Board Thread:Wiki management/@comment-7091122-20161114201217

'''THIS IS A DISCUSSION, NOT A VOTE. DON'T VOTE ON ANYTHING, AND DON'T MAKE A VOTE THREAD RELATED TO THIS SUBJECT UNTIL THE DISCUSSION IS ABSOLUTELY OVER.'''

Recently, a voting thread for adding a template to show articles that needed updating because of the outdated information was closed because we "already had it" in the form of this guy:

...but the thing is, there is zero prompt for editing like all other templates to prompt articles that need editing, thusly making it seem to denote content that was archived and outdated.

This got me thinking; there are several templates that have similar function to Archived, but we hardly use, and are always mixed up with archived, and we have zero standardization for it.

Archived This is the basic template for archived content. I think given the existence of the variations, this is supposed to be used for content that is flat-out gone, and will never be accessible again; stuff like Plants vs. Zombies Adventures content.

Removed Never seen it? It's right here:

This guy seems to be for content that is archived since it was removed from the game altogether. The game itself is still active, but the content in the article is not.

This seems to be for stuff like the old Keys in PvZ2, or the old plant evolutions in Plants vs. Zombies: All Stars (such as Liontail.)

Outdated This one is just confusing; this is for content that is archived because it was changed (not removed, just changed) in a later update. Stuff like the pre-1.8 levels in Plants vs. Zombies 2 (Chinese version) that were moved to days and not entirely removed.

Or, that's what I thought; according to, the template is actually an edit template, used for the same contexts as stuff like </nowiki or , and denotes pages that need updating due to outdated content...

Except, unlike those two templates, Outdated lacks a prompt for the user to edit the page, making it seem more like an Archived template!

So, what do? I say not only should Outdated be classed as an archived template as opposed to an edit template, but Removed and Outdated should be enforced as variations. I've seen Removed in particular be removed in favor of Archived, despite the game itself never being taken down; needless to say, it's confusing.

Either that, or don't bother and make Archived the only one, but that really should be saved for a last resort as opposed to just blindly doing so in order to be lazy; we want to be professional here.

And again, DO NOT VOTE. This is a discussion. 