Thread:Tdt30/@comment-4102115-20120714051723

Hi, agree and disagree with your reply.

Templates are used extensively across wikia and to say they should not be used because they make things difficult for contributors is contrary to the purpose of templates.

Absolutely "the idea of a wiki is that anyone should be to contribute, so we should make that as simple as we can", which is the sole reason I'm putting so much effort into creating simplified templates.

Thus I disagree with "I would keep the use the templates here at minimum possible, because they can be a huge problem if someone else tries to update the data"

The fact is, as is evident across many pages, the lack of templates is what is hindering contributors from updating data. Take a look at the Profitability page for example - no one has bothered updating that data because as it is, every single cell needs to be filled in individually. Take a look at the India Hotel and Cottage pages - you created these great tables, but no-one else has duplicated this across other pages because currently you have to fill in those tables manually.

Look at the Opera page - the purchase cost for this changed way back in or before April. A kind contributor changed the purchase cost on the page, but he and no-one else corrected all the (now-wrong) data cells due to them having to be calculated manually either by hand with every contributor on here somehow knowing the formulas, or using a third-party Excel/Google spreadsheet (what novice contributor is going to do that?) or by using a third-party PHP website (what novice user is going to use that?) And then manually edit each cell one by one, ensuring no typos.

The fact is no-one did correct those values for many months, wheras, if a template was used, when WWarrior updated the purchase price, every data cell would have simply automatically instantly been updated.

The fact is, pretty much every wiki with "character", "episode", ("structure") type pages has standardised formatting to make it easier to follow and navigate, and makes its easier for others to add to.

The fact is, oldies get bored and move on. Besides CMONYALL, I'm the oldest contributor left maintaining this site, and since you and I stepped up our active updating, CMONYALL has been able to step back and focus on his other sites. And even you have just admitted to: "Sorry for taking so long to answer, I wasn't visiting the page for personal reasons and because I almost don't play the game anymore (almost level 43 so there is no incentive)." which is key to this whole discussion.

The complex formulas that are needed will be behind the scenes within the template code. The average contributor does not need to know or care about the code.

Really the only reason this wiki hasn't had proper table templates is because (a) until recently we did not know the Internal Formulas, and (b) the complex wikitext coding required behind the scenes.

However, in researching, I discovered mw:Extension:Variables and I asked wikia staff if they could activate that extension for us, and they agreed, so now as you can see in Special:Version, we can use Variables, so even the behind-the-scenes code can be hugely simplified.

Bear in mind, in using templates, once properly set up, what any new contributor should see when editing is something as neat and simple as:

If an update changes a value for India Hotel, is it easier for a novice to navigate through the hundreds of lines of code found here: India Hotel?action=edit and correctly put the right manually-or-third-party-generated values in the right cells, or to change one value on a clearly labelled line like this random example picked from thousands of standardised wikis: w:c:diehard:Hans_Gruber?action=edit 