UESPWiki:Community Portal

The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995

Contents 1 Active Discussions 2 Reorganization of CP Archives 3 Sortable Tables 4 Tamriel Namespace Moving 4.1 Update 1 4.2 Tamriel (continent) 5 Update 2 6 New User log

This is the main discussion forum used for community-wide discussions about UESP's operations, policies, design, and improvement.

All members of the community are welcome to contribute to this page. Please sign and date your post by typing ~~~~ or clicking the signature icon in the edit toolbar. If you would like to start a new inquiry, please place it at the bottom of the page with a two-tier (==) heading.

Other pages for community-wide or general questions include:

• Existing policies and guidelines have individual pages; their talk pages are the best place to discuss these policies (see Active Discussions for links to active policy discussions).
• If you have a request that requires an administrator, you may want to post your comments on the administrator noticeboard.
• The reference desk is the best place for questions about how to play Elder Scrolls games.

In addition, past discussions from the Community Portal can be found at:

• CP Archives lists all of the past discussions from the Community Portal page, including major discussions and chronlogical archives.
• Archive is a general archive for organizing all past community-wide discussions.

[edit] Active Discussions

Many discussions of community-wide interest are held on pages other than the community portal. Discussions about specific policies belong on the policy talk pages, for example. The following table lists other discussions that are currently in progress on other talk pages. If you start a discussion on another talk page, please add it to this list. If a discussion listed here has been inactive (i.e., no comments of any type in at least a week), please remove it from the list.

Location	Date Started	Topic
UESPWiki talk:Lore#Sources for Lore Articles	August 4, 2008	Are non-game books acceptable as source material? What is canon?
Oblivion talk:Roleplaying#Better guidelines	July 9, 2008	Improving the roleplaying articles
UESPWiki talk:Namespace Move Project	July 3, 2008	Reorganizing UESP's namespaces: renaming Tamriel, moving General and Review namespaces

[edit] Reorganization of CP Archives

I've reorganized how the Community Portal page is laid out (in particular the discussion links at the top of the page); changed where the archives and major discussions are listed; and, moved some discussion that was on this page elsewhere. One of the key concepts in this reorganization is that it is not necessary for all discussions to be held on the community portal. In many cases, there are other talk pages that are more appropriate for long-term organization of the site's discussions. Accordingly, I've chosen to not explain everything that I've done here, but instead I've started a discussion of the whole reorganization at UESPWiki talk:Community Portal/Archives. This notice is primarily to let the community know about the discussion; I invite anyone who has feedback to provide it at the talk page rather than here. Thanks! --Nephele^Talk 22:05, 20 June 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Sortable Tables

I've made some updates to how sortable tables work, adding some new useful features. The changes are documented at Help:Tables#Sortable Tables. To see the changes you'll probably need to hard refresh (Ctrl-F5) your browser window. If you notice any sortable tables that are broken by the updates, let me know. Or let me know if there are problems with the new features, or requests for other tweaks (not guaranteeing they'll be doable, but you can always ask). --Nephele^Talk 02:11, 25 June 2008 (EDT)

Sweet! Did you get this code from somewhere or write it yourself? If you wrote it, you should let the Mediawiki people know - there's some pretty good improvements there I think they'd be interested in. (I put in a request for descending sort on their page months ago, and never got a response. I was really surprised that feature wasn't included by default.) As for the changes to Morrowind:Merchant List, I guess the letters instead of icons are a reasonable compromise, if that's what's needed to make the page viewable again. It's too bad you can't do something equivalent to the "Freeze Panes" feature in Excel. Having a header column that stays visible on the top while the rest of the contents scroll below it would be REALLY useful, but I can imagine how that would be tricky to code in a wiki. (Though maybe possible - If you think that just about every browser-accessed e-mail site manages to do something like that, I wonder if something along those lines would do the trick - but it's probably not worth the effort.) Another tweak that would be nice is some way of dictating the format of an entire column by choosing a class in the header cell. You can do it easily with rows, but not columns. A good example where this would be handy would be the colored columns on Morrowind:Spell Merchants. If you could just set something once on the first cell and have it carry all the way down the column instead of treating every cell individually, this page would load MUCH faster, I think. Assuming it's possible, which I'll leave to your judgement, of course. Anyhow, nice work there. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 02:37, 25 June 2008 (EDT)

The code updates are mine; I put them together a while back for my "real" job and finally took the time today to port them over to the wiki. Some day here I'll get around to sharing my wisdom with the Mediawiki developers :P

Setting properties for an entire column in a table is basically just not possible with HTML. HTML doesn't have a concept of columns, only rows and cells. The code I've put together for the sortable tables starts to simulate columns, but this code is all javascript-based. In other words, if we wanted to pursue column formatting, the formatting would only be available to readers with javascript-enabled browsers (OK, that's probably most everyone today, except perhaps security-paranoid people). And it wouldn't really make the page load that much faster. The HTML would be a bit smaller, but our performance problems come from images and templates, not from raw HTML. Then once the page gets to your browser, there'd be an additional delay added as the javascript processes the page--effectively just adding the missing HTML back in. --Nephele^Talk 04:16, 25 June 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Tamriel Namespace Moving

The move to the new Lore namespace is finally under way.

This is currently in progress, so until the process is complete, please:

• Do not rename any Tamriel or Lore articles (bots are going to assume that before-move name is the same as after-move name, and that assumption has to hold until after all the links are fixed)
• Do not attempt to fix any Tamriel or Lore articles that appear in Double Redirects (the bots should be fixing all of these; if any are missed by the bot, then the bot operator needs to know about it to update the bot code, and will probably want to test the updates on the existing problem case).
• Any new articles that need to be created should be created in Lore and only in Lore. But first make sure that no Tamriel article with same name exists. If there's a Tamriel article, edit that article instead of creating a Lore article.
• Standard edits to Lore/Tamriel articles can still be made.

–Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 03:57, 30 July 2008 (EDT)

The move is now complete. There's still checking to be done, but these restrictions no longer apply. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 02:31, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Update 1

The move phase is now complete - all required pages have been moved to the new Lore namespace. I've manually updated the templates that mention Tamriel (except Template:Tam - which probably wants deleting at some point) and I'm going to wait until the job queue drops to something more sensible than its current 14,670 before starting the relinking process (unless NepheleBot wants to step in first). –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 08:04, 31 July 2008 (EDT)

One thing I've just noticed is that there are a few pages like Tamriel:Suran and Tamriel:Silt Strider that aren't going to get recreated in the Lore namespace at the moment. The reason is that they are just redirects out of Tamriel into the gamespace (both Morrowind in this case). I'd like to suggest that we do not fix these by creating new Lore redirects. In general, I do not believe Lore should be redirecting to gamespace; rather, Lore should contain a generic article about the item and then should be transcluded into the game page where more detail can be added. Of course, if others have sound objections to that idea... –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 09:47, 31 July 2008 (EDT)

I'd agree that in general we don't want redirects from Tamriel/Lore articles to other namespaces, especially in cases such as Tamriel:Suran where the page is an orphaned redirect. Also both of those examples were created nearly two years ago, back when the site had far fewer features than nowadays to help readers and editors find articles. So even if they once were useful, I don't think they are any more. At some point we'll need to fix any links to those articles, and it might be good to get a list of such articles just to make sure nothing has been overlooked. But I'd say both of those are low priorities and can wait until the rest of the move is finalized. --Nephele^Talk 20:13, 31 July 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Tamriel (continent)

Okay, I've noticed that I've sort of broken that first rule by creating the Lore:Tamriel page, but I left the Lore:Tamriel (continent) redirect in place, so the bots shouldn't have a problem with that. At any rate, all links to either Lore:Tamriel or Lore:Main Page are going to have to be manually reviewed after the relinking is done, because it would be impossible for a bot to decide which page is more appropriate in each case. Hope this didn't throw a wrench in anything, but it seemed it was the appropriate time to do this. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 09:58, 31 July 2008 (EDT)

Yes... I'd deliberately left the continent page in place, but I'm sure the bots will deal with it. I would strongly advise against doing any moving around at the moment. There's enough going on in the job queue without confusing the site further. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 10:02, 31 July 2008 (EDT)

I already undid the Tamriel (continent) move. By default every link to Tamriel:Tamriel is going to be changed by the bots into a link to Lore:Tamriel. Which means hundreds of links that say "see the [[Tamriel:Tamriel|Tamriel]] namespace" are going to become links to Lore:Tamriel. Readers are going to be really confused if that takes them to a page that doesn't contain navigational information for the entire namespace. I think the best thing to do with Tamriel:Tamriel type links is to work towards changing them into links to either Lore:Main_Page or Lore:Tamriel_(continent) to make it clear that the link has been examined and someone has determined what page is most appropriate. Once we have essentially eliminated all Tamriel:Tamriel (or Lore:Tamriel) links, then I think we can safely move Tamriel (continent) to be the only Tamriel article, and at that point bots can easily remove "(continent)" from all of the links. --Nephele^Talk 10:42, 31 July 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Update 2

There are still some pages linking to Lore:Tamriel, but almost all of them are archive pages. If anybody feels they need relinking, the list is here. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 02:33, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

Probably should, because if Lore:Tamriel (continent) ultimately gets moved to Lore:Tamriel, then the links in those archive pages won't make any sense. They should be changed with discretion, of course, because some of them may be more appropriate to link to the continent article than the main page. I know there's a "don't edit archive pages" rule, but I think it should be suspended in the case of correcting links, otherwise there's not much point in keeping the archives if their links don't make any sense. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 09:55, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

It already says at the top of every archive page (at least every archive page using the Archive Header, e.g., UESPWiki:Community Portal/Archive 1 or UESPWiki:Archive/CP Biographies?): "Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links." What else are you suggesting is needed? --Nephele^Talk 11:18, 3 August 2008 (EDT)

Me? I was just suggesting that the links should be updated by a human, rather than a bot, because some of them should point to Lore:Main Page and others should point to Lore:Tamriel (continent). That's all I meant by "discretion". --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:48, 4 August 2008 (EDT)

(Outdent) Can we make Lore a default selection for searches, like Tamriel was? Driving me nuts ;) --Benould^•T•C 11:53, 4 August 2008 (EDT)

You can do that in your Preferences. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 12:34, 4 August 2008 (EDT)

Thanks rpeh, that helps ;) Although Lore should still be included in the default searches, like Tamriel was. --Benould^•T•C 16:00, 4 August 2008 (EDT)

Lore is being included in default searches, the exact same way that Tamriel was. Every custom reference to Tamriel in our PHP code has been replaced by a reference to Lore; Daveh installed the new PHP over the weekend. I tested and everything seemed to be working properly. For example, doing Go Vvardenfell when on an Oblivion page took me straight to Lore:Vvardenfell (not to a Tamriel redirect). --Nephele^Talk 17:03, 4 August 2008 (EDT)

[edit] New User log

We need a new user log, kinda like what Wikipedia has (click). It'd enable the creation of a Welcoming Committee (I could be the founder!) and we'd also be able to spot Sockpuppets upon creation. All in favor? Daedryon^{•T•C•E•} 00:01, 4 August 2008 (EDT)

Aye --M'aiq the Liar 03:59, 27 August 2008 (EDT)