User talk:Stargazer/Projects/The North Downs Quests

Hi Stargazer!

I noticed your project page and thought I could share some of my thoughts. I have recently updated some of the quest overview pages in later regions (e.g. West Rohan Quests and Western Gondor Quests) and I think it could be useful to try and transclude some category pages. For example, typing:

 {{Category:Protecting the Refugees Quests}} 

to show:

1. [26] Low Food Stores
2. [21] Spying on the Goblins
3. [22] The Scout Becomes the Hunter

Completed: Low Food Stores is prerequisite for: Nathan Hodges' Farm

Having: The Scout Becomes the Hunter is prerequisite for: The Stonehold Chief

Completed: The Scout Becomes the Hunter is prerequisite for: A Lonely Watcher

In this case, the follow-up quests appear as well, which might or might not be wanted. Anyway, it is a good thing to not have to type out lists twice on the wiki.

Good luck on your project and feel free to reach out if you need any help. You can also join our Discord for short questions with short answers (see sidebar).--RoyalKnight5 (talk) 15:32, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Hello RoyalKnight5!

Thanks for the tip! I'm quite new to wiki editing, so I'm not sure I understand (yet) what transclusion is or how it is used in practice. I think I would need to read up on that further before I'm able to think of ways on how I could incorporate that into the project. I might need to rethink my plans on how to go about it as well. I'm pretty much learning as I go along here, so... :)

The transclusion idea does sound rather interesting though, and I do agree it is generally much better for database-type information to be consolidated in one place and then linked to from all other places. I'm wondering; is it possible to break all this down into tiny pieces (e.g. lots of various categories), and then connect them together as you branch your way up, in a nested kind of way? Sort of like LEGO bricks? I.e. thinking in terms of 'supersets' and 'subsets' – which in turn contain smaller 'subsets' etc.? If you get my meaning. Like: the smallest categories contain the quests and are the 'leaves' at the bottom, which then get transcluded as they are composed together into (bigger and bigger) 'super-categories' in the nodes above it, in a tree structure. I hope I'm making sense here!?

The project is still only in the planned state for now; I haven't begun it yet. I likely won't start it until I level a character through the region slowly, so I can take my time investigating all the quests etc.

Unfortunately I don't use Discord at all (for various reasons), so that avenue of asking for help isn't an option I'm afraid. Thanks again for reaching out! --Stargazer (talk) 17:07, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that is the general approach on most quest categories in later regions:

• On a page like Category:<area> Quests, the quest chain of the area is typed out. This category also contains these quests, as you can see when scrolling down the page (for example Category:The Wold Quests, with The Wold being an area in East Rohan). This categorization coincides with how the quests appear in the in-game quests panel.
• A page like Category:<region> Quests often does not contain any quests, but some do contain an introduction quest (example Category:Old Anórien Quests). We then create a separate, non-category page where all epic and regional quests chains are simply transcluded.

However, I must add that for earlier regions, quests are often categorized in their quest chain (for example the Protecting the Refugees chain above). I believe on the page North Downs Quests, some of these quest chains are missing.

Anyway, we all learn how the wiki works by looking at other pages and asking other editors. And yeah, take your time with this project: there are a lot of things to do on the wiki and only a limited amount of editors. :) --RoyalKnight5 (talk) 15:14, 14 August 2021 (UTC)

I will look into all the examples you have mentioned thus far to see how they are made up, when I get to that point. :) For now though, I have a few questions:

