Morrowind talk:Books

Completion of list

The list of books is currently complete, except for notes that weigh less than one. Text still needs to be added to the books, and summaries still need to be added for the vast majority of the books. Drostie 10:17, 31 Jul 2005 (EDT)

I've added some of the book pages, I hope that's okay. I can do the rest if you're fine with it. :) Marobar Sul 18:49, 8 Oct 2005 (EDT)

Just finished giving all the books the correct headers and wikified anything that needed it. Morrowind books is pretty much finished.Werdnanoslen 12:18, 21 August 2006 (EDT)

Thanks for all the work you've done on this, Werdnanoslen. One thing I was wondering about is whether the descriptions for each of the books on the Morrowind:Books page basically just reproduce the contents of each book's /Desc page. If so, should Morrowind:Books just transclude the /Desc pages instead of having redundant info? It would be fairly easy to set up a new template to automatically show the /Desc pages using the existing format of the page; if you'd like me to set one up, let me know. --Nephele 13:33, 21 August 2006 (EDT)

I don't think "transclude" is a word, maybe you're thinking of "exclude". Anyway, I think the description should definitely be on the book list to show what the book is about before anyone wants to read it. But to have it on the book page itself would be redundant, but just for the sake of consistency and to make it look like it has more content, if it's not taking up space that could otherwise be used elsewhere then I would say to just keep it. Werdnanoslen 11:17, 22 August 2006 (EDT)

Sorry, I was using wiki-speak. "Transclude" means to have the wiki automatically paste the contents of another page into this one. So, for example, if I type {{Lore:ABCs for Barbarians/Description}}, the wiki inserts:

{{Lore:ABCs for Barbarians/Description}}

So what I was suggesting is that if all of the descriptions on the page Morrowind:Books are just duplicates of the contents of the individual /Desc pages, why not actually use the contents of the /Desc pages on Morrowind:Books, instead of having multiple versions of the description that need to be maintained. Hopefully that makes more sense now. --Nephele 11:38, 22 August 2006 (EDT)

Yes, that definitely makes more since now (still new to the wiki stuff.) I'll get started as soon as I get home (at school right now.) I'll probably get all of them done then.

No rush to get it done... I still haven't cleaned up all the unused books and links in the Morrowind namespace! For whenever you do get to it, I thought I'd point out another possibly helpful tip. There is a template called Book Link that you can use to automatically fill in all of the information. For example, {{Book Link|ABCs for Barbarians}} will display:

ABCs for Barbarians

Or {{Book Link|The Affairs of Wizards}} gives:

The Affairs of Wizards

The only catch is that the display format isn't the same as that being used on the Morrowind page right now. I don't know what everyone's opinion is on the format. Using the Book Link format would make the format match that being used on the Oblivion and Tribunal pages. If a different format is desired for Morrowind, a different template could be created. Or the format of the Book Link template can also be modified if that seems to make the most sense (for example, I like the longer descriptions being used on the Morrowind page, and I'm not sure they will look as good using the Book Link format). Anyway, I just thought I would throw the idea out there. --Nephele 12:54, 22 August 2006 (EDT)

I see what you mean about the template, and it would be good to have all book pages with the same template. Although, looking at the other pages, they look less organized and more cluttered than Morrowind's. If the title, author, and description can all fit on one line, then this makes all of them sort of scrunched up. In Morrowind's they all have title on top and description on bottom which keeps them all looking the same. Maybe if a new template could be created looking like this:

ABCs for Barbarians by Anonymous.

Picturebook for Barbarians.

This would make it both like all other book pages, and it would keep the same organization as the current Morrowind book page. I'm not at all experienced with creating templates, though, so I have to ask for someone's help with that. Whenever this can be done, I'll get right to it. Werdnanoslen 21:54, 22 August 2006 (EDT)

I opted to change the format for the Book Link template, so that it's now more similar to the Morrowind format. I think this works on the other book pages, and this way all the book pages can have a similar look. I may still tweak things a bit, but in the meantime I'd welcome any feedback. --Nephele 00:11, 23 August 2006 (EDT)

Redirects necessary?

Are all the Morrowind:Name of Book redirects necessary? Couldn't all these links could point directly to the Tamriel:Books/Name of Book pages? --Actreal 23:34, 15 August 2006 (EDT)

Agreed. No need to have these all be under Morrowind namespace. The books (most of them) are common to at least two if not three of the games in the series, which is why they're in Tamriel:Books in the first place. --TheRealLurlock 23:57, 15 August 2006 (EDT)

All the books are under Tamriel namespaces.Werdnanoslen 12:18, 21 August 2006 (EDT)

Expansion consistency

This page, Tribunal:Books, and Bloodmoon:Books all have completely different layouts. Do we want to choose one of those layouts for all of the pages? Or should we try to go for site-wide consistancy and make them all closer to Oblivion:Books or Tamriel:Books? For that matter, Daggerfall:Books is another completely different layout, though that probably needs to be updated as well. (Somebody more familiar with Daggerfall than me will have to deal with that one.) Any thoughts? Votes? Whatever? --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:49, 7 March 2007 (EST)

