Forum:SH Archive/Loading the Star Wars: The Old Republic article appearance list

Hey all. Per the Mofference, the size of the Star Wars: The Old Republic article's appearance section (which accounts for half of its size) and its affect on loading both the page itself and editing the article was discussed. The original idea was to split it from the main page and link to an appearances subpage so you would have to navigate to the subpage to view the appearances. I suggested an idea of having it on a subpage and loading it into the main page with JS. This means the main page will load first and then the appearances section will load shortly after. This means the main page will load faster than with the appearances section and there will be half as much text in the edit window as with the original idea, but the reader will still be able to view the appearances section on the main article page without navigating to a separate appearances page.

To demonstrate this I've put together a very rough example here: User:Grunny/SWTOR_2. You should be able to see the appearances section load once you clear your browser cache so the JS I added to MW:Common.js take effect for you. This loads the subpage User:Grunny/SWTOR_2/App into the appearances section shortly after the article itself loads. This is the simplest implementation, and we could potentially try more complex things like only loading it if people scroll down that far which would save them some bandwidth, but I figured I'd demonstrate it the simple way first to see if it's something the community will go for.

Now there are some limitations, the biggest of which is that of course that references used on the appearances sub page won't appear in the reference list of the main page. As a simple solution to this, I used reference grouping to place those references in an additional reference list at the bottom of the hideable appearances list. This makes those references still work from the main page, and how we display those references is up for bikeshedding of course, I just shoved them there for this demonstration.

So there it is. Let me know what you think and if you run into any problems. This is an alternative to having the appearances list purely on a subpage that you have to navigate to from the main page, possibly we'll come up with a better idea later. Cheers,  grunny &#64; wookieepedia :&#126;$ 14:58, January 27, 2014 (UTC)