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Thread:Spectre Leeloo Shepard/@comment-1814425-20200627023359/@comment-25356303-20200628192650

Sorry, mixed-up late-night comment on my part. Yes, the tabber on the "Kalash (AK-74M)" page is totally portable since it uses the section/panel style, and works fine on mobile. The problem with such things is a UX issue, not portability. In the top section, the only thing that changes is the gallery image (the data), but readers can still expect there to be an image. The format is consistent. However, in the bottom section, the tabber changes everything about that part of the infobox. The variables/headers are different, and the layout is also different (and also Exodus and 2033 have swapped places, although that's not relevant to tabbers).

  • Metro 2033 has "Statistics" (with three side-by-side data fields) and "Variants"
  • Last Light switches out "Variants" for "Attachments"
  • Exodus changes the format of "Statistics" by adding a fourth "Stability" field, and also changes "Variants"/"Attachments" out for "Customization."

This means that upon switching tabs, users have to re-scan all of the lower headers to know what they're looking at, and the data means somewhat different things too. The subject matter is certainly similar, but the way that the game structures it (different terminology/organization) is not similar enough to make a tabber the ideal solution here.

A tabber is only really useful to compare two different data points about the exact same thing, formatted the exact same way; people want to look at the header once (so they know what they're comparing) and only have the data change, so they can go back-forth-back-forth-back-forth. So if you're using a tabber to place two elements that can't be compared (or take a while to compare) next to each other, it's not really serving its purpose. At that point the tabbed content may as well be split across different pages (the experience would be almost the same). FishTank recommends this sort of thinking in one of his "best practices" blogs: "Design tabs that are parallel in nature. If the tabs are significantly dissimilar, users will interpret them as site navigation."

I don't really like any tabbers in general—portable or not—because if a tabber is just being used to condense information, people aren't going to look at the info that isn't highlighted by default. I don't remember the numbers perfectly off the top of my head, but the clickthrough rate for tabs on Fandom is like 70% for the first tab, 25% for the second tab, and like 5% for the third tab. So the hidden content is just not really seen. And thinking a little more long-term here, as more games are inevitably added to the Cyberpunk series and you keep having to add more tabs, the later ones will just get less and less visibility. JadedTLC (SEO) said something about this once (heavily paraphrasing): "If you want people on your site to see content, why hide it with a tab in the first place?"

My understanding is also that tabbers are a JavaScript function, and I try to take any opportunity to avoid JS in articles where possible. It's harder for search engines and web archival services (e.g. the Wayback Machine) to deal with, and slows down loading times ever so slightly.

But actually the bigger issue for that article is not the infobox, which from a portability standpoint is okay (if not perfect), but the fact that 2/3 of the article content is irrelevant to most readers. The duplicated section headers are a pain to link to, but more importantly having three games' worth of content on one page just bloats the article a lot. With rare exceptions (mostly wiki editors or really hardcore players doing some other sort of research, who make up a very small percentage of the userbase), if someone is searching for the Kalash (AK-74M), they're looking for it in the game that they're currently playing.

So if I were playing Exodus, having to scroll through 2033 and Last Light content to get to what I actually care about would be a bit of a chore, especially because I'd have to do it in every single section. Flipping the order wouldn't solve the issue. I'm currently playing The Witcher 3, and I have this problem all the time when looking up creatures or items on the wiki. Now, In order to compare the different appearances of a given subject (if desired), it would be appropriate to have information that is relevant to all appearances on a disambiguation or lore page. For example, on Elder Scrolls, our disambiguation/lore page on Solitude includes info that talks about the city as a general concept, while Solitude (Arena), Solitude (Skyrim), and Solitude (Online) each include info about the city that's relevant only to that game, like specific quests and characters who can be found there. (I think technically the preferred naming scheme would be Solitude/Skyrim, for SEO purposes, but that's not the point.)

It's possible that the pen & paper games are similar enough in scope to use one article for a weapon or something that appears in a few titles (I couldn't say), but I'd definitely suggest splitting all articles for 2077 content. 95% of players are not interested in 2020 etc., so any combination effort beyond the scope of a disambiguation/lore page is not intuitive for them, and could make them gravitate toward IGN guides or similar. I think we have to recognize that as wiki editors, what's intuitive to us isn't always intuitive to readers. And more pages certainly means a bigger database, which is definitely more work to maintain, but with proper categorization (which this wiki luckily has), it would be completely feasible.

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