Forum:Parser awareness

Greetings everyone! Well last night I finally got some answers as to why some of the new magic words weren't working to us while hanging out at #wikia from Uberfuzzy. He explained to me why, and it was because our templates were listed as having loads of issues with coding and such. Wikia Wikis need to be set on a new parser in order to have all the functions available to them (such as us), but cannot do that until we are cleaned up. Now I see why some templates are a problem - templates like Sw and Sa will cause these issues. I will manually go through a list Uberfuzzy was so kind enough to me listing all the pages we have to manually fix. So therefore, once complete, we can move onto the new parser and have all functions available to us.

One such function is through the coding  __HIDDENCAT__ , which will hide a category on the article it is on, but not hide it from searches and such. This is done on Wikipedia, for example; I have already created Hidden to place on future hidden categories. These categories will not go to our standard in-universe categories, because those are required, but rather to maintenance categories, such as Category: Articles that need to be fanonified. Hiding it will keep the category active and findable (through other categories such as Category: Things to do) so that those willing to fix the article(s) will do so but it won't show up and look nasty on articles. Plus, this way, maintenance categories won't appear anymore (unless you allow them to via preferences, but default is to let them remain hidden) and users will learn what real categories are. Anyway, that's just a function I wish to bring to Star Wars Fanon hence why I am calling for parser awareness.

I am calling for this so that we can have the latest updates and our Wiki can be as efficient as possible, without hindering our progress. But it's not just templates like "Sa", it was also the old infoboxes, some which still exist. For example, the old revision of Template:SpecOps character infobox was messing code up, one of the reasons why the parser cannot be changed yet. I updated the infobox to the latest character infobox style, which fixes the problem for all pages with that infobox. Another one I just fixed was Template:Weapontemp, by simply killing it and redirecting it to the problem template, Template:Weapon, which had already been fully updated. Now, please realize this: You can still use Sa or Sw; but please, do it properly by adding " SUBST: " in front of it, as Bail Prestor Organa for example. That way, we can still use the shortcut, but we just have to "SUBST:" (substitute) it so it generates raw coding, preventing any parser errors.

So the list I have is massive, 11 kb in length. Seems short, as it would be fairly short if it were an article, but it's a long list of URLs denoting the issues presented by bad templates, poorly coded infoboxes, and the like. So please, join me in fixing these errors. "Parser awareness" basically means: Keep using our beloved templates, but please "SUBST:" them to prevent errors and keep our Wiki steady in its updates and the like. Thank you - so when you see me editing a whole bunch of articles to change old templates or "SUBST" others, don't assume I'm just being my regular old obsessive-compulsive self; I'm doing it because our Wiki needs it. Thanks! --Victortalk 23:31, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Note: If you want to help, you can do so by going to Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Sa and Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Sw and placing a substitute code in front of every instance of the template. It would be highly appreciated, thanks a lot.