Wowpedia talk:AddOn pages

= Proposal to deprecate addon collection =


 * For newcomers to this discussion: WoWWiki used to have a rather incomplete AddOn collection, as a heritage from the days when there weren't any big AddOn sites. This accepted proposal was about getting rid of the majority of pages that were better-represented elsewhere.

I've been browsing through Category:AddOns of late, to me it seems that the only sane thing to do is basically get rid of it.

It served a great purpose long ago when WoW was new and we didn't have lots of automated AddOn sites. This is no longer true. To me, it just brings badwill to WoWWiki - "Hey! Look! We have AddOn listings!" ... except they pages haven't been updated in over a year, and we only have a couple dozen of them.


 * Category:AddOns has 160 articles. Some of them are not AddOns at all. Let's call it 150.


 * curse-gaming.com has 3249 addons.


 * wowinterface.com has 1111 addons.


 * worldofwar.net has (arf, can't find it. lots anyway)

In addition to this (and please check this out if you don't believe me), the vast majority of addon pages have not been updated since mid-2005!. A lot of them even have "deprected, please see" or stub tags on them.

Proposal

 * Remove any and all addon pages that have not had subtantive content added or modified during 2006.


 * Remove any and all addon pages that have less than 10 sentences of actual information, or do not have at least one screen shot (where it would make sense to have a screenshot, of course. Some addons don't have UIs.).


 * Remove any and all addons that are found to be outdated, obsoleted, abandoned, or otherwise integrated into something else.


 * Remove any and all addon pages that can be demonstrated are several versions behind what is documented on other sites (where available).


 * Re-classify Category:AddOns as a place that AddOn developers can use as the main page for their AddOn, if they like, but that there's no point for WoWWiki, nor for its visitors, and neither for the Author himself that the WoWWiki page just be an outdated and lesser copy of what's available on addon sites. OR a page actively maintained by WoWWiki contributors for a mod that they find particularily useful and like to tell others about (objectively and usefully).

"Remove" above would be tagging the pages T:deletemod after this vote passes.

I'm not going to try and make this policy. Think of it as a big effin' delete vote. I myself don't particularily want anyone hunting down poor addon authors that post info about their addon here without intending to use it as their main (and hence updated!) page. I just want to clear out the crud that, frankly, does nothing but annoy new visitors that don't know better than to just ignore any addon pages listed on WoWWiki since all the info is outdated, like most of us that know the place actually do!

(And, yes, the idealist in me would love to have all of AddOndom on WoWWiki with lots of screenshots and extra info from our contributors. But, let's face it, it isn't happening. It stopped happening over a year ago. The big AddOn sites are where people go to look for info on AddOns.)


 * --Mikk 15:23, 21 June 2006 (EDT)

✅

Votes

 * Yes :


 * No :

Comments
Good idea. Rather than speedydelete, I think there should be another tag that also says that we'll delete it, but to give a reason, and to make it at least separate from all the other pages in that category, if you know what I mean. I want the reason to be evident at least to me or someone like me who deletes it. I don't think I read everything completely, but I would like to point out that pages here on addons could be as useful as our pages on items. This way we can have basically an open FAQ on each mod (each one that has a page here). But all the old ones could certainly be deleted. Schmidt 15:54, 21 June 2006 (EDT)


 * Yep, that's precisely my intention. We should have stuff that's unique to the wiki, where our contributors can actually provide useful information. (Or where the author himself is the actual contributor, making it unique!). But just having a "please download here" or outdated stuff like we mostly do today is just .. wrong. I'll go fix another tag for this delete spree. --Mikk 15:57, 21 June 2006 (EDT)


 * Right. T:deletemod exists now. It doesn't add a category, so you'll have to find them via looking at which pages pull it in. Works for this little project I suppose. --Mikk 16:07, 21 June 2006 (EDT)


 * I would have preferred a different name for it like oldmod or something, basically saying "this is an old mod page, and may be deleted soon. if you disagree, state your explanation in the talk page, and make an effort to update the page." Something like that, but properly capitalized. I didn't care to, because I didn't want anyone to copy and paste. :P But I definitely think it shouldn't say that it'll be deleted until this thing officially goes through in accordance with policy. Schmidt 17:30, 21 June 2006 (EDT)


 * Good point there. I'm rephrasing it. (I did have the "please update, etc..." spiel in though) --Mikk 20:31, 21 June 2006 (EDT)

Yikes, fastest 5 votes in the history of WoWWiki. I'm going to be every so slightly bold and go through the pages and tag them as I see fit now, but I certainly don't expect anything to disappear until after the vote has closed. If anyone disagrees with a tag, you're of course welcome to change it to a standard delete vote. --Mikk 16:26, 21 June 2006 (EDT)


 * Right. 90 AddOns tagged. I've made sure (to my mind) that they're either:
 * Oneliners
 * Not updated since v1.6 and page is waaay old
 * Or have more+newer info on other addon sites or own web sites


 * There's currently 113 pages in Category:AddOns, not all of which are AddOns. There will be a slight echo :-P
 * I also managed to poke the Cosmos peeps into action; we've now cleanly separated cosmos-related mods from generic mods. No article lives in both "AddOns" and "Cosmos AddOns" any longer. (The latter is still a mess, but I'm not going to make it my mess =))
 * --Mikk 22:30, 21 June 2006 (EDT)


