All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXIX

[Labster]

What's with whatever tool we're using on the Reviews subpages not understanding the standard wiki formatting in the page description boxes? It reports at least one standard Magic Word as a missing template (although it actions the magic word correctly), it doesn't display the category "Reviews" in the category list, and it prefixes the word "Category:" to the categories that it does display (although it sends people to the correct categories). Somebody's going to wonder why the heck this thing is broken...

The way we do reviews has long been broken.  I have an archive of reviews carried over at the fork from TVT, and I haven't done anything with them because (among other reasons) of it.

Another thing I don't like about our Review plug-in/widget/gadget/whatever: its interaction with the Work page header is such that it created redlinks for Reviews subpages for ''every work on the wiki''. Bad enough in the past, but now that Special:Wanted Pages is cached and has a maximum of 5000 entries, these redlinks are crowding out the redlinks to pages that we really want.

Hence the sitenotice that I just posted on the wiki. We need to do something to make the redlink list useful again, and that "something" is either "junk the Review plug-in/widget/gadget/whatever" or "ask the Tropers to contribute reviews".

It turns out no one likes the Review software: formerly Flow, currently StructuredDiscussions, and future deprecated.  I was going to file a bug report on the link until I found out the whole extension is being discontinued.  The replacement is Extension:DiscussionTools -- which looks like it might be great for our talk pages, but not possibly not so good for our review pages.

The redlinks are coming from the linking to the review namepsace in the {{work}} template.  I could go ahead and fix that temporarily by doing {{#ifexist:Review:Foo}} in the header -- it's an expensive function, but not too bad for only one.  (The subpages list is another expensive function, but it only does one DB roundtrip, looking for one page more is another one!)  But honestly, there are only 22 reviews so it would be best to just copy them to a Work/Reviews and I can change the work template.

I think we just need to figure out what our format looks like in wikitext, and then paste stuff, and lose our old reviews.  Simple with linebreaks, or a template that draws a box around a review, with another place to add replies to the review below?