Problems creating wiki categories that actually do any thing (from Talk:Page Creation Information)

[Snargash Moonclaw]

The Setting Template on my main page works and the Category:Settings functions properly, however nothing beyond this seems to work. If I edit the main page, at the bottom is a long list of "Templates Used" in red - clicking on them routes to a page that hasn't been created. However, the templates referred to are the links to other pages in the setting embedded in the main page which do direct properly when clicked on in the page itself. Further, I can't seem to get any subcategories to actually be recognized as such; "Category:PC Races" is used at the bottom of all six race descriptions - The box at the bottom of the pages show Categories: Panisadore | PC Races, and if I click on PC Races part it shows the category and all six pages under it, while if I click on the Panisadore half it goes to that category, shows all pages (including the 6 PC Race Pages) but *not* the PC Races subcategory - I can find no way to get the two to actually relate to each other in any fashion. Sadly, the (externally linked) Editing Help is utterly unintelligible to me, hence completely useless. I'm trying to get the various pages categorized and organized so they can be navigated easily but have not been able to accomplish a damn thing. At this point the volume of material is becoming unwieldy without some sort of organization and means of referencing and navigating through it - any additions would become confusing to the reader making use of the wiki less than practical - creating trouble understanding material rather than making it more accessible and therefore pointless to me to "use" the wiki for the setting (when I find myself unable to use it in any practical fashion.) Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

After wandering around rather aimlessly in pages linked from Editing Help I finally stumbled upon a page that had a link to info on Categories. The link was found 2 or 3 steps beyond the initial help page which gives absolutely no indication that any discussion of the topic is available. If someone were trying to sell me a copy a MediaWiki on the claim that it organizes information easily and clearly I would have shown them the door long ago - it does the exact opposite with it's own information! It's by far the worst e documentation I've ever encountered!

[Lmns Crn]

I had trouble getting category page edits to "stick"-- I would click on a red category link, click "save changes" without adding text (since all I wanted was the actual links to pages in that category, not my own commentary), and find that no changes had actually been saved.

I discovered through trial and error that "blank" category pages like that are not saved, and at least one character has to be typed into the text field for it to work. I generally use "&nbsp" as the content for category pages. It's the HTML character code to produce a blank space, like pressing the spacebar, but deliberate enough that browsers don't reduce it out.

I am pretty proud of the categories set up for the Jade Stage wiki stuff. Feel free to take a look at the code that produces it, if you like, or to ask me more specific questions about what you're trying to do and the problems you're encountering.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

Trying to see how it's been actually structured has been an exercise in frustration - no body's main pages really give any indication of further structure and trying to see how categories are actually built upon each other generally is only successful if I happen to click on a category statement at the bottom of an arbitrary page that happens to link to a subcategory page. The most frustrating thing in any category page is that subcategories are all listed as if they're at the same level - i.e., the Panisadore category page shows Regions and Oceana as if they're =, there's no indication that Oceana (and three other subcategories listed) are actually subcategories of Regions. Ultimately I'm getting the impression that categories don't in fact really *do or accomplish* anything! I'm wanting someone reading the main page to have an easy time determining what follows beneath it and where - if they want to know about elves in my world I want them to be able to find the info easily. Linking is good to some degree, but too much and you get lost in a tangle of cross references that hide how info is related to each other. Sadly - reading yours or anyone else's code is useless to me - I don't understand it and in all honestly, don't want to learn to! What *would* help me is simply understanding how you are using categories to organize your info - and how you actually get any *real and functional* organization from doing so. All I seem to have accomplished this evening is to have little boxes that say "Category|Panisadore|xyz" at the bottoms of my pages which only *look like* they mean something. If the "structure" of the MediaWiki Help pages sis any indication, the software does not in fact provide any means of organizing information at all. (If I sound grumpy ,it's not with you. After over a week of constantly trying to make some headway, I'm reaching the point of being utterly disgusted with the whole thing and growing more inclined to take the material off the wiki than add more to it. . .)

[Matt Larkin (author)]

I fixed the PC races issue for you.

Add [[Category:Pasindore]] to the subcategory page as desired to make it appear as a subcategory in pasindore cat page. (make sense :)?)

[Matt Larkin (author)]

Categories don't really structure your wiki that much. What they do do is allow your reader to click the category if he's interested in that topic and see other topics related to it.

For Eclipse I only use one category page because there would only be one page in each subcategory.

For the Mythology Resource database, I use more. For example, the subcategory Germanic Myth.

