Talk:Creature

First Topic of this Page

Would it be a idea to place monsters here by level and location? --Blakborn 08:05, 3 March 2007 (PST)

At a minimum we should have a representation of all the threat levels to explain the icon color. Also I do think we should capture key monsters here. --Hinney 21:21, 16 March 2007 (PDT)

Looks good, but i dont know if 'orc-kind' is a good description. --Blakborn 03:44, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

But Orc-kind is the type that is used in the tooltips in the games when you hover a creature... --Tjikke 05:48, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

Then keep it like that. ;)--Blakborn 07:31, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

Think we gotta agree on how we'll categories the creatures. Either through the in-game categories that Turbine created, or through some we fix by ourselves. If we use the in-game ones, then birds fall into the 'Beasts' category :) --Tjikke 08:27, 26 March 2007 (PDT)

i havent seen any category for birds but i noticed i saw quite a lot of them. And you described beasts as mammals and birds arent mammal, I think. Since we got insects and mammals, why not birds. Thinking about the races of middle earth birds dont realy classefy anywhere. I believe they are realy hard to classify and therefor need their own class. If Turbine gives us a full monsterlist or classify's them as something else we can always change it. --Blakborn 08:51, 26 March 2007 (PDT)

Shouldn't we go further then just spiders and name Bindhole spider, Weaver spider etc. --Blakborn 08:53, 26 March 2007 (PDT)

I think it would be most right to use the ingame creature categories. Sure we should mension all the spider species that exist :) --Tjikke 14:17, 26 March 2007 (PDT)

We still need to decide if we should use the in-game creature categories, or create our own. The first would mean that we had to remove Bird-kind. We need someone else but Blakborn and myself to comment on this, since we can't agree on this matter :)

We also still need some better names for the evil alligned Men and Dwarves. I still dont like 'Evil Dwarves' ^^ --Tjikke 06:15, 29 March 2007 (PDT)

Stick with the in-game classifications, and we probably can search the quests text for better names for the evil men and dwarves. --Hinney 10:03, 29 March 2007 (PDT)

How about BRIGANDS for both Evil Dwarves and Man? Its used in Accomplishments and in Ered Luin refered to Dourhands and i believe in Bree-land to those Evil Man...
PS: Sorry for caps but this page needs cleaning up anyway--Xander 06:14, 31 March 2007 (PDT)

In-game tooltip for birds is Swarm. I think the proper designation on the creature type here is Swarm, and this type includes other non-bird multi-individual organizms such as bats and gnats.--Nemmerle 10:09, 29 March 2007 (PDT)

No when you look at the toop tips for birds its:

Craban
Swarm
>Healthbar<
Beast

I don't know what 'swarm' actually is supposed to mean. For other creatures, like a boar it look like:

Boar
Normal
>Healthbar<
Beast

Birds is ordered into the 'Beast' category. What 'swarm' and 'normal' mean, is another issuse, which ofc could be useful to determine :) --Tjikke 10:57, 29 March 2007 (PDT)

Aren't normal creatures 1 creature and swams are a lot of smaller ones? --Blakborn 14:27, 29 March 2007 (PDT)

Difficulty indicators

I found during monster play 2 more indicators. nemisis and arch-nemisis. Should i enter them? --Blakborn 15:03, 26 March 2007 (PDT)

Sure, but we should figure out if they are unique to Monster Players or to Ettenmoors in generel :) --Tjikke 23:26, 26 March 2007 (PDT)

I think they are restricted to pvmp area's but need conformation from high-level player. --Blakborn 04:20, 27 March 2007 (PDT)

Not sure if this has been answered yet, it's been a while... but I will go ahead and do it. As you may have noticed from the recent increase in Nemesis mobs from the instance articles I have been working on, this classification is not used simply for PvMP. Starting with Garth Agarwen, all the hardest bosses in instances seem to be considered a Nemesis, and without a doubt require a full fellowship to defeat. Arch-nemesis on the other hand is used pretty much exclusively used for Raid bosses... Thorog and others in Helegrod are of this type, and as more raids are added I'm sure there will be more. --Fedaykin 20:55, 6 August 2007 (PDT)

