User blog:WarBlade/Mission Article Categories

I am starting to chip away at the growing problem of mission articles having been categorised haphazardly.

What has happened: Manually added categories have been added to mission articles, initially with some kind of plan, but later apparently with more of a "seemed right at the time" mentality.

What this means: With Borderlands 2 released, and the DLCs coming hot on its heels, a bit of a mess has turned into a huge mess.

What is being done: In order to resolve this, manually added templates are being removed from mission articles and will be restored via the mission infobox (or a few other templates in rare cases. This will allow us to assess and rewrite the entire mission category structure with a small number of edits to the appropriate templates (several edits instead of hundreds in the long term).

As this process gets worked on, you may notice a few strange things occurring with the mission categories. Sometimes articles linking to categories don't initially appear in the list on the category page, for example. Don't be too concerned - it happens.

As a heads up, I'm going to run with a standard established early in the Borderlands Wiki's existence, where common nouns in the category will be lower case if they're not the first word, e.g. "Category:Scavenger missions".

As part of the update, I'm also adding the "game" field to mission infoboxes in the articles. They don't show up in the infobox just yet, but that functionality will be added once a higher proportion of mission articles get prepared for it.

I will also be asking for assistance at some point, but for the moment I'm starting with trying to iron out some of the smaller wrinkles, which should help to point out the general direction that things are heading in. In other words, the tangle is starting out messy enough that the road through it is not yet clear, and a few small scale fixes might make things a little clearer.