User blog:SQhi/SQhi's Project Pilot (category automation)

Another very long blog post.(the trend for these few weeks)

For those of you who have been studying the Recent Changes carefully this past fortnight, you may have noticed a small pilot which I have been silently carrying out.

I have always been fascinated with how our management templates add the relevant category to our articles. So since a few months ago been studying them in more detail, as part of my plan to upgrade my skills from regular article creation to template creation.

I started sifting through for a comprehensive list of all existing management templates, a list of which i have just established at Nitrome:Sandbox. I do hope the list is complete, else inform me. A list of these would be helpful to educate our new members. Open this page, now don't close it.

Back to the point.

The secret to the categories, tags. This allows the template to add a category to the pages it is added to, but not add the template into the category at the same time.

Meanwhile, I thought about the laborious work we do manually adding categories and removing duplicates from pages, and I wondered, why not automate the process.

I began my pilot on Magic Touch, on which I have completed Rename and Rainbogeddon. I removed the category Magic Touch from all the Magic Touch Pages.


 * 1) http://nitrome.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Touch?diff=next&oldid=82243
 * 2) http://nitrome.wikia.com/index.php?title=Magic_Touch_%28Nintendo_DS%29&diff=83682&oldid=83681
 * 3) http://nitrome.wikia.com/index.php?title=Castle_%28Magic_Touch%29&diff=83683&oldid=82239
 * 4) http://nitrome.wikia.com/index.php?title=Wizard_%28Magic_Touch%29&diff=83684&oldid=82241
 * 5) http://nitrome.wikia.com/index.php?title=Knights_%28Magic_Touch%29&diff=83685&oldid=80101
 * 6) http://nitrome.wikia.com/index.php?title=Balloons_%28Magic_Touch%29&diff=83686&oldid=82238

I then added Category:Magic Touch to Template:Magic Touch. However, as I had posted my template onto Nitrome:Rename and Nitrome:Rainbogeddon/SQhi, these two pages were added into the Magic Touch Category as well.
 * http://nitrome.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Magic_Touch?diff=prev&oldid=82567

Look back to Nitrome:Sandbox Look at the categories. I have successfully turned Nitrome:Sandbox into the "most problematic page on the wiki".

I tried a different tack. I was likewise engrossed with how the template's description changes depending on the space it is placed in. It turns out to be a #switch. I applied it to my Magic Touch Template, and after some tinkering, tada, it worked. My template would now only add Category:Magic Touch to articles. Proof
 * http://nitrome.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Magic_Touch?diff=next&oldid=83416
 * http://nitrome.wikia.com/wiki/Nitrome:Rainbogeddon/SQhi#Magic_Touch
 * http://nitrome.wikia.com/wiki/Enemies_(Droplets)?diff=prev&oldid=83596

1 week later, so far so good.

This blog post details my inspiration for automating the adding of categories, the possible issues that could be faced discovered through my pilot, and the solutions to overcome these problems.

I do see a lot of potential in this idea. It could clear up our confused, disoriented addition of categories to our articles. We can integrate it into our infoboxes, and our navboxes. It would save us tons of time and effort spent on proper categorisation, or to prevent us leaving our categories in disarray due to heavy overheads.

No, please don't try knock this idea down by stating a whole list of issues and things that can go wrong, although constructive feedback is always appreciated. We will never know how it would work out, until we try. Just like in my pilot.

SQhi&bull;(talk)&bull;52k edit 15:41, July 15, 2012 (UTC)