Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-2140588-20151017220055/@comment-1251315-20151018075732

I just wanted to point out that there is a bit of misinformation occuring, though not intentional and possibly of my causing, which is my fault if I did cause a bit of misinformation.

It is possible to make the automatic sections invisible using a parameter (like, hiding the whole section) and I can easily set up the parameters as needed. I believe there's one for techniques (suppress-tech=true will hide the whole section), the same can be done for any other collapsible section. However, that is all that can be done, it is impossible to make the section invisible based on anything like "is there any pages?" as that is expensive and Wikia will hate my guts if I do that! :P

The reason I didn't add these from the start is because I thought it would be better if the sections were always visible, rather than just being suppressed. As far as I understand it, these will be hidden temporarily in any case, as when the new technique infobox is created, the section on character pages will be populated with data.

Automating the addition of techniques, tools and so on will mean less work for editors when a chapter is released: they would have to go and find every single instance and update it, whereas with the automatic method, they don't need to do too much and it updates across the wiki with little effort. A manual infobox would work out on other kinds of wiki's (like gaming wiki's and those which don't need quick updating of their infoboxes, since they don't have much content to automate), but we could be dealing with large amounts of techniques and tools data sooner or later, so I would prefer that the wiki automates this stuff from the outset, rather than many months down the line.

For that, I am going to vote for option 1 (though it is a bit biased and obvious that I would vote for my own creation :P). The newer infobox has a lot of fancy tools that all tie in with the feeling of wanting to improve the wiki and make it nicer. The older, manual infobox, at least for me, looks very narrow compared to the automated one (on my 1920x1080 screen) and we have to take into account that people may have wider screens who may find the automated box better to read.