Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-17897872-20150806193544/@comment-4189499-20150809110353

Storm2 wrote: Imamadmad wrote: Re 2) Category Clean-up:

I think the categories should stay, but maybe make them hidden. The only reason is is that the bots use the category system to edit, and it makes editing easier (or at least faster) if we can target bot runs for certain things more easily. For example, imagine that there was a major change to the way that liquorice swirls worked. You might want to add a message to the difficulty section of every page with liquorice swirls asking users to re-evaluate the difficulty of that level with the change in place. That could only really be done with a category for all levels with liquorice swirls on them.

Also, if we were to enable DPL on this wiki (which I recently realised we didn't have yet), we could use the categories as another way of organising levels, such as showing a list of all levels with liquorice swirls on the liquorice swirls page, which is populated based on which pages have that category. You could also organise pages in finer detail, such as making a list of all very hard jelly levels with liquorice swirls on them, if that were ever relevant. That can only be easily be done with these categories.

If you want those sections cleaned up, make the categories hidden, but they definitely have a use, especially if somebody asks staff to enable DPL.

What's DPL? DPL does stand for Dynamic Page List. In short, it is an extension that allows for lists of pages to be generated depending on certain criteria, most of which are based on which categories pages are in. You can see it in action in slightly different ways at w:c:drwho.answers:DWA:CFD, w:c:drwho.answers:Template:Createdby, and w:c:drwho.answers:Category:Doctor Who (novels), the former of which shows the pages in the category in order of last edit, the middle of which displays several lists of questions users have asked and displaying if they've been answered or not, and the latter of which shows a full list of categories which fall into two other categories, "Doctor Who" and the one in the drop-down, although the drop-down menu itself was an extra addition and not a core part of DPL. For those more technically minded, using DPL is a bit like querying a database to return a list of pages satisfying certain conditions and in a specified format. It is amazing the amount of places where it is relevant, and the sort of querying which can be achieved with this tool if you think creatively about it. I only realised we didn't have it here when I tried to use it in the documentation of Template:Infobox_level/test to record a list of all pages that template was being tested on. There will be plenty of other opportunities where it will be relevant, both as a permanent fixture of pages as well as a tool individual users can set up on their own user and user sub-pages to find pages to work on. If I get enough support, I'll send off a message to Wikia asking if this feature can be enabled here.