User blog:Tephra/Tephra's better editing guide

This guide is meant to address minor issues I've seen on the Diablo Wiki. I may write more of these in the future, it depends on the quality of articles I come across, I suppose.

The subject for today is the overuse of things on the wiki; going beyond that which is helpful, into the realm of redundancy and messiness.

The purpose of this is not to reprimand, but to explain the correct method of doing things. If you've been doing things wrong, don't feel ashamed, just start doing them right.

Stub
Stub is the most used maintenance template on the wiki. As of writing this blog, there are 518 pages under Article stubs. Yes, 518 pages. The wiki could certainly use more content, I do not contend this fact, but with such a massive quantity of pages there, it isn't very helpful to anyone who might be trying to work on stub articles.

Firstly, an article that doesn't exist should never be created with nothing but a stub template simply because it is redlinked. This is akin to vandalism. Any pages with virtually no actual content should either be expanded immediately or marked for deletion, not stubbed.

Make use of the multiple sub-stub templates. These include:
 * Item Stub &mdash; if the article is about an item
 * Location Stub &mdash; if the article is about a location
 * Monster Stub &mdash; if the article is about a monster
 * NPC Stub &mdash; if the article is about a character
 * Skill Stub &mdash; if the article is about a skill

If a section is missing, there is a sub-stub template for that too:
 * Section Stub

The generic Stub template should only be used if the article does not fit into any of the subcategories listed above. It also should be used for missing content, not poorly written content.

Cleanup
The opposite of Stub, Cleanup should only be used for poorly written articles, not missing content.

NoImage
The NoImage template should not be added to any article that doesn't have an image, only an article that doesn't have an image and feels incomplete without one.

Template-added categories
Many templates add categories when placed into articles. If you are using templates, you should know what categories it is adding (if any). If a template adds a category, do not add the same category to the page. The only exception is if the article in question needs the be listed in a certain order on the category page, if you don't know what this means or how to do this, then this exception does not exist for you.

There is a reason why templates add categories, and it's not just to save space, if categories need to be changed at a later time, changing the one template is much easier than changing the 20 pages that use it individually.

If every page in a navigation template is using the same category, the template should be adding them. If the template is not already adding them, there might be a good reason why it is not, so don't be in a great hurry to start adding new categories to templates.

Category hierarchy
To make navigation easier, categories have subcategories, and subcategories have even more subcategories. This is the category hierarchy.

Do not add an entire hierarchy to an article's categories. This is redundant and defeats the purpose in having subcategories. If category C is a subcategory of B and B is a subcategory of A, then an article that is relevant to A, B, and C should only be using C.

That is all for this blog. Happy editing, and stay efficient. ◄► Tephra ◄►