UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard/Archives/Morrowind Books Duplicated in Tamriel

This is an archive of past UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

Morrowind Books

[Moved discussion to the admin noticeboard]

Just discovered that most of the Morrowind books are duplicated in both the Morrowind: and Tamriel:Books/ namespaces. Now, I'm not going to go adding Delete tags to every single one of them, but if you or one of the other admins could take a look at this and get rid of all the redundancy it would help out. I have already changed the links on the Morrowind:Books and Morrowind:Faction Books pages, not sure how many more of them there are. But as many of these pages as there are, I think it would probably be good to get rid of them, as that's a pretty large quantity of unnecessary duplication. --TheRealLurlock 00:18, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

1) It might be worth to compare the Tamriel and the Morrowind books together to see which is worth keeping and which is worth deleting. 2) I'm going to sleep after this edit, so Nephele is probably going to be the deletionist.--Aristeo 00:32, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

Yeah, I was going to suggest Nephele, but then I remembered she doesn't have Morrowind, so she can't look this stuff up as easily. And the other admins haven't been really active lately. Anyhow, if there's any way I can help, let me know. --TheRealLurlock 09:35, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

Actually, it probably would be useful if you went through the duplicated books, and put a delete tag on whichever copy you think needs deleting. That would definitely make it easier for me to find them (and, by the way, I do now own Morrowind... I just haven't done much other than install it so far). Depending on how extensive the edit histories are, I might be inclined to do some delete/restores that allow the two pages to be merged, instead of actually deleting the pages. (Gives me an excuse to try out some of those fancy admin features I've read about!) But I can judge that better once I see which books are on the list. --Nephele 12:41, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

oooOOOooo... A merge :D That's exactly what the pages need! We really don't have a very good way to propose merges, (or deletions for that matter, but that's another story) so I still recommend marking the articles for deletion with the delete tag. Nephele, just be careful with the merges, because they're a pain to undo if something is messed up. --Aristeo 12:58, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

I doubt the page histories will be much of an issue in this case, because we're talking about the books, which are pretty much the text copied verbatim from the game, no interpretation or added content by the editors, nothing controversial or potentially incorrect about them, so there's not likely to be more than an edit or two per page, and most of them will be minor typo and formatting corrections, nothing important worth archiving. (Also, it's been my practice when seeing typos in the text of a book to leave them in as written. If the typo appears in-game, it may be intentional, so it's not for us to correct it.) I may go through and find all the Morrowind books to label them for deletion/merging, but you should now be able to find most of them just by looking at the Orphaned Pages list, since I changed the two main pages that linked to them. (Some may be individually linked from various other pages, so that may be harder to track down.) --TheRealLurlock 17:48, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

Okay, you should be able to find them on Orphaned Pages, but you can't. Or at least, I already marked the only 2 you can find. Anybody else have a clue where they may be linked from? --17:56, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

I've taken care of the ones that had been marked for deletion. I opted to give preference to whichever version had been created first, and deleted the more recently-created page. In other words, I didn't always delete the specific page that had been tagged, but the final result should match what you wanted.--Nephele 19:22, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

On the topic of books, might I inquire why there exist article pages for both the book's contents and a description article as well...it seems rather superfluous to me. After all, take the following:

Lore:Children of the Sky: The book.

Lore:Children of the Sky/Description: The description; which reads "Description of the Nords.".

See my point?

Might I suggest - if it is not against the better interests of the site - that these "Description" pages be appended to the "Book-Content" page. Simply adding such under the heading of "Description" at the top or bottom of the page, then listing a brief analysis of the contents, would surely be more appropriate to the circumstances than this...

Oh, and ere anyone says "because we need it for this chart, I'd ask: why? Surely a new table can be designed that does not require such redundant topics. -- Booyah boy 14:23, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

If the /Desc pages are being used in multiple places, then it's no longer redundant; instead it allows various links in different places to be consistent, and makes it easier for editors to set up links to the books. At the moment, the /Desc pages are being on all the Lore:Books pages, and also on the Oblivion:Books page. Admittedly, though, it's not being implemented all that well at the moment. The Morrowind:Books page isn't using the descriptions; this probably needs to be fixed at some point. So many of the /Desc pages are missing that pages like Oblivion:Books end up filled with ugly red links. Finally, the naming is somewhat inconsistent: non-book pages use /Description instead of /Desc for the subpages (e.g., on Oblivion:Places... hopefully this inconsistency isn't completely my fault). But I think these problems will slowly get resolved, and so it's better to work on improving the system than scrapping it altogether. --Nephele 14:45, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

I agree whole-heartedly with you, Nephele, and apologize, for obviously my comments were poorly phrased...in short, I am not advocating that the pages be "scrapped", rather, that they be implemented more appropriately.

My primary reason for bringing this forward is thus: due to the sheer number of book-description pages, they appear quite often when clicking the "Random page" link; apart from containing little content (due to their nature), they would - most likely - act as something of a deterrent to future purusal of the wiki by outside parties. Might there be some means by which you - the administrators - can limit the access to these pages, or, at least, prohibit them from appearing when hitting the "Random page" link? -- Booyah boy 15:10, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

Good point. I don't use Random page too often, so I hadn't thought about that before. But probably the Random page should be set up to not use any subpages like these, and perhaps also get it to skip stubs and any page less than some meaningful length. The only problem is that this requires even higher-level access than admins have... Daveh is the only one who can implement any changes. I'll add a suggestion to his talk page, but since he's already got a sizeable to-do list, there are no guarantees he'll be able to get to it soon. --Nephele 15:05, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

The random page feature was made so that people might find themselves on a stub that doesn't have much attention, and could increase upon it. It's not really a serious feature, it's just a "for fun" kind of thing that some editors might like to use to find a page or group of pages that they would have otherwise not have heard of. --Aristeo 17:53, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

That sounds great, Nepehele. Thank you for resolving this issue on my behalf. Hopefully Daveh will find the time to get to it sometime soon...for now, I'll leave this topic alone, lest something remains to be said on it's original premise (Morrowind books, that is). -- Booyah boy 15:10, 16 August 2006 (EDT)