1. How do I find out which special/named 'quest chain' (i.e. not area or region) a quest belongs to? It seems like, as you also mention, this is only "a thing" for old(er) quests in early/Shadows of Angmar regions and not in later regions – OR in revamped (parts of?) earlier regions either! The Quest Log page mentions that this should be visible, for each quest, in the quest log, but I have been unable to find ANY listing of a named "quest chain" anywhere (whether somewhere in the log or elsewhere – in the game or out), for any quest at all. This leads me to believe that these "quest chains" have, in fact, been deprecated/removed in the game as a whole and are no longer relevant (or accessible at all)!?
2. If I can't figure out which 'quest chain' a given quest belongs to, and/or it has no known such chain, how should I then go about grouping a series of quests together at the lowest level? Should I make a sort of 'fake' quest chain category (e.g. belonging to the NPC that bestows them; like "Category:Elsie_Woodruff_Quests" etc.) and add the relevant quests to that, and use that category instead (rather than e.g. the aforementioned Protecting the Refugees group – which is old and very inaccurate anyway!) for transcluding into the location category (then area category and ultimately region category after that) when building up the structure for all the quests? That seems like the most logical thing to do going forward, and easiest to maintain with any possible further changes down the line (quest and/or region changes/revamps or similar). Maybe that should also be the case for quests that are currently already listed as belonging to a certain (named) quest chain, if indeed this characteristic is something that has been deprecated in the game?
3. How do I go about illustrating 'quest dependencies' when listing quests; i.e. where one quest activates only after a certain other quest has been completed? Especially if it involves different NPCs (and/or "quest chains")? Things like numbering or indenting could perhaps be used in some way if it is a certain flow from only one NPC, I suppose, but several? This is further compounded if several quests become activated at the same time, or if a certain quest needs several others (e.g. in parallel) to all be completed first, before it activates. What's the best/recommended way to go about this?
4. I've been reading up on transclusion and how it works in practice, and I've come across the concept of Selective Transclusion, particularly the Section (header) transclusion, which seems to be very useful and interesting. I've been trying to do a little bit of testing on this, but I've been unable to get it to work for some reason. The syntax for this is PAGENAME (where SECTIONNAME is apparently optional) which, as I understand it, is just an alias/short-hand for Pagename, but this doesn't seem to work (at least not for me?). Perhaps this is functionality that needs to be installed and/or enabled first? Could you maybe talk with the other admins about getting this functionality up and running here? It would be really great to have, since it would then allow each target page to (individually) control what to transclude from a given source page, without the need to add specific markup on the source page itself (which would affect all target pages transcluding from it)! I think that would be very useful indeed. :)

Thanks for your help! :) --Stargazer (talk) 17:40, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Ok, I'll try to answer your questions.

1. The page Quest Log mentions that a quest chain can be found under the quest name. I had a look at my completed quests and found several quests belonging to a quest chain, e.g. Quest:A Dwarf-made Blade and Quest:A Man Called Estel. If there is no quest chain parameter, the quest chain was probably removed and the quest should probably belong to the general Category:<area> Quests. If you could find out what chains are missing, that would be great.
2. See previous point.
3. I believe there is no general way of doing this. You could add a remark in the "Walkthrough & Notes" section on the quest page and on the relevant Category:<area> Quests page.
4. I have asked in the Discord and they said that Selective Transclusion is not available on MediaWiki (the documentation you linked is from Wikipedia), but there is the extension Labeled Section Transclusion. Normally, <onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> does the job and sometimes a separate page can be created (e.g. NPC Supplier).

Hopefully this helps! --RoyalKnight5 (talk) 16:13, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

I'll just add a bit:

1. Explnation with images here: Boilerplate:Quest#Explanation_of_Parameters
2. Since ssg stopped using questchains, it seems instead of using the questchain pages in, the newer quests have the questchains tables in the category pages, and are mostly questgroup = questchain
3. If a quest opens several quests - they are usually listed as unnumbered entries eg. (Rohan Quest chains are quite complicated and good examples i think)

-- Drono (talk) 17:27, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Thank you both for your answers! I'm not sure I got the info I was looking for though, or maybe I just didn't understand it. Perhaps we misunderstood each other as well; I might have been a bit unclear in my explanations. :)

I'll have a think about what to do and how best to proceed with this later! We'll see how it goes. =D

Regarding transclusion; yes, that is the extension I was referring to (with my second link above). I'm guessing #lsth stands for "Labeled Section Transclusion – Header" or some such. I saw that e.g. the DDO wiki has this extension active on their site.

Drono, could we please get the LST extension installed and enabled here as well? I think that would be a good and very useful tool to have. Or are there substantial arguments against it that I'm not aware of, which would preclude having it here? Thank you for your consideration. :)

--Stargazer (talk) 09:57, 21 August 2021 (UTC)