Wiki Development Project: Namespace Cleanup and Configuration

Hi, folks! We're currently in the middle of an extended wiki development project that will add some nifty tools to the moderation kit (and some bells and whistles for tropers as well). While a full list of what's coming is outside the scope of this topic, there is one very specific thing that needs community involvement and feedback: the namespace configuration system.

In a Nutshell

We're changing namespaces from informal components that anyone can add (you can make an article in the "Glurkbrgl" namespace if you want, just by editing it) to a formal list of allowed values. This list can be added to and offers additional controls, such as the ability to set which style sheet is used by articles in the namespace, which page type is the default, the icon for the namespace tab bar, and how editing and article creation work.

Edited by nombretomado on Jan 5th 2020 at 11:39:34 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That Castle example brings up one question: How should works with multiple trope pages be handled? As it is, they (at least many do; not sure how consistently) use the work name as the namespace, with a page name like "TropesAToZ". Is there a different solution in mind for that, or do we continue to create them like that?

Check out my fanfiction!

That's a very good question, and the answer comes down to a dichotomy between what works and what I think is the best practice.

Best-practice, the splits would be the namespace and the article name would be the title. So rather than Castle.Tropes A To D, it would be TropesAToD.Castle, to fit the pattern of existing subpage usage (YMMV.Castle, Trivia.Castle, etc.).

The primary benefits of this are:

• The namespace header bar would work with these subpages.
• They would fit the pattern of other subpages.
• We wouldn't have to make a new namespace each time a work article is hard split for length.

The drawbacks are:

• We'd have to maintain a namespace for each alphabetical split that's in use (or forcibly consolidate them).
• It'd be a lot of work to move all the articles.
• The Wiki Word for each subpage would render as the title of the article (Castle), rather than Tropes A to D as it does currently. This would require some mental shifts in how people use such links.

Changing the work split structure would have the additional advantage that it would make the eventual migration to the 2.0 design (should that come to fruition) much easier, as we wouldn't have to create special handling for all the subpages.

Bottom line: yes, it would be better, but are we willing to do the work? Also, I'd recommend that the effort to do this, if we decide to, should go in a separate Projects thread.

edited 7th Jun '17 12:16:10 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I've set up the Namespace Cleanup Project page. It's causing the site to throw a "page too long" error, but I'm hoping it can be managed. If there are suggestions for how to do it better, I'm all ears.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Hello. I just wanted to warn everyone that the Pl Komiks and Pl Subiektywny Odbior are Polish versions of the Comic Book and YMMV namespaces, respectively. Please don't delete them. The Polish translations are still a work in progress, but I will post my ideas for the Polish namespaces soon. Thank you, Piterpicher.

edited 7th Jun '17 1:15:06 PM by Piterpicher

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Later on I'll take a look at some of the under-used namespaces we have, like Video Games, try to figure out what's useful and what's not.

Would there be any better way, plus or minus the 2.0 revamp, to organize sub-pages for tropes rather than creating a new namespace per trope? Because at a glance that's the issue with the page I provided; the namespace exists for the two sub-pages of this trivia page.

"But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you." - O'Brien, 1984

Don't worry. Nothing's being deleted without a justification.

But let's start with something kind of crazy, from the "there's only one of these" part of the list: StorylineAndAesopReactionsAndInterpretations.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. Really, folks? Assuming that we need a subpage just for this stuff, it can go as YMMV.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Storyline And Aesop Reactions or something like that.

edited 7th Jun '17 1:36:11 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I skimmed over the list, and some of them had up to seven or eight trope pages sorted alphabetically. Many of them had redirects (usually a real page like TropesAToZ with a redirect like TropesA-Z), character pages in the "work" namespace, and other organisations, such as by season. In total, I'd estimate at most some 10%-20% of all namespaces are used like that, but it's hard to get an exact number. Maybe less.

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Rotpar: Unfortunately, I see no functional way, pending the 2.0 design, to eliminate subpages that use the trope as the namespace.

Another Duck: I feel like we may end up doing some sort of title search for all pages whose names start with "Tropes" and putting that as a separate cleanup effort.

edited 7th Jun '17 1:37:43 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Presumably the Split Trope Pages will be handled the same way as the Split Works Pages question. like how... DeaderThanDisco has been split into 17 different pages. ... And the Translations will follow the same...

And then there's Disambig.Dead Air, which is a Disambiguation, but it's the only one that's in the Disambig namespace, presumably 'cause it's got a trope called that as well.

edited 7th Jun '17 2:08:57 PM by Malady

Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576

Now that's a much-welcome, much-needed project.

Note that a lot of one-entry namespaces are just redirects to a work, usually because the initial page was created under a wrong namespace. For example, LiveActionTV.Felix The Cat Live (redirect to Series/); or Podcasts.New Generation Project Podcast (redirect to Podcast/).

I assume that, for those barely useful redirects, we can clean them up freely without having to check here? That'll simplify things for everybody.

Yes, by all means chop away at those bad-namespace redirects!

Disambig.Dead Air may have to be transplanted back to the trope page. As it stands, it's pointless, because nobody will ever link directly to the namespace. The reason disambigs live in Main in the first place is to capture naked wicks.

edited 7th Jun '17 2:03:13 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I'd keep this type of formula: Live-Action TV.

