Template talk:Page Status

General Comments
We should probably generate a template to track "completion" and frequency of different tasks for game pages, it could exist on each page's talk page and assist with maintenance. I'd like some help to scope such out here.


 * How are we supposed to do this exactly? I don't understand the mechanics of what you are trying to accomplish. What level of automation would be involved, and how much work does it take of an editor to fulfill everything? - MayImilae (talk) 00:26, 1 February 2013 (CET)


 * This has been started at Template:Page Status. It's nowhere near complete though, it just shows that it's possible. It's actually fairly easy to automate finding missing sections, though the regex can behave kind of weird (pulling in garbage sometimes, transclusion errors?). Since the actual output isn't required, just existence or nonexistence, it still works ok. When I made it I didn't realize that this was on Project:To Do, so I didn't see the following section of suggestions, or the previous DPLs that accomplish a lot of the same things. I still don't really understand how some of these are supposed to be handled. The infobox information has to be confirmed by hand, and Kolano and I were the only people who ever did it, so that seems pretty pointless for the template. There's other things where it's like, if someone's going to report about it, they could instead just fix it themselves rather quickly, like the title's description can easily be copy/pasted from GameFAQs by anyone. Anything else I thought was questionable or I would like expansion on, I marked with a (?) in the list below. - Xerxes (talk) 02:31, 21 August 2017 (CEST)

My intention was really for some sort of manual review to be established, beyond just establishing that a few fields were present. I'm not clear the current template accomplishes much that couldn't be handled via some additions to output similar categories in the infobox template (oe as already seen here). I'm guessing it's a heavier query, so perhaps it is better to restrict it to talk pages. Though I'd guess pre-generation/caching would mean there's little real difference. Kolano (talk) 05:11, 21 August 2017 (CEST)


 * Well, if this template is planned for mass addition when it's completed, all of the error handling and maintenance categories for the different templates could theoretically be moved to Page Status. The intention was mostly to show that that sort of thing would be possible, missing sections isn't really that useful of an application. User-input sections like "I fixed this on this date" would be trivial to add, just something like |infobox=timestamp, then have some check that infobox exists, and if it does output "This page's infobox was last checked on timestamp", if not "This page's infobox has not been checked". I don't know about date handling tools available in particular, but that seems like a common operation so I'd be surprised if they weren't included with MediaWiki. I know there's magic words related to it.


 * The one thing that's actually completely functional in the template is the unconfirmed ID reporting, so if the rest falls through, there's potential to just keep that as its own template for tracking IDs. I intentionally did that part first and fully fleshed it out because I wanted it the most, and it has immediate application without requiring mass editing. - Xerxes (talk) 06:34, 21 August 2017 (CEST)

Since a sample template now exists for this this discussion should migrate to it's talk page. Kolano (talk) 06:47, 21 August 2017 (CEST)


 * Done. - Xerxes (talk) 20:18, 22 August 2017 (CEST)


 * So, there's a limit on the regex-on-another-page thing; you can't extract data, just look for existence. I kind of foreshadowed this earlier with how it was pulling garbage out but I really can't make it work, this is skirting into undefined behavior. That means that some of these things in the list are impossible with this template (or at least, I'm out of ideas). The good news is I'm fairly confident I could just put everything else people wanted into Infobox VG, so no big loss.


 * This template is ready to be nitpicked by everyone. I know it doesn't look very good, but I'm horrendous at CSS and I just copied the stylings from pre-existing templates. It shouldn't be too hard for someone to make it look better if they wanted. Functionally though I think this should be done. The only thing that really needs to be added is support for IP signatures, but when I went to make one to mess with regexing it I realized IP edits are blocked right now anyways. - Xerxes (talk) 21:27, 23 August 2017 (CEST)

Proposed "Game Page Status" Template Fields

 * Infobox contains accurate information regarding the game


 * VideoGallery contains acceptable quality videos and proper formatting (some ideas from Kolano here)


 * Page includes a full set of sections


 * Date of last issue tracker scan (unclear this shouldn't just be handled with more regular review of the issues list, see here)
 * I think this is perfectly fine and appropriate for this template. - Xerxes (talk) 20:40, 22 August 2017 (CEST)


 * Display and track unconfirmed GameIDs


 * Linkages to patches, texture packs, etc are in place and still valid
 * The "Patches" section in Xenoblade Chronicles is something like this. We could adopt this as template (and then add this in Project:Wiki Conventions) mbc07 (talk)


 * Date of last forum page review (looking for extra reported issues/patches to bring here)
 * This one seems questionable. What is the point of checking the forum pages for individual games, in the context of this wiki and a template for improvement of page contents? This seems like a problem for the forum administrators, not us. In my opinion, our only consideration should be making sure that our links to there work and nothing else. - Xerxes (talk) 20:40, 22 August 2017 (CEST)
 * The reason is to consolidate issues / enhancements posted to forum pages here, which also makes up the first page of those forum posts. Kolano (talk) 02:28, 23 August 2017 (CEST)
 * Ah, I see. That makes sense actually. So it's just like another extension of searching the issue tracker occasionally. - Xerxes (talk) 06:30, 23 August 2017 (CEST)


 * Description is: accurate, brief, provides info beyond what's found in the infobox
 * If you notice it's bad, just copy paste from GameFAQs? This seems really pointless compared to the others since 99% of pages don't have original descriptions. - Xerxes (talk) 20:40, 22 August 2017 (CEST)
 * Even if they are mostly scraped from other sources, I'd still prefer the descriptions to not read as "Title is a Genre game published on Date by Publisher". It frequently is the start of Wikipedia articles and only duplicates info already provided by the infobox, and thus is generally pointless. Kolano (talk) 06:44, 21 August 2017 (CEST)
 * I do agree with the sentiment, but for long term in a template called on every page? I mean these scraped descriptions will never, ever change (how often do the back covers of your games suddenly rewrite themselves?). Even the forum links have more potential to have something happen to them than descriptions. - Xerxes (talk) 20:40, 22 August 2017 (CEST)
 * I moved stuff around to make it as easy as possible to remove sections in the future, each section and everything related to it is on its own line. So we can definitely have this and then some day in the future remove it. This would leave around a lot of pointless signatures but they'd be harmless, and we could check for them and remove them (or regex) later. So, I don't see a problem with having it anymore. - Xerxes (talk) 14:45, 23 August 2017 (CEST)


 * Game list is accurate for platform pages (and still exists if it was removed somehow)
 * I toyed around with the idea of this, but the problem is that nobody should be expected to sit down and check every single entry on the Wii page for example, that's just absurd. This could only feasibly see application for Virtual Console platforms. - Xerxes (talk) 21:27, 23 August 2017 (CEST)
 * I implemented it anyways. New sections of the template are basically free in terms of performance for any pages that aren't using them, so there's really no loss in having more besides the length of the template call. - Xerxes (talk) 10:15, 27 August 2017 (CEST)


 * A special page flag parameter to mark specific pages as needing administrator review/mediation