One last thing: It appears that <ref></ref> tags don't work on the wiki, which seems rather inconvenient.
This is provided by a third-party extension - it's not a native Mediawiki feature. We do have our own {{cite}} and related templates here:
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Category:Citation_templates - they are primitive compared to the extension, but can be useful if you just want to link to where something came from.
I think your ideas are generally good. Anything drastic should have more discussion, and also likely requires a significant time committment.
I think pages for indivual items (stones, creatures, etc.) make sense for a couple reasons:
- determining which things are "important" enough to have their own page is very subjective. Not everyone will agree on this.
- combining everything into larger pages will produce, well, larger pages. This is more taxing on both the wiki and readers. We've had issues with particularly large pages like
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Creature taking too long and failing to render entirely, and that one doesn't contain nearly as much information as what's in the sidebars of each creature page.
- individual pages are easy to search for. Yeah, we can redirect every creature to a single "creature" page, and redirects come up in search results too, but then we have to set up thousands of redirects. (We already do, in a sense, to redirect from the main -> DF2014 namespace, so it's really just the migration that would take some effort here)
Speaking of namespaces, for the next major migration, I'm thinking of naming the new namespace "Current" and copying the last DF2014 revisions into an old namespace (probably "v0.47"). Clearly the "DF2014" name didn't age well. In the past, the newer namespace has been created as a copy of the old one (e.g. copying all DF2012 pages into DF2014), but this has the disadvantages of breaking page history and preventing people from effectively editing/reading the new namespace until the process is done.
I'm not saying we have to keep everything the same - just thinking that consolidating every historical version of every page into a single page sounds like a lot of manual work. (Plus, some pages refer to mechanics not present in the newer version, and would need some extra templating or wording to make this clear, while it's already fairly clear with the current namespace setup.)