In terms of the hover/alt text for quick descriptions of tropes -- I had already been thinking about that idea. Or trying to come up with some other mechanism to display the laconic of the trope, like a right-click, or something. I will note that you have to do a db request for every single link anyway, to determine whether it's a red link or blue link. It might be as simple as requesting another field when the parser runs -- but I'm not the one writing the software, so we might need to wait on this idea.
As for the index pages idea, that's already done. We're thinking on the same wavelength here. Each page will have a summary field, which is editable at the same time as the page, along with a tags field. And then we have a macro to generate a list from the tags, and another that generates a tags list with the summary included. Combine this system, and you have instant labeled indexing from a single edit. (Assuming the index page already exists, of course.) This does reverse the indexing system to be done at the page level again, but it's stored in the metadata rather than the page.
It also means that the Laconic descriptions can be moved into the page metadata as summaries as well. I'll have to think about whether that can be done automatically. Which, hidden as Laconic pages are currently, will likely be a massive improvement.
Unless someone has a concern about this sort of structure.
So far as the Tropes namespace -- I've thought about that one too, but I'm not sure what the advantage of it is. Leave the root namespace empty except for redirects? It certainly can't be done automatically, given the massive amount of junk in Main/ currently, so a decision on this can wait. What we can do is tag trope pages with "trope". I'm not against it, but right now, I can't think of any arguments in favor of it.
-- ∇×V
As for the index pages idea, that's already done. We're thinking on the same wavelength here. Each page will have a summary field, which is editable at the same time as the page, along with a tags field. And then we have a macro to generate a list from the tags, and another that generates a tags list with the summary included. Combine this system, and you have instant labeled indexing from a single edit. (Assuming the index page already exists, of course.) This does reverse the indexing system to be done at the page level again, but it's stored in the metadata rather than the page.
It also means that the Laconic descriptions can be moved into the page metadata as summaries as well. I'll have to think about whether that can be done automatically. Which, hidden as Laconic pages are currently, will likely be a massive improvement.
Unless someone has a concern about this sort of structure.
So far as the Tropes namespace -- I've thought about that one too, but I'm not sure what the advantage of it is. Leave the root namespace empty except for redirects? It certainly can't be done automatically, given the massive amount of junk in Main/ currently, so a decision on this can wait. What we can do is tag trope pages with "trope". I'm not against it, but right now, I can't think of any arguments in favor of it.
-- ∇×V