Talk:Cooking

From PZwiki

Cooking Guide

I've been slowly working on a draft of the Cooking Guide. Once I have it decently organized, I'll post it here for comments and such. Hemilash (talk) 22:24, 26 August 2014 (BST)





General Guides Organization Notes

It makes more sense to simplify pages. Cooking = Cooking Guide, Farming = Farming Guide, Carpentry = Carpentry Guide, etc. From there each section can link to relevant items and recipes. That way we minimalize the amount of filler on the wiki.

Was also thinking about condensing the WHOLE wiki in such a fashion. A lot of the links on the current main page are a little redundant and scattered. I'm trying to conceptualize a way to simplify it. Following the K.I.S.S. doctrine. Keep It Simple Stupid. I think something like this would suit.

  • Basics
    • Game Modes
    • Player
    • Controls
    • Moodles
    • Items
    • FAQs
  • Survival Guide
    • Carpentry
    • Cooking
    • Fishing
    • Farming
    • Trapping
    • Map

This way visitors unfamiliar with the Zomboid basics would know where to go to source all their concerns. Survival guide is the more advanced section with in depth strategy guides. Basic Info vs In Depth Guide.

--Bowlympicshero (talk) 22:46, 26 August 2014 (BST)


That's a really good point; there is no functional reason to have a separate page for each skill other than a guide (Nimble Guide? I don't think so).

  • The parts of those pages that focus on the player skills aspect will get migrated to Player (which needs improvement anyway)
  • The Cooking Guide will take over the Cooking page, and a Cooking redirect will be created just to catch anyone who is too specific for their own good while searching (Farming is already set up sorta like this)
    • Hell, I'm not even too sure it should be called the "Cooking Guide." Maybe "Food Guide" or something like that. But renaming is easy anyway.


As for the KISS approach, that's exactly what I was hoping you were planning for the main page. I think it'll be impossible to get rid of the individual pages, nor that we should. Some items are going to need more description than the Items page will afford. Socks versus Stew Recipe for example.

I imagine the wiki should look, organizationally, like an ancestry chart: Main Page as the grand patriarch, ...sorta something like this: WikiOrgDemo.png

Four Tiers of page types
1st - Major 1st stop pages - especially important for beginners (Survival Guide, Items, Crafting, etc.)
2nd - Topic-guide-level and concept-level pages (Cooking Guide, Carpentry Guide, Player, etc.)
3rd - Group pages - Items or topics that should be handled together and get linked to as a group (Skills, Pest Sprays, etc)
4th - Individual Items - Things that either are complex enough to need a page or get linked to individually (Stew, Hunting Rifle, and I would even argue Broccoli)

But that said, some of the 2nd tier pages should be linked on the main page too, just so one does not have to dig for them.


This opens up the hard question of what gets a page, what gets a link to a listing on the Items page (f.e. Items instead of French Fries), and what gets something in-between (such as a 3rd tier). There's no reason to have a page for each fruit. They don't behave differently, they all get used in the same custom recipe in the same way. So they could be referred to by [[Fruits#Orange|Orange]] or maybe even just [[Items#Fruits|Orange]]. In short, I don't know. :-P

For items, the general rule for item clean up back in the day was entertaining the idea, that if an item was used in crafting it could have it's own page. If not (such as food) you could could probably collapse it so it's a smaller part of a bigger page. --Connall (talk) 12:20, 27 August 2014 (BST)

I wouldn't see why each item wouldn't have it's own page. Take the Minecraft wiki as an example. Multiple blocks have the same function, but each have their own page. Redirects should all be contextual. For example, item names as a label should redirect to the item's page whereas items referenced in a body of text should redirect to the item's section in the item catalog. It also depends on what other article may be relevant to the info at hand.

OR

--Bowlympicshero (talk) 19:03, 27 August 2014 (BST)