User talk:Mzs/TODO/Deprecating Sources

An alternate suggestion

Before we get too far down this road, if we're going to be making major architecture changes I'd like to offer up an additional suggestion: Semantic Mediawiki (which I really should start adding some documentation for). The end-state is that instead of having a "Category:X Sources" pages for every quality or item X, we would instead have one page "Property:Is source of" which can annotate links from actions to items/qualities.

There are two main benefits to using SMW properties instead of qualities:

1. Editors don't have to go and create a new Sources category page for every new quality page. This is pretty automated but still a burden.
2. Qualities being renamed is a non-issue. SMW is aware of redirects, so Source links using an old name will categorize correctly.

I've spent some time thinking about how this might work with qualities/items with non-trivial Source categories (example), and I think the answer is Concept pages. I'm pretty sure I know how to make this work out, but my attention has been elsewhere.

The transition process looks mostly the same, but with some extra admin steps. In particular, the Source property should be made a Fixed Property (requires Alan to fiddle with a setting), and I'll need to make some new templates to replace {{Category tree}}.

I'll confess, I haven't been able to wrap my head around some of the workings of SMW, and their documentation has not been as helpful as I'd hoped at rectifying that. I reckon that the setup is easy enough, it won't affect how editors use templates, and replacing the directly-set categories with directly-set properties is fairly direct, so that's easy enough, but I have no idea what it'd look like for a user who wants to know all of sources of an item or quality.

The other question is what the time frame would be on switching it to SMW? If we can get it before Marigold opens, great. Otherwise, I may be inclined to finish this while leaving it open for a later switch to SMW. -- mzs (talk) 01:38, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Yeah I should definitely start writing that documentation then. I guess it helps I have a tiny bit of previous exposure to graph databases.

You're right that the under-the-hood stuff mostly gets Templatized and doesn't really impact editors much. I could make it look fairly similar to how the flow works today. The main user-noticeable difference would be that the separate page for Actions That Gain X would be a dynamic page (Special:Ask but with the query pre-filled). But the presentation of that page can actually be styled with templates, it's pretty wild.

I think I can knock this out before Marigold. Certainly before it opens, maybe before we start laying track if that's not happening on Monday. The main thing that's going to take time is the replacement for Category Tree. The two options can be pursued in parallel as well, templates can set categories and SMW properties at the same time.

@Alan I've created Property:Gains. Can you configure this to be a Fixed Property the way that Property:Has icon is? PSGarak (talk) 02:11, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Fixed property configured, though perhaps I should have remembered that changes to $smwgFixedProperties throws up an interstitial from SMW. Oops. No harm done, though, aside from a minute's interstitial.

There will most likely not be a similar performance debacle as what happened in the first few days of Whitsun, even if we run into Marigold releasing at an inopportune time - feel free to make whatever changes you deem necessary. Alan (talk) 02:35, 30 May 2021 (UTC)