Mystery Dungeon Franchise Wiki:Manual of Style (Lists)

Previously on the MDFW, we used to include lists of ... you name it; Locations, Items, Monsters, etc. on the page of matching names. We stopped doing this for a few reasons, and here's why:

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The first, and biggest issue was loading time. Huge tables load slowly, and this creates a poor reader and wiki editor experience. It's made even worse by the fact that they were basic gameplay element pages, which many readers would be visiting.

Laziness

The second issue was our own laziness. We'd often just have a page such as "Game Name:Traps", which was just a list of traps and nothing more. So not only does a reader click on this slow-to-load page, the title is misleading. Which is the third issue.

Misleading

As mentioned before, the page titles were misleading. Readers should know what they're getting when they click on a page. When a page is titled "Game Name:Traps", they should be educated on traps as a gameplay element. So when they click on it and only get a list of traps, they've been misled, which yet again, creates a poor reader experience. While having red links for a major category, such as traps is also a bad thing, it's better for a page to not exist yet, than it is to waste a reader's time with an article that isn't what it claims to be.

Redundancy

The "final nail in the coffin", so to speak is redundancy. For a very long time on this wiki, we didn't use navboxes. We eventually began to rectify this issue and then these list pages became redundant. What's the point of having a list of items page when the navbox lists every item? While some readers would argue that having every item price, in-game description, etc. in one page is valuable. We agree, to an extent, which is why the list pages are now on their own pages, for the readers who may find them useful.

When to Split?

Some readers may ask "Why is this list split? It's only 3 items long." and the reason is CONSISTENCY! At what arbitrary point should we say "This list is too long and needs to be split." or "This list isn't long enough to be split."? It will only lead to confusion and inconsistent formatting across the wiki, which we don't allow. Readers and editors should expect to find the same formatting (with few exceptions) across the wiki, regardless of the subject.

An example is Food in  Torneko's Great Adventure: Mystery Dungeon. While there are only three food items in Torneko 1, we've still split them into their own page to remain consistent with the rest of the wiki.