User talk:XGlass Reflection

Hello, greetings and welcome to the Narutopedia! Thanks for your edit to the User talk:Dantman page.

We do hope that you will stay for a long time. Enjoy your stay as we work to become the best Naruto info site out there. BELIEVE IT!

If you're looking for something to do why not look over the Forums or more specifically Narutopedia Collaboration for a list of projects we're working on. And the Community portal has a lot of recent discussions and places to go listed on it.

Please leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! -- Omnibender (Talk) 01:28, 11 April 2013

Re: Needs major changes
I know I'm not the one you left the message for, but Dantman is more like the behind the scenes kind of guy. Regarding the criticisms you made about the wiki:
 * Categories. We use something else to group pages. If you go to the characters category, you'll see a big "You can browse this page to give you a list of Characters you can browse through and filter" at the top of the article. By clicking the link in that box, you'll go to a page which collects semantic data from the articles, allowing you to filter characters by many criteria, such as rank, chakra nature, kekkei genkai, affiliation, media, status, clan. Similar filters are available for jutsu. That link you gave for the Fairy Tail wiki isn't a category either, it's a list. You call it an eye sore, we call it useful, and despite what you think, it is organised, since we can quickly drill down any specific combination of criteria. Jōnin with Lightning Release? Quickly find Kakashi, C and Darui. Living Mangekyō Sharingan users? Kakashi, Sasuke and Obito. Fire Release-using Kage? Mū, Ōnoki, Mei and Hiruzen. Kirigakure ANBU? Ao, Kushimaru, Tsurugi, Zabuza and Raiga. You may not like it, but it works for us.
 * Images. Images used in infoboxes are for how the character was introduced in the series, we don't do "current" images, since those can give loads of spoilers. Imagine if we had Kabuto with Orochimaru's remains as his infobox image. Imagine if we had unmasked Obito with Sharingan and Rinnegan as his infobox image. Should we have a Tailed Beast Mode Naruto in his infobox? Edo Tensei Madara or Nagato? We put in the infobox images of how they were when they were introduced, which means part 1 images for part 1 characters. Omnibender - Talk - Contributions 01:04, April 12, 2013 (UTC)

Categories are actually a bad way to represent that other info. When you have a category like "Genin" it's 1-dimensional, you can't intersect it with other information. And to top it off you can have an ever growing number of these categories that need to be created and they start to get less and less intelligible. "Uzumaki clan members", "Male characters", "Female characters", "Characters born on October 10th", "Characters born in October", "Characters born in November", "Anime only characters", "Manga only characters", "Characters in the anime and manga", "Movie only characters", "Anime characters", "Manga characters", and on and on. Wikipedia is a great example of how crazy categorization can get when you try to use this information to categorize and start creating categories that intersect things.

Instead of 1-dimensional categories like this we group pages of one type (a Character, Episode, Jutsu, etc... page). And then we use SMW to annotate the page with information. For example a character page might have a. This marks a character as having a "Rank" of "Genin", instead of just belonging to some arbitrary category named "Genin". This annotated information becomes available to use in any kind of list you want to create. It's just not very visible from the interface without some extra work. Take a look at Special:Browse/Naruto Uzumaki, that's all the information we have annotated about Naruto. The reason BrowseData unfortunately looks like that is due to how much data we have annotated on characters for you to use.

If you feel like learning how to use SMW and it's #ask, etc... there's actually enough information already annotated on this wiki for you to create a character page just like that Fairy Tail one. One that even automatically update itself.

Btw, I don't think most pages are admin-only protected. Some really high traffic pages may be semi-protected that just stops new and anonymous users. ~ Daniel Friesen (DanTMan, Nadir Seen Fire) (Local Talk &#8285; Animanga Talk) 02:18, April 12, 2013 (UTC)