Forum:Managing removed content

Forums: Village pump → Managing removed content

Hey there people. As you already know, I am kinda passionate about the subject of removed content, and this is why you've seen me weighting on issues such as Classic WoW and NPCs removed from game almost constantly since I joined wowpedia.

This has resulted in me creating many categories such as Category:Durotar (original) mobs for all mobs having ever appeared in Durotar but now being gone. Note that this lists contain: mobs that appeared in vanilla and were removed with the Cataclysm, mobs that only temporarily appeared during Zalazane's Fall, mobs that only appeared during Battlefield: Barrens... There is no distinctions between them all, the only criteria to belong in the category is to have been in Durotar once but not anymore.

Proposal

So my proposal is that I want to extend that system further. Pcj has been kind enough to use a bot to "harvest" all the categories which pages using {{removed}} belonged to before the template was added. With that he created an excel sheet, that I tweaked by hand. Then a new bot would go through all the pages using the template to add back selected categories to match the old ones. For example, all boats that belonged to Category:Active passenger transports would be put into Category:Inactive passenger transports instead of having the category deleted entirely. All NPCs that belonged to Category:Arathi Highlands NPCs would be put into Category:Arathi Highlands (original) NPCs instead of having the category deleted. And this would happen for NPCs, quests, items, etc.

For example, the following NPC Lieutenant Benedict would end up with the following categories:

The bot would also remove "|doc=" parameters and of course not add a category twice if it is already present.

Advantages

I believe this proposal has many advantages:

This will add back a lot of information that was, in my opinion, unnecessary to remove.
If we ever decide to create Classic specific pages or categories, we can browse through the (original) categories to make our work much faster.
Even if we later decide that "(original)" isn't such a good name and that we want to rename everything to another name, since everything would be categorized properly, it would be very easy to use a bot to rename all the categories.

Flaws

Of course this isn't a magical system and there are still some flaws:

1) All the characters that were removed from a zone but added to another won't have the {{removed}} template and as such wouldn't be affected by the bot. Such NPCs will have to be found and edited manually.
2) It seems at some point it was standard to put "Unknown" as the location of NPCs once they were removed from WoW. A bot can't fix that.
3) The bot only parsed through pages using the {{removed}} template, it didn't go through pages using the {{Unobtainable}} or holiday ones so those will be left unaffected.
4) There is the possibility that some pages were mis-categorized in the past, and as such that bogus categories will be added back to wowpedia.

Nothing we can really do about 1, 2 and 3 considering that's already happening, and for point 4 I believe it won't be too much of a problem, because the bot will add the categories at the very end of each page and as such it'll make it easy to take a look at them and decide wether they are good or not.

Of course the proposal is not perfect but I think we should go forward with it. What do you guys think? --Xporc (talk) 13:31, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

The original categories shouldn't have been removed in the first place just because the NPC was removed. Now we have countless uncategorized pages floating around in the database. If we can bring them back, I'm in. -- MyMindWontQuiet 13:53, 18 October 2018 (UTC)