Category talk:Templates

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Whatever happened to the Template for Resource Spawns or Nodes

3 years ago (2011) there was a discussion to build a template for the Resource Spawns/Nodes when the Template:Infobox Item was replaced. I see that User:Neum built a replacement Template:Object but it was never used. Do you remember where this project was left? I want to pickup the pieces and finish putting it together. Matthew.zellmer (talk) 19:45, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Hijacking this to morph it into a philosophical discussion :) (And will also point Neum to this discussion as (s)he is actively adding stuff in West Rohan.
I suspect that this is actually a "why bother" effort.
  1. User_talk:Neum#So_many_templates discusses (apparently) the original idea (the talk page Template talk:Infobox Item is less than informative in that regard, and it was before my time), however, the reality is -- Landscape Objects, especially resource nodes are NOT UNIQUE. That is to say, they do not consistently appear in the same location nor as the same item -- although some do! (Thank you Turbine!)
    As for the Burglar Skill - Track Treasure -- never having played a burglar, I don't know if A) the still is still around, B) how widely or commonly it is used.
  2. Furthermore, the parallel issue is the fact that the obsolete Template:Infobox Item does not "pop-up." That is the primary function of the new template: Template:Item Tooltip.
  3. Template:Objectis NOT baed on Template:Item Tooltip although it could be.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 21:19, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
As far as I know, nothing "happened" to Template:Object - just that no one ever finished it. If you (Matt) want to adopt it, then definitely feel free! You'll obviously have to contend with the issues that Magill brought up above, as well as others (e.g., what is an "object"? Do you include quest clickables, ground spawns, etc.?) And the template actually is a subtemplate of Template:Item Tooltip - look at the first line of the code. You should be able to pull off a pop-up even as it is now by doing the old {{:Someobject|mode=imlink}} (unless I miss my guess; I'm looking at it really quickly here). Neum will know more as he was the last one with hands on it. Sethladan 00:28, 7 March 2014 (UTC)


