Author Topic: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles  (Read 59388 times)

Sekoia

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Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« on: April 01, 2012, 04:21:38 PM »
Consider this article: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Absolute_Amazement:_Chance_for_ToHit_Debuff

This article is actually for two distinct items: a recipe and an enhancement. The article starts by saying "This is an enhancement..." and proceeds to display several info boxes that reference it as an enhancement. Then we get a series of info boxes that reference it as a recipe instead. Then we get to "Effects" where it is once again an enhancement. Then we get to "Recipe" where it is once again a recipe. The final paragraph of the article is: "This recipe is considered level 50 for crafting purposes. The requirements for crafting this enhancement are: ...".

The article does not make a clear distinction between recipe and enhancement. I would imagine that this would be very confusing for a very new player trying to get a grasp on things.

New players aside, I think the combination approach to these kinds of articles is starting to break. We now have Archetype Enhancements which are only enhancements. They do not have recipes, and thus break the above mold. This means they won't work with all of our templates and DPL queries, which are built towards the Invention System exclusively.

It's worth noting that ATE's are not the only item that break the mold. There are also Store-Bought Enhancements, whose article presently links to the Invention System articles as if they were the same thing--but they're not. SBE's have no recipes. They are also attuned and account bound. An SBE is quite distinct from its corresponding IO enhancement.

And while it's easy to overlook them in this context, there are also Training Origin, Dual-Origin, and Single-Origin Enhancements. There are Special Enhancements: Hamidon Origin, Crystal Titan Origin, and Hydra Origin Enhancements. And we mustn't forget the Going Rogue Pre-Order enhancements or the enhancements sold by Mr. Yin. None of these kinds of enhancements have their own articles presently.

So at this point, I think we need to think about how these articles should be structured. We may even need to start from scratch and then go try to make what we have fit an entirely new mold.

Before getting into how such articles should be laid out, I think we should resolve a larger question first regarding the IO articles: do we split them or do we keep them merged?

Option one is to split the merged IO articles apart. If we go this route, I propose we add two new namespaces: "Recipe:" and "Enhancement:". For IO articles, it would be trivially easy to link between the two. If necessary, we could also transclude summary info from each into the other. We would then rework our templating system to disentangle the recipe stuff from the enhancement stuff, which are presently somewhat tangled together. It's worth noting that while we have enhancements that do not have recipes (the point of this thread), we also have recipes that do not have enhancements such as costume pieces and respecs; distinct namespaces would better reflect that separation.

Option two is to keep the IO articles merged. However, within the articles, we should make two distinct sub-articles: "Enhancement" and "Recipe". Even if the two are highly related, they are in fact two completely distinct items and they warrant distinct sub-articles. This would allow us to accomplish many of the same goals as the first option; the only difference being that the distinct articles would live in the same page.

(I can't think of any other options other than "merge" and "split", if you can, please share!)

Some additional considerations to keep in mind with respect to the above:

Categorization. Merged articles get categorized as both recipe and enhancement. Split articles obviously only get categorized for their own topic.

Store-Bought Enhancements. I believe these items are all named identically to the corresponding IO enhancements. If we have separate articles for recipe and enhancement, then do we also have separate articles for the IO and SBE versions of the enhancement? Or do we have a single merged enhancement article? For a merged article the answer is more obvious, but we'd need to decide whether the article gets three main sub-articles ("Recipe", "IO Enhancement", "SBE") or two main sub-articles ("Recipe" and "Enhancement", with the later covering the differences in a less distinct manner).

Enhancements other than IO, ATE, and SBE. Do we want to consider giving them articles? If we do, does that influence whether we want separate namespaces or not?

Migration. Whether we migrate to distinct articles in separate namespaces or to a different format for the merged articles, it is likely I can throw my bot at the problem to minimize manual work required to migrate. So by-and-large, this shouldn't be much of a consideration.

Redundancy. We want to avoid having the same information manually maintained in multiple spots. However, even if we have multiple articles, we should be able to easily set up templates to transclude details from single sources. So by-and-large, this also shouldn't be much of a consideration.

Okay, I'll stop rambling here so people can express opinions. :)

GuyPerfect

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #1 on: April 01, 2012, 06:23:54 PM »
Many IOs nowadays have store-bought counterparts, which are very similar in most regards, but are nonetheless distinct and qualify as a third version of a given item, after the recipe and the IO itself. To keep it tidy, we really should have three different articles, then a fourth that connects them all. Something like this:
  • Mako's Bite: Acc/Dam (Recipe)
  • Mako's Bite: Acc/Dam (Crafted)
  • Mako's Bite: Acc/Dam (Purchased)
  • Mako's Bite: Acc/Dam
That fourth one there would tie the other three together. And the other three themselves would at least link to each other in the See Also section.

Alternately, we could use Recipe: and Enhancement: namespaces to keep them a bit cleaner, but then there's the fact that the store-bought and crafted versions are Enhancements with the same name and would still need parenthetical titles. What would we do, introduce a Purchased: namespace? What of all the other Enhancements, then? We would need namespaces for those to be consistent, right?

I think instead of namespaces, it might be better to use sub-pages. Consider the following:
  • Recipes/Enhancement/Mako's Bite: Acc/Dam
  • Recipes/Costume/Costume Piece: Rocket Boots
  • Recipes/Ritual of Summoning: Adamastor
  • Recipes/Respec Recipe
  • Enhancements/Invention/Mako's Bite: Acc/Dam
  • Enhancements/Purchased/Mako's Bite: Acc/Dam
  • Enhancements/Mako's Bite: Acc/Dam
  • Enhancements/Single Origin/Power of Grey
  • Enhancements/Hydra/Delta Particle Exposure
  • Enhancements/Going Rogue/Syndicate Techniques
The items I've put bold there are special-case and are right off the top level. They really can't be categorized any further, so they get to hang out in front. The master pages for set Enhancements would be there, which in turn transclude certain content from the Invention, Purchased and Recipes articles.

And why stop there?
  • Inspirations/Super/Sight Beyond Sight
  • Inspirations/Present/Gift of Energy
  • Inspirations/Awaken
  • Salvage/Arcane/Pangean Soil
  • Salvage/Base/Shillelagh
  • Salvage/Incarnate/Drop of the Well
  • Badges/Achievement/Hacker
  • Badges/Defeats/The Solution
  • Incarnate/Lore/Polar Lights Total Core Improved Ally
Some of this could conceivably be categorized further, like Inspirations/Small/ or Salvage/Incarnate/Rare/. If we're gonna do this right, I really think it would be worthwhile to apply it to all inventory/collectible elements in the game.

Sekoia

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #2 on: April 01, 2012, 07:32:53 PM »
Another factor to consider in this that I can't believe I didn't think of sooner (pretend I put this up in my earlier post):

Enhancement sets. In addition to having articles for the recipes/enhancements, we also have separate articles for the sets. Depending on how we re-organize things, we may also have to update the set articles as well.

Thirty-Seven

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #3 on: April 02, 2012, 01:41:16 PM »
I haven't fully processed everything above, as in I am getting close to sleep time and may not have fully incorporated all the angles, but the idea of additional Namespaces (with a few article types involving parentheticals) seems to be preferable to what seems to be a rather complex "directory" structure of nested sub-pages whose organization may not seem obvious to the end-user.

I will have to think more on this before I can really help puzzle all this out.

taosin

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #4 on: April 02, 2012, 10:24:41 PM »
Loving the thread.

Not much I can add apart from some thoughts:

(A) What is being described is a 'thing' (for which we have no name in general other than the name of it i.e. Mako's Bight) which could be any or all of recipe, enhancement, SBE, recipe, ATE, ... it could be could be part of a collection (set), be attuned, account bound, purchased (went's), crafted, store bought..

Some of the qualifiers in the above para are boolean, some not; and some booleans then have added fields (levels  of attunement?)

Some descriptive text in the above common (what it does!) are common.

I guess any categorization structure works if the info is in one place once, and the categorization fits the purpose.

For now prefer to focus on recipes/enhancements, and ignore Guy's other ideas (Insps, salvage) except to be aware whatever is done for recipes may later be relevant in some waysfor them (keeping the ambit focussed).

Going back to (A), and considering what little I know of templates, is it possible to have a universal template for the thing that spits out the links/pages for the things that are enabled? And/Or defines the articles transclusions we see and can add (and expect to have?) (Thinking of recent talk on Enemy Template, considering contact overview and others; noting these can spit out links, categories)

It just seems with no research a 'thing' can be described by a lot of booleans and then additional if some booleans are true - all I mean by this is that the thing can be systematised/structured strongly enough to reliably be documented. Spitting out required links which are predictable and thus able to be transcluded.

I'm not sure (and am not expert at all) that namespacing everything is the way to go. 