 * Slight change of plans. Some Cosmos addons will go back to living in AddOns also, but this time they'll be clearly marked with T:cosmosdep or T:cosmosoptdep so that we can tell them apart. The general agreement is that only pages that are sufficiently representative will be allowed in AddOns, otherwise they go back to only living in Cosmos AddOns. --Mikk 22:55, 22 June 2006 (EDT)

I'm not concerned about it, but curious. Why have some Cosmos addons that are common to both Cosmos AddOns and Addons? It doesn't much make sense to me. If AddOns doesn't include Cosmos, and Cosmos AddOns don't include non-Cosmos addons, why have some that are in both? Schmidt 21:16, 24 June 2006 (EDT)


 * It's the optionally Cosmos-dependent ones. The Cosmos gang want them in Cosmos AddOns to show that they integrate nicely into Cosmos, but if the page is good enough, they feel that it deserves to live in AddOns also. Can't say I disagree with that thinking. Oh, and "Cosmos" itself gets to live in AddOns :-)  --Mikk 06:23, 25 June 2006 (EDT)

= New discussions =

Hosted AddOn Pages
I put up Hosted AddOn Pages with oneliners for each addon here. Wasn't that much work with the slightly lower number of them that we have now. --Mikk 10:29, 1 August 2006 (EDT)

Deletemod
I am removing T:deletemod as it has no use these days, and is better served with delete. 16:54, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Remove addon pages
I would like to propose we go ahead and complete the old proposal above by removing *all* AddOn pages. They are all without exception ancient and entirely outdated and such a listing is better done at a site like CurseForge.

Votes

 * Yes :


 * No :

Comments
Some pages like WoW Census do bring some interesting information, like historical player data. Also, Category:Hosted AddOns these addons were specifically chosen by their authors to be hosted in wowwiki/wowpedia rather than anywhere else. Finally, I'd personally refrain from deleting anything until Classic releases, some of these addons might come back. Xporc (talk) 08:38, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Regarding the WoW Census page, that list of statistics can probably be merged into the Realm § Statistics section. 11:15, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Adding to my comment above (and I'm admittedly very biased), some addons have had a meaningful impact on how the game evolved. CTMod (CTRA, specifically) predated modern raid frames and its original developers coordinated with Blizzard to evolve the API. Some addons have been notable for causing controversy and pages should actually be created for them to highlight their impact (not as a 'this is an addon, here's how it works' but as a 'this historic event happened and here's how it changed WoW'). Decursive and Healbot automating combat before WoW 2.0 secure frames, I'm looking at you. LookingForGroup in Classic just a couple months ago, ditto. DDC (talk) 05:16, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * PS, I'll present the counter-argument to be fair. The solution might not be creating pages for notable addons, but rather including background discussion in other relevant pages (such as API or in-game things) to put some more meat on the bones. DDC (talk) 05:16, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * a good point. addons that led to official features/changes (whether because they were well-loved or because they did something the devs didn't want) are a part of wow's history and helped shape it into what it is today, which i think is always worth documenting. maybe we don't need individual addon pages to do so though; i could totally see a single "historically notable addons" page being enough —Eithris (talk) 05:34, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Better, I think, would be a "historically notable addons" section on the Addons page. I don't really see a need to create an entirely separate page for it. -- Dark T Zeratul (talk) 07:49, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * A section does sound like a good idea for this sort of thing. 08:12, 4 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I sat down today and tried to build a meaningful counter-proposal. My temporary user page shows a draft, that would focus on reforming these pages as meaningful encyclopedic entries but only if demonstrable references may be found to establish their notability.  Non-notable addons would be speedy deleted.  The draft includes a table with six criteria for notabiltiy... addons meeting 3 or more would keep a page while others with 2 or less would be merged/deleted/etc.. Implementing something like this would take me time, since I'm busy trying to do the API docs, but I'd be willing to devote some effort to make it happen.  DDC (talk) 22:11, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Alternate suggestion
Since this vote has stagnated for a long time (and I am personally opposed to it), could I offer an alternative to at least move the yardstick forward?

What if we changed addon to have two variants, shown below:

 Wowpedia Hosted AddOn Page This page describes fan-made scripting using the World of Warcraft API which has had notable impact on the game's development/history.
 * For addons with some interesting sources demonstrating an impact on the game (such as content later absorbed by Blizzard, or causing API changes to be crushed by Blizzard)

 Wowpedia Hosted AddOn Page This page describes fan-made scripting using the World of Warcraft API. However, this page and others like it are proposed for future deletion unless sources are added to demonstrate that the addon has had a particularly notable impact on the game.
 * For addons lacking any sources to indicate notability

In the future, this would make it easier to identify addon pages that ought to be deleted vice those that ought to be retained or merged someplace else. Of course, to be useful this means not rushing to delete the pages until someone's had time to go through and find the notable ones. DDC (talk) 06:44, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Seems like a reasonable thing to do imo. 10:47, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Notable addons
DevTools is a notable addon that I think should be documented in the section DTZ suggested above (it made Blizzard do Blizzard DebugTools). I know there was also an addon that inspired the Auction House, but I do not remember the name of it. 09:16, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * looks like it was called Autotrade: Eithris (talk) 15:31, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Yup that was the name! 23:37, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Sea (add-on) keep. 02:21, 18 May 2021 (UTC)