Hearthstone Wiki:News 7
Huge changes and new features to card articles
Introducing Card Article Rework 2.0, a project that consists of huge changes and new features to Card articles and is expected to be completed before November 2022!
For editors, this is an announcement of Hearthstone Wiki:Project 13, which is starting soon. If you don't know yet, check out the project for more details and how it's progressing.
Disclaimer: All images and new infoboxes shown in this blog are on our testing environment and they should not be referred as official representation of card articles!
Summary[edit source]
In this project:
- We change how we manage card data again to
- reduce our dependencies on third-party APIs as much as we can.
- manage Card articles more efficiently
- Infoboxes are reworked with a new portable view compatible with both PC and Mobile view and more information about cards.
- Card articles' template is made of mostly data rather than paragraphs of texts
- Each article will be able to generate disambiguation links (on its own) so that you can find the right cards you are looking for, or find the right and available disambiguation.
- How to get, Notes and Patch changes sections are now fully controlled as data, not a paragraph of texts.
- Related cards section's algorithm has been improved so that it can detect related cards more accurately.
- Strategy section is removed due to low-effort and easily-outdated context, given how regularly Hearthstone is updated nowadays.
- Mercenaries Card articles will receive additional features to represent Mercenaries that can transform and get new set of abilities (like
Khadgar and 
Genn Greymane).
Examples[edit source]
You can see some examples of Card articles after the project is completed here: User:Use25/templates.
Data representation[edit source]
In this project, we focus on how we can manage articles more efficiently. Previously, Card articles were made mostly of paragraphs with almost free stylings. Due to the free stylings without any restriction, it becomes increasingly hard to manage over 18000 Card articles manually. We decide that every article should use an unified form of template, which not only generates a formatted paragraph but also auto-updates by itself every time we push updates to our database.
While this implementation has been partially effective ever since Mercenaries released, we want to reduce usage of paragraphs even more and make things almost auto-updated and auto-generated. To do that, we have turned paragraphs into data, notably Notes, Patch changes, and Reward/How to get data.
Infobox improvements[edit source]
Infoboxes are the most important aspect of any article on any wiki, not just on Hearthstone Wiki. They work like a summary box, consisting of very basic information of the context of the article and the first thing anyone would look at, so it's essential that we try to keep it updated and informative as often as possible.
New visual and Portable Infobox[edit source]
In this project, we use a new extension to implement infoboxes, called Portable infoboxes. Made by Fandom, Portable Infobox is specifically designed for us local admins to create an infobox in the most convenient way possible without having to rely on codings. Portable Infobox also supports a cleaner visual when you read articles on both PC and mobile, and improves the chance to appear on Google Search or similar searching tools.
New labels[edit source]
We added tons of new labels, representing new information of the card!
- New section: Availablity, representing the appearances of the card and how much available it is to players
- Craftable?: Determines if the card is craftable using Arcane Dust.
- Formats: Constructed formats or game modes the card can make appearances in.
- Exclusions: Pools of cards or formats that excluded it from appearing.
- New section: Flavor, representing the design and story, characters behind the card
- Character(s): Lorewise Blizzard-franchise character(s) that the minion/merc/hero card represents.
The Amazing Reno is representing Reno Jackson.
- Background character(s): Character(s) that appear in the card's full art.
- Race(s): Lorewise Warcraft race of the minion/merc/hero card's character(s).
- Background race(s): Race of character(s) that appear in the card's full art.
- Gender(s): Gender of the minion/merc/hero card's character(s).
For Mercenaries, we are introducing a completely new infobox design to Mercenary cards (since the previous infobox was a bit unfriendly to readers). In short, their infobox will look like any other cards in Mercenaries, with more optimized and cleaner look.
Mercenaries will also receive a new label called Other form(s), which represents other forms of the Mercenary if they have ability to transform and replace any of their original Abilities. Take a look at User:Use25/Mercenaries/Khadgar for example!
