Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-45310000-20200415125300

(edit: I have now written a document (a draft) which more formally describes what I am trying to accomplish, it is here: Strong Article Typing System. Thank you to everybody that participated in this conversation, as it help me to get this all written down.)

I'd like to eventually write a proposal and formally submit it to Fandom as a set of feature requests for UCP, but I would like to hear you folks here for input on this.

Basically, I am designing my Wiki to use a strong typing system, where all of the article pages have suffixes to indicate the type of topic, i.e. 'Arthur Morgan (character)' or 'Carbine Repeater (weapon)' or 'Guthrie Farm (discoverable place)'. This way, you can easily disambiguate from looking at the article titles, rather than having to read the article and disambiguate yourself. There are other advantages, such as automatic categorization from the Article names that could be done by a standard template call included on each page. Or generating lists from simply searching for all articles with the type suffix.

The problem with this though, is getting users to use the suffixes, because it would a hassle to type out Arthur Morgan every time. The visual editor is a bit easier, since is shows a drop down list with the desired link. So, I am developing a set of templates such that each type would have a template for a link, like { {Lchar|Arthur Morgan}} would generate the appropriate link with the link label without the suffix.

So I decided to write a document called w:c:rdrii:Contributing for Dummies that describes in the shortest way possible how to add links to the text using this system for a non-savvy user, and while I think that this typing system is workable, I think it could be made better by some more direct support by a feature added to both the Source Editor and the Visual Editor, where adding a link would present you with a choice of using the default method, or by selecting a specialized template from a short list that takes one anonymous parameter, where the editor simply outputs a call to the template, and the visual editor would allow you to go back and edit the parameter when selected.

I could imagine that sort of system could apply to most any game, especially those really nerdy D&D-style board games.

Any thoughts on this? 