This type of formula is another matter: Write A Cloudcuckoolander.

edited 7th Jun '17 2:04:24 PM by ANTMuddle

Live-Action TV is not currently a valid namespace, although the idea of using it for medium splits of trope pages has some merit. The problem is when you also do work subpages for the trope. LiveActionTV.Badass Adorable is a trope subpage split by medium, while BadassAdorable.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic is a work subpage split by trope? Confusion all around.

Edit: You edited your post, making what I wanted to say moot.

The So You Want To namespace is fine to leave as is. No reason to mess with it as it lives in Just for Fun and helps us keep those things separate. If we want to be really pedantic, we could fold all of those in to the JFF namespace, reattaching the So You Want To part into the title: SoYouWantTo.Write A Story => JustForFun.So You Want To Write A Story. But I don't really see the point.

edited 7th Jun '17 2:11:38 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I have, thanks to the admins, downloaded two lists queried from the database.

The first is all articles not in Main whose title starts with "Tropes". Google Drive link. There are some obvious false positives but it's enough to start with.

The second is all namespaces whose name matches the name of a trope. Google Drive link. We can eliminate any that are for works and then identify them all as 'a subpage'.

Edit: By the statistics, roughly 53% of all namespaces are trope subpages.

edited 7th Jun '17 4:21:27 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Does this mean we can finally change Videogame to Video Game? :D

The Protomen enhanced my life.

"recap" and "tropers" are two we can probably afford to get away with. Work pages can already get their own namespace, so there's no reason to have a separate one for recaps and even though I have a page myself, it's mainly there for the purpose of curating pages I launched, and I haven't even been doing that well. Watch List and To Do List can easily achieve the same function, especially since other tropers can't even edit your page anymore, which takes all the fun out of it.

I understand why headscratchers and fridge have two different namespaces, (it made more sense when headscratchers was "It Just Bugs Me") but if push comes to shove those two could be merged, with !!! for "headscratchers" and another for !!! "fridge logic" on the same page, the way some trope pages have !!!"examples where this" and !!!"examples where that".

Anime and western animation should just be merged into animation, the way every other regional variant of animation already is, although I suppose web animation can get a pass it could be folded into fan works and web original with no real loss.

Manga, comicbook, comicstrip, manhwa, manhua. That's even worse, they should all be merged under comics and be done with. Again, webcomics might get a pass here but they could be folded into web original and fanworks with no real loss.

Bollywood having a usefulnotes page and an index is fine. Why it has a namespace is beyond me. The film namespace seems sufficient.

That's why he wants you to have the money. Not so you can buy 14 Cadillacs but so you can help build up the wastes

Web Original hasn't been a valid namespace for a few years because it is way too vague.

Animation and comics are an issue because there are distinct subtypes that mean different things to different countries and audiences. Anime and Hollywood animation are incredibly different categories, as are manga and western comics.

We definitely need to figure out what to do with all the smaller subtypes of both. Only thing that's crossed my mind is East and West, but that's 1) tacky and gross and 2) often not accurate.

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. -Terry Pratchett

Web Original has already been covered by Web Video, Podcast, Web Comics, and other namespaces, so I agree that it seems unnecessary.

If we're really looking for namespaces to cut, check out the Just for Fun homepages listed here^{Link works} I used an anchor point so it's red even though it works. Most of them are in one-off namespaces like Yoda, ROT13, and Elmer Fudd. Nearly everything below the Just For Fun marker there is from a namespace that can be cut.

We aren't cutting or redoing any primary medium namespaces or popular subpages. Let's not get crazy here: we're far less concerned with Tropers and Recap than we are with stuff toward the bottom of the list.

The alt-language home pages are fine; they're not hurting anything and they're fun.

edited 8th Jun '17 6:16:19 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

About WebOriginal/, although it is true that we tried to discontinue it and LOTS of work pages using it should be better in another namespaces, it is still in legit use for some works that are very difficult to pin down (as specified on Wick Namespace Migration).

For example, where else would you put the OS-tan page?

edited 8th Jun '17 7:15:56 AM by StFan

Yep. We won't arbitrarily cut those namespaces, although we may make it more difficult to create new articles in them. Nothing's set in stone, anyway.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

May be a dumb question, but... it seems a lot of the issues relate to pages that were split for length. But each page is basically all text, with maybe one image at the top. Text doesn't take long to load. Maybe the solution is to just stop splitting pages, and merge all the ones that were already split back into one? (So the aforementioned 'Castle A-D, Castle E-H, etc.' pages would be concatenated into just one Series/Castle page, for instance).

There's a limit to how large a file can be without breaking the server. It's not a small number, but pages that are split for length generally have neared or exceeded it. Merging them back into one isn't an option.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

There is a limit to how long articles can be for browsers to render them efficiently, and there are also internal limits on how the database handles links and history tables. Further, there are readability concerns when an article gets too large.

There are technical ways to handle this, but they rely on future development ideas that we aren't close to implementing. In the meantime, hard-splitting large articles is a fact of life.

Edit: 'd by Madrugada.

edited 8th Jun '17 9:25:15 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"