Template talk:Landmark

I want to suggest rephrasing the note.

The current phrasing is somewhat misleading and limits its use:

• Misleading: You can also map travel to Mission locations (and some people refer to Cities, etc.)
• Limited: it would be helpful to use the same note for non-village locations, e.g. Giant's Basin, Devourer Cave, etc.

[Current note phrasing]

Note: This location is neither a town nor an outpost, so it is not labeled on the map and you cannot map travel there. You have to walk there every time you want to pay a visit. Make sure you've completed all your business before you leave.

[Suggested note phrasing]

Note: You cannot map travel to this location, it is a part of a larger Explorable area, and you have to walk here from a nearby portal whenever you visit. Be sure to complete all your business before you leave.

This would require actually having a Point of Interest page, which also seems like a good idea.

--Tennessee Ernie Ford 23:54, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I revised a little grammar bit in the new version, but other than that it seems fine to me. I'm not so sure we need a special page dedicated to "Point of Interest" as it's not an in-game term and is not commonly used by players, it's just a way to classify a location. The word "location" instead would seem just fine. Also, a Mission Outpost is still considered an Outpost for map purposes, "Outpost" is part of its name after all, it's just a special case of an Outpost. RoseOfKali 00:20, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Your edits work for me. I'm also good with replacing Point of Interest with location (no article) (now changed).

However, the wiki does refer to Mission locations rather than Mission Outposts...and, until the discussion, I didn't understand what was/was not similar about the one from the other. --Tennessee Ernie Ford 00:28, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I haven't seen any comments — does that mean it's okay to update the text? Or, should I post a note in community portal before changing a template (however limited its use)?   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 20:52, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

If the purple text above is what you want to update to, that's fine with me. I also think this page should be adequate for a question of this nature. RoseOfKali 21:06, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Shorter suggestion

Note: This landmark is part of a larger zone; to get there, you need to enter the zone and walk to the Landmark.

I kicked the "make sure to complete" because you always need to do that with explorables, and with landmarks it's actually wrong. You can start some business, leave the landmark, and come back later to finish as long as you don't leave the zone. (I think it works that way with the Nolani Academy graveyard?)

When you put the template on a page, it will not read "way to the Poi", but rather use the name of the page, which should be the name of the landmark. I gave Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Poi a glance and it ought to work out.

I hope TEF will tell me if my suggestion is too short. ;) --◄mendel► 00:45, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

More accurate wording for POIs that are in outposts, and most players who have a basic understanding of how GW zones work should be able to figure out to finish their business before they exit the zone. I would argue to remove the "the" from right before the PAGENAME, because it might cause things like when you Ctrl-ping "I'm using a The Breach..." RoseOfKali 01:10, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Ok, that makes sense. Shortening yet again:

Note: This landmark is part of a larger zone; to reach it, enter the zone and walk there.

--◄mendel► 01:34, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Brief is good :-) The phrase is good!

Three good test cases: Giant's Basin, The Roost, & Ashford Village

If y'all are good with marking the land, let's make it so.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 03:50, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm :-D (at your edit summary, too). Anyway, if you want to wait for the outcome of the discussion about the location taxonomy to finish this, that might be quite indeterminate. As it stands, "landmark" on the wiki means these kind of locations that aren't zones, even if they're not points; replacing it with "location" in the above phrase would also make sense semantically because landmarks are locations. I prefer "Landmark" slightly because its use impresses upon the reader that we're calling them that here. The way to go about is for you, TEF, to edit the template now, because then you get to decide and I'll be too lazy to do anything about it. ;-)

And the landmarks really should have a Template:Location box on the page because that gives us a simple way to indicate which zone they're in. User type=landmark for now. --◄mendel► 10:29, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

So it shall be done, so it has been written. (re: template rewording)

There are about a dozen or two pages that use the POI template. Shall I go through each to make sure that they include the LI template, too? (w/user type = "landmark")   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 16:46, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Sure, that'd be good. Please note that I renamed the template to the less opaque {{landmark}}. I'm certain we could have many more landmark articles, too — GWW has a list of game locations pulled from the game data file, but I can't find it right now. --◄mendel► 17:25, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Good idea changing this to template:landmark...but now I have to change my redirected redirects :-)

(there's a lot of poi-notes→poi that I was updating to poi...I'll just update them to landmark directly)   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 17:20, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

... Outpost

→ Moved to GuildWiki talk:Style and formatting/Missions

Progress Report - poi/poi-notes now marked as land

I've updated all the pages that linked from poi or poi-note to the landmark template. I've tried to make them as consistent as possible.

• generally consolidated text, esp. for articles that were already brief.
• included location box for all, so that they are more easily found. I've left in placeholders for adding maps and primary images.
• generally moved inline images to the location box.
• removed extra white space, to be consistent with what seems to be used here currently.

Other command decisions:

• "NOTOC"d landmarks, since most should be short (even if they have many sections)
• removed beast/enemy notes and moved them to description (since details already lie in the explorable's article) (this done as separate edit, in case s/o wants to undo easily)
• moved Getting There into Description (for all but the longest article) and clarifying the directions along the way

Left to Do:

• there weren't all that many, and it strikes me that there are probably a lot of articles out there that should be Landmarks, but aren't — any idea how to find them?
• Nightfall had zero — either means that few people here play (or those that do are too wiki'd out to be writing/updating)... which might mean that there's other Nightfall TBD work that is hidden.
• There's no category:landmarks...and I'm not good enuf w/wikicode to pull it off. (Feel free to teach me to fish.)

  — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 20:28, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm used to seeing "Getting there" as a separate section in most location-related articles, such as cities and regions. I think it should stay consistent, even if it's very short. RoseOfKali 21:13, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

I thought of that, too...so, I tried it both ways. Getting There ends up adding a large proportion of screen real-estate to headers. And including it in the description makes it more readable IMO. My rationalization is that these aren't meant to be like most location articles; they are closer to subsections of the article on the main zone. So, shorter seems sweeter here. Take a look at a couple of the pages (using what links to template:landmark) and let me know if you still miss it.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 21:32, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:Landmark should be added into the template, so that all pages using the template are automatically categorized. Also, I don't miss the section header personally, just wondered if it would throw people off if some location articles have it and others don't. RoseOfKali 05:01, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I somehow thought that type=landmark would auto-categorize. Thanks, I definitely missed that. (So, is type= just cosmetic?) With luck, by the time you read this, they'll be manually categorized.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 06:02, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Hmmn, so I created category:Landmark, but it probably should have been plural (reads better in Category:Locations). Is there an easy way to fix this? i.e move Category:Landmark to Category:Landmarks and update the pages marked with the category to the plural?   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 06:32, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I would think the proper way is actually singular, meaning Locations should be... singularized? *shrug* And type= only puts that into the infobox (or so I thought) - it links to the Landmark article rather than the category. RoseOfKali 06:59, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

The proper way for categories is plural. If you look at Category:Locations , you see how it is done, and if you look at the sub-categories you'll also see that locations aren't catted into these directly, but rather by campaign.

Of course the location box could auto-cat, but it'd help if all locations had either links or no links (although we do have a template to de-link these now). Also, have a look at the other location type categories and find out how they were made to group under T in Category:Locations. ;) If you don't get it, ask and I shall reveal the secret. ;-) Oh, how I love a conundrum! --◄mendel► 00:46, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Never knew there existed a "system" for naming categories, but cool, thanks for clarifying. RoseOfKali 03:02, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

(re-indent) I'll take a look (and I hope none of us shall be surprised if I don't figure it out). BTW, I took a stab at a style guide (mostly to make sure I stayed consistent if/when I encounter the next un-tagged landmark).

Incidentally, why is it better that categories group under, Type:, instead of under their own, alphabetic name? I tend to look for, Locations, rather than, Type: Locations. (Why? I'm already at a category page, which is a type of type.) — Don't get me wrong: I'll stick with whatever folks have worked out here.

and more progress:

• I believe I caught everything that was inappropriately tagged as :category:location and converted it (mostly to landmarks).
  • I treated sub-areas of The Underworld and FoW also as landmarks (although I tend to think those articles should be transcluded subsections of the main articles, rather than require their own, official pages).
• I noticed that we our great, new, shiny template:landmark doesn't work for unreachable landmarks (as the glossary article would suggest). I hesitate to add another new template:unreachable landmark, but perhaps that's the best solution. (But likely no new category:unreachable landmark; there are too few.) In the meantime, I kludged a similar note for the couple I found.

  — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 02:44, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Isn't a Landmark also a Location? Many articles belong to multiple categories. RoseOfKali 03:02, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely. However, the category:locations is a category of categories...the only pages that belong to it directly are continents. Other location-related articles belong to category:locations by virtue of their inclusion in a smaller subset (e.g. category:kryta, category:outposts, etc.) So, most landmarks will belong to at least two categories: :landmark(s) and :[containing explorable] (if it exists) or :[containing:next larger subset], both of which will (ahem) land them in category:locations.   — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 03:15, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Gotcha. You just talked about removing "category:location" from improperly-catted articles, so it made me think they were not going to be in that category at all. RoseOfKali 04:24, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Actually, a Category:unreachable landmarks is a good idea; because there are so few, it makes it easier to find them. (And I think there are more than you expect, too, they just haven't been documented.)

About the grouping by type: I don't know why it is done, but it may have been in preparation for folding the Campaign subcategories into Category:Locations. That, of course, hasn't been done yet.

Categories can't be moved, they can only be recreated, and I could recat articles by bot, even into the campaign landmark categories, but I am reluctant because I don't know whether I'd better make the location box autocat. Maybe I just need a nudge one way or the other. Autocatting is probably less painful. --◄mendel► 12:14, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

re:unreacables — cool, in that case, I'll put together a :category:unreachable landmark and a :template:unreachable landmark. Obviously, I haven't yet looked at getting things into type alpha ordered (still on to-do list).

re:autocat via infobox. Should I presume you've seen the other info box? Should I be using that instead?

re:recat vs autocat for fixing :category:landmark to the plural: yes, please :-)

• Fixing the singularity is a giving fish solution and autocat is a teaching to fish solution. The first is less work, but has no long lasting impact. Autocat is more work, but will prevent the problem for GW2 and make it easier to resolve current overcategorizations (I caught overcat in :Locations, but I'm sure it must occur at the continent, region, and even explorable levels).

  — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 17:46, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:Unreachable landmarkS, please. ;-) Location box2 is still experimental. If it gets used, it will replace the old location box, so no changes should be necessary. Needed for the autocat are campaign and type, these should not be linkified, but I'll either write teh template to do that or let teh bot take care of it; just don't linkify them when you edit boxes. :) If the autocat stays to long on my mental "procrastination list", give me a symbolic kick on my talkpage, please. --◄mendel► 02:19, 10 March 2009 (UTC)