Notes data[edit source]
Notes are proven to be quite helpful sections. If you are looking a particular interaction between the card and another, or just a clear explaination on what the card really does (looking at you, 
Kazakusan), Notes should be the section for you.
Unfortunately, Notes were not established as some kind of data, but rather than a paragraph (or bunch of texts). In this project, we are creating a databased-table that stores Note templates, each of which contains the paragraph to represent the Notes section. While this doesn't affect anything to the content itself, this design change will allow us to manage Notes much easier, and be able to create Notes that can be recycled and used in multiple articles.
Other sections' update[edit source]
- Related cards section's algorithm has been improved so that it can detect related cards more accurately.
- Almost all of old Patch changes are converted to data (much like Notes). Old Card articles will use an automatic template to query through the Patch changes databased-table.
- Each article will be able to generate disambiguation links (on its own) so that you can find the right cards you are looking for, or find the right and available disambiguation.
- External links to other fansites have been moved to its own section, in addition to link to HSReplay.net's card page.
How to get section and rewards[edit source]
Since there are more diverse ways to get collection items (or rewards) in Hearthstone, we have decided to use the database to get all ways to get them. There will be 2 data tables in use: One from the Hearthstone client, and one established by us.
We are also experimenting a new article, Reward. In this article, you can see the lists of all common ways to get rewards/items, and tables of unique ways to get rewards/items. It should be noted that these tables are made of data established by us, which we talked about earlier. You can absolutely help us contribute to this table, starting from the documentation in Template:CustomReward table!
Removal of Strategy section[edit source]
We are going to remove the Strategy section. It was occasionally the text-richest content of Card articles, and we are considering reducing texts as much as we can.
The Strategy content overall was made few efforts, wordy, and easily outdated, considering how frequently Hearthstone is updated these days. However, the main point is that we hadn't any guidance, nor any policy to Strategy section at all, so pretty much any editors were free to edit and contribute in their own ways.
Not all is lost though, as we are backing up the Strategy content, so that editors can take time to review them. In meantime, we are working on a new way to represent these similar kind of content, so that they can be more helpful to players and readers, while they are sufficient and reasonable.
Future updates to the Wiki[edit source]
As soon as the Rework is completed, we will focus working on these projects in the coming months:
- All card lists will be improved to abandon a certain unstable feature which prevents them for getting all the cards they represent. For now, they will not work at all right after this project is completed.
- Battlegrounds articles will receive additional features to represent Seasonal Mechanics better (like Quests and Buddies).
Relationship with developers[edit source]
Since pretty much stuffs in Card articles have been turned into data, we are making applications that allows you to get our data directly as JSON (Each application will get data from a table of our database). In theory, these applications will do the following:
- Send GET requests to our API to retrieve data (preferably through Special:CargoExport). Since each request can only get a maximum of 5000 entities/objects, this application will be able to send multiple requests.
- Clean and transform the data into something more usable
- The values from list keys are not working properly right now (they are not arrays of strings or numbers, but rather than just strings with delimiter), so we will need this step to transform them.
And that's pretty much it. We will also work on writing documentations so that you can fully acknowledge of the features of our APIs and what our databases represent. For now, there are 2 APIs you can experiment with, which are public:
- Api.php - This API allows you to interact with pages on Wiki in general
- Special:CargoExport - This API allows you to get data from Cargo database. A full list of tables of the database can be found in Special:CargoTables.
Relationship with content creators[edit source]
In the future, we are making applications with these main features:
- Getting potentially ALL card images from Wiki and Firestone app with desired ratio and dimension.
- Generating a file that contains a table of cards and can be opened with applications like Excel and Google Spreadsheets.
We will also write a documentation that helps you navigate through the Wiki, from the main and important articles to the lesser and related ones.
Gallery[edit source]
Old infobox design on mobile devices
New infobox design on mobile devices
Old Mercenary infobox design on mobile devices
New Mercenary infobox design on mobile devices