Well I been add new Creatures as I play on-line. Any way with Location as we going to use namespace for it? --Speico 11:03am AEST 21 June 2007

Redo Beasts pages

Hi all I am redo doing the Beasts Pages so they all be category right. This will help in adding new crearures to the Beasts area as it will auto update. I have fix the list of items that show up under the beast category now as they will be in a sub list call "beast-name Trophies". --Speico 15:09, 12 December 2007 (PST)

Longer Discussion on Same-name Creatures

This will gonna be long, but please endure and feedback your opinions on how to deal with same-name within same region creatures and mobs. I will soon tell why I believe this is important, but am indeed open for being told "it is not".

Background: For a long time we have handled same-name creatures per region, such as Elder Moor-stalker (North Downs) versus Elder Moor-stalker (Trollshaws). These same-name creatures are found within just a very small level range of 1 or 2 levels wide, e.g. 12-13 or 12-14. These creatures behave very much the same regarding loot-drops, quests, abilities, etc. Let us establish some items for the following, lengthier discussion:

These creatures appear in a zone comprizing one or more areas but the zone is never split in several disconnected zones. Such zones may cross region borders (rare), e.g. a few mobs in the Weather Hills where the zone spans Bree-land as well as the Lone-lands.
These creatures share the same Lore-master readings, any differences are only from the level of the LM's versus the creature levels.
Usually they drop exactly the same loot, except if the level-range crosses a loot table border (e.g. Light vs. Medium Hide).
Usually they are valid for the same quests, except for quest that have a built in quest-zone recognition system that makes the location name to flash under the radar (those quest-zones are indeed unbound to region/area/landmark).
Usually they share the same abilities and hence also share attackers' tactics.
Usually they share exactly the same appearance.

So far it seems sensible to split creatures only per region, and occasionally accept same-name mobs to spawn elsewhere for certain quests or so. However...

Until Angmar I had never encountered same-name mobs within the same region having a very wide level-range, but suddenly blogmal orc pages and iron crown angmarim pages covered from level 40 to 50. At a closer look the above items did not hold any longer. The mobs I encountered appear in disconnected zones, they drop very different loot and they pertain to very different quests. To be able to check the LM readings we need to cooperate and have several LMs (on par level-wise with the different creatures) to read their stats and then compare the outcome. To be able to check the abilities we need results from a fair number of fights with the differently levelled creatures and then compare the results. Appearance seems to be quite the same, but on the other hand many mobs look the same wherever we go, same-name or not. Actually, I compared the level 40-ish with level 45-ish, but I anticipate yet another difference between 45-ish and 50-ish.

Information Clarity

We all agree that our wiki is for bringing forth information in best possible way, right? But on the other hand we don't want to complicate things unnecessarily, hence we have often chosen a more pragmatic style, such as allowing this or that to share a page. But at other times we have gone to the extreme in the other direction and split very tightly coupled things into different pages.

We also to not include any information that do not pertain to the current page (unless it is trivia or lore but then bottommost, out of the immediate sight). Examples of thing not to include: A creature page may mention a related "owner" but any of the owner's lore should not be found at the creature page but at the owner's page. For looted items we do not include information on how it is used, its lore, or any other info not related to the creature, because all of this should be found at the item pages. For quests we do not tell prerequisites as that is found at the quest page. And so on and on.

On a related note I want to mention that text is not always a good info conveyor. Indeed it is, when people expect texts and bulky documents. But text is not when people are looking for data of any kind, then the data should be found as singleton items in clearly labelled sections. Somewhat out of topic but worth thinking about -- it is a known fact for GUI application designers that a dialogue should not have more than five (5) words if possible, otherwise people will not read but click the button they assume is correct. That is a reason why you sometimes find me shorten texts a lot, taking away words and phrases that do not add value to the context but are just fluff.

