As part of the Mission overhaul several of us are working hard on, I've found that we can use some of the mission mentality on areas. Many of the area pages are out of date and grossly disorganized. Of course, these areas have been available for quite some time, many long before missions were introduced. We should keep this chronology clear as often as possible.

These are important pages (especially based on the number of hits) and some of the most used by exploring players, not just because they've been around for a while accumulating visits. I feel that the most important information on them is the monster spawn, but this also clutters the article. The way these pages are compressed is both good and bad. It's messy looking for many of the pages, but it also gets the idea across that "okay, blast furnace is just tunnels with fire monsters."

We seek to better organize the information on these pages, while maintaining education about what the icon colors and shapes indicate, and that everything is mushed together while also being predictable (monster spawns can replace each other etc). Several areas are extremely complex, most notably, compounds. Others are rather simple. Oh, and adding soundtrack data would be welcome information for many users.

I've developed a subpage system that can be used to either link the Area ("areas" are "Wolver Den", "Lichenous Lair", etc.) as plugged into the article, or simply be redirects. We use the plug system frequently, most notably with Alchemy Paths, and more recently with Artifacts.

For example, "Devilish Drudgery: Everybody's Fired" would redirect to Devilish Drudgery#Everybody's Fired, if we were to make a page for it. Which we should, for category purposes, but...uh...there's hundreds of accessories that don't register, oh well. Not that important. On the other hand, complicated areas such as "Frozen Compound: Creeping Colony" would have content on the page that can be plugged in or linked to as desired. Redirecting or plugging could be determined by the complexity of the area as well as functionality of the article - but I'd like it to be consistent. So I'd settle for the simplest, cleanest looking format that's also easy to update and easy for users to read. A "mother page" explaining what to expect in general, linking to "subpages" which are actually true pages that have a lot more data. Conveniently, these also show up for searches.

===============================================================================================
EDIT: We have settled on "sleek."
===============================================================================================

Some potential format options to consider:

Examples of "mother page" format so far for a simple area, such as Scarlet Fortress:
Current format that could use improvement
Sleek
Plugged

Examples of "mother page" format so far for a complicated area, such as Compound:
Current format that could use improvement
Sleek
Plugged (EDIT: made true "plug" format, previous format, let's call it linkedtoplugs)
*Please note that the compound data is limited, there are only two created subpages at the moment, for "Frozen Compound: Creeping Colony" and "Frozen Compound: Ravenous Warrens" to get the idea across. The spawn data for these subpages is also incomplete.

Bear in mind this is another project for down the road, we just ran into it while doing mission pages. It takes higher priority than the monster overhaul because a lot of the information is out of date/incorrect, similar to how materials were "wrong" for years.

===============================================================================================
ProCons

Entire project:
-Pros: areas will be much better documented and more likely to show up when users search for specifics. Areas can be directly linked to for discussion purposes or personal favorites and many other miscellaneous factors. Editing and updating is more easily managed.
-Cons: work work work work WORK WORK and then the game updates D:

Sleek:
-Pros: A simple article that joins together subpages in a neat and tidy format. Information focuses on general factors such as what to expect and provides important information about the area itself, minus all the distracting information of its composition. This "distracting" information is of course readily available, just a click away in the infobox. It's essentially like wanting to know what a "dictionary" is and the history of the dictionary, without all the dictionary's definitions. It's also aesthetically different enough from the Mission page format so users are less likely to be confused by "Shadow of the Beast" vs. "Gloaming Wildwoods." I mean, besides the giant pictures :P
-Cons: Users might have trouble clicking on the small links, when that's where they wanted to go in the first place (might be resolved by clicking the right search result). Areas must be compared by popping open tabs.

Plugged:
-Pros: everything visible on a single page! Just scroll or use the ToC to find what you're looking for.
-Cons: very crowded looking, long load time depending on content, ToC is difficult to click.

Linkedtoplugs: everything's a little bigger and easier to click.

===============================================================================================
Votes:

Sleek: 2 ,1 (but only because there can be only one highlander)

Plugged:

Linktoplugs:

===============================================================================================
TL;DR: Vote for Sleek, Plugged, Linkedtoplugs, or come up with a better format, or just say "who cares, just fix the information that's there to be correct." This won't be done for a long time, we are doing missions and acquisition first.