Board Thread:Destinypedia Forum/@comment-160529-20131008133154/@comment-4712589-20131008203927

Foman123 wrote: Let's consolidate all category discussion in this thread; you posted very similar comments on the talk pages for Colony Ship, Charlemagne, and The Cassini. It is probably counterproductive to have several nearly identical discussions going at the same time. I'll mark those talk pages as being consolidated here.

I agree with the notion that, ideally, nearly every article would be categorized. That's a long-standing Wikia guideline and we should follow it. But past experience on other wikis teaches that categories need to be carefully considered, especially as wikis grow and categorization becomes harder to control.


 * Spaceships

We need to think about this in terms of what will be most useful for readers and, specifically, for players of the game who will be visiting this wiki to get more information. From what we know right now and can reasonably speculate, there are three different kinds of "spacecraft": (1) spaceships that players can own and use; (2) enemy spaceships that are used by enemies or neutral/friendly NPCs, but cannot be flown or owned by players (for example, the enemy dropships we saw in the E3 gameplay); and (3) derelict spaceships that are actually a fixed location rather than a vehicle (like the Cassini). Despite the fact that these these are all "spaceships," they are not related to each other -- they have very different functionality, usage, and appearance in the game. One is a subcategory of player transportation, one is an in-game asset perhaps best described as a subcategory of technology, and one is a subcategory of locations.

I don't think there is a use for a category containing "all things that can or used to be able to travel through space," which includes fixed locations or immobile spaceships. A user who specifically wants to read about the various ships he/she can fly -- or which he/she might see flying towards them -- is not going to be interested in The Cassini or The Traveler. To that extent, I oppose adding these articles to a "Spaceships" category. They should remain categorized as either locations or otherwise until and unless it is confirmed that they are actually mobile.

I DO think that there is a usefulness to having a broad category "Spaceships" that contains all known NPC, enemy, and player spaceships that actually move around in-game, and which contains a subcategory for "Player Spaceships." I would support this additional category.


 * Artificial Entities

Support. I'm okay with a category entitled "Artificial Entities".

In accordance with our policies, we'll wait for community consensus before making a final decision on this.

For the most part I fully support Forman123's summary here with regards to the category system. Categories are quickly and easily misused, so stringent category policies and structure are needed to prevent the issue of thousands of mislabelled articles when the wiki gets larger - as seen with certain big gaming wikis currently.

Spaceships as an umbrella category is what we have on Halo Nation, and thus I support the idea, but again this needs to adhere to our predefined structure. We have a draft design which has been sitting in the admin chat, so I'll give that a quick clean up and post it here for others to see.

Artificial Entities is a nice concept, but personally I think the name is too under used to be of use, most users will just add robots, artificial intelligence, yada yada. So we need to a name which is likely to be commonly known and used but is also specifically descriptive of what it will include.

Regards.