Now, facing these same-name creatures we also face an information issue. For a while, please suppress prejudices and immediate gut feelings; we need to think this through (and I am really not sure I yesterday begun any good deeds, if you noticed them).

At the wiki we want to present clear at-a-glance info about creatures:

Their location -- usually one or a few areas within the same region (without coordinates as the creatures are roaming a zone)
- Possibly landmarks where the creatures also occur (with the coordinates of the landmark)
- Possibly coordinates for creatures' static location (and also for where rare creatures have appeared)
Their abilities
Quest involvement -- possibly some tactics
Achievements -- the results from deeds that pertain to the creature type
Loot drops

This sounds OK, simple and sensible. However, the split second same-name creatures break any one or more of these items the information flow begins to waver, it is no longer that easy to convey crisp and clear info but we in one way or the other have to add specifications/explanations. That may be done by introducing sub-sections for the variations, but still that adds complexity to the page which spills over to the visitor. Hence such subsections must be cleverly thought out.

Another approach is to split into different pages based on locale. (Here I did wrong yesterday and split on level, I will backtrack my steps, rectify, and spend the day self-flagellating.) We could do this even if the creatures exist within the same region but only if they indeed break any of the above items.

And of course there is a third approach, we split only if subsections become complex and too hard to comprehend easily.

Locations

This is not a very hard issue, we may add subsections based on levels. Either we use sub-headers such as ===== Mob Levels 41-43 ===== and tell their locations as we do today, followed by the next subsection. Or we simply have different paragraphs. We do not have to have a hard policy as this may be done sensibly from case to case depending on how complex the resulting location info is.

Or we split on different pages based on locale.

Simply put, we just need to be clear about which creatures belong to where.

Loot Drops

In other discussions loot-drops were discussed. Originally it started as a question at RTC's talk page, but also at this talk page. This discussion never reached consensus, but none was asked for I think.

Basically, the discussion was what and how to handle the Drops section at creature pages. Should we just add the stuff we find, mixed wildly, grouped somehow, ordered alphabetically or price-wise, find patterns for loot that could go into generic pages, etc.

The reason for that discussion is multi-faceted but basically it is about keeping the information overload at a minimum. A spin-off effect from this was the new generic pages for recipe scroll cases; now creatures link to a generic page and do not have to list all possible 7-8 types of scrolls [1]. The same is possibly true for armament loots, just that we have not gathered enough such items to find any pattern. The same is perhaps true also for looted "resource items" (those for jewellers and scholars) and "ingredients", but again we need to find evidence for any patterns.

The reason for the "grouping" discussion is, yet again, about information clarity. For a visitor (and ourselves) it should be easy to find out if a certain creature drops something wanted. Groups that make sense are "quest items", "resources and ingredients", "uncommon and useful", "vendor trash", and "task trophies" (loosely ordered by importance).

It was suggested that rather than using one "Lootbox" we use a Lootbox per group (the groups just mentioned). At least we would not need to bother with "fixing the layout" when adding items, but we just add them to the appropriate boxes. If we want to keep loot drop info at creatures pages I support this idea as it will definitely ease the workload on us editors, we who do add loot drops to creatures. And even if we could find evidence and reach consensus for having more of those "generic loot item pages" we would still need a few groups.

However, one could argue if the "Drops" section should be there at all. That is since from a creature reader's point of view much is irrelevant info, and since the symmetric reflection of this info is also found at the item pages respectively -- or it should. One could also argue if "vendor trash" (usually armaments which never ever surpass crafted or rewarded items) should be included at all, because of the negligible info, but for a completeness point of view it should be documented somehow.

So, this is an open-ended question:

Should we retain the "Drops" section, or should we drop it and rather focus on the item pages respectively?

Personally I am fine with dropping it. The reason is that I doubt anybody looks up a certain creature to find out how to obtain a particular item. However, the immediate but the only exception I have found is when I wanted to verify that a certain hide dies not drop from a very fury creature; and this may support the idea to have only a "drops-hide" at these pages. But from a creature reader's point of view there may be more items to track, are there? Hence the open-ended question.

