New subject: Activity (was "Trading cards and their data")

8 Dec 2004

I apologize for the crosspost between two of Wikimedia's mailing lists 
in advance, as this is somewhat related to both Wikipedia and 
Wikibooks.

One of my pet projects is [[b:Pokémon]], which attempts be a game guide 
for everything Pokémon (some at Wikipedia have proposed that all of the 
Pokémon articles be moved to the books, but that's not a relevant point 
here), and part of any good strategy guide is data and lots of it.  
Organizing this data is quite the problem.  Here's an example:

One of the subprojects in [[b:Pokémon]] is the guide to the trading 
card game, and I need to solicit opinions on how a list of trading 
cards should be presented.  In particular, what would the Wikipedia 
convention be when dealing with large amounts of raw data?  Here are a 
few ideas I had thought up:

* Each trading card should have its own page.  This will make 
categorization a trivial task, but will result in too many 
substub-quality pages.
* Each set should have its own page, with each page describing the 
cards within that set.  This will make categorization between sets of 
cards trivial, but categorization along other lines (such as the type 
of the trading card) a pain in the ass.  This goes for giving a page to 
any arbitrary group of cards.  My personal direction (not necessarily a 
good one) is a variation on this theme: the Pokémon cards themselves 
are described in their corresponding entry in [[b:Wikibooks Pokédex]].
* Wait until there's a real good Wikidata-like thing before 
implementing such an idea.

Part of the problem, I guess, is the lack of contributions from anyone 
else in the Wiki community - thus the need to solicit opinions.  Plus, 
this idea does not have to specifically apply for my project - this 
scenario may arise in any other project in the books or the pedia (for 
example, a good application of this idea in the pedia is episode guides 
for particularly well-known series).