MarioWiki:Proposals

List of Talk Page Proposals

 * Merge Nep-Enut (Yoshi's Woolly World) with Nep-Enut (Discuss) Passed.
 * Merge Short Fuse and Seedy Sally with Ukiki (Discuss) Deadline: January 11, 2016, 23:59 GMT
 * Split from Rope (Discuss) Deadline: December 29, 2015, 23:59 GMT Extended: January 5, 2016, 23:59 GMT, January 12, 2016, 23:59 GMT
 * Merge 5 Gold Coin and 50 Gold Coin with Coin (Discuss) Deadline: January 13, 2016, 23:59 GMT
 * Use only when pages clearly have an informal appearance (Discuss) Deadline: January 15, 2016, 23:59 GMT
 * Create the page: Drilldigger (Discuss) Deadline: January 17, 2016, 23:59 GMT
 * Split the sections Attackathlon, Toad Quiz and Lakitu Info Centre into and  (Discuss) Deadline: January 18, 2016, 23:59 GMT
 * Split Gold Bar and (Discuss) Deadline: January 18, 2016, 23:59 GMT
 * Split Banana and (Discuss) Deadline: January 19, 2016, 23:59 GMT

Writing Guidelines
None at the moment.

Redesign RPG infoboxes and bestiaries
Having multiple infoboxes side-by-side in stats sections looks terrible, so after months of forum discussion and design drafting in my userspace, I am proposing complete redesigns of all the RPG infoboxes, primarily to allow for them to be able to toggle between vertical and horizontal forms. Vertical forms can be used like normal, at the tops of enemy pages as their main infoboxes: clutter is bad), but now for stats sections, the horizontal forms can be stacked on top of each other instead of haphazardly floating side-by-side and at the whims of varying screen widths. This is the main purpose for this proposal (hence it's in "new features"), but at the same time, various other changes will happen:


 * 1) All RPG infoboxes will toggle between vertical and horizontal forms - See above. Note that the vertical forms are the defaults so this won't cause mass appearance chaos as soon as the templates are changed.
 * 2) All RPG infoboxes will use the same colour-scheme as navigation templates (as seen here) - This will create consistency and ensures neatness and easy readability.
 * 3) All RPG infobox pages will have usage instructions and an input chart - This will make them easier to use.
 * 4) All RPG infoboxes will use consistent inputs whenever possible - This will also make them easier to use (less memorization and guessing), although it also means some inputs are being renamed and/or combined and will need to be updated on the articles (noted in red on the draft pages below).
 * 5) Some RPG infoboxes will be expanded with additional info - The infoboxes should have all the stats that we know of present, rather than forcing folks to look up supplemental charts in the bestiaries or elsewhere.
 * 6)  will need to be (re)created - Right now, Paper Mario and TTYD use the same infobox, but once all the new stats and featured are added, that won't be possible anymore, plus it's inconsistent and unnecessary to have two games in one.
 * 7) RPG infoboxes embedded in History sections should be moved to stats sections - If it's not the enemy's overall infobox, it should be in a stats section: it's just inconsistent clutter anywhere else.

It sounds like a lot, but the redesigned templates have all been drafted and are completely ready to go. All that needs to be done is updating the articles themselves by adding inputs to bring the templates up-to-date, and reorganizing the stats sections (including moving some infoboxes down there from History sections). Examples of the templates in action can be found here, and the drafts are as follows:


 * User:Walkazo/Test9 - - Super Mario RPG
 * User:Walkazo/Test1 - - Paper Mario
 * User:Walkazo/Test3 - - Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
 * User:Walkazo/Test4 - - Super Paper Mario
 * User:Walkazo/Test6 - - Paper Mario: Sticker Star
 * User:Walkazo/Test2 - - Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
 * User:Walkazo/Test5 - - Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
 * User:Walkazo/Test7 - - Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
 * User:Walkazo/Test8 - - Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