Another reason to drop that section is simply editor convenience, the less to update and focusing on the item pages only.

Should the answer turn out to be a strong "keep it", then:

Should we skip certain kind of loot and just include "important" loot?

But then we of course need to define "important" ... though "quest items", "resources", and "task trophies" are natural items to include. Would it turn out to be hard to define "important" then we should perhaps group by using many Lootbox-es per page, for the ease of use and for clarity.

However --- This post is about same-name creatures. Having very different loot-drops listed at the same page is indeed confusing. Either we should split pages, based on locale, to be able to list the different loot items properly, or, we must somehow sub-section the loot-drops to make it clear what may drop from what. That would be a few subsections with a few Lootbox-es each.

To provide clear information becomes much more important, and worse, for "quest items" which will drop only from the proper creatures, but not their same-name siblings (or cousins). It is not correct to mix quest-items together in the same Lootbox since that is a plain lie. If goblin X does not drop the wanted quest-item, but his same-name goblin X' does, then we should not fool anybody by saying differently. But then, how? Text is OK to a very small degree, subsections are OK if not too complex, split pages for X and X' may be OK but has other drawbacks.

This subtopic does not matter much for simple "Light Hide" versus "Medium Hide" and many other "resource and ingredient" loot drops. I believe the same is quite true also for "task trophies". The item pages respectively should clearly read which level of creatures that drop the items, otherwise the problem is more for those pages than for the creature pages. (Sadly, many trophy pages do not read drop-levels but only which tasks they pertain to, but this could be amended). Finally, personally I am not too worried about the "vendor-trash" items, who cares? Other than completionists I mean? :P

However --- By adding lots of loot-drop items to pages that cover wildly different levels we may lose precision about which levels drop what. Unless that information is always added to the item pages. Sadly, that is not the common case. Hence, by allowing wide-level pages without otherwise specifying the data, we will indeed lose knowledge and precision, if we in the future want to gather evidence for something.

So, if having both different Lootbox-es based on groups and different subsection for the different same-name siblings, then we suddenly have a quite complex picture. Is that complex picture so complex that it justifies splitting pages based on locale.

Quests

When same-name creatures pertain to different quests and different areas, then the information we provide could be split on subsections. I guess this is much less invasive than for loot-drops (implied by the very long wall of text just above). We simply need sub-headers such as ===== Mob Levels 41-43 ===== and then to group the different quests accordingly.

Or we split the creature into different pages based on locale.

Simply put, we just need to be clear about which creatures are pertaining to which quests.

Abilities and LM Readings

I assume we already today split on different pages if same-name creatures also are let's say "normal" versus "elite".

For same-name and same-type creatures, what if LM readings differ? And then I mean an LM level 50 is reading a mob level 50 while an LM level 40 is reading a mob level 40, and their readings indeed differ. In one way this is similar to "Tier 1" versus "Tier 2" creatures, but in this case the creatures not exist at the same location, they are not even the same individual but one another's sibling (or cousin). (I think Tiers are only about bosses, but I do not know that for sure.)

I guess different LM readings as well as abilities support the idea to split into different pages based on locale, right? That would be the easiest to convey the correct information without beginning to fiddle around with the template too much to overcome these odd-balls.

Split Pages versus Subsections

Pros and cons. Both have their advantages, and both have their drawbacks. Period. But which is better than the other? And which is worse?

Shared page with subsections...

+ This will reduce the number of pages, disambiguation pages, and the use of the Other-template. Thus they will not require the visitor to click any extra link to arrive at the correct page if they started out wrong.

+ This will reduce the number of errors we editors do, linking to the wrong page. And indeed we do wrong, I find several such mistakes every week, usually links to a non-specific page when it should have been to a specified page. (Compare the mock pages "Wolf" and "Wolf (Angmar)", you can bet that many editors will link to "Wolf" which may be a level 7 in Bree-land. Actually it would have been better not having "Wolf" at all but "Wolf (Bree-land)".)

