Proposed New Category for the Wiki

I just went through all 34 pages (on "Grid" layout option) of the Concepts for the wiki, and it is overrun with Variant Cover tags.

So I was wondering if maybe that should be its own category? "Variants" being the category, instead of Concept?

"Variants" are pretty much a monthly thing at this point with Marvel, DC, Dynamite, IDW, and Archie. The DC & Marvel monthly variants usually have their own theme, so there's another two tags every month at minimum. Not to mention that any comic shop or bookstore that wants their own variant tag can get one (it seems). If there were a "Variant" category to the wiki, it would cut the Concepts category by half or better (about that- I didn't count them).

Just seems like it would make the wiki better organized, and make it easier to sift through the Concepts category.

Thanks for your time. -cb

I don't see a need and there are not enough of them to justify it plus they are concepts so it fits. We've been trying to get a collected edition category for like a decade now, if we can't get that something small like this wouldn't have a chance.

As for not being organized or cluttered I don't really see a reason why that would even matter or why a person would have a need to look through 34 pages of concepts (or any amount of pages) when the filtering tools are right there.

@pikahyper: I looked through the 34 pages of concepts, because I was looking for concepts that might be there that I haven't seen used. Just trying to up my knowledge for any future wiki editing. Filtering tools don't help if you don't know what you're looking for- that's the main reason for going through all of the Concepts at once.

Did you actually look at the Concepts category though? Fully half of it is variant tags, and those are only going to increase while Marvel and DC are doing new themes each month. 17 pages of tags seems like enough to justify its own category to me.

I think the "Collected Edition" category is a different animal. If you label all TPB's as "Collected Edition," then they're not labelled under their companies- DC, Marvel, Image, etc. And we have a "Trade Paperback" concept that can be tagged to every TPB. If only mods would quit telling us not to use it. Which is exactly what happened when I started using it back in 2010.

@cbishop: A collected edition category would basically have the same set-up as volume/issue but instead of volume it would be collected edition, it would help separate collected editions further from what they collect and allow us to associate individual issues to the collected editions and vice versa being able to see what collected editions include specific issues on issue pages.

Creating a category just for variants makes no sense to me, the 13 we have covers everything pretty well and historically variants are relatively new so if it was a category and it was added as another section for issue associations there would be hundreds of thousands of issues with more whitespace since they have no variants and without them added to concepts fewer concepts would end up being used creating more whitespace. Just seems like a lot of work just creating the "feature" and that is before all the work of recreating the variant pages under the new category and re-associating them and removing the associations from the concept ones then deleting all of them, a ridiculous amount of work for very little pay off, concepts are basically just an Other category for things that don't fit in any other section of the wiki.

@pikahyper: I don't see the point of Collected Editions in that way. You can list the associated issues in the Volume info now. I'd probably have to see it.

And I wasn't thinking about all the white space on non-variant-having pages, so that's a fair point. I was only thinking of the variant tags not cluttering the Concepts page, and showing up in the search bar as "Variant" instead of "Concept."

@cbishop: for collected editions it is just a more accurate way of associating one thing to another, here are a couple of examples from CBDB, from the issue page (Reprinted/Collected section) and from the collected edition page (Reprints/Collects section). The way we do it requires extra work and usually actual writing (and you end up with this mess, sure it is organized but it is also overwhelming to readers and the average short attention span). Having it as associations built into the page also means the data can be used more efficiently and for other things such as the API which adds more value to the site and the data, when it's added to the descriptions that is just a blob of text the site doesn't really know there are links in it and what they are connected too so it can't use them for other things.

@pikahyper: Oh, oh, oh, ohhh! Okay, I see what you're saying now. Yeah, that would be helpful. :}

@cbishop: seeing as how CV doesn't have its own engineers and we get ignored most of the time anyways we have to focus on big picture things: new platform, fixed bugs, improved search, improved monetizing of the site, etc., creating a new small category like variants just doesn't have the pay off like creating the movie and TV Series sections which brought in more traffic, more users, more editors and greatly expanded the wiki.

@pikahyper: Agreed.

@pikahyper: I know it opens up the door for a lot of abuse, but the alternate covers concepts could be built the same way the same way as the homage covers page. For whatever reason that page seems to be kept up to standards. I guess it is not as easy to abuse as some other concept pages.