Lotro-Wiki Categorization

From Lotro-Wiki.com

I am creating this page to help discuss categorization issues and concerns with this wiki. The way I look at categorization is as an organizational tool to help people find what they are looking for. Too much sub-categorization and folks end up drilling through tons of "categories" to get to the information they were searching for. Too few categories and users can become confused and frustrated (2,000 documents to 'page through'?!?!?) Requiring too much "specialized" knowledge required (abbreviations, "in the know" phrases used, etc..) to find what you're after and, again... frustration and confusion ensue.

To provide a clearer understanding, I think a single example of categorization should be looked at so... Here's an example of what I mean.

What is a location?

What qualifies as a location?

How do you differentiate between different types of locations -- Landmarks versus Areas versus Zones versus Lands?

How about instanced portions of towns and the like? How would you differentiate them between Instanced Dungeons?

When you look at such things, in general it's "well, we'll figure it out." or "hmmm... It should be easy." It's not really that easy but there's a good working idea to base a schema upon.

Let's look at how Turbine arranged some of this in their lorebook. In truth, its implementation is a bit sloppy, incomplete, misleading and inaccurate from a players standpoint. If you start hunting around there, you'll find yourself getting very frustrated rather quickly.

Their structure goes:

This looks orderly except... Look closely -- see how Areas is sub'd under Regions yet Landmarks, Dungeons and Interiors are all "on their own"? That's a problem and how they chose to get this portion of their data out to people.

Overall their format isn't bad but it's pretty tough to work with and poorly maintained/setup. Some spots are 'Landmarks' that should properly be areas (Needlehole, etc...). Some spots are Landmarks that should probably be Regions (Rivendell) and similar such problems.

Let's give a brief shot at reformatting based upon a more hierarchical structure:

If we base an implementation upon their layout but properly set it up and maintain it, it shouldn't be too difficult to do right. We can also use the same/similar syntax to what their wording goes so 'official' communications from Turbine will be intelligible to new users of this site.

Places would hold everything. All potential items would exist within this category.

Lands would hold just Eriador and any other major segement of that nature for lore purposes and the like.

Regions would hold just the primary regions.

Areas on down... These would cross-link as much as possible.

Examples:

Cat Woman's House (In Bree) would be categorized as:

Bree

Areas

Interiors

Landmarks

So anyone checking Areas, Bree, Interiors or Landmarks could find it.

Asht-Shapol (In Urugath instance in Angmar)

Angmar

Areas

Interiors

Dungeons

It is not a true landmark type location but it is a dungeon and interior and an area within angmar and urugath but Urugath (probably) would only be a document versus a category.

If a consistent architecture like this is followed, the templates can help 'smartly' categorize the locations appropriately.

Now this is only ONE category area and one of the easiest to look at. Tougher ones would need a lot more planning and thought than this. What about NPC's --- vendors, guards, quest givers, trainers -- What Class? Vocation?, etc... Lots of variety and cross categorization involved in this. How would you locate a supplier in the Shire? How about Angmar? What about reputation vendors? How about that horse vendor...

As you can see, this categorization could enable or disable a lot of use for folks.