– If the information is complex the subsections will be harder to understand. --- Personally I see this as a problem only with the loot-drop sections, and certainly so by using several Lootbox-es for the different groups (which is something I support).

– Cannot be used for different LM readings, but may be used if different abilities.

– Cannot be used for "normal" versus "elite" creatures.

– Lost precision in information about which levels drop what (unless that info is always added somewhere else).

Split Pages...

+ Crisp an clear info about the creature, from any information point of view. No mix-ups with any other same-name creature are possible.

+ Supports different LM reading and anything else that is different.

+ Retains and improves precision in information about creature levels versus any other things.

– May require extra link-clicking if ending up at the wrong page to begin with.

– May require disambiguation pages if resulting in ≥ 3 pages.

– Editors must search to find the proper page to link to, but this also improves data precision.

– May possibly increase mistakes in linking to the correct creature page, policing attention required.

– Increases the amount of wiki pages (which is indeed not a problem for the database but rather for us maintainers).

Summary

First of all, I apologize for the wall of text, but on the other hand I have hopefully covered all possible facets of this particular subject. The wall also confirms that this topic is perhaps not that simple than anyone can say either this or that based on one's immediate gut feelings. Certainly so when it comes to the more complex subject of loot-drops. (It should be noted that much of creatures' loot-drop info is duplications over creatures-of-same-locale, thence that entire discussion and its possible duplication-reduction methods should indeed be kept elsewhere.)

Yesterday I split several blogmal and angmarim pages in Angmar. I wrongly specified them on levels but should have used locale. That wrongdoing aside, Seth was right to bring this up with me at IRC. I have pondered over the subject and wanted to point out that this is not a simple subject and that splitting pages (as I did, maybe rash?) is not the only solution. But which is better than the other? And that is an honest question.

In the end of the day, we all want clear and correct information, and we want to have useful information found at the correct and expected pages. With that said this topic is indeed open for discussions. Hopefully they will be open-minded and initially leaving no closed doors. In the end we may reach consensus which can be documented somewhere, as guidelines for our successors and ourselves. Cheers!
-- Zimoon (talk) 07:56, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

Comments

A lot of ideas here. A bit long, and hard to digest in one quick read, though. I'll give a few of my thoughts on generalities that relate to this topic.

We are documenting the game on the basis of our observations. We do not have access to the game internals, so all we have to go on is the information provided by the game, and occasionally developer comments and the developer diaries.

I want to reiterate, and hopefully make clear something I have said several times before. The name is not the identifier, but merely an attribute of the creature, item, quest, whatever. Internally, every game object has a unique numeric identifier. We know this from data.lotro.com and from the Lua scripting environment. We can see from searching the lorebook for names (of items, creatures, quests) that there can be many results with the same name. When you search the lorebook for a creature and get multiple results, you can be sure that in-game those creatures are different entities.

But, we are trying to be better than both data.lotro.com and the lorebook, by building a repository of as-built information, whereas those resources are out-of-date, and sometimes incomplete, and appear to be haphazardly maintained. To be better than those resources, we need to need to be more accurate, not less.

An example is the Angmarim Scout. The 4 current incarnations have similar levels, but different appearances, different regions (or locations), and one is an Elite while the rest are normals. Same name, but four different creatures. They may have the same base trophy drops due to their level, and type, but they are not interchangeable.

One of the challenges we face is deducing the separate items, creatures, etc. based on the imperfect information provided by the game. At first glance, they may appear to be the same thing, but if they are actually different entities, they need to be documented at different entities, no matter how similar they may be. That similar may be capturedd through Template:Other or some other mechanism.

-- RingTailCat (talk) 10:20, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

A quick comment just to clarify the scope of the wall of text.

All of the text applies only to same-name within same region. Not different regions, with some exceptions for some rare border-line creatures as mentioned above, when they indeed are the "same entities" as RTC put it. -- Zimoon (talk) 10:30, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

PS: For now ~~Iron Crown Fighter~~ may serve as an example of using a shared page for same-name-same region creatures. Most of this discussion is actually about mobs as creatures seldom cause this kind of problems. -- Zimoon (talk) 12:07, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

Where did all feedback go? :)

Either way, a quick summary:

We could keep each same-name-same-region creature at a shared page with subsections for their different characteristics (mainly based on levels and/or locations).
Or we could split same-name-same-region creatures over several pages specified by location (area/landmark/whatever).

