Board Thread:Help Desk/@comment-24896668-20141225123105/@comment-24896668-20141227005135

§1  I agree with having a simple overview of products that can be made with a crop of product. That's useful and not the point. See §2. These tables aren't a simple overview of products anymore.

If exact the same information is shown on Wheat as it is on Bread, then we have a problem with Bread.

I didn't say that it did, and I see no problem with Bread. In fact, I think the Bread page is a perfect example of one fine page, unlike Wheat in its current form. So I think I failed to explain my points. I'll try again.

To make an analogy, I would see a problem with Bread if Bread would show that hamburgers unlock at level 18, gain me 180 coins when sold through the shop, take 2 h  or ★★★ 1 h 42 min to make, gain me 22 experience points, take two bread and two bacon to make, and are made in the BBQ Grill. Why would I see a problem with that? Because all of that information, except for the "two bread", is related to hamburgers and not to bread! And then all the same for fish burgers, veggie bagels, bacon toast, egg sandwiches and honey toast? Where does it end?

.. why not include all that on the wheat page as well? It'd really show you all possible differences between every use of wheat right on the Wheat page! ;)

Or should the Wheat page contain information that is related to... wheat?

The table shows a lot of duplicate information that is not related to page itself. The products you can make with wheat, yes. The amount of wheat you need to make a bread, sure, why not indeed. But everything else I read on the bread row in the table on the Wheat page, well, that's information that's related to bread.

§2  ''So what if you can find out what you can make with wheat on a page about wheat? That's useful information.''

Yes, I totally agree with that! And that's why I didn't just suggest removing the tables, but suggested removing the tables and go back to a simple list of products. Like, on the Bread page and every other page except the crop pages. It was at the very end of my post, you might have missed that? Wouldn't that exactly be a simple overview of the products that can be made with a crop or product as you say?

§3 I'm not saying "tables are bad", they're useful. When used right in the right place! I'm saying these tables contain a lot of information that's not related to the page they're on. Hence it's redundant on those pages. Second to that, they make these pages look bad, unless I make my browser really wide on my already not so small pc screen. It doesn't cooperate with the infobox. So the infobox is at the right side of the page, the text starts at the top left. A couple of lines of general information about wheat, and then the "Uses" header. And then there's a whole page of blank nothing on the left side because the table won't fit left of the infobox. That's a whole lot of nothing, for information that's not even related to the page I'm visiting.

Looking at the examples you give:  The Diamond page looks perfectly fine even on my ultracheap low resolution chinese android piece of junk mobile phone. Table, pictures, everything works fine. Both in firefox and the standard android browser. Same for the Levels page. The table on Levels is too wide for my screen, but I can just swipe it left and right and it works right, including the pictures. Again, in both browsers. Fine pages with fine tables that are used right and work right. I fail to see what you mean.

The only section after the table on Wheat is "Strategy tips" which technically aren't official anyway

What do you mean? If I recall correctly, this wiki was decided to be a game guide, not an encyclopedia. How are "Strategy tips" not an official part of a game guide, technically or not? Are they, very technically, part of the page or not? They've been rather helpful, and I've added some myself. Those ideas and some other got my farm to level 106 in like, 9 months. I don't buy diamonds, and I've never been short on coins. I've shared all of it with my nh and people applied what appealed to them. Sounds like a perfect fit for any game guide to me. Could you explain this please?

§4 ''For the editing part, it isn't a problem. The so-called "maintenance nightmare" only occurs when you have a product with, like, 20 ingredients. You can edit a table really fast.''

No.

It's not "a table" but "a few dozen of tables" that you'll need to edit even for a product with a couple of ingredients, because the same data is repeated all over the place. With the mass renaming that I did,  the workload was tripled because I needed to edit a dozen of tables! For example, I had to edit 9 of these tables just to rename White sugar. Information about wheat is now on 10 other pages in the Crops category. That work is (almost) done and I have absolutely no regrets about the part I did. How many page renames did you do after these tables were added though?

I can't look into the future to see what's coming, but I do know about the workload these tables can give! For what!? For redundant data! This is a perfect example of why redundant data is considered a bad idea in the context of database management.

And the workload was only tripled because it's just all the crops and not all the products.... yet! FYI, there currently are 21 crops and 35 products that can be used to make other products...

Why was it so easy to rename all the fishies? There wasn't any redundant data, because the links were in one single place, a template. Same goes for the animal shelters and the BuildingsMenu template. Which is the sane way to handle data. Repeating the same data all over the place is the dumbest way to handle data one can imagine.

From a data management perspective, the way to handle the data would be to have a single place where the data resides. And then get the data on the pages through templates. I don't know how complicated it would be to make that. I looked at some information and discussions about this and there are different ways to handle it. Using Semantic MediaWiki is one way. Using DPL to have the main content page as data page, and using template substitution in DPL queries to reuse the data with other templates is another.

While I was fresh to wiki editing when I started to edit here, I do have experience with programming, scripting and database management. Exploring templates and data management in a wiki does appeal to me. But would it be worth it for information that is not even related to the page it's on?

Making the table collapsable would hide the useful simple overview, still have the information on the page that's not related to the page, and it wouldn't make the page look any better. So I don't think that would improve anything.