Forum:Changing pages' graphical update galleries
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In the past few months, mostly thanks to Abex, I have been adding galleries of graphical updates to pages for items, NPCs, and some objects. See here, here, and here for respective examples. However I have run into several problems with this along the way:
- The main problem is that galleries force smaller images to expand to fill all possible space. I have read through the MediaWiki guide to galleries and there seems to be no way whatsoever of turning this off. Under this system, the expanded chatheads look strange, while the 30x30 inventory icons expanded to 150x150 look terrible.
- It's possible to remedy this somewhat by forcibly limiting the height of the gallery; but if you have pictures of different heights then one will either be expanded or compressed incorrectly.
- The captions underneath cannot be centered, which is just annoying to look at.
- The width of the gallery has to be specified each time. I was using this parameter to stop wide images from being tiny, and to prevent the caption from being split over two lines. But it turns out that on mobile, this creates a giant white background, whatever width you specified. Perhaps it's just me but I think this looks pretty bad, and if I had known it looked like this on mobile I would not have done it.
So with that, I would like to propose replacing these galleries with tables. They solve the problems listed above, as all the image sizes and text orientation can be nicely customised. Likewise, the overall width of the table is optimised far better than galleries, and they show up well on mobile. I've drafted two examples here, one with a table format and one with no lines.
Questions
However, I think this is also a good opportunity to decide how the galleries should be formatted, just so there is no confusion going forward. For example recently there was some discussion about whether they should be a subsection of update history, so I think these issues should be discussed here.
- Should graphical updates be included in the update history section? Some pages already do this, like Clue bottle (elite). It would allow the gallery to become a subsection of update history. However there is a risk of redundant and duplicated information, especially if graphical updates have been the only changes to that content.
- Should the present day appearance of content be included in graphical updates? RS3 wiki has recently started doing this, so that the total graphical history is encapsulated in the gallery. On the one hand, it is nice to see all the changes at a glance. On the other hand, there is again a risk of duplicated information, for example if there's only been one graphical update.
- Should the table include lines or not? While having a full table format probably looks neater, it's possibly more intrusive, which is not what these galleries should be.
- How should dates be formatted? Three different ways of representing identical information. For reference, the RS3 Wiki currently uses 1, and we currently use 2.
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| 1 | Appearance after 3 March 2016 |
Appearance after 9 November 2017 |
| 2 | Appearance until 9 November 2017 |
Current appearance |
| 3 | 3 March 2016 - 9 November 2017 |
9 November 2017 - present |
This is probably not a very exciting topic for most people. But I would appreciate all your thoughts and suggestions, especially if there is something I haven't thought of that may be a potential issue in future. Hopefully we can all agree on a format that works. Hlwys (talk) 02:27, 14 August 2021 (UTC)
Discussion
Yes-No-No preference-#2 - I like the idea of them being in the same section, they are very much linked. I don't exactly mind "duplicating" information, althought I'm not sure it is doing that so much as labelling. Including the current version is nice and I can see its use, but I'm not sure that I like it, its a pretty weak no though. No table lines looks clean, but its really preference, maybe light towards no lines. I think it would be cook/nice/interesting for the date listed to link to the update sections with a ref or something, that way there is a direct reference to its update, links to the date and other things, I'm open to change on this as well. I feel 2 is easier to read for me. Fjaratalk 23:23, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
- Dates: #3 - the thing that changed my mind for this is if an NPC is removed and then added back with a different model at a later date, the clearest option is the 3rd.
? - Yes - ? - #3 - my own opinions on these issues are as follows:
- No preference
- Yes - my opinion on this has changed since I was previously vehemently opposed. But ultimately, the point of these sections should be to show how an item/npc/object's appearance has changed over the time. It defeats the purpose if you have to scroll back to the top of the page in order to see what exactly changed, rather than just being able to compare the images side by side, or scroll through them in fullscreen.
Yes - having lines looks neater in my opinion, and is less disorientating on galleries with multiple pictures.No preference - having changed the formatting of the no-lines table to include padding, it looks a lot better than I thought, so I'm not really bothered either way- Option 3 - I think listing both the start and end date for an appearance is the best way to avoid any potential confusion. While we currently use #2, I think this is far too confusing, as at a glance you could very easily think that was when the appearance started, rather than when it ended. Likewise, both #1 and #2 suffer when there have been multiple updates, since it's not really specified if the first were different variants, or whether they are still ingame. Hlwys (talk) 00:28, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
Yes - Yes - Comment - #3 - I prefer the classless table, but we should add a couple more pixels of padding between columns and rows, the text between columns especially is pretty close together. 
Crow 03:53, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
Sure | Ye | No, but | Option 3
- I don't see why not
- I lean towards including the current appearance, like Hlwys mentioned. It would ease the unnecessary navigation a user might have to do. And does it have to be an all or nothing approach? Could the policy not be made so, that if the gallery has had less than 'x' updates, exclude the current apearance, else include it in gallery with everything?
- I lean towards no lines because they look intrusive, but I also very much see that they could become hard to differentiate. I'm still a wikitext noob, but is it possible to show only the column lines? Or just add way more padding, maybe lol. I think with how you're currently formatting them, including the row lines makes them all seem like entirely separate entries from each other.
- Strong preference towards 3, but 2 is also fine with me. But absolutely not 1 lol. Option 1 with its "after date" doesn't parse as well as Option 2's "until date" in my brain. 3 is the most straightforward and simplest option, being the easiest one to understand at a glance
--maimegidola
07:15, 22 August 2021 (UTC)
Closed - There's consensus towards including graphical updates in the update history section, inclusion of current data model in history, and option 3 chosen as the format of the dates. The style of the table, however, didn't have a major preference (with a slight curve towards no lines) to most so it is fair to assume that the implementers will agree on a design at the time of production. Jakesterwars (talk) 04:18, 28 August 2021 (UTC)