As seen in the proposal's title, bestiaries are also on the slab here, and the reason why is because, rather than having multiple and/or too-wide-for-1024px-screen tables that force readers to scroll up and down and back and forth, from now on, bestiaries should take the form of multiple stacked horizontal infoboxes. Basically, anyway - as seen on Megadardery's test pages here and here, a slightly different template will be used to change the headers from the game titles to just the enemy names, and the bestiaries will still need to include the templates in an overall table for slightly more compact stacking and uniform column widths. However, the important part is that the bestiaries' inputs will all be the same as the corresponding infoboxes', making it a simple matter of cutting and pasting to move and update information between the bestiaries and the enemy pages, or at least make it easier to use both (even the how-to information is mostly the same). A final note is that the bestiaries will now use colour-coding in the names to denote enemy types (bosses vs. enemies vs. support), as explained in the nice legend at the top of the first test page I liked to in this paragraph.

Unlike the infoboxes, only the Paper Mario bestiary is drafted and ready, but I think it's still better to get the ball rolling on this overall stats project sooner than later and start working on getting those horizontal infoboxes out there: more bestiaries can follow in time.

Proposer: (with input from  and others; bestiary work by ) Deadline: January 11, 2016, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) - Per proposal.
 * 2) Per proposal.
 * 3) Though I haven't commented, I've been in support of an RPG infobox template overhaul since the day it was suggested. It, at the current moment, is extrmeley unsightly, ugly, and most importantly, horribly formatted to not fit in with the stats and the like. Therefore, I'm in major support with this proposal and I want it to pass ASAP.
 * 4) – Per proposal.
 * 5) The way the vertical layout of RPG infobox templates are used is utterly miserable. Here are some examples: Dry Bones, Fawful, Lava Piranha, Blooper, Spiny, Buzzy Beetle, Elite Trio, the list goes on, but it's no small sample. They leave behind lots of white space, are extremely cluttery and overall messy, and they're not very reader-friendly. Worse, practically any recurring enemy article from a MaRPG game is doomed to have several of these templates, which are not designed with recurring enemies in mind. I also support moving infoboxes that otherwise clutter the article like in Boo or Hammer Bro. to stats section and get converted to the horizontal design. I'm glad we're going to redesign some of the wiki's biggest eyesores.
 * 6) Very sharp looking compared to the dated templates we are using now.
 * 7) per all
 * 8) - Per Walkazo.
 * 9) Per Walkazo
 * 10) Per all.
 * 11) Per Bazooka Mario and proposal.
 * 12) Definitely per proposal
 * 13) – Per all, this looks a lot better than what we currently have.

Comments
While I'm supportive of the redesign, I have a few suggestions to go with it. 15:48, 5 January 2016 (EST)
 * 1) Infoboxes should probably ignore the direction parameter in the mobile version, as it looks pretty bad when vertical there. (I'm not entirely sure yet how that'd work though.)
 * 2) You should put the CSS that goes into these infoboxes into Common.css to avoid all that clutter.


 * The mobile stuff's beyond my abilities, I'm afraid, and I generally prefer not to add stuff to the css if I can help it. Most of the clutter you're highlighting is unavoidable anyway, as things like the widths, colours and underlining aren't uniform for cells, rows and columns, and will always have to be specified in the templates. Other things like the float and margin coding are affected by the switch function, so again, they have to be in the templates afaik. All the ugly-looking border-radius stuff is just because of the use of, so in the actual editing windows, there's not nearly that much clutter up top, and it's not like this small handful of templates will need to be edited often either way (hopefully). - 12:19, 6 January 2016 (EST)


