BattleMaster Wiki talk:General Talk

Meta Discussion

I've opened a page for Meta discussion, where we can talk about how we want to communicate, talk, organise ourselves.

Formatting

Please format your comments the same as everyone else. Otherwise it will quickly become unreadable. Your name should come immediately after everything you wrote. e.g.

I think that turnips should 
be considered a fruit. They are tasty and 
delicious, it only makes sense. -- ~~~~~

Note that 4 tildes will expand to your name and the date, 3 tildes will expand to just your name. 2 tildes will expand to simply the date.

You can also use one or more colons (:) in front of your paragraph to indent the text. More than one asterisk (*) will indent the bullet.

Discussion

Minor Edits

I consider "minor edits" to be anything that does not actually contribute any useful information, and does not radically change the page. So, spelling, grammar, and punctuation edits (unless large in scale) would be considered minor. Small corrections to style or format would be minor. However, any factual corrections are not minor.

I would go so far as to say that it's better to make minor edits separately from editing substance, so that if something is incorrect it can be safely rolled back without needing to re-edit spelling and grammar and such. -- JPM

I tend to agree, minor edits should be changes that do not add or remove facts. Note that you can use three tildes to automatically insert your name into the page. -- Nicholas

Ah hah! Useful, thanks. -- Dolohov

I agree grammeric, punctuation, style, and form et al. would all be minor edits. I think adjusting appearance of a page to either match the appearance of the rest of the page or a particular section or subsection to match and be more pleasing to to the eye should also be concidered minor edit. There is nothing that is a bigger turn off to reading an item than when it doesn't have a smooth uniform look. --ESP 18 July 2005 20:22 (CEST)

Style

I would really like to see a consistent style over all the articles. Use of sections and subsections is a must, and it might even be a good idea to mandate a kind of abstract/summary at the beginning. A naming convention for articles is also a good idea. -- Dolohov

I think that the only way we're going to be able to hash out a good consistant style is if everyone tries their hand at adding a few articles. This will allow everyone to become used to mediawiki and give us a place to start in our criticism. If you're looking for a place to start, try the Special:Wantedpages -- Nicholas July 19, 2005 03:42 (CEST)

Spelling

I guess we can all agree (so far) on this at least. I put my chips in on all that has been previously said.

However, I have one minor question of concern. It is to my knowledge, words like "armour/armor" and "colour/color" are spelt differently in different forms of "English".

Are we going to have any preference as to which is used? Again, as I said, very minor. -- Darfix

Looks good to me, but I've had the same thought as Darfix concerning different spelling for words and such. It might be a bit annoying going through different edits and seeing letters that shouldn't be there (or that should be there, depending on where you're writing from). --Thraymn

I'd say the standard is pretty obvious. Tom has used British Spelling for Battlemaster, we should probably do the same. (i.e. put that u in honour) -- Nicholas

The simpler standard would be to spell everything as it appears in the game. It's not always clear which is the British and which the American spelling, and I for one am not always aware that there may be a different spelling for a given word. -- Dolohov 19 July 2005 04:09 (CEST)

British spelling is what I use in BattleMaster, at least where I know the difference. There are two reasons for that. One is I just like it better, two is that while English changed over time, certainly US english didn't exist in the middle ages, and british english is as close as we get without making everyone learn 12th century english. --Tom 19 July 2005 17:47 (CEST)

That is going to be difficult for most Americans, myself included. We really are a people separated by a common language. We don't even think about the spelling differences other than the really common ones because even our the way we pronounce the words with spelling differance is different... even if just slightly. The only example I have off the top of my head is Color and Colour. The way the Brits and Americas prounounce the words are completely different (incidently the American version is correct, being the same word as the latin word color). It would make no more sense for us to enunciate color as colour in the Middle English Old French way than it would for us to enunciate it as colos in the Old Latin.

To make a long tirade slightly longer, you will lose a lot of Americans to those spelling corrections. I think we should leave them both uncorrected.

--Eric S P

Never have a seen such a passionate hatred of the letter "u". :-) Seriously: honour, colour, armour are about the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. The vast majority of the differances are completely irrelavant to a medieval world. Who cares whether you call it a lorry or a truck, there aren't any in battlemaster! As for prounounciation, well, that's completely irrelavant to the subject at hand too. -- Nicholas July 19, 2005 23:23 (CEST)

Tiki -> MediaWiki

I'll just say that I think MediaWiki is nicer than TikiWiki, although it doesn't really matter in the end. Anyway, how much of the Tiki information are we going to keep/only make minor edits to, and how much are we going to completely rewrite? Can we presume wiping most of the old wiki away, or will that be more on a case-by-case basis with the better articles being copied over with little change? DorianGray

I'm aware that it's been mentioned on another page, BTW. Another thing I just thought of - Are we going to keep the Wish List concept from the Tiki? Maybe it should because of the need, but the Wish List on the Tiki doesn't seem to be used very often anyway... DorianGray

