Author Topic: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages  (Read 7537 times)

Felderburg

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"Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« on: April 03, 2013, 03:45:41 PM »
So this is something I've noticed for a while now, but never got around to bringing up. If you look on the list of wanted pages, there are several "contacts" listed as needing pages (Detective Hopp and Madame Bellarose, for example). Examining one in particular, Taskmaster Carlyle, we find that the pages that link to him (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Taskmaster_Carlyle) all have him incorporated into their page as a Notable NPC contact within the mission. Because of the way the mission sections are written, he gets his own small contact pic (as seen here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mission:A_Matter_of_Honor_-_Part_One:_An_Audience_by_Proxy#Visit_Taskmaster_Carlyle). With contacts that have existing pages, the small contact pic takes you to that page. This can be seen with Positron in the Pandora's Box mission: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/James_Harvan#Part_One:_The_Illusion_of_Safety - below his small contact pic his name is also a link to his page. It seems to me that giving Notable NPCs their own small contact pic is somehow automatically also giving them links to their own page - a page that does not exist for most of them.

As I recall, I first encountered this when writing Leonard's arc (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Leonard). The doctors that talk to you when you're testing your clones got small contact pics (as seen in their dialogue hidden by spoiler tags on that page). I recall thinking that the only way to solve the problem is to either not give them their own pictures, or give them their own pages that either redirect somewhere useful, or have a small blurb about these minor characters. For some of these characters (like Leonard's doctors) it's not worth giving them their own page, but for someone like Detective Hopp, maybe it is? But even if there are a few notables that we give their own page, there's still the ones like Leonard's doctors that appear on the wanted pages.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 05:20:11 PM by Felderburg »
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eabrace

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Re: Notable NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2013, 05:28:07 PM »
In March last year, Sekoia modified the Mission Briefing template to only link to another page if the page already existed.

So, for example, since Positron has his own page, his name is linked under his picture in James Harvan's mission.

On the other hand, if you were to place a Mission Briefing on a page where Becky, the Tarantula Mistress is the NPC you're speaking to, her name would not be linked because she doesn't have a page of her own.

That being said... it looks like even though the link isn't being created in the name under the image in a Mission Briefing, there's something in there that's still making the wiki think there should be a link in there to that missing page.  I tried changing one of the Taskmaster Carlyle breifings to Taskmaster Carlyle II and Taskmaster Carlyle II immediately indicated the mission was linking to it.

But it's not the image itself that's creating the link.
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eabrace

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #2 on: April 03, 2013, 05:31:01 PM »
It's embedded in the Linkifexists template.  Note what links to "Fake Page".

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Fake_Page
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Felderburg

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #3 on: April 03, 2013, 05:38:17 PM »
I'm not sure I understand what's going on with that template. Is that template in every single mission or something?

Edit: Or is it the fact that by putting a name in the "Contact=XXXX" section, the wiki thinks that every contact has to have a page or a link? Because that "Contact=XXXX" is also able to pull up the picture of that contact, if it exists, which seems to me like it's doing more than just displaying a name (since the pictures themselves aren't mentioned in the articles).

Edit 2: I should note this isn't a huge issue, since there's no broken links on the pages with these contacts, it just clutters up the Wanted Pages with articles that shouldn't be made.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 05:44:05 PM by Felderburg »
I used CIT before they even joined the Titan network! But then I left for a long ol' time, and came back. Now I edit the wiki.

I'm working on sorting the Lore AMAs so that questions are easily found and linked: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA/Sorted Tell me what you think!

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eabrace

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #4 on: April 03, 2013, 05:43:08 PM »
When you see the dialogue in the middle of a mission with the image and name of an NPC you're interacting with (e.g. Taskmaster Carlyle), that's placed on the page using the Mission Briefing template.  The Mission Briefing template, in turn, makes use of the Linkifexists template.  Since the Linkifexists template is creating false entries on the "What Links Here" (it needs to be fixed to stop doing that if at all possible), every call to Mission Briefing is creating a false entry on the "What Links Here" list for pages that don't actually exist.

Unless someone beats me to it, I'll try looking into that fix tonight when I get home.  For now, however, work beckons.
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Felderburg

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #5 on: April 03, 2013, 06:06:30 PM »
Woohoo, I was right! It is in every single mission!

There sure are a lot of brackets in that template (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Template:Mission_Briefing). I assume that's the right template? Although that's not the problem at all. I wonder... if we just added the "|Home" notation (as seen in the "linkifexists" page) after {{Contact}} in the "linkifexists" portion of the mission briefing template, would that work? ...No, because that just changes the way it displays. Good thing I am brainstorming straight into this post.

If there's no way to fix the "linkifexists" template, is there another template that will serve a similar function, without creating false links? Edit to add: It really would have to be a template, because just adding a link with the contact's name to the mission briefing template would not only keep the false links in the wanted pages, it would also create red links for all the contacts this thread addresses.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 06:17:18 PM by Felderburg »
I used CIT before they even joined the Titan network! But then I left for a long ol' time, and came back. Now I edit the wiki.

I'm working on sorting the Lore AMAs so that questions are easily found and linked: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA/Sorted Tell me what you think!

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Felderburg

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #6 on: April 03, 2013, 07:20:36 PM »
Looking at the wikimedia pages for the ifexist template (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:If#.23ifexist - this notes that "The page A checking existence of page B is listed on Special:Whatlinkshere/B as a page which links to B") which was used for "iflinkexists", I came across an interesting page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Exists This page notes that: "The method is based on transclusion of the possibly existing page. If the page does not exist the code for page transclusion produces a (red) link. Even if this result is used for comparison only, and not for final output, the page counts as being transcluded. Therefore the page appears as red link in the list of transcluded pages." However, it mentions some sort of code that I don't understand, and says: "Thus a false-positive for a non-existing page is avoided. A false-negative for an existing page is possible, but typically only for specially constructed examples." I don't know if that means it avoids the transclusion and red links, or just avoids false positives, but I suspect it's worth looking into for this issue.

Edit: Alas, there appears to be no solution with the #ifexist function, so we'll (I'll) either have to live with the Wanted Pages clutter, or use another template: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Extension_talk:ParserFunctions/_ifexist_results_in_Wanted_Pages

Edit: Yet more evidence there is not a solution (but a possible (albeit probably terrible) workaround): http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?16305-Exclude-ifexist-from-Wanted-Pages

Edit: I should add that the 1st wikimedia page I link also suggests using a different template for interwiki links. I know that none of the links are interwiki, but maybe something can be learned from it?
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 07:30:04 PM by Felderburg »
I used CIT before they even joined the Titan network! But then I left for a long ol' time, and came back. Now I edit the wiki.

I'm working on sorting the Lore AMAs so that questions are easily found and linked: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA/Sorted Tell me what you think!

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Sekoia

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #7 on: April 04, 2013, 12:53:21 AM »
I did some testing and the Exists template you link to from Mediawiki does not appear to put pages on the "Wanted" list, though the pages do still show up on "What links here". I just ported it over to Paragon Wiki and updated {{Linkifexists}} to use that instead.

eabrace

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #8 on: April 04, 2013, 04:27:52 AM »
Cool.  Thanks for that, Sekoia.
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Felderburg

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #9 on: April 04, 2013, 03:14:18 PM »
Cool!

Although it seems to have removed some of the unwanted Wanted Pages links, the largest offenders, Madame Bellerose and Detective Hopp, are still there (although their number of links has gone down). I'll look and see if those are legit links, but the first one I clicked on for Madame appears to still have the issue, and uses her name in the Mission Briefing Template (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mission:Burden_of_the_Past_-_Part_Three:_Those_Who_Have_Fought).

Actually, on closer examination, the links from the missions have "(transclusion) noted next to them on her "What Links Here" page (http://paragonwiki.com/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere&target=Madame+Bellerose). The rest are actual links. Given that she has 5 or 6, she may be worthy of her own article.

Examining the doctors from Leonard's arc, they no longer appear on the Wanted Pages, but when you search for them in the "What Links Here" manual entry, they show up with a single link and "(transclusion)" next to it. ..which I now see you noted in your post. So it looks like the new template won't show pages that are only linked by its searching on the Wanted Pages list unless the Wanted Page is actually wanted by other legitimate sources.

So in conclusion: success!

Edit: Would it be possible to outline what you did on this help topic: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Extension_talk:ParserFunctions/_ifexist_results_in_Wanted_Pages ? Since we're not the only wiki that had (hooray past tense!) this issue, I'm sure others would be elated to know what you did.
« Last Edit: April 04, 2013, 03:32:10 PM by Felderburg »
I used CIT before they even joined the Titan network! But then I left for a long ol' time, and came back. Now I edit the wiki.

I'm working on sorting the Lore AMAs so that questions are easily found and linked: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA/Sorted Tell me what you think!

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Sekoia

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #10 on: April 04, 2013, 04:56:17 PM »
The {{exists}} template will still make pages show up under WhatLinksHere as transcluded references. However, the WantedPage list doesn't count transclusions when determining how many references a page has. So if the only references an article has are transclusion ones, it won't show up on WhatLinksHere.

I think I looked at Detective Hopp briefly yesterday and at least one of his references was a direct link. Something to be aware of when looking at those articles is that some of the references are in transcluded text. Contact articles generally transclude content from Mission namespace articles. So check the Mission articles first -- that's where the references probably live.

(I'll give it a few days and if no other issues crop up, I'll try to remember to poke over to mediawiki and leave a note about the workaround we're using.)

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Re: "Notable" NPCs As Wanted Pages
« Reply #11 on: June 07, 2013, 08:23:05 PM »
FYI for people that happened to be following this: the change of the template caused pages that were not part of the WIP category to be listed as WIPs. So the change has been reverted (for more detailed info, go here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Talk:Chief_Interrogator_Washington).
I used CIT before they even joined the Titan network! But then I left for a long ol' time, and came back. Now I edit the wiki.

I'm working on sorting the Lore AMAs so that questions are easily found and linked: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA/Sorted Tell me what you think!

Pinnacle: The only server that faceplants before a fight! Member of the Pinnacle RP Congress (People's Elf of the CCCP); formerly @The Holy Flame