  • This has gotten a bit separated in time because of issues getting the Wiki to update pages for me.
So, where am I going with this? It's always fun trying to second guess Turbine, but one thing which (I think) we all know and can agree upon -- ALL of the "stuff" in LOTRO is located in a database at Tuirbine -- how it is organized is a closely guarded secret. At one time, data.lotro.com, was available to us to retrieve information about that "stuff," as was the Lorebook. (Which was a WIKI and was accessible via the API.) Turbine broke those interfaces with Rise of Isengard, and ultimately declared them "beyond repair;" and both were dropped shortly after "the great downtime." Which a number of us took to be Turbine's efforts at updating their Database Engine, which was probably unchanged since 2+ years before launch of DDO, i.e. 2003. (Maybe also AC, but we only were familiar with DDO and its relationship to LOTRO. That would have just made that database even older.)
Basically, I have no issue with resource nodes being left as Items, because they really are. What is the difference between a "Thing" and an "Item?" Although, currently they are mixed.
Similarly, while such a detailed analysis as offered in the new template, might have been a reasonable thing in 2011 when we had many more editors working on the Wiki and looking for things to do -- in 2014, we have no where near enough editors to even get all quests entered in a timely fashion, let alone the data on new, "high-level" equipment. I regularly hear complaints both in Kin and in-game that the Wiki is worthless today because it only has information about Bree and that much of the information on the Wiki is wrong -- out of date or obsolete. I realize that the Wiki is populated by folks who are interested in some particular aspect of LOTRO. However, we do risk both spreading ourselves too thin, individually as well as collectively.
What I am saying is -- we need to NOT expend efforts simply "reorganizing the deck chairs on the Titanic" when there are much more "missing" things to do. And, yes, I realize that this is all very subjective.
The main reason for turning this philosophical is that there is a TREMENDOUS amount of work that needs to be done on Templates in general. This particular query simply touches on the tip of the iceberg.
I have been trying to document as much as I can about the Wiki and how it works. And, for me at least, Templates, are a serious "black hole."
I'm a "senior" editor primarily because everybody else with more tenure (and therefore knowledge) than I is "inactive."
A huge amount of the "lore of the Wiki" was and is Oral, or otherwise not written down. Structures that were put in place back in 2007 when the Wiki was created have not been kept up, and many have been expanded upon and morphed to the point where they are almost unrecognizable.
  • This is apparently a classic example -- a new template was created and it was implemented with some old stuff, but mostly with new. Right now, there are less than 100 entries which link to "Template:Infobox Item" -- but that is the problem, they are still there and an obsolete template is still in use.
  • So, I guess the question becomes, how can we get Templates more under control?
I'm not objecting to new ones, I just want to coral the old ones! There have (apparently) been many attempts to expand/re-write/re-organize templates over the years from many different editors, but they all seem to have sputtered out as the author (usually singular) gets bored, has Real Life complications, finds new interests, etc. The original question here is classic in that regard.
  • I still have not found any source of documentation on "how to write templates" or "how templates work" anywhere on Wikipedia or MediaWiki.
  • One project I am working on is extending the use of the "nocat=" parameter to all templates so that we can cutdown on a lot of extraneous entries into certain categories caused by "auto-categorization."
  • While doing that, I am trying to create "/doc" pages for all templates and thereby standardizing their look some what.
  • At the same time, that process yields "new data" about how various templates work, and similar information which gets folded back into the doc files.
  • Back to the original question -- one aspect is/was the apparent conflict between the "many little templates" and the "one template to rule them all" folks.
Some templates truly are huge, complex, and hard to understand, let alone utilize. This has complicated the issue in that when looking at many template usages, typically "Item" templates -- one sees what looks like a plethora of different templates, when in fact they are all the same template but different editors have chose to include or exclude different parameters over time ... PLUS the fact that the master template itself changes and those changes do not get propagated into the actively used templates. "| Item_level" is one "new" parameter that nicely falls into that latter category as of Helm's Deep.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:37, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
The Object template was definitely a low priority for me. I'm still not 100% on the implementation so feel free to muck with it. Building on the original idea, I was trying to match the in-game tooltip you get when mousing over these landscape objects (which are more like containers than items) and at the same time get rid of Template:Infobox Item once and for all.
The template is an instance of Template:Item Tooltip which is itself an instance of Template:Tooltip. It shouldn't need any new parameters from Item Tooltip other than nocat={{{nocat|}}}. Template:ObjectInfo is a helper template meant to standardize the additional information, though there was some discussion that it might be a bit more restricting than necessary.
The other issue I ran into was how the location information from the Scholar resources are transcluded onto Artifacts. While I try to be as detailed as possible, I'm not a big fan of duplicating information, opting to update as little as possible, so something should get rearranged there as well.
Neum (talk) 08:53, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

A general attempt to index (define) templates and their usages

These are the "primary" templates that form the basis for most of the pages here on Lotro-Wiki.

Templates used to enumerate Quest reward Items

  • {{Worth}} - used to display the coin reward for a Quest
  • {{Quest Rep}} - Reputation faction and amount
  • {{Quest Mathom}} - Mathoms
  • {{IXP}} - Legendary Item Experience awarded
  • {{SXP}} - used to display the War-steed Experience award
  • {{Reward}} - this displays the Item and its icon
  • {{Loot}} - Displays the given text as a loot link with the desired item quality. (i.e. the link text is coloured.} - Depreciated in favor of {{Reward}}

Templates used within articles to enumerate "drops"

Templates used to create specific articles or complex portions of articles

All have matching "Create xxx" pages -- See: Help:Contents Article Creation

Templates used to create specific articles or complex portions of MONSTER PLAY (PvMP) articles

Templates used to create repetitive portions of articles

Note that frequently regular articles are simply trancluded in this same manner:
Many NPCs are in this category. They can be found in Category: Transclusion NPCs

(Above material originally compiled by Magill and copied from Category:General Wiki Templates.)

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