 * I generally prefer not to add stuff to the css if I can help it. – These templates are included in 1046 pages in total as of now. All those pages include the same coding over and over again, which is exactly what CSS files were invented for; styling similar elements with the same code multiple times. Not to mention the loading times and stress on the server by keeping everything self-contained.
 * Most of the clutter you're highlighting is unavoidable anyway, as things like the widths, colours and underlining aren't uniform for cells, rows and columns, and will always have to be specified in the templates. – It is not unavoidable at all, quite the opposite. I have made this page with an example of . You can see here that the tables and a few special cells where just assigned a few CSS classes, and the rest all gets filled in by the complimenting CSS.
 * Other things like the float and margin coding are affected by the switch function, so again, they have to be in the templates afaik. – These things also can be generalized in the CSS, see the first five selectors in the CSS on the example page, and the align parameter in the Wikicode. (btw, your margin code doesn't work, it needs a default or it will be left empty.)
 * All the ugly-looking border-radius stuff is just because of the use of  – Yeah about that, only border-radius: xx is needed, the rest really is unnecessary clutter. But that is a thing that can be accounted for on a different occasion.
 * 14:29, 7 January 2016 (EST)

There's not a infobox for Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam enemies or there will be one, but it is not done yet?-- 15:22, 7 January 2016 (EST)


 * Okay, I switched everything to "border-radius:5px" to get rid of that clutter, and having "horizontal" in the align function rather than its own thing is a good idea too, so I'll convert the templates to that (skips a bit of redundancy and fixes a really trivial irritation I had with the lack of margin in the template pages). But I'm still against outsourcing the designs to the css. Navigation templates are much more widespread, yet we don't bother doing anything more than the series-specific background colours and basic franchise-wide things like the borders, text and link colours. It's just easier to deal with template design when the design's in the template, not off in the css, which the vast majority of users would have no idea how to deal with - including admins. Plus, we're the only ones who can edit the css anyway, adding another level of complication to what should be an accessible operation: wikis are supposed to be user-friendly, but needing to get help to change a column width is not user-friendly. @LudwigVon: There wasn't a M&L:PJ template while I was working on the designs, and not knowing anything about the stats that might be applicable to the game, I didn't want to hazard a guess at a template design - then someone did make a template at the last-minute, which I didn't find out about until after I made the proposal, but its a bit dodgy and currently only in use on one page, so I was going to hold off on making a new draft for it until I've had time to check out the game mechanics myself, or see other users vetting it. - 16:04, 7 January 2016 (EST)


 * I can see where you are coming from, but I don't agree about keeping everything in the templates themselves. Making it less open may be true to an extend, but infoboxes (and navtemplates too) are things that are supposed to look uniform on the wiki in whole, and I don't suppose there is a lot of reason to change the width of a column any time soon. I think it would protect the design rather than 'closing' the openness.
 * If not moving to the common css, I would at least suggest updating obsolete code. On your Essay page with all those templates, the W3C's Validator return 329 errors. I was going to bring this up at some point anyway as it is a wikiwide problem, but now is as good a time as any.
 * 17:47, 7 January 2016 (EST)


 * Every time an input needs to be added, it'll potentially force things to be shuffled around, and it'll be easier to design new templates with old ones readily available in full. The only thing I'd concede to for the css is a proper, overall infobox class or two to cover the basics (cellpadding, cellspacing, maybe border and font stuff), the way there's an overall nav template class, but that's a whole other kettle of fish since there are a lot of infoboxes that will have to be dealt with: it's beyond the scope of what this proposal is about. Anyway, I fixed all the non-padding/spacing obsolete coding in my drafts here (and there weren't 329 errors from the templates alone - the essays page had a lot more content on it). You're not the first to voice concerns about the wiki as a whole having a lot of depreciated coding, but no one's ever really cared enough to try to do anything about something that basically seems like an invisible non-issue that's beyond the knowledge of the majority of users. You could try to set up a wiki collab about it if you really wanted to. - 23:15, 7 January 2016 (EST)


 * If there where at least some base classes that would be a big improvement already (seeing the table opening tag is the worst offender everywhere), but you are right that this is outside the scope of this proposal.
 * I have been planning on making some form of collab sometime already as 'non-issue' is not really the case but that also is outside this proposal's scope so that's a discussion for then. 11:05, 8 January 2016 (EST)
 * Yeah, I was surprised when I checked common.css and found that there actually wasn't an "infobox" class, even though all the infoboxes start out that way: fixing that's definitely on my to-do list now (maybe after the rollout of this proposal's done). - 11:28, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Removals
None at the moment.

