When you are looking for an item on the wiki, and it tells you that it is sold by "one or more shopkeepers", when you click on it, it gives you a link of a bunch of shopkeepers names. If you aren't familiar with the shopkeeper, you have to click on each one to see where they are located. It would be nice if, when searching for an item, you can more easily tell what town to go to. Would anyone be up for the task of developing some kind of system so you know what town to go to, at first glance, when you are looking for an item? Maybe a link that could bring you to some sort of table that tells you exactly what towns and what npcs you can go to in order to get these items...all on one page. --Rheon 13:10, 14 January 2013 (EST)
I agree with everything you've said, and while it isn't really feasible to have an automated template for it, now that most shopkeepers have been written up the data is there to make static displays viable and I think they would be much more useful than having to parse a ton of links when a handful of places to buy are really all that's needed. I'll add this soon, thanks for the suggestion. --Tlosk 08:04, 20 January 2013 (EST)
Tlosk, have you ever thought about using namespaces to help with filtering links. I know that Rheon didn't really mention that as a problem but when you click the links in "one or more shopkeepers" or "Recipes (which call for Tan Rat Tail)" for example, you have to search through a lot of unrelated links sometimes. From what I read on namespaces, you could have an article named "Recipe: Spicy Sausage" and then be able to search the recipes namespace from any ingredient page.
I'm guessing that this would be pretty huge job, though, and probably not worth it? --Arkalor 11:54, 20 January 2013 (EST)
Edit: I completely forgot about your use of invisible links for :whatlinkshere results. Is it possible to do this with trophy drops and crafting recipes somehow?--Arkalor 12:17, 20 January 2013 (EST)
Those are both good ideas to a difficult nut. The first unfortunately brings a lot of unintended side effects. Additional name spaces don't really do well with material that is related to the wiki's core content. It's for this very reason that I have a dedicated wiki for AC2 going live this weekend, we'll still have AC2 content here but for usability reasons it will help a lot to have a stand alone wiki for them. They'll be able to cross link articles like any other interwiki (like we do with wikipedia). And you're right on the second one it would be a lot of work to go back and change all the needed articles (it also has the downside of requiring consistently adding the identifiers when it isn't always obvious to a regular editor what it is for). Last night I exported the shopkeepers and made a parser to pull the item data (who sells it and where) and it's all in one big data dump now. I'm going to write a quick table tool so it will take that data and construct a little table for each page now.
Historically the main reason we went with what it is right now is because for a long time we didn't have complete pages on most shopkeepers so it was important to have the places sold generated on demand so it would be as up to date as possible.
I'd like to do this for recipes as well though I'm still thinking about the format, right now I'm leaning towards just a little box with icons of the things you can make. --Tlosk 21:22, 20 January 2013 (EST)
Now THIS is what I'm talking about! http://ac.wikkii.net/wiki/Carving_Knife