

However, this is not the fault of anybody around. It seems most job is from older sins -- I sincerely wish so. But the fact that we stumble over old sins that were to one extreme does not force us to today go to the other extreme.

Conclusion: to save loads of time and to ease the job for all editors we, you, you, and I, need to think through what we want from the category system, update the help-pages, and then continue with a smile :

/Zimoon

Quick comment then - transclusions are needed any time the same info is in multiple places. So that we don't get " partially updated" info conflicting in different articles

Steve

Steve

Steve

That said... here's a comment for you.

The whole issue of Categorization is undefined ... and apparently not particularly a subject which people wish to define.

The discussion page I just put together "User_talk:Magill/Sandbox-Help:Getting_Started_editing_or_creating_pages" tries to approach the documentation problem as a Whole. In particular there are two pages about Categorization which have been recommended to be merged now since February of 2011....

http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Lotro-Wiki_Categorization
and
http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Categorization_Guideline
For which I generated a proposed merged page:
http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/User:Magill/Sandbox-5
back in June... when I was very new (since May) to the Wiki and was trying to figure out "Who's on first?" (Which is an old Aboott and Costello Comedy Routine for those of you who don't recognize it. YOu can watch the skit here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sShMA85pv8M )

So, from my point of view... the whole definition of "what is an appropriate category" is undefined and at best poorly documented .... the most definition coming from the "auto-categorization" done by the various templates.
(And things are complicated by the fact that Turbine has apparently changed their naming conventions over time, AND we are only guessing what we assume Turbine's naming conventions to be!)
-----
For me, the basic question comes back to ... what is it that people are looking for, and how do they look for it?
-----
"... the question is if a new "questcategory" variable that can take multiple arguments will cover for such needs? Or must we have one variable for each of them?"

To this i would answer... it depends on how they are documented.

Using the "Boilerplate/Template" mechanism, multiple items are probably easier to "comment" -- although they can quickly get out of hand -- witness the "Create Item" issue:
http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/User:Adelas/Sandbox-itemboilerplate

But the question then rises as a result -- if the Template is not included in the Boilerplate (which it is not) then what the user sees in the end can be quite different than what they see in the beginning of the "creation process." (I.e. comments in the Boilerplate, and indeed parameters are often "different" from that which are in the Template. (Hopefully still) I corrected a bunch of such missing pieces with the "Quest Boilerplate/Template/Create Quest" framework a while back.

"In theory" -- (and I think this is what Seth is ultimately working on at: http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/User:Sethladan/Sandbox)
There could be one "simple" -- create entry point whch then has AI ask you questions to determine what it is that you A) want to do and B) need to do.

... I don't know if any of this makes any sense....
/Magill

Thanks for the example tests you posted with dynamic- and category-tree views. I guess they won't do right yet as most people also want to know quest level already before they click the link for the quests. And possibly stuff we flavor the lists with, such as faction, fellowship, etc. Perhaps it is easiest for now to transclude "upwards" from "lower" categories, or...?

Server load may become an issue yes. I do not know how heavy transclusions are, neither if they happen per page load (per visitor), nor if they are "compiled and cached". If the latter I guess it won't hurt at all, only when something is edited that affects pages "upwards".

I pass on the admin-rights. If it becomes an issue or if people begin to abuse or destroy our dear work then...

@Ravanel: good point about newbies, who we welcome, right? At least I feel welcomed. I guess it depends on where and how they are used, that is for sure. Even though I believe that if somebody wants to edit something and finds lots of unknown tags he would step back a bit and think twice about what he sees. I think of things like <onlyinclude> and <includeonly> but think the <noinlcude> is pretty self-explanatory. BUT, you are right, this might be an issue that must be patrolled.

Worse is though, if something is corrected at some page and the editor does not know that this info is duplicated at this, that, and maybe more pages ;) Quests are like that, there is a quest-starter, a starting-location, an involved-location, an end-location, and only Gandalf knows what more. Not even I or so many more remembers to update all of these pages when we edit a quest.

I guess many more pages are like that. Creatures for example, they are now categorized under region, even though you won't find slugs (spelling?) from Rushock Bog over at Stock, still they are categorized under The Shire. Most creatures are found just in one or a few Areas, some even at/around just one Landmark. But the only way to find them all for a particular location is by sifting through what-links-here. That said, I believe we should be very conservative with the landmark thing, perhaps allow them just for named mobs.

That was a roundabout, again. I do not think there are many places we would use loads of transclusions, but some would benefit from being chopped up somewhat. Those few and their feeders needs to be monitored of course, perhaps using the "My Watchlist" is enough, I am not sure.