No. 1 is perhaps the easiest and will only cause information overload in a few cases which we could split when/if the complexity becomes too much. However, RTC's argument is valid, those mobs are not the same entity as such but what I named "same-name siblings or cousins". The drawbacks with splitting on "entity" are listed above under the "split page" discussion. Pages with this style is the easiest-to-find for a visitor, but the readability depends on the complexity of potential subsections and their content, so there are a + and a potential - for "usability and affordance".

No. 2 is perhaps the most correct (seen from an "entity" point of view). It is also the simplest to read for a visitor but s/he must first find the proper page and since they are specified by name+location there may be quite a few more pages which might be a valid reason against splitting (though we already today have this issue with same-name in different regions), so there are both + and - for "usability and affordance".

Unless very strong opinions flow in within a few days I'd suggest we go with 1) but we keep the door open for 2) on case by case decisions based on when the pages surpasses some undecided threshold of complexity. The complexity thing cannot be easily expressed in guidelines but will be more of common sense and on editors' gut feelings ... some policing of newcomers would be asked for I'd guess.

Either way, I will begin to look at help/boilerplate/template-doc for creatures. Already today the information is overwhelming and can be condensed, but let's do that when finalizing this loooooooooooooong wall of text.
-- Zimoon (talk) 05:54, 3 October 2012 (EDT)

Eventually the Template:Creature/doc, Template:Creature/Preload, Boilerplate:Creature, and Help:Creatures are updated, yell at me if something is wrong, please. -- Zimoon (talk) 15:59, 7 October 2012 (EDT)

Longer Discussion on Same-name Creatures -- 2

First off, I am not at all pleased with myself. Why? I hate becoming a weathercock changing opinion every week, and this time I have to admit I should have tested the outcome and also have removed myself from the topic to have a distant view. So...

You may read the wall of text above, and then...

Why this have not been an issue in lower level regions is beyond me, but for some reason very few creatures have name-clashes which not also really called split pages in the early regions. Usually those are about normal versus elite, or low-level versus high-level quest creatures, etc. Up until Evendim and Angmar most name-clashes are about different regions so the clashes never cause any problem, different pages right away. However...

Both within Evendim and within Angmar we have same-name but in different areas, different level ranges, different quests, different loot drops, etc. Sometimes they are actually of different genus. They could be kind of 30-32 and 36-38 at different locations. And it looks like this continues in the higher levels. RTC is 100% correct, behind the curtains these things are named such as @a97bd23fac versus @f291de7384 but just happens to have the same name. And they are probably also "cousins" in their genus category.

The more I have meddled with them the more I am convinced that we should really split pages. It is, of course, possible to share as we discussed above, but...

Sharing pages kind of moves responsibility of careful reading to the visitor. For each "thing" the visitor must sift through information that is not about that "thing". Example: Pick a level 50 quest, now the visitor must pinpoint the section for locale and/or drops and/or whatever she is looking for. That is not user friendly.

Secondly, things like loot-drop lose precision. Does item X drop from creature levels 32 or 36? Hmmm, how would you tell if the editor has not been very precise?

Split pages are very very clear in each case. The "thing" exists for just the creature presented at that very page, no sifting not searching. And precision is retained, but at the cost of finding the proper creature when adding/updating things.

Historically the larger problem has been with "one creature is X(Loc) but another creature is just X, the editor misses X(Loc) and wrongly refers to X". Those errors are sometimes hard to resolve without eyeballing the issue. I have neither split nor merged to many pages so backtracking would be quite easy.

Unless somebody whines really loud I am actually going to whip myself and undo the suggestions regarding merge/split creature pages and favour splitting. But not right away, what does the team members have to say? Except that I am a weathercock ;)
-- Zimoon (talk) 14:08, 21 October 2012 (EDT)

Since you posted on my talk page, I'm guessing you'd like a response from the absentee meddler. :) I sympathize with the indecision - I often feel the same way when you are (or anyone else is) trying to convince me of something. There seems to be no clean-cut solution. However, approaching this a month or longer since we argued about it on IRC, I would support splitting mob pages if they are distinct creatures, absolutely.

With respect to this, and to disambiguation in general, it may be time to (re)consider the notion of a specific disambiguation-page template. There is a special page that lets us track pages inappropriately linking to disambig pages, and this would (with regular maintenance) allow us to keep pages pointing in the right direction (avoiding cases of linking to Mob Soandso when the correct page is Mob Soandso (Big Brother)). I (and, historically, Rogue) have generally been against a proliferation of Wikipedia-style disambiguation, but the fact may simply be that the information isn't orderly and simple enough for us to do without.

While I generally don't advocate depending on Lorebook in any capacity, the comments by Z and RTC about how it returns multiple listings for the same mob name makes me wonder if it wouldn't be helpful to take that information into consideration when splitting pages. If the "official" game source suggests that there are four different "Angmarim Warrior"s in Evendim, then it may give us a starting point for deciding where and how to split up what we've got. Geography and zoology are not my especial interests in game, so hopefully this endorsement provides some support. :-P Sethladan 16:20, 21 October 2012 (EDT)

Thanks for that link, the special page. But is it working? Now it is empty. Or did you mean we need to use the special wiki-style disambig pages? Yes, they are not nice :( -- Zimoon (talk) 17:52, 21 October 2012 (EDT)

Gave it a little test: Created Template:Disambiguation and added that to the list of "wiki-official" disambiguation templates list (Mediawiki:Disambiguationspage) and added Template:Disambiguation (which currently does nothing at all) to Amdir. Now you can see that there are a few pages on Special:Disambiguations. Whew.

Unfortunately, I'm realizing that this list would quickly contain a lot of "noise" if we intentionally link to disambiguation pages (like the Amdir pages do). This nice feature might not be much use after all, hmm, unless we avoid linking to the base-name page on Mob (Loc) pages, etc. Sethladan 18:21, 21 October 2012 (EDT)

Aaah, great, in a way. At least we can see that no spurious pages are linking to Amdir. But there will be, believe me, and most will begin with "User:" hehe, but also some pages linking to some generic name (perhaps they should not as the link is kind of useless). At least that template is not intrusive, it could be made to just add the Cat:Disambig part for less typing, but that is a discussion for another talk page. Also, for creatures there are not so many disambig pages compared to using the other-template, a bunch yes, but most creatures are two and two. Luckily.

I think we should not hesitate splitting because of other- and disambig-templates and that part of the discussion. Actually, adding a link to an item for a loot-dropper and ending up at an disamig-page is much better than ending up at a creature which name looked OK but failing to see it was located or levelled wrongly ... which is easily done when adding info for a dozen loot or two. Also, the majority of split pages would still stem from "normal" splits due to region, so those from this topic would just add a few but not massively.

So, one big thing is to also always move the original page as soon as a same-name appears. That will reduce mistakes, and those are found at a daily basis when doing a creature review...and almost always faulty links to the generically named page.

A comment on "official entities" - there is a huge difference between mobs and creatures. Creatures just drop hide and task trophies. Mobs drop a large zoo of stuff which sometimes makes a wall of information (we could probably make more generic pages like Item:Artisan Scroll Case but for "Item:Artisan Craft Components" and "Item:Healing Potions III" but not so for reputation items and the rest as they are locale dependent and not for task trophies as they are level+locale+dropper dependent). Less quests pertain to creatures, but I cannot yet tell an example for which to split. Numerous quests pertain to mobs and then only for one sort of "cousins". So, in the end of the day pragmatism is probably the best way to go, "split if necessary, otherwise don't". There is no need to split just because it can be done.

-- Zimoon (talk) 01:54, 22 October 2012 (EDT)