What's in a good Ability Page
I like this new boilerplate over the old one. The info box cleans up a lot of the stuff that was just in bullet lists before. I think any page on a wiki should be able to stand on it's own, without the reader having to bounce around too many links to piece together the details. At the same time, too much redundancy can make it too long, or easily dated when little details change with patches. But these pages are usually short, so more details wouldn't hurt.
Separating "Tips" and "Tricks" seems unnecessary. The "Notes" section seems like a good place to list facts about the ability that would be too much detail for the intro. Notes is where you may list things like: this spell overrides this debuff, you can't use it in this situation, use this formula to calculate damage/mana/crit or whatever. Whereas Tips and Tricks sections are for player suggestions, like "this spell is good for killing Warlocks., here's how". I'd propose re-combining them.
The Notes section would be a good place to list known bugs.
"Past Changes" is straightforward.
I'd suggest including a short section on Talents (maybe a sub-section somewhere), where talents that affect the ability are described in a short bit of prose. The info box of course lists talents with links, but a short blurb wouldn't hurt to make the article more informative, and the link to the talent always has more detailed info. For example, in the 
[Frostbolt] article you'd mention "The 
[Piercing Ice] talent increases the damage of this spell by up to 6%" and so on.
I'll pick an article and work on it as a guinea pig this week. --Piumosso-Uldum 00:43, 19 April 2007 (EDT)
- I'll add a "Known bugs" section; I have that section header at Cold Snap (Mage talent) also. I'm not sure that "this spell is good for killing Warlocks" is a good idea; we have other pages for that. Duplicate info isn't cool. But I'll think on it. I'll also think about putting tips and tricks back together. /me goes off to ponder the mysteries of life. --User:Sky2042/Sig 01:14, 19 April 2007 (EDT)
- I worked on
[Cone of Cold] a bit, it's a work in progress. I included a short section on talents. I'm not too happy with it as a sub-section where it is, I'm open to suggestion. Though I do feel it has a place in the article, as it is specifically addressing how the talent affects the ability. It's short, and not necessarily duplicate of the talent pages themselves (assuming they will exist of course, more to do!) since I'm keeping it in context. As for how to kill a warlock, it was just an random thought to illustrate my feeling that "player suggestions" should be kept in a different section than "known mechanics". Anything in the tips&tricks sections should be relevant to the ability, and written in that context. In the cone of cold case, I wouldn't go in to great depth on how to AOE farm ZG crocs with it, rather I'd leave that for a different article, and only mention cone of cold-specific mechanics. --Piumosso-Uldum 00:30, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- I worked on
- Also, why don't you like the class footer? I always found it quite handy when bouncing around mage stuff --Piumosso-Uldum 00:31, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- Why not? It lengthens the page vertically, quite unnecessarily imo. If some other way could be found to choose where we want it to float, I would like that very much. I like the idea of it, however, it is fairly unwieldy for articles. Rest of reply later, after I make
[Invisibility] into a mage only page, and make Invisibility (disambiguation) a proper disambig, etc.--User:Sky2042/Sig 18:15, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- Why not? It lengthens the page vertically, quite unnecessarily imo. If some other way could be found to choose where we want it to float, I would like that very much. I like the idea of it, however, it is fairly unwieldy for articles. Rest of reply later, after I make
- Also, why don't you like the class footer? I always found it quite handy when bouncing around mage stuff --Piumosso-Uldum 00:31, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- On my browser the vertical extension isn't too bad. All the stuff on the left pushes the vertical page down pretty far for these short articles, and that footer doesn't add more than the categories box does. I don't maximize my browser window, I keep it about half the width of my monitor. It's at the bottom so it doesn't push important stuff down. The main reason I like the footer is it's easy browsing to the other class-related stuff, making the page able to "stand on its own" as I discussed earlier. Consider how a person arrives at an ability page - either by following links through the pages down to the "leaf" pages, or by using the search box to get right to it. For the link clickers, they can get back to more pages using the browser history, but a searcher needs some signposts. The footer style is consistent with other wikis too, see [1] as an example (that ones much larger). We also have it all over wowwiki, see The Scarlet Monastery. An alternative is something like the "Part of a series on..." style like on this article [2] but that has a problem: we have an infobox on that side so it would push the page even longer. --Piumosso-Uldum 19:42, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
(unindenting) Which is exactly the problem. Atm, most of the abilities articles I've seen haven't been larger (taller) than the infobox (on my resolution... :x), which means the footer unnecessarily extends the article another inch or two. I'm not sure what browser you're using, but I'm using Firefox... If there were a way to make the footer float left, I would be happy.--User:Sky2042/Sig 19:56, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- I don't get it. Are you trying to get the whole page on one screenful? Or maybe because it doesn't consume the width of the page, you feel it should not be centered and below everything, but follow the last line in the text? Right now it butts up against the Categories box, which looks fine to me. --Piumosso-Uldum 20:17, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- More to the latter. Take [Cheap Shot] as an example. On whatever browser you're using, it doesn't look the same, because right now it's a good inch above the categories box for me. Tbh, the template isn't designed well either, as it requires a line (----) to look at all good. I'm open to suggestions here.