Sekoia

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #5 on: April 09, 2012, 10:57:55 PM »
Going back to (A), and considering what little I know of templates, is it possible to have a universal template for the thing that spits out the links/pages for the things that are enabled? And/Or defines the articles transclusions we see and can add (and expect to have?) (Thinking of recent talk on Enemy Template, considering contact overview and others; noting these can spit out links, categories)

It just seems with no research a 'thing' can be described by a lot of booleans and then additional if some booleans are true - all I mean by this is that the thing can be systematised/structured strongly enough to reliably be documented. Spitting out required links which are predictable and thus able to be transcluded.

I don't entirely follow everything you've written there. However, we can definitely do a lot with templating--and in fact, already do. It should be pretty feasible to set up a template (or set of templates) to spit everything out given the appropriate parameters/booleans.

The more a template is generalized, the more complex it tends to get. If you generalize it to include several very different kinds of assets, then you could end up with an unmanageable mess. However, that can be mitigated some with sub-templates.

So I would say that you can probably assume that we can accomplish almost anything relevant via templating, given enough time and the appropriate parameters.


Also, consider this a "bump" for further discussion. :)

Thirty-Seven

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #6 on: April 10, 2012, 04:39:36 AM »
Unfortunately, with another set of ATOs on the way... we kinda need to figure out a method so that we can at least properly document the ones we have.

I do sorta question why we don't just have a Set page that lists all the information for the recipes and then links to the seperate enhancer pages.  Do we really need seperate pages for both all recipes and all enhancers?

Sekoia

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #7 on: April 10, 2012, 11:28:22 AM »
I do sorta question why we don't just have a Set page that lists all the information for the recipes and then links to the seperate enhancer pages.  Do we really need seperate pages for both all recipes and all enhancers?

Are you proposing that set pages such as Absolute Amazement include, in addition to their current content, the crafting requirements for each enhancement? And that then the individual articles such as Absolute Amazement: Chance for ToHit Debuff contain only the information specific to the enhancement?

One critical problem with that idea is that it'll make DPL queries even messier if not impossible. For example, all of the salvage articles such as Alchemical Silver Salvage are generated using DPL queries that require that each recipe be its own article. I think we have a number of other such kinds of DPL queries as well. So that makes the idea a non-starter. :/

If that wasn't what you meant, please clarify. :)

Thirty-Seven

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #8 on: April 10, 2012, 11:32:13 AM »
No, that's precisely what I meant.  Silly DPL ruining my plans.  I guess I don't use the Salvage Pages ever so I didnt think of it.

Aggelakis

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #9 on: April 10, 2012, 08:47:31 PM »
In my ideal world:

Recipe:Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff
Enhancement:Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff
Achilles' Heel [[for the set page, in the main namespace]]

**ALTERNATELY**

Achilles' Heel [[set page]]
Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff [[enhancement page]]
Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff (Recipe) [[recipe page, obviously!]]

With either setup, the recipe page would include salvage, crafting cost, etc, and ways to buy/obtain the *recipe*. The recipes would link to their crafted enhancements, and an overview line ("This recipe is part of the [[Achilles' Heel]] [[Category:Sets for improving Defense Debuff|Defense Debuff]] set.") would link to the set page in main namespace.

The enhancement page would include enhancement values and ways to buy/obtain the *ready-to-slot enhancement* (note some items may only have one way to buy or obtain the item). The enhancement page would link to the recipes (if they exist) and a similar overview line would be used as in the recipe page to link to the set page.

The set page would function almost exactly the same as it would now, except linking to both the recipe and enhancement pages -- perhaps a table that allows a side-by-side list, or a (Recipe) link after the full-text enhancement link, e.g.
* [[Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff]] [[Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff (Recipe)|(Recipe)]]



In addition to the overhaul of the enhancement pages, we need to overhaul the categories as well. Most of them are referencing the Invention System, which not all of these are anymore.
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Thirty-Seven

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #10 on: April 11, 2012, 01:21:00 AM »
Totally agreed with that system, and preference here to the first naming convention without parentheticals.  And yeah, some pretty major re-templating and re-categroizing would need to go with that.  I mean, pretty much every template call uses 'IO' in it somewhere.  Even the shortcuts to display the Proc and Global images.

Sekoia

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #11 on: April 11, 2012, 01:24:25 AM »
Agge, how would you handle SBE versus IO in your proposed scheme?

Aggelakis

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #12 on: April 11, 2012, 01:31:24 AM »
The enhancement values are all exactly the same, so that doesn't need changed. The procs are different between crafted and SBE, so you can have a subsection for each.
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Thirty-Seven

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #13 on: April 11, 2012, 01:37:19 AM »
Agge, how would you handle SBE versus IO in your proposed scheme?
Personally, I would go with a subsection on the Enhancement page since the majority of info is the same, except for proc rate.

