Forum:Categorization

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Discussions soon after the merger

What do you guys think should be the category scheme for the wiki (e.g. for game-specific units)? Looks like after the merge there are some duplicate categories. If you want, we can use a bot to properly categorize e.g. all Civ4 units in the proper Civ4 units category, we just need to know which category names we should use. Ausir^(talk) 22:42, August 12, 2010 (UTC)

See also project:Categories and Civilization:Categorization. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:59, August 13, 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'd go for a simple Category:Units (Civ4), Category:Buildings (Civ3), Category:Wonders (Civ2), etc. scheme. I actually just changed Template:Unit (Civ4) to add units into the Category:Units (Civ4) category. Unfortunately the articles imported from the Civ4 Wiki also have hard-coded categories set but in time they can be removed. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 15:33, August 14, 2010 (UTC)

I'm happy with those. A couple of characters longer than an alternative such as Category:Civ4:Units but we have so many of the parenthetical pagenames that the suggested system would be less work now. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:32, August 30, 2010 (UTC)

What sort of "hard-coded categories"? Whatever they are, can't we {{Category redirect}} them all with a bit of bot help? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:32, August 30, 2010 (UTC)

"Hard-coded" in the sense that it actually reads "[[Category:Units]]" on those pages, which means the category assignment cannot be removed simply by editing the template. It's not a big deal though. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 21:55, August 30, 2010 (UTC)

Of course. They can keep those categories, mostly useful for editors checking on completeness. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:54, August 31, 2010 (UTC)

See also Civilization:Category layout‎, imported from Civ4 after a long history after being copied from this wiki (but don't ask me which page!). I've added some clarifying notes at the top of each section. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 15:32, August 30, 2010 (UTC)

Neat. I renamed the article to Civilization:Civilization 4 category layout though as the previous name suggested that the given scheme should be followed with each game, and the page didn't contain separate categories for things of different games (such as Category:Units (Civ4) and Category:Units (Civ3), only. I think we need to get rid of the non-disambiguated categories or to make them disambiguation/overview categories only, so that they'd contain sub-categories for each game. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 21:55, August 30, 2010 (UTC)

The non-disambiguated categories are already acting as disambiguation/overview categories, in an incomplete way. Certainly should not be deleted. Useful for anyone interested in comparing games. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:54, August 31, 2010 (UTC)

Consequent developments

Just for info: most of the above discussion led to agreement. Our clever templates are now geared up for that kind of structure; but some old pages have yet to be revised accordingly. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:42, July 16, 2011 (UTC)

For example, see the "Duplications" heading below. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:36, August 26, 2011 (UTC)

Which categories should an article be in?

I was wondering about the categories for Advances/Technology. I was scrolling through them, and there are a lot of different categories on different pages. I'm currently trying to sort all of this out - I'm wondering, what are the right categories? I personally think, from all of the pages i looked through, the one with the best idea Had [[Category:Civilization III]], [[Category:Technologies (Civ3)]], and [[Category:Technologies]]. I thought this makes sense, for various reasons.

1. It should be in a large Category that contained all civ3 things (Civilization III Category)
2. It should be in a list of Technologies for Civ3 (Technologies (Civ3) category)
3. It should be in a large Technology/Advancement database. (Technologies Category)

Please tell me what you think!

Curycoo From PPW ^{@Wiki-A-While} 11:45, July 16, 2011 (UTC)

I like all of those. The second one is practically compulsory. The first and third would get frowned at by Wikipedia purists because "Technologies (Civ3)" should be in both of them, making the "leap-frog" links ontologically redundant; but we can make good use of such comprehensive categories here for looking through to see where we may have gaps.

A possible fourth category would be for the actual tech, but the overview page probably suffices for linking those from other games. Check that each article has a link to the relevant overview page, e.g. "Archer is an early unit in Civ3".

For some games and some types of article, a suitable fourth or fifth category, smaller than any of the above, would be something like "Ground units (C-evo)" or "Militaristic city-states (Civ5)" or "Industrial Age advances (Civ-whatever)".

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 13:42, July 16, 2011 (UTC)

Duplications

As noted above, we have some duplications. Here, for example, are the "Units" categories at present:

1. Units (BTS)
2. Units (BtS)
3. Units (C-evo)
4. Units (Civ1)
5. Units (Civ2)
6. Units (Civ3)
7. Units (Civ4)
8. Units (Civ5)
9. Units (Colonization)
10. Units (Conquests)
11. Units (Freeciv)
12. Units (PtW)
13. Units (ToT)
14. Units (Warlords)
15. Units in Civilization
16. Units in Civilization 5
17. Units in Civilization II
18. Units in Civilization III
19. Units in Civilization III: Conquests
20. Units in Civilization III: Play the World
21. Units in Civilization IV
22. Units in Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
23. Units in Civilization IV: Warlords
24. Units in Civilization Revolution
25. Units in Colonization
26. Units in FreeCol
27. Units in Freeciv
28. Units in Test of Time
29. Units in Test of Time Fantasy

We should be redirecting all of the "Units in" ones to the shorter parenthetical forms. Use {{Category redirect}}. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 05:36, August 26, 2011 (UTC)

For long-term benefit, however, whenever you edit a page that has some of the "whatever it is in such-and-such a game" categories, please change that to the standard parenthetical one. We are a little unlikely to get a bot to do that for us. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:18, January 25, 2012 (UTC)

Update: some of the duplication is getting reduced, but I (and maybe other editors) seem unsure about the scenarios or extensions, such as "PtW". Some of the reason may be that even some players of those tend to forget which civ game they were part of. How about a slightly longer but rather more explanatory expression such as " (Civ3 PtW)"? That will be clearer at a glance, and will also greatly reduce the chance of duplication if some game in the future produces a scenario or extension with the same abbreviation as another game. As soon as one of those categories is actually created, "autocomplete" will make it fairly easy to add to any article without too much typing. -- Robin Patterson (Talk)

Categorization through templates

Part of my philosophy when editing is that most content pages (Units, buildings, technologies) should contain no categories in their text if it can be avoided. The categories should be automatically added through templates. As such I consider it good practice to create a template per category, even if all that template does is add a category and some navigation links (See Template:GameConceptNav5). This makes the act of adding and/or removing categories trivially easy and removes the need to edit every page each time the categorization policy changes. One of my next categorization projects is to have the technologies assign themselves in the right era category automatically, based on their Science cost. This might mean creating a duplicate of each civ5 era to keep the g&k eras separated, as the current method brings about confusion. --Becer (talk) 17:08, February 12, 2013 (UTC)

Seems good in principle. I looked at GameConceptNav5 but saw no documentation and didn't check its coding, so I can't imagine exactly what it does. (By the way, as part of the cleanup could you add a response to the above section?) -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 21:51, February 13, 2013 (UTC)

Also in reply to Becer's paragraph just above (specifically the last sentence of it) - not all games (not even all official Civ Series games) have the "era" separation of techs. Generally, in Civ1 and Civ2 anyway, if you have the prerequisite techs you can start researching any tech. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:22, July 12, 2013 (UTC)

Categorizing templates is now easier

As noted on Forum:Templates update, categorizing templates is now easier because the software now strips "Template:" from pagenames for category listing (as it did for "Category:" several years ago). So you no longer need to add |{{PAGENAME}} after the category name. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:22, July 12, 2013 (UTC)

"Civ5 templates" etc

In classifying templates for specific games (a very good idea) we seem to have started categories such as "Civ5 templates", not "Templates (Civ5)". I'm happy with that shorter version, but I'm open to change if someone who has looked into it can see a good reason why we should use the longer version. -- Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:22, July 12, 2013 (UTC)