[Lmns Crn]

Yeah, using categories does not do anything like creating a site tree of any kind, and most readers and not going to use your categories to navigate the wiki information. Site navigation is going to be made easier by a very well-made main page (note: mine is terrible, and I need to fix that), and by the use of a boatload of links.

You might also want to try making a few "navigation" pages-- for example, a "Nations" page that contains little information of its own, but provides links to all the nations in your setting, with perhaps a little more information to help the reader figure out where to go next.

Subcategories are listed equally with their parent categories at the bottom of each page, yes. They seem only to be useful if you want a shorthand way of category designation. For example, if "Campaign XYZ's Cities" is a subcategory of "Campaign XYZ's Geography," then placing a page into the Cities category will automatically place it into the Geography category as well. Beyond that, I'm not sure subcategories do anything at all.

As for how I use categories, I often use the "Category:Jade Stage" page as an index of sorts. (I have it open right now in a separate browser tab, actually.) I find it useful to have a complete, alphabetical list of all the pages I've put on the wiki, because it lets me see what I have and haven't included, and it lets me navigate quickly.

The various subcategories are ways of sorting things. Sometimes I don't want to see the whole list, just the JS wiki pages that deal with magic, or with nations, or with dwarves, or whatever. Readers other than myself can also navigate this way. Not that I really expect them to most of the time, but the option is there.

Maybe the most useful trick I have involves putting a category in a template page. I have a "Jade Stage Stub" template that I stick on articles that are woefully unfinished-- little more than placeholders. The template is in the "Jade Stage Incomplete Pages" category-- which means that every page that includes that template is in the category as well. This means that when I get into the mood to clean house a bit, it's easy to find a complete and automatically-updating list of pages that I feel are unfinished.

[LordVreeg]

[blockquote=LC]Yeah, using categories does not do anything like creating a site tree of any kind, and most readers and not going to use your categories to navigate the wiki information. Site navigation is going to be made easier by a very well-made main page (note: mine is terrible, and I need to fix that), and by the use of a boatload of links[/blockquote]
Doing the exact same thing for the same reason on my main PB wiki, and realizing that it will have to be here as well.  The larger the setting, the more this becomes absolutely critical.  I have more pages that you cannot get to except through a fourth level link...

[Ishmayl-Retired]

list of pages[/url] that I feel are unfinished.

Yeah, I stole that from you - very useful. :)

[Snargash Moonclaw]

Of course one derivative of Murphy's Law is very much in evidence - I bitched loudly and publicly about being completely unable to do certain things in the wiki and then stumbled blindly onto a reference telling me how to do it. Help pages remain astonishingly bad and certain details are entirely absent, only to be discovered largely by accident.

It's becoming more evident that I need to also pre-edit my writing for the the medium. Obviously I'm not writing specifically for it - the recent Salis Freeport material is up to 35 pgs in OpenOffice Writer - as presented in the forums so far it really doesn't lend itself to electronic publishing at all - it's not broken into lots of little discreet bite sized info-crackers which can be consumed in any order and pretty well comprehended entirely in isolation from each other. It's that last facet that I find particularly repugnant about the medium - it lends to the false assumption that things are entirely unrelated to other things and can be comprehended and understood without reference to anything else. Linking these data canapes only partially addresses this since readers are beginning to approach e-material *with* links as if the latter are merely optional features - the article is consumed like a cracker which can be perfectly adequate alone - linked information is merely viewed then as a menu of spreads to add to it, all, any or none, as the reader pleases. This would be okay *if* a subject can be covered in the space of a couple of screens of data. Few subjects really can however, and the medium is beginning to encourage people to believe that they do anyway. It's also being misused by those who understand the trend, like political spin doctors. If you can feed the public a pithy screenfull, many now will happily assume that they grasp the whole subject and *don't need to look any deeper*.

Okay, ranting about the dumbing down of humanity aside, my main page in particular needs some revision. The Deities and Orders and Societies sections lend themselves very well to wiki formatting since each entry is relatively short and they can be clustered readily (partially done already). I'll be crosslinking the two sections over the next week or so, where Associated Orders are already listed for Deities I'm turning them into links, and likewise for constituent churches listed under each Order. It took countless hours to find how to use a pipe in the link to a subsection to get it to only display the subheader on the page rather than a long string in the middle of a sentence like "they also confer with various Orders and Societies#Druid Groves on matters of mutual interest. . ." Inability to prevent that from occurring nearly had me eliminating links from various sections since they were pointless if they made the section itself illegible. At this point it's simply time consuming and repetitive - however I think the clarity of information in each entry is worth it,  Primordials.  