There's no sense throwing out useful information, but a lot of it is out of date or wasn't correct in the first place. We can use information from the old wiki as needed, but if we start copying over whole pages, we could easily be overwhelmed -- lots of information coming in quickly, and not much time to check it all for accuracy. -- Dolohov 19 July 2005 14:59 (CEST)

How to deal with realm pages

Looking at Wikipedia, they have a box template that fills itself in for most countries, with information and statistics and what-not. Would we be after a similar kind of thing with our realm pages (assuming we are to have realm pages)?
I threw one up briefly here, using a makeshift template based on the Wikipedia one, and using data from the realm page. DorianGray

I see no particular reason why we should duplicate all the ingame information about the realms. If they really want to expand on the information created in the realm summary ingame, they can create their own page. -- Nicholas July 19, 2005 16:19 (CEST)

Of course, there's no reason you can't duplicate the info for your own realms. The ones I see are very pretty. I just think you'll get tired before you do all 50 in the game. Also the information is very dynamic. Do you want to have to update the wiki every time the ruler of your realm changes? -- Nicholas July 19, 2005 16:30 (CEST)

We should discourage duplication of information. It will become outdated. Instead, we should encourage people to do one of two things: a) Link to the outside information (e.g. the realm page) b) Include the information. For example, images can be easily included, so realm banners, realm maps, etc. can be included without duplicating them, and this way will also be automatically updated if they change. --Tom 19 July 2005 17:50 (CEST)

Is there a way to make it fetch the info directly, then? Hmmm, that'd probably be too hard, save it for the realms that want to do it. How about island pages? Information like approximate population, number of regions, etc. won't change too much. DorianGray 20 July 2005 08:30 (CEST)

If we really, really need it, I can implement a way to fetch data to the wiki, I think that's possible. However, I think linking to the realm page is just as good, if not better. --Tom 20 July 2005 10:17 (CEST)

And the island pages? DorianGray 20 July 2005 11:38 (CEST)

SM/BM History

I have noticed in the Island News (Clumsy title, I think we can do better, I still love BattleMaster Newpaper Agency) that there are mentions about dates of Island and such in only the raw terms of BM. I think that is a major mistake. It also gets a little odd as well. BM did spring from SM and I believe we can not forget that and start things from a singular perspective.

The biggest example is a discussion I had with a player about the age and the opening of the islands. I off handedly made referance to why was it that SE was taking so long especially as long as it had been open it should have finished well before SW. I made an error, obviously. Not in the age of the island but the perception. The player quickly tried to correct me saying that SE was the 6th world and opened after both SW and Colonies (WI). I quickly corrected him with SE was the 3rd world opening before Beluaterra.

Most of the editors, well all but Tom, will put me in my place and tell me how wrong I am and the less polite will alude to me being high. But we were both right and both wrong. SE is world 3. It was being played before Beluaterra opened. It was also the 6th world to open and it did so after Colonies.

What is the point you may ask. Well the second Island open to BattleMaster was called the New World and it is not now called Beluaterra. Colonies is the West Island likely the most storied Island in the SM/BM Universe. I think all of this should make us watch how we phrase things in absolutes. --Eric S P 20 July 2005 12:23 (CEST)

Structuring and planning our approach

I think we need to stop for a minute and overview our objectives and work out all the nitty gritty boring administrative details before we rush out into making articles (I know I've been the worst at that -_-). Things like capitalisations in page names (do we call it Civil Work or Civil work?), categories, making sure we don't double-up on pages or end up with a lot of uncategorised pages, etc. I know we've been doing this for a while, but we really need a single place where we can look at everything and check it all, and have the discussions elsewhere. I would have started making categories and such, but we're not even sure of what kind of category system we will be using yet (category discussion is on a page somewhere). DorianGray 21 July 2005 09:26 (CEST)

As far as page names goes, I'd reccomend capitalizing the first letter and lowercasing everthing else. i.e. Civil work. -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 01:12 (CEST)

Yes, but now after we've decided this we need to write it in an easy-to-access page, laying down the law as it were, telling people that this is how we do things and why. Otherwise what will happen is anyone wanting to make a new page needs to read half a dozen discussion pages. Even the help pages that sort of fill this need are spaced out too much. DorianGray 22 July 2005 12:26 (CEST)

The page that fills this need is the Style Guide. In fact, it already contains a line about this.-- Nicholas July 22, 2005 18:12 (CEST)

New Topics

Country Templates

Template:Country I am having way too much fun playing around with templates. On an unrelated note, feel free to add this template to your user page.

{{country|change_this}}

-- Nicholas July 27, 2005 19:17 (CEST)

Stubs

I just went through and cleaned the stub template off of articles which are way too long and informative to be considered stubs. Feel free to do this yourself if you think an article completely covers a topic. This does not necessecarily mean that nothing can be added to a topic, just that someone thinks there is nothