Merchants Page

So, I've notice the Merchant page needs a bit of work. Very few trainers are actually on it despite a section for them, as well the way it is written it is sometimes hard to tell when it gets onto a new character. Now, I'd love to touch it up myself but I'm sort of...Retarded, when it comes to editing stuff on the wiki. So I was wondering if anyone else might be interested in sprucing that part up a bit?

Apart from shiva and dusk, all the other merchant sections are included versions of the character pages, so you get all the unnecessary character info as well. It was done this way while the wiki was under construction, and after patches, to ensure items and prices had the same values in all the pages. There should be no big problems with making a dedicated merchants page by now, since all their details are known.

Should the merchants page only have items for sale and trade, with links to each character page with the rest of their info? Or should it have character location, drops, location specific items, etc, as well?

Hmm, I'd say more so just what they trade, so if you are just trying to find items to buy you can scan that way easily. But if you want to know the more detailed stuff, just go to the general NPC's page. Because otherwise it might come off more that they should just be one page as opposed to how it is set up now.

So more or less a complete inventory list of items for sale. Should items still be sortetd by merchants, or should it be a list of all sold items sorted by category?

Ex:
----
Weapons
Short Sword - Undead Merchant - 500
Shotel - Shiva - 10.000
----
Items
Green Blossom - Crestfallen Merchant - 500
Lloyd's Talisman - Undead Merchant - 100
----
Armor
...
...

Hmm, that's a good question really. Because, in one sense you could be wondering. "Well there is this merchant in this area, I am about to head there, I wonder what they have?" So you'd want the whole merchant's inventory.

At the same time, when searching for specific items, the other way by item type with the merchant listed next to it would be nice. At the same time, if they are looking for the item they would probably be searching for that individual item. While searching for Merchants, you'd probably want their full inventory. Maybe getting the opinions of more people would shed some light on what people search for exactly.

Could you have a list like Ublug showed, with each name as a hyperlink to the merchants page? And then at the top of the page have a list with all names hyperlinked? It would be a lot of effort but I feel it woulod be a good solution.

I thought about it some more, and because the page is named 'merchants' the logical thing would be to sort the list by merchants. Apart from arrows and ore, each merchant have mostly unique items, so it shouldn't matter too much either way.

And yes, the idea is to have hyperlinks to each merchants page as well.

/edit

The page gets messy either way. If I sort it by items, the items not available from vendors seems to belong to the list as well, but if I also include them the page becomes a bit too much like a general overview page. I'll try a bit more.

I should really learn how to edit these things myself some day, so that I could be of actual assistance.

http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/test+page

Sorted by items, and sub-categories for each merchant. I have a feeling that doing the whole page like this will make it even more incomprehensible than it is today. (only did consumables to test the layout)

I think it actually looks a lot better than it did before.

That's the test page btw, so feel free to edit it in any way you like

When you edit a page, to the right of the 'save' button is a small arrow. Click the arrow to swap to wikitext editor, which is often easier to use when dealing with information inside tables.

I'm trying to figure out a way to make the merchants more tangible.
We already have the Characters page, which is an overview of npcs, their services and location.

What if we dedicate the Merchants page to sellers of items, armor and weapons only.
Then we could make a new 'Trainers' page with the Spell trainers only, and a 'Blacksmiths' page with ascension abilities.
Trainers and blacksmiths also sells items, so they'll appear on the merchants page as well.

Sounds pretty good to me, by the way do you think images might spruce things up a bit? *Holds his camera in hand* I swear, I won't use instagram.

Custom images are appreciated.

http://photobucket.com/darksoulslore

*Coughs*

EDIT: Let me know if you want any cropped, shrunk down, or slightly edited for needs if any are applicable on the wiki.

Stuff on test page looks good, and the images are great Tolvo

Thank you, I just wish I had a real capture device for taking them, then we could get some real quality ones.