LC - how are you utilizing this "stub template"? It sounds to me like it would be more effective than what I've been doing so far: Inserting "WiP" at the top of such pages. . . Now that I've got the categories working I can at least navigate through my own stuff readily with them (before I was having to click on "my contributions" and scroll down till I found the one I wanted to edit. . .) and the fact that all pages show up under Panisadore regardless of if they're buried under layers of subcategories is actually helpful.

[Ishmayl-Retired]

To properly implement a "stub" template like I and LC have done, you need to first create a template called "Panisadore Stub," and format it to say whatever you want ("This page isn't yet finished, yaddah, yaddah, blah, blah"), and then you add on the template page:

[[Category:Panisadore Stub]]

Just add that template to the top/bottom of any incomplete Panisadore pages, and you'll have a full index soon of stubs.

[Snargash Moonclaw]

hm - I'll have to see if I can make sense of how to actually create a template - the only one I use is Setting|Panisadore - which I essentially created by blindly following the instructions in Page Creation Information and really don't understand how it works  - further experimentation with it and category pages has made it clear that I have actually grossly misunderstood how it works (See User Talk, I think I've managed to clarify a lot of what has been confusing me - I mean describing my confusion more clearly, not clearing up the things that I'm confused about. . .  :morons: )

Next question - "the template page"? what/where is this ?? It's becoming obvious that there are numerous "special pages" which don't act anything like the normal wikitext pages I've been tearing my hair out trying to format and categorize so they can be found. Sadly MediWiki seems to assume that you already know all about these things (especially the fact that they exist in the first place) before you start trying to do anything. I have been blithely proving that assumption to be just as incorrect as MediaWiki has been proving to be the case with my assumptions. . .

[Ishmayl-Retired]

Good questions - a template is simply a page that gets transposed into another page.  It can have variables that fill in (such as the Template:Location), or it can be just a static image/filler/text area (such as Template:Jade_Stage_Banner).  To access a template page, just type in Template:Name_Of_Template at the top in place of where a page name normally goes.

A lot of us have created setting banners for the top of our pages, which include links to various other pages within our setting, as well as copyright information, and the Template:Setting template - yes, you can have a template within a template.

I would start by just creating a page-width box at the top of the page that says "Panisadore" (or something like that) that is pretty simple, perhaps along the lines of the Template:CeruleanBrowser (http://www.thecbg.org/wiki/index.php/Template:CeruleanBrowser).  Just copy all the formatting in that one to a new template called "Template:Panisadore_Header" (or something along those lines), and change the links, images, etc to match your own.  Once you do that, you can just add {{Panisadore_Header}} to the top of each of your pages, and it will have that header at the top of each of your pages.

Maybe sparkletwist will drop by and give a better explanation :)

[Lmns Crn]

Template:Jade_Stage_Banner[/url].) If you change the text just once in the template, it automatically changes on every page that the template includes (useful whenever I decide to add a link to my nav bar, for example.)

Templates can include other things, also. Since {{Setting|Jade Stage}} needs to be on all of my pages, I just put it once into Template:Jade_Stage_Banner, and I never have to worry about it again-- it's automatically included in every page that has the banner. If I add [[Category:Jade_Stage_Incomplete_Pages]] to Template:Jade_Stage_Stub, it puts all the pages that include that template into that category.

I'm linking these pages so you can take a look at the actual code if you want to. Click "Edit," take a look, even copy/paste the code into your own templates and change "Jade Stage" to "Panisadore" every time it appears, if you want to. (It's how I made mine, stealing from Ishy's Shadowfell stuff. :yumm: )

hm - I'll have to see if I can make sense of how to actually create a template

right here![/i]"

When you look at you page after saving or previewing, instead of "{{Template:Snargash}}", you should see the contents of Template:Snargash. It will just say, "My name is Snargash Moonclaw, and I am awesome!"

And that is how you will know that not only can you make templates from scratch, you can implement them as well.

Just remember that a template is nothing more than a tiny wiki page you can stick wherever you want. There are tricks you can do with them, like adding categories and other templates (like we've already talked about) or even little fill-in-the-blank sections, but it's still just a mini-page you can stick wherever you want.

Feel free to ask, of course, if you have other questions.

I hope this is a helpful description. I am trying to break things down more simply than the MediaWiki tutorial, but please do not misinterpret my tone as being patronizing or condescending-- that's absolutely not my intent.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

list of pages[/url] that I feel are unfinished.

While not necessarily bad, one side effect is that the template itself appears on the category page. It makes it easier for others to find your template, but, on say wikipedia, you wouldn't normally expect that kind of meta-page to appear as a topic.
Yeah, I stole that from you - very useful. :)