Morrowind talk:Items

Item Pages Master Plan

This is the Item Pages Master Plan, or at least how I see it. Items have been moving from the old Morrowind:Item List pages to these pages, where they are listed in an improved format and in more detail. There is a set of main item pages where all item redirects should point, namely: Base Armor, Base Clothing, Base Weapons, Generic Magic Armor, Generic Magic Clothing, Generic Magic Weapons, Special Magic Armor, Special Magic Clothing, Special Magic Weapons, Unique Armor, Unique Clothing, Unique Weapons, Quest Items, Alchemy Apparatus, Keys, Lights, Scrolls, Potions, Thieves Tools, Repair Tools, and Miscellaneous Items.

Other pages are just lists of items wich have already their own page, and no redirects are necessary, i.e. links should point to the item pages unless referencing to that type of items in general. These pages are: Armor Artifacts, Clothing Artifacts, Weapon Artifacts, Other Artifacts, Ingredients, Books and Notes.

There are other pages which offer alternative lists classified in a different way for ease of comparison, mainly for browsing purposes. These are: Armor, by Body Area, Item Materials and Styles, Magic Apparel by Effect, Magic Weapons by Effect, and the new pages created by Lurlock recently (can you list them here please?). Links to these pages are used in special ocasions, e.g. the Effect pages link to Magic Apparel by Effect and Magic Weapons by Effect, or when referring to a full set of Daedric armor you can link to Item Materials and Styles (this page may be splitted into different style pages, as it is quite difficult to edit).

So this is my Master Plan. Please give your opinions to improve this Plan. --DrPhoton 03:50, 6 March 2008 (EST)

That pretty much goes with my plans. (I added links to your post to help the discussion.) I was already planning to split up Item Materials and Styles, and have created links to the pages I plan to create on both Armor and Weapons. As for a list of the new pages, okay, here goes:

Armor	Clothing	Weapons
Boots Cuirasses* Morrowind:Gauntlets and Bracers Greaves Morrowind:Helmets Morrowind:Pauldrons Morrowind:Shields	Common Clothing Expensive Clothing Extravagant Clothing Exquisite Clothing Amulets Belts Gloves Pants Rings Robes Shirts Shoes Skirts	Axes Blunt Weapons Bows and Arrows Crossbows and Bolts Long Blades Short Blades Spears Throwing Weapons

* Apparently someone got impatient with the red-link I left during my vacation and created this page - it doesn't match the style of the others, and I may change it to be more like the rest, or perhaps use elements from that page on the others I made. My pages don't list item stats, they're merely there to give a visual comparison. As such, I'd want to have pictures of the armor being worn by NPCs, both male and female, to better show what they look like, much like I did with some of the clothing pages. I held off for several reasons - first because there's so many of them, and second because I'd need to take into account things like the LeFemm Armor plug-in, which adds new female-specific models for several of the default armors, and I'd have to show the female NPCs both with and without the new models, so it's a slightly more complicated job. Also, if I include LeFemm models for the old armors, do I include the new ones from LeFemm as well? And for that matter, what about the Adamantium Armor and the Helm of Tohan added by those plugins? (Though that should be covered in Tribunal space at some point, of course.)

Anyhow, I think that pretty much answers all of the questions you had. Was thinking we might create a few other pages to further split up Miscellaneous Items, e.g. Soul Gems at the very least seems like it should have its own page. The others may be not so important, but that's the kind of thing somebody might search for. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 23:10, 6 March 2008 (EST)

Splitting Miscellaneous Items is a good idea. Soul Gems should definitely have their own page, also Propylon Indices already have their own. The rest I think could stay. --DrPhoton 03:25, 7 March 2008 (EST)

Thanks DrPhoton and Lurlock for starting to explain what's going on with these pages. The questions I raised before weren't specifically about the generic magic items pages, but were rather about the more general concept of what's going on, and this is a good start at trying to explain that general concept.

