Category talk:Armor

I'm considering axing this category while we're pruning the tree. My reasoning is that having a category of every piece of armor in the game isn't really useful, and it causes submitters to have to remember to put their new articles in extra categories. Other categories I'm considering doing away with are lights (for the same reason as this one) and brandishes (because wands, stave, and spellcasting objects should be enough). Anyone have any objections before I get to work? Or, does anyone have any other categories that they feel are unnecessary? --Waite 11:08, 14 February 2006 (EST)

Hmmm. I spoke with Mel for a bit last night and agreed that we should get rid of both the "all gear" and "all mob" lists. I took care of the latter last night and was gonna take care of the former myself later today, actually. But I'm not sure that I agree with you on this one. I rather liked the idea of having one category for each object-type in the game (see Object Types)--or at least each of the ones that you can actually pick up and do stuff with (as opposed to Nexues and whatnot). And I also think that it might be easier for folks to remember to "put every object in its type category" rather than to "put only these objects in their type categories but not these"; I think that consistency would be good here even if it results in a long list of Armor. And, as for Brandishes, hmmm. In practice, people on the MUD talk about "brandishes" regularly and it would seem a bit odd to me if the MUD didn't reflect that by having a Brandishes category. What if we kept Brandishes as is but just didn't file any pages underneath it? It would pop up when people searched for Brandishes, people could read all about what the heck "brandishes" are and such ("Brandishes are staves and wands, they use the brandish command, etc."), and then they could then click on its subcategories (Wands and Staves) to view individual item pages? This change would also simplify what contributors would have to remember when filing things, too, I think. Hmmm. Having a good filing system is very important to me and so I've been thinking and working hard on this matter for some time now. See Format for my (present) recommendations. I'd love to discuss this more but I need to get ready for class very soon. --Dave Garber 11:58, 14 February 2006 (EST)

I agree with your idea on the brandishes category. We can keep it as a redirect/disambiguation type page so if someone searches for brandishes they'll be displayed with links to staves/wands/spellcasting objects. I'm still not sure about all the object types categories. I understand your point about how it could be confusing to categorize some articles based on object types, but not others. So, let me explain my motivation a little bit better. I don't want to ask our contributors to place their new articles in a bunch of categories that aren't going to be useful to anyone. I can imagine someone coming to the wiki and searching for containers, or boats, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to see every object of type trash. I guess it boils down to the fact that some objects are useful based on their type, notably boats, containers, wands, potions, spellbooks, etc. Other object types, like treasure, trash, armor, weapon, light, are more generic and an item of that type is only going to be useful based on some other special modifier. I have no problem with big categories. As a matter of fact I get excited when a useful category gets well populated (like this one :)). Right now I'm just on a witch hunt for categories that aren't ever going to be used, and are only going to serve as a hassle for our contributors. --Waite 13:51, 14 February 2006 (EST)