Template talk:Main page toc

New top-level taxonomy

I propose the following reorganization of the category table of contents:

Geography | Herbarium | Bestiary | Races

History | Culture | Persons | Organizations

Magic | Cosmology | Items | OOC

Empire | Avernum | Abyss | Vahnatai

This separates out the quasi-top-level categories, the nations, as I can't think of any reason an article would be in one of those categories but not one of the real top-level categories. It groups the others in a somewhat more organized manner than they are now: into the natural world, the human(oid) world, and the interpreted/manufactured world.

Aran, I know you have some reasoning behind the way it is now, but I'm not clear on why Herbarium gets bigger billing than Persons, for example. Anyway, I think this would make a lot more sense. Any comments? --- Slarty 09:09, 25 March 2007 (PDT)

I have to admit that it makes a lot more sense this way than I thought when you mentioned it in Vahnatai.

I also have to admit that the only reason the taxonomy is the way it is now is because it was based on that of NSWiki, the NationStates encyclopedia. We gradually modified it but let the arbitrary "five large ones, several small ones" stand. If we can work out the details, I think this change would be a good idea.

However, four rows of top-levels would mess up the look. Could we put some of those rows next to each other?

-- Arancaytar | Send Reply! --- That is not dead which can eternal lie... 02:26, 26 March 2007 (PDT)

Here's my prototype. Just to put it in context here's a section title:

Browse the encyclopedia by topic

Incidentally, this seems like a good time to mention that I really hate using | as the divider in all these templates. Visually, it's just not easy enough to distinguish from the text around it, so it means that navigating a link box here presents an undue visual processing load. Wikipedia uses • these days, which makes things much easier.

You may be right about the Abyss category. It's in a unique spot however, as nothing else would be big enough to even be a candidate. That reminds me -- one of the problems with the canon box is that we can no longer use What links here to get an easy list of all the articles from a given source. --- Slarty 08:26, 26 March 2007 (PDT)