Minecraft Wiki:Projects/DIG:Design to Implement Granularity

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MCW:P/DIG

Welcome to DIG: Design to Implement Granularity, or simply DIG!

This project was marked complete in January 2025, but re-opened on February 4, 2025.

About

After a lengthy discussion on page granularity, the wiki community has decided that the current standard for page granularity, or how many blocks/items are covered on one page, needs to change. The goal of this project is to coordinate and accomplish those changes by creating individual pages for blocks (or groups of blocks), and then turning the existing pages into "overview" pages.

It is very important to understand that this project is mostly to coordinate and share tips, nothing in here is binding, my word is not gospel, and in all cases an editor should do whatever is best for the readers in that particular situation. Generally avoid stylistic edits to another editors efforts, there is plenty of work to go around and the wiki is a constantly evolving thing. Feel free to contact the author directly or use talk pages to discuss anything that is not an obvious mistake. On the other hand, editors do not own their pages. The wiki community in general, and myself very personally, greatly appreciate your efforts to help implement these changes, and there will likely be multiple revisions needed for each created page to fix typos, clean up history, and fix grammatical errors.

Overview pages

Some current examples of overview pages: Door, Ore, Smithing Template. Door is the latest revision of what the community has decided is the best format for overview pages. The general format is a page without an infobox, with a "Variants" section as section 1, listing and linking to all "children" pages that the overview page is applicable to. The overview page also serves as a place for information that applies to all children pages. If the information is more than a few sentences, it should only be on the overview page, with a prominent link to the section from the children pages. See Iron Door#Usage for an example, where "Placement", "Behavior", and "Barrier" are all the same between doors, and so the content is not duplicated to children pages.

These ideas are not set in stone, and in all cases doing what is best for readers takes priority.

Contributors

Harristic | Talk 20:26, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
UnExpectedDino ᐸ talk | contribs 20:27, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
Mudscape talk 20:34, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
Misode (talk) 00:35, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
--ThatOneWolf ^{(talk|contribs)} 13:42, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
Delvin4519 (talk) 13:54, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
Enbyd (talk) 02:27, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
Nixinova T C 22:47, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
Melwin22 (talk) 19:21, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
MinecraftExp123 (talk) 12:34, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
Miner (talk) 08:14, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
Amysteryman^(talk) 13:47, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
--TreeIsLife (talk) 09:25, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
--ThreeEy (talk) 07:35, 28 July 2024 (UTC)
-~- Nerdyguy2000 talk edits 14:03, 14 August 2024 (UTC)
(talk|contributions) 20:33, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
SymORmaK (talk) 18:17, 1 October 2023 (UTC)
Hxy123abc (talk) 03:48, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 (talk)(contribs) 20:37, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
- Ssysi - (talk) 08:41, 8 February 2025 (UTC)
Realshow19 (talk) 13:36, 7 March 2025 (UTC)
LevelRatings (talk) 0:38, 23 March 2025 (UTC)
Sebbog (talk) 23:30, 25 March 2025 (UTC)
User:MCJA17 (talk, Korean) 10:51, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Userboxes

There are userboxes relating to DIG:

{{MCW:Userboxes/project-dig}}

Projects participated in the DIG project!

Steps

An example of my process for creating a child page:

Edit the existing/parent page to copy all its contents, paste this into the target page. Do not change the parent page at this time.
Go through the target page section by section, removing information that does not pertain to the more granular article.
After finishing the history section and adding any appropriate navboxes, check for hidden categories at the bottom of the preview. These can help notify you of things like missing footers.
Work one section at a time, previewing often to catch any mistakes.
After editing, previewing, and testing; save the page.
Now its time for redirects: Using Special:WhatLinksHere, set it to hide transclusions and hide links and type in the name of the parent page. This gives you a list of only redirects, select the relevant redirects and change them to point directly to the newly create page.

Very important: Do not change the existing page into an overview page until all child pages have been published. This is imperative to not lose any information, and to minimize reader confusion during the transition process.

Note: For pages split with overview pages, split the subpages only when all of them are done. This is to prevent reader confusion from why for example, if Potion of Invisibility exists but not Potion of Fire Resistance.

Message box header

Every DIG draft page should have this message box at the top of it, before all other message boxes and notices. Here's an example:

{{MCW:Projects/DIG/Notice|Iron Sword|Sword}}:

DIG draft

This is a draft page for the DIG project. It is a draft of Iron Sword, which is split from Sword.

Tips

If a template result is ever one header below where it should be, you forgot to set |foot = 1
You can enable viewing hidden categories in your user preferences, under the Appearance tab. The checkbox is all the way at the bottom.
History is one of the more complex sections to edit, I find it easiest to preview often, and be ready to re-copy portions from the original article if it turns out you removed something important.
- Use find (Ctrl + F) to highlight the specific block name that should be kept in the new history, this lets you easily find sections and images that should definitely be kept.
"What links here" on the sidebar will pre-fill the page name for you.
{{subst:PAGENAME}} (copied exactly, PAGENAME is a special word and shouldn't be changed) is a special macro that permanently replaces itself with the name of the page when the page is saved. This can greatly cut down on manual edit work, as some recipe results, history sections, or template parameters can be directly copy/pasted between multiple new children pages.
- {{subst:lc:{{subst:PAGENAME}}}} (again copied exactly) This is another macro that puts the pagename in all lower case, suitable for our style of usage in prose.
- {{subst:ucfirst:{{subst:lc:{{subst:PAGENAME}}}}}} (again copied exactly) This macro outputs the pagename with the first letter capitalized, for use at the start of a sentence.
Depending on time available, it can be beneficial to work on multiple related children pages concurrently. This lets you make sure that things are standardized between them, and make full use of the substitution trick mentioned above.
If you ever need help or don't understand why a page is doing something, come ask in discord! The #wiki-help channel is great and full of smart people.
Click "Show preview" often! Its very hard to get a wall of text 100% correct the first time, and preview lets you see what the page will look like without actually saving. (one caveat is tabbed infoboxes will no longer tab on the second preview, but they will work correctly when saved.)
If you are creating a redirect to a page with tabs in the infobox, you can append #TabName to the redirect destination to have the page auto select that tab.

Tasks

Because of the large benefits to one person doing multiple related new pages concurrently, we are going to try a bit of an unusual system.

Before working on any pages in a section, put your signature on the current worker line, and remove it when you are no longer actively working on the pages. If you would like to work on the same section as someone is currently working on, contact them first to work together and avoid duplicating work. Not all the pages in a section need to be done by the same person, or in the same session. This isn't a hard rule, just something to try and guide the group work.