Either way. I explained my very on-clouds vision, not wanting to filter out what was possible or not. As lotroadmin nailed it: "this is one area that the pure database websites excel at and where wiki are behind on". But we are here just because it is a wiki, and we will do the best we can with it and perhaps take it to another level :)

/Z

You guys shouldn't worry too much about the power costs of default and "improved" skills. So far I've found that they always follow the same power cost, so there is no problem with this. On my Lore-master, I've written down the power cost of the 'old' skill at the latest level and that of the improved skill at the same level, and they were always the same. This has been the case for all improved skills in between level 65 and 75, and also earlier on. I think we can safely assume that Turbine is too lazy to change power cost for normal and improved versions of skills, and we can safely add the tables for the old skills to level cap, as it is theoretically possible that someone keeps it.

About the Class Skill pages: right now they show the power cost as it is at the level you get it. This always seems to confuse editors who fill in different values (mostly for their own level). Another disadvantage is that you can not compare them. If they would all represent the cost at the same level, you can see directly which skills are expensive and which are cheap in use. As Seth was planning on consolidating all Class Skill pages into one format, I proposed level 75 because it's a logical choice, being the level cap, but also because you need to have all skills in order to be able to compare them. Currently, you get your last skill at level 74.

As soon as everybody agrees on power cost at level 75 > power cost at level skill received, we can update all those Class Skill pages and should add a "Power cost at 75" label. I'm looking at Seth now, as this is his project.

But it seems that at least Elinnea agrees. :)

@Aydeen, good to see someone else is helping out with skill pages. Seems like it's a hot topic at the moment, which is all the better since perhaps they'll be all up to date soon! :D

"What I like with a Wiki is that virtually anybody can add, complement, correct, and remove content. A Wiki rocks any forum or db-driven site always."

And:

"This takes another part of the vision to make more use of transclusions: break long articles into shorter and just transclude their summaries; and use category pages for transclusion of facts or lists unless tree-features can do the job."

If you use a LOT of transclusions, will this not just confuse casual editors? They'll try to edit pages that are being transcluded, breaking the style as it looks on the main page where they are combined. Or they will try to edit a page which contains a lot of transclusions and won't understand where they can edit what they want.

I like transclusions, but if they would be literally everywhere, they might confuse people.

I believe most editors try to use the catogories based on in-game usage, which I do consider to be the most logical. For example, quests are listed by region but not landmark, so the category needs to match the in-game category. I see both sides to this argument and I think with the right extensions, javascript and api.php calls we can make tables that can sort quests in a region by landmarks, etc.

One of the reasons why we tie categories to templates is mainly to simplify editing for other users and even keep it consistent.

I will admit this is one area that the pure database websites excel at and where wiki are behind on.

Now for transclusion, I have mixed feelings honestly. One hand it resembles categories but with a better presentation, on the other hand, transclusion is a server side load, and just like templates, we would have to monitor the usage. Certain templates you need a certain rank to even edit, transclusion might even have to follow that approach. I wouldn't expect transclusion to be a huge issue initially, and don't even know where the server load threshold exists, so it's defiantly worth a try.

This isn't my call though, the wiki Bureaucrats and Admins can voice opinions on how categories and transclusion should work as a community. With that said, if we need an wiki extension to improve presentation, I don't have any issues trying them out.

We more or less concluded that the variable "questcategory" is not always the best solution for adding a quest to a category location; the example was "Epic" which is not a location. It is a category, yes, but any epic quest is rather categorized under Intro, Book I, etc.

That said, templates are great because the do so many cool stuff for the ignorant editor that would otherwise be just half-done or just half-correct --- initially we all do mistakes ;P

Moving forward

1) Find which categories we want a template to populate and when.
2) Find out how the template can be improved with backwards compatibility.
2) Tweak the template to accommodate the improvements.

---------

Locations:
Today we list quests for two different use-cases: starting and involving. The "starting" thing is natural. But the "involving" case, is that wanted and used much? This is an honest question, I am unbiased but we need to gather this info.

Usually startinglocation = LOC can be used to set Category:LOC Quests
Sometimes startinglocation is empty, it is started by a letter or an item, but it is still not certain that questgroup is the best fall-back.

If we want "involved" in the template we need the following to discern them from "starting", somewhat error-prone:
* Category:LOC Involved in Quests (or shorter, C:LOC InvQuests).
* Variable questinvolved, which can take several locations and make them into categories.
Notice that we can always omit this feature and manually find the difference between C:LOC Quests and what-link-here for LOC using quest-name-space. And remember to review locations when we read through or update quests.