I've done all to Daggerfall Books that I can; before, it had a lot of editorializing. As for this page, I'd say this, Bloodmoon and Tribunal ought to be similarly formatted, since they're all the same "generation." Somercy 12:16, 7 March 2007 (EST)

Looking at all these pages, I think we should try to make a site-wide format. Books can be listed in alphabetical order in a table format, like Oblivion:Books or Tamriel:Books, with the following information: title, author, description, skill taught, and posibly location. There can also be other pages where books are listed by author or subject, and another page with all skill books listed by skill. We can also have other pages for scrolls or notes, like Bloodmoon:Books. --DrPhoton 03:34, 8 March 2007 (EST)

Well, as for books by author or subject, I already did that. No need to have separate tables for each of the games that duplicate what's already on those two pages. I was also debating for Tribunal and Bloodmoon whether it's even worth listing the books which exist already in Morrowind. Personally, I think only the new books added by the expansions need to be mentioned on those pages. We don't list every occurance of an Iron Shortsword added by the expansion. I don't see why we should need to do that with books. Skill books of course should have their own pages, but then, they already do also. Since no new skill books are added by the expansions, they don't need similar pages. The only other thing is stuff like scrolls and notes, which arguably shouldn't exist in the Tamriel namespace, as they're mostly short and of no relevance outside of the games they're in. I'm leaning towards a site-wide format as well, just trying to decide which format is best. Ideally, you'd want something that tells you not only which books are added, but where to find them (particularly if they're somewhat rare). Might have to work on that. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 09:35, 8 March 2007 (EST)

Regarding the expansion books, I think they should also be listed there because someone playing any of the expansions will look on the expansion pages for a book found in the expansions. How can anyone know in-game if a book is added by the expansion or is already part of Morrowind? The best in my opinion is to do something like in Bloodmoon:Books. --DrPhoton 11:33, 8 March 2007 (EST)

Okay, now I think I remember why we didn't do that...

I replaced all the manual links and descriptions (which didn't match the Description pages) with the standard Book Link template, but now the page takes an extremely long time to load, despite being half the size. Is there any way we can trim down the Book Link template to make it not bog the page down so much? Or perhaps format this page in another way that still uses the standard Author and Description pages, but doesn't kill the server? I tried looking at how the Oblivion:Books page worked, but that's not loading for me now either. (I seem to recall it was in a table, rather than a straight list.) One possible solution would be to separate this page into several, maybe not one for each letter like the Lore:Books pages, but medium sized-chunks - A-F, G-L, etc. I'm still trying to aim for some consistancy between the various namespaces' Books pages (see discussion above, which never really went anywhere). But in this case, there just seems to be too many for the server to handle on one page. Is there any chance that these new Servers Daveh was talking about installing will alleviate the situation somewhat? Because the current formatting of this page is probably the best in terms of navigation, but not if it won't load. Apologies for the disruption to the servers, but now I can't even look at the page to change it back. (It worked fine in Preview...) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 17:52, 2 August 2008 (EDT)

Flushed with my recent success modifying the Faction template, I have moved the body of the Book Link template into a /Code subpage, to allow the 'main' template to simply resolve the parameters. This was purported to improve the performance of the Faction template, so hopefully it will do the same thing here. Assuming I haven't completely screwed it up. --Gaebrial 04:22, 4 August 2008 (EDT)

It looks like it helped, though it may just be a result of there being less site traffic right now than when I last checked. It does however have the curious effect that the Book Link template no longer shows up in the "Templates Used On This Page" section when you edit the page - and the /Code page doesn't either. Odd. I also can't imagine why this would help, but I can't argue with results (at least not right now, as I said it may depend on traffic). --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 12:28, 4 August 2008 (EDT)

Strange. Both the Book Link and /Code pages appear in the "Templates Used On This Page" section for me.

Oh, and I think the reason it helps the page to load quicker is that it's only resolving the parameters once for each book, so rather than having several instances of, for example, {{{altname|{{{title|1}}}}}} in the template, the 'main' template now resolves it to the alias 'altn', and the /Code just uses that alias.

--Gaebrial 02:29, 5 August 2008 (EDT)

Whoa, they show up now, along with all of the /Author and /Description pages that weren't there yesterday. (When I looked then, I saw only two - the LetterMenu and the breadcrumb trail. I'll attribute that to cached server glitch or something like that. Odd. As for the quicker loading - I'm starting to wonder if that's why Wikipedia's templates all seem to be nested 5 or 6 deep? I mean, it makes them almost impossible to debug, but maybe it speeds up the pageload? (Of course few WP pages have more than a couple templates per page, we're a lot more template-heavy here.) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:11, 5 August 2008 (EDT)

Should we add a mention...

It seems mildly noteworthy to me that most books can only be found as closed books, others can only be found as open books, and some come in both varieties. Is this worth mentioning, do you think? Xolroc (talk) 14:46, 14 October 2013 (GMT)