All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXVII

[GethN7]

Still doing lots and lots and lots of cleanup on the wiki...

Somebody give me a convincing reason why I shouldn't simply redirect Category:Index Index to Special:Categories and let MediaWiki automation do at least that much of the cleanup work. I see no reason to manually replicate an automated list.

Technical explanation in the simplest way possible:

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:Categories

This is just a list of all categories for EVERYTHING. This includes maintenance, categories included with imported content that is not trope/work-related, hidden utility ones, and lots of other trivia that is not entirely needed for us to look at all the time.

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Category:Index_Index

This, on the other hand, are the actual content categories, all the things that court as things the average reader will care about or have good reason to peruse. This is just groups all that "relevant to the average site reader and editor" content" together, while the former makes no distinctions between this and background stuff not of strict importance to the former.

That might be what it was intended to be, but it isn't what it's become over the years. Everything gets dumped into Category:Index Index because that's what's on the boilerplate, and nobody bothers to change it.

If that's what you want Index Index to be (and I don't see why, because with over 65 thousand entries it's far too large for any "average reader" to use), then you're going to have to clean it up.

The only content that should be in the Index Index is what is is in the main namespace. Everything else that is template, MediaWiki pages (barring certain policy pages that may have overlap), or otherwise not pertinent to the main namespace should be removed from the Index Index.

Since you didn't complain when I said "you're going to have to clean it up", I assume your'e volunteering to clean it up.

I can thumb through it and prune what doesn't belong. I expect we'll be able to prune a lot of duplicate categories this way.

I'm just finishing up a game review project, so I can have some time over the next few days to give this section a well deserved pruning. Also looks like we can clean up redirects with category pages, they aren't content per se and thus do not require one in the Index Index, though their pages are categorized in the Ambiguity Index, which does need and has a proper entry.

P.S. - Noticed that you (Rob) have been double checking my fanfic recs deletions and edits, glad you are doing so. I tried to check for stuff that still existed or was yeeted, but at the time my skill at keeping it all straight was less than now and I was juggling a ton of different tabs checking links, so a lot of stuff may have died that shouldn't have. If so, I'm falling on my sword for that.

In the mean time, over the next couple of days I'll be working on the Index Index cleanup and will definitely be paying more attention for that.