Having read through all of this, though, I'm still left trying to figure out the purpose of the new pages that Lurlock listed (Morrowind:Boots, etc.) If I understand these comments correctly, the idea is that those pages will only ever contain a handful of images? In other words, the pages are for the most part complete in their current form? If so, that seems far from ideal, for two main reasons:

• First, readers are going to pull up those pages expecting to see more than just images. The links on Morrowind:Armor don't give readers any hints that the articles contain no factual content. Other pages on the site do not consist of nothing but images: usually the images are shown side-by-side with information to enhance articles. The existing articles just seem empty and stublike to me. The fact that Game Lord immediately started adding stats to the Cuirasses article would seem to suggest that I'm not the only person who feels that way.
• Second, a redirect such as Morrowind:Iron Cuirass should take a reader to the single location that contains all information about an iron cuirass. The reader shouldn't pull up that link just to then be told "This page only contains the statistics. If you want to see what the item looks like, you're going to have pull up yet another page." Any image that exists should instead be accessible in the same location, not split off into a separate article.

In other words, I really think that the images should be integrated with the rest of the item articles.

Also, it would be good to finalize some of the final details, such as what items are going to be split off from Miscellaneous Items. Making those decisions now, rather than after a few hundred new redirects have been created, would be easier in the long run. --Nephele^Talk 23:27, 7 March 2008 (EST)

I agree that the images should better go together with the stats, and it would be rather simple to place them next to the tables. Regarding the Miscellaneous Items split, I suggest we split off Soul Gems, Propylon Indices and Clutter, leaving the rest in. Soul Gems because they are quite important in the game, Propylon Indices because they already have a page elsewhere, and Clutter because it occupies a lot of space. --DrPhoton 09:35, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

(←) (outdent for sanity) As I had some spare time (not a lot happens at work on a Friday afternoon), I moved the images from the various 'image-only' pages (Boots, Pauldrons, Shields, etc.) to Base Armor and Armor, by Body Area and changed all the 'image-only' pages to redirects to the relevant sections on Armor, by Body Area. I haven't touched the Cuirasses page, and as there don't appear to be any 'group shots' of the cuirasses, I haven't added any images of these to the other pages.

Having done that, I'm not sure I'm entirely happy. There appear to be three separate pages - Base Armor, Armor, by Body Area, and Item Materials and Styles - that list the armor statistics, and each is organised in a different way. Whereas the Oblivion armors appear to be only listed in one place.

--Gaebrial 11:53, 21 March 2008 (EDT)

Thanks, Gaebrial :) I think that works much better. I agree that having three overlapping pages still isn't ideal, but at least three is better than ten. --Nephele^Talk 00:28, 24 March 2008 (EDT)

Base Item Redirects

I brought this up a while ago on DrPhoton's page, and I think it needs to be addressed on a more general level now. We currently have several redirects in the form of Morrowind:Expensive Amulet (base item), which I feel are not really needed, mainly because it causes all pages which link to Morrowind:Expensive Amulet to end up going to a disambig page instead of directly to where the item is described. I agree that the quest-versions of these items should have redirects, in this case Morrowind:Expensive Amulet (quest item), but the base item should be the default, and the Disambig page doesn't really even need to exist. 99 times out of 100, if somebody makes such a link, they're not talking about the quest item. It appears mostly on merchant pages, and only one article actually links to the quest item. This is true of most if not all of the item pages that currently appear on Special:Disambiguations. I propose that these disambig pages all be deleted, and the base item redirects moved into their place. The base item should always be the default, not the exception. People adding links to pages where items are listed such as merchant pages should not have to first check every single base item on the list to make sure there isn't a disambig where they're linking. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:02, 17 June 2008 (EDT)

Agreed. I think in the case where people are looking for the special version of an item they're more likely to be starting from a quest page anyway, and we can make sure the right links are on those. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 10:25, 18 June 2008 (EDT)

Materials and Styles armor images

The models wearing the armor in the screenshots, by virtue of their Height and Weight stats, cause some distortion of the armor itself. I suggest we alter them so that both the male and female in all such images have an equal height and weight, so as to prevent distorting the armor meshes, and preferably 1.0/1.0. A custom race can be used, or we can use Dunmer male and Redguard female. If this is agreed upon, I should have the time to do it myself sometime in the next month. 216.82.142.13 22:21, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Restocking merchants

Is there an easy way to check if there is a merchant in the game that actually has a restocking supply for a given item?— Unsigned comment by 178.17.171.148 (talk)