It should also be noted that categories provide much the same use as this particular template; either the template should be expanded, or gotten rid of, or changed so that it's a fair site more helpful. --User:Sky2042/Sig 20:22, 20 April 2007 (EDT)- I made a scratch template at Template:SpellFooter/Alternate to try and expand it into a proper navbox. It fills the whole width, has relevant navigation links. It looks more consistent with other footers across wowwiki. Guinea pig [Cone of Cold] is using it now. I can't get the extra vert. space to go away before the category box, but I think that's a wowwiki thing - it's like that on every article. --Piumosso-Uldum 21:33, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
- The problem is the div class "print footer" on the default wowwiki skin. The gap disappears in any other skin. I'll make a note on the owner's talk page about it. --Piumosso-Uldum 16:13, 21 April 2007 (EDT)
- The auto-catting needs to go, since if we want consistency across all ability pages, not all classes use spells. Other than that, it looks like it isn't alphabetized correctly (Mage is in front of Hunter...). --User:Sky2042/Sig 17:25, 21 April 2007 (EDT)
- It doesn't auto-categorize, that was probably a past version of the template and the comment got left in when I copy-pasted. So I removed that comment. Come to think of it, I can get rid of the double-template thing for that reason. --Piumosso-Uldum 18:06, 21 April 2007 (EDT)
- That get's my stamp of approval. Feel free to add it. :)--User:Sky2042/Sig 18:19, 21 April 2007 (EDT)
- It doesn't auto-categorize, that was probably a past version of the template and the comment got left in when I copy-pasted. So I removed that comment. Come to think of it, I can get rid of the double-template thing for that reason. --Piumosso-Uldum 18:06, 21 April 2007 (EDT)
- The auto-catting needs to go, since if we want consistency across all ability pages, not all classes use spells. Other than that, it looks like it isn't alphabetized correctly (Mage is in front of Hunter...). --User:Sky2042/Sig 17:25, 21 April 2007 (EDT)
- I made a scratch template at Template:SpellFooter/Alternate to try and expand it into a proper navbox. It fills the whole width, has relevant navigation links. It looks more consistent with other footers across wowwiki. Guinea pig
- More to the latter. Take
Maybe a good idea would be to move that to another Template page. I suggest Template:Tlink (I love caps :))--User:Sky2042/Sig 18:41, 21 April 2007 (EDT)
- Yeah, that's a placeholder name, until the content is finalized. I think classfooter is as good as any though. I'll do the move and incorporate it in the boilerplate. --Piumosso-Uldum 22:49, 21 April 2007 (EDT)
Updates
After editing a few more ability articles, I've updated this boilerplate. I merged the tips section and the tricks section into a single "Tips and Tactics" section. It's difficult to separate a tip from a trick from a tactic, or even define what those things mean, and articles already had these headings. In reality, this section is all player-generated advice rather than factual information. I also added some suggestions on what to include in each section. The main ideas are that facts should be separated from advice, summaries in context are preferred over duplication of other articles, and a concise lead, with details left for later. --Piumosso-Uldum 16:02, 5 May 2007 (EDT)
- I used the boilerplate today to rework [Exorcism]. I welcome any feedback, both on that article and in general on the boilerplate. Harveydrone 19:59, 10 May 2007 (EDT)
The Blizzard link at the top is to show how to do disambigs :) Kirkburn talk contr 13:15, 26 November 2007 (UTC)