Prohibit the Usage of in Headers
Using in headers has a couple of issues. For one, it looks ugly and inconsistent with how other headers look like. The only acceptable text formatting in headers should be italicising as to indicate that it's a piece of fiction being talked about. Underlining text in headers is very bad. Furthermore, it breaks the Recent Changes. Using the Recent Changes, a user may jump directly to a section of an article if only a section was edited. However, should the header contain, this feature is broken. Having a feature that breaks a vital function of the Wiki should never be allowed. Sure, you could just hop to the section manually, but why would you do that when the Wiki can provide you a function that does that for you automatically?

I do realise and acknowledge that there is an issue with this: how do we notify the reader that these names are conjectural? The solution is simple.

===Thing that is conjecturally named===  is a thing blah blah blah blah

That way, we get the information that it's conjecturally named across, it doesn't break the Recent Changes, and it makes headers look consistent. This means that all information is preserved, and we don't have to implement a feature that breaks a very vital function of the Wiki. Alternatively and depending on the kind of section being worked with, the text doesn't need to be in a bold typeface. This also gives us the possibility to quickly summarise what the section is about in one sentence before describing the rest of the subject in greater detail. Furthermore, this methodology ensures no unnecessary and ugly notification templates need to be used at all. Additionally, removing does not break section linking at all, so all links that already exist and link to headers that already contain  will not be broken and still work.

But how do we go about finding these? The answer here is also simple. This is how.

EDIT: The old link for finding the instances of the template did not work, so this will be used instead.

Proposer: {{User|RandomYoshi}} Deadline: January 11, 2016, 23:59 GMT

Support

 * 1) – Per proposal.
 * 2) - Per RandomYoshi.
 * 3) Per RandomYoshi.
 * 4) – Per RandomYoshi.
 * 5) - Per Pi.
 * 6) - Per π
 * 7) &mdash; Per RandomYoshi.
 * 8) I hate the use of the conjectural text template in headers, it's time to end that practice once and for all.
 * 9) Per all.
 * 10) Sure thing.
 * 11) Per all.
 * 12) per all
 * 13) Per all.

Oppose

 * 1) To me, this could just be a MediaWiki bug. Before making changes to pages to adapt around the bug, have  update the software that MarioWiki uses and report the bug to the developers of MediaWiki if the bug persists.

Comments
Unfortunately MediaWiki search is broken, so the link you provided will not help us find the pages. But as far as I've seen, the only pages with conjectural section titles are the Galaxies and list of Glitches, which should be easy enough to track down. Otherwise, how is the suggested workaround going to work in the list of glitches pages? It doesn't seem efficient to specify the glitch name in every section. I think we need a better idea to over all say "Yo guys, these are all made up names so don't quote us on them will ya?".-- 12:03, 4 January 2016 (EST)
 * How about making a similar template to Template:Conjecture, but that states something like "The titles of the following sections of this article are conjectural; [and the rest is equal to the base template]"? It could have a "section=" variable that, if set to yes, states "The title of the following subsections of this section [equal to normal]". The first is used in glitch pages, the second in Galaxies pages.
 * Having additional notice templates is only going to help in increasing how messy pages look like. It's not going to be the end of the world if we repeat it for every subject we talk about. In fact, it's better to first aptly summarise a subject in one concise sentence before prattling on about the minor details of a subject: that way, readers who only wish to gain an elementary understanding of a topic can choose only to read the first sentence of a paragraph, whilst others that feel like they want a more in-depth analysis can do so by continuing to read about the subject. Because is used in the beginning of the sentence and has the subject bolded (or not), the information that they're conjecturally named is still going to be conveyed in the same way it's done at this point, except it won't break the Recent Changes and generate unprofessional-looking headers. To summarise, it won't hurt us, it won't hurt the reader, it won't hurt the page by introducing a whole batch of notice templates, and it certainly won't hurt the Recent Changes.  13:47, 4 January 2016 (EST)
 * No, it would be repetitive to state the nonofficial name of the glitch underneath every glitch section with that exact same title, it seems okay in the introduction of main articles, because you really are introducing the main element of the page, however in glitches' pages, it becomes overly annoying to read the same thing over and over again. It's like going over every section in the Mario article starting it with "[..] is a game that Mario stars in." which would be insane. Don't get me wrong, I support this proposal, because this issue is super annoying when it comes to actual editing and linking. However, the consequences of doing it this way is not something I support. I don't support the idea of the notice template either, it would be an eye catcher. However, adding it to the introduction of the list in one short sentence is not something I'm keen on, but not something I'm against either.-- 15:10, 4 January 2016 (EST)
 * I agree with RandomYoshi at this point. However, I have another idea: if templates are not good, let's just add a sentence just before the various section start. It should say "NOTE: All the glitches'/galaxies' names in this page are conjectural. Fitting names have been given by the editors.". This may seem repetitive, but remember that phone users have no way to read the message shown by hovering the cursor over conjectural text.