Sekoia

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #14 on: April 11, 2012, 03:32:12 AM »
SBEs also scale to your level, whereas IOs do not.

At the moment, enhancements with the same name have the same general values, so subsections could work. Should we consider planning for the possibility of that changing? Is there any reason to suspect they might introduce something that would warrant having separate articles?

Aggelakis

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #15 on: April 11, 2012, 03:40:53 AM »
If they introduce something worth separating the articles, it can be its own article since it wouldn't match up with any of the data on the enhancement page.
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Thirty-Seven

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #16 on: April 11, 2012, 08:05:34 AM »
So with that seeming to be in a state of 'consensus,' any thought on how the actual formatting of a page should change so that a standard can be applied?
  • I suppose we will need all of the IO Templates to be made into more generic templates (at the very least, dropping 'IO' from every blasted template).
  • All of the Recipe formatting needs to be done in such a way as to keep in mind the use of Temporary Power, Respec and Costume Piece Recipes.
  • And all Enhancement pages need to be made to keep in mind Enhancements like ATOs that don't come from recipes.
  • And of course an extra section will need to be added to each Enhancement that has an SBE version discussing PPMs and Attunement (both of which will prolly require some new formatting templates)
  • Lastly, there is the matter of whether and how to continue to use the DropPool Icons I made a while back.

Does that about sum it up?  Oh no... not quite... *Categories*

Sekoia

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #17 on: April 11, 2012, 08:36:20 AM »
So with that seeming to be in a state of 'consensus,

I don't know that it's fair quite yet to say we have a consensus, but we appear to be heading that way.

I think it's safe to keep the SBE and IO together in a single article. If anyone disagrees with that specific sentiment, please say so and why.

Focusing solely on Sets, Recipes, and Enhancements, these seem to be the viable options on the table:

Option 1: Separate Namespaces
Set: Achilles' Heel   (main namespace)
Recipe: Recipe:Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff   (new Recipe namespace)
Enhancement: Enhancement:Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff   (new Enhancement namespace)

Option 2: Dual Parenthetical
Set: Achilles' Heel   (main namespace)
Recipe: Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff (Recipe)   (main namespace)
Enhancement: Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff (Enhancement)   (main namespace)

Option 2a: Dual Parenthetical with Disambig
Like Option 2, but adding a disambig page at: Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff

Option 3: Parenthetical for Enhancement
Set: Achilles' Heel   (main namespace)
Recipe: Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff   (main namespace)
Enhancement: Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff (Enhancement)   (main namespace)

Option 4: Parenthetical for Recipe
Set: Achilles' Heel   (main namespace)
Recipe: Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff (Recipe)   (main namespace)
Enhancement: Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff   (main namespace)

Option 5: Subpages
Set: (I don't know?)
Recipe: Recipes/Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff   (main namespace)
Enhancement: Enhancements/Achilles' Heel: Defense Debuff   (main namespace)



Agge, Thirty7, and myself are all apparently in favor of Option 1: Separate Namespaces. So far that seems to be the developing consensus. If anyone wants to argue in favor of any of the other above options, now is the time.

Sekoia

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #18 on: April 11, 2012, 08:43:07 AM »
  • And all Enhancement pages need to be made to keep in mind Enhancements like ATOs that don't come from recipes.
  • And of course an extra section will need to be added to each Enhancement that has an SBE version discussing PPMs and Attunement (both of which will prolly require some new formatting templates)

These two points actually underscore a slight shift in thinking we need to make. The points assume that enhancements are IOs, except for a few exceptions. We need to think about enhancements first and foremost as enhancements, and only think about where they came from secondarily.

Most of what we have to say about any given enhancement is pretty independent of how it came into existence. For example, most enhancements enhance an aspect of a power by a given percentage. That particular mechanic works whether it's an SO, IO, Hami-O, AE, or any other kind of enhancement you want to toss into the alphabet soup. Many enhancements also work in sets and give set bonuses; where that mechanic is present, it applies regardless of origin. Many enhancements have a proc effect; that, too, appears to work regardless of origin. (The Going Rogue enhancements have a proc effect, and they aren't IO or AE for instance.)

So really we need to decouple "source" and "effects" as much as possible.

Thirty-Seven

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Re: Re-evaluating Recipe/Enhancement articles
« Reply #19 on: April 11, 2012, 08:46:09 AM »
I spooooose I did jump the gun a bit.

But yes, Option 1 has my vote.  One thing though... with this movement to more namespaces, can we justify not making a Salvage namespace?  Also... are we in favor of making articles for TOs, DOs, etc., etc.?