------

Misc:
We have a lot of quests that are in miscellaneous categories, such as crafting, season, special, etc. Sometimes this matches the questgroup but more often they do not. Example: a quest is just spring-festival, but its questgroup is Festival. C:Spring Festival Quests is sub-cat of C:Festival Quests so the spring version should be used.

Effectively these quests ask for a variable "questcategory" which probably can take several arguments, such as Spring Festival, XXX Ale, etc., which adds to their category respectively.

Over time perhaps this new variable can replace class, profession, and race, can it?

----

The startinglocation and the questcategory variables are not mutually exclusive.

In the end, only if none of these new variables is set, fall back to questgroup, no matter what it reads. At least we then have a list of quests to look into for an overhaul.

----

You know that I am not high-level in LOTRO and thence there are certainly corner-cases I have not thought of. Either way, the question is if a new "questcategory" variable that can take multiple arguments will cover for such needs? Or must we have one variable for each of them?

----

Timeframe?
The sooner the better as we are all updating quests at the moment. Some of us are adding news that came with ROI, myself is emptying C:Locations, with side effects; and I am slowly walking through The Shire to fill potholes, and then touching quests. My next turn after C:Locations will be walking over location-categories one by one, region-and-areas. All of this includes quests.

Objections?
Suggestions?

/Zimoon

So, I'm guessing that you are using the completely batch process to update the index... as opposed to the "incremental on-the-fly index updates"

That said, since the power costs for regular/improved skills seem to be in line, it seems trivial to list both...but for the sake of consistency... heh.

The subject line kind of sets the tone. The tech details we can get into a tad later. And rather than thinking 'this cannot be done' think 'can something similar be done?' ... surprisingly often it can. Dreaming is one thing, implementing is another story.

What I like with a Wiki is that virtually anybody can add, complement, correct, and remove content. A Wiki rocks any forum or db-driven site always. However, when a wiki becomes a massive db but as text pages, then we stretch its possibilities. We have thousands of articles which fits a db perfectly, but in a Wiki the "relational" in a db is rather the category system.

When, I mean 'when' and not 'if', we finally have cleaned out old times' dirt from categories AND have linked articles to best-fit categories we will be in a position when articles are maintained with the least effort. I will give an example in a snap.

-------

On another note, today we have many loooooooong articles full of facts of all sorts. Most of the factual section is each in itself a short article (sometimes one exists which then partly doubles the long one). Only a few over-sight articles seems to be built by transcluding from shorter, with some great exceptions.

This takes another part of the vision to make more use of transclusions: break long articles into shorter and just transclude their summaries; and use category pages for transclusion of facts or lists unless tree-features can do the job.

--------

Consistency -- many pages, location articles most of all, provide lists of this and that. With up-to-date categorization it is easy to check that a page is consistent with other info. Or when adding something somewhere it may automatically propagate to pages, via the category-tree (or similar) features. Exactly how will differ, but even without automation it is simple to check if a certain category matches some page which lists some data.

EXAMPLE: Think of Burrow-downs for a minute, there are dozens of quests, NPCs, creatures, interiors(dungeons), deeds, loot items, objects, and maybe more. A player finds that creature X in tomb Z is missing at the Wiki and adds it. He is not aware of locations, quests, and Gandalf knows what. Or he is in a hurry and later he forgets the rest. With the template properly filled it is added to Category: Z Creatures (or maybe Mobs).

Now we several scenarios: the article for tomb Z may show a tree-list of all creatures from the category which now is correct; or another editor updates a manual list at the category page which is transcluded to landmark, area, "creatures in Bree-land" or what that oversight page is called, and so forth. Also the creature-type page is updated the same way. But essentially it boils down to having a category named Cat:Z Creatures, with such a narrow scope.

The very same vision applies to whatever lies the closest to YOUR heart. With a narrow category its information can be used by its closest stakeholders, the next "parent", and so on.

My problem ... or rather, what shadows the dream ... is that today we have several templates that automatically assigns an article to a category, but it is not the most logical category. And no, I do not *only* refer to landmarks which skips over their areas (wink wink) but there are other templates as well.

Hence, I welcome a fact-based discussion on how we best and quickest can arrive at a dream :D

/Zimoon

(Good point about skills that get upgraded/replaced, though. Hm hm hm...)

More things are coming with the new search engine.. i.e. "did you mean" spell checking and better character mapping for those funny ones...

I took out the Power Cost listing on the Guardian skills, and replaced it with recovery time before seeing your post though, Sethladan. I'll try adding them back in with level 75 values, then!