Thread:Oioiaussie/@comment-5222017-20120821010552/@comment-5222017-20120824003645

Fanoftinyvillage wrote: In the construction of the information on the Category:Active and Category:Inactive Oioiaussie took over your initiative and simplified it. Your suggestion to make more use of templates has been applied exactly for the active and inactive dinos. Unfortunately, this was not merely a simplification, as the purpose of the categories as created by me is a completely different one. You simply can’t do what we should be able to do with global, non-parameterized categories that only capture this one variable, activity. (Namely, you can’t link to the currently active species for a given biome and tier.)

Fortunately, we don’t have to use categories for this. If you feel so super-strongly that the entry in the categories box must only read Active or Inactive, but can’t read something like Tier1/Tundra/Active, okay, let’s not use categories. Templates work just as well, perhaps even better, because you can use them to include the name of any active dino (without having to hard-code its name!).

That’s what we should use within Template:TabberDAI and all other places where active dinos are listed. Hopefully, we’ll get there. (WieQ’s comment sounded positive, FWIW.)

To illustrate, I added a partial solution to this (under my own user page namespace, so that really shouldn’t bother anybody). E.g., I can include User:Justvisitin/da/forest1 and I will get. If the Brontosaurus goes to sleep and another species takes her place, this only needs to be changed once — in the template — and all the tables and lists will be fine.

This also allows me to still do what I wanted on User_blog:Justvisitin/Dino_fusion_history (right-most column). These developments have been discussed upfront with the contributors and the Administrators merely helped out where requested. I’m a contributor and nobody discussed anything with me before destroying my work — that’s my entire point. Perhaps talking to a contributor first could have helped you understand what the purpose of the work was. Hopefully, then all involved could have figured out the best way of accomplishing this. (This didn’t have to be what I started with, of course.) That’s how wikis are supposed to work.