So, I used the link above to track down all the pages that have conjecturaltext templates in at least an header, and oooh boy, there's a very long list awaiting...

I figured out how we're going to deal with the Super Mario Galaxy and the Super Mario Galaxy 2 Galaxy levels with their planets and such. In each section about a planetoid, a picture of this planetoid should be accompanied. In this picture is usually found a small description of the planetoid. In this thumbnail should the name of the planetoid always be found. This is the instance that can have on it. How does this sound? 15:59, 5 January 2016 (EST)
 * It's a good idea. I don't know, however, if everyone reading the Galaxies' pages would stop to read thumbnails. Should we make the planet's name bold in the thumbnail, so it's more apparent?

So, we're about to settle about how to apply conjecturaltext changes on the various types of pages, but there's still an archetype: 50 pages about Wario Land II pages. Here, the problem is in the Hidden Treasure section: a conjectural name, stating what's the treasure, is in the header. However, the paragraph doesn't ever repeat this name, and we can't do the same thing RandomYoshi proposed for Galaxies because the images are far too small. The only idea I have is removing that name altogheter: I don't think it's even needed. Do you have any other ideas?


 * Been mulling it over, and I think just having a "Note: all these names are conjectural." message (in bold, even) at the tops of the "Planets/Areas" sections (on the galaxy and mission pages) would be the most efficient way to deal with the situation, avoiding the use of the specific template at all (or the need to hide the names in the thumbnail descriptions - which would be inconsistent with the rest of the wiki). As for the WLII items, I agree that it'd be simpler to remove them from the headers, and instead just describe them in the body text without having to pass them off as names. For example, Turn off the alarm clock!'s header would be "Hidden Treasure : Viking Helmet " and then the text will simply read "...The treasure of this level is a horned viking helmet that bears some resemblance to the Bull Pot..." (underline showing new content). - 12:38, 6 January 2016 (EST)
 * There are some areas that are officially named, like Cosmic Cove Galaxy's Twin Falls and Cosmic Cavern. Should we note that these are exceptions to the rule by just saying "NOTE: This area is officially named.", and provide a source for its name? 13:10, 6 January 2016 (EST)
 * Or just say "NOTE: Unless otherwise marked, all names are unofficial." and then for the ones with real names, do specifically mention and bold the names in the text with a ref ("The Twin Falls[1] area consists of..."), and that should be enough to tip readers off that those are the official ones. Then the mission articles could go a step further and say "NOTE: Unless otherwise marked with a reference, all names are unofficial." since there's no headers to worry about gunking up, just thumbnails (of if using refs for the mission pages seems like overkill, asterisks could work instead). - 13:40, 6 January 2016 (EST)
 * Deal. 13:55, 6 January 2016 (EST)

See my opposition vote for details about my thoughts. I don't know what version of MediaWiki MarioWiki is using. -- 17:49, 7 January 2016 (EST)
 * Actually even if this issue persists forever there is an easy workaround. That is, use the template under each section. Just sayin, I still agree with this proposal because the look of the hovertext in the section titles.-- 09:50, 8 January 2016 (EST)

Miscellaneous
None at the moment.