Forum:Weapon (and other tool) organisation

I was looking at some of the pages here and saw how different ship tools that are upgrades of each other all have different pages - most weapons, ship ability upgrades, and the Happy Ray. There isn't much information in any of these pages, and since they're essentially the same tool, I thought why - shouldn't they just be merged?

Also, many of the ship weapons have equivalents in other stages and in GA. For examples: lasers are used by aircraft in Civ Stage and GA; not only are there Proton and Antimatter Missiles, but also torpedoes used by boats in Civ Stage and also land vehicles in GA, and then there's also the Missile Flinger Captain weapon; there's the Pulse ship weapon and the Plasma Pulser/Pulse Blast for Captains, etc. Bombs have the most different types - Mini/Justa/Mega; Antimatter; Small/Medium/Long in GA; Static, Mighty, Gadget/ICBMs in Civ Stage and Fire Bombs in Tribal.

Those could all easily be dealt with using a disambiguation page, and really Laser is the only one of those that is really a problem (and that would be solved by moving it to "Laser (ship tool)" and having Laser as a disambig also describing the aircraft tool. But I see no reason not to apply the idea to all weapons. Bombs, however, could just be "Bomb" for the ship tool with all bombs and similar weapons (grenades and mines, for example) in an "Explosive weapons" category. That category would probably include missiles as well, but that would have to be a subcategory.

In short, my idea is:
 * All ship tools making use of upgrades would be merged, with a description of what the tool does and then sections describing all of the upgrades.
 * When weapons exist as both ship weapons and as other weapons, there can either be:
 * Something like a disambiguation page where multiple articles are linked to in a main article
 * Disambiguation on a page about one of the tools (possibly the Space Stage tool) linking to the other weapons
 * A category of the weapons
 * The latter can also apply to other tools - for example, both there are both energy and health upgrades for captains as well as spaceships - so there could be something like an "Energy and Health Tools" category. Of course, there would have to be a lot of recategorisation with that one...

Not so short a summary, really, but anyway: does anybody else have any opinions on this? Is it a good idea? Am I thinking about this all too much? 07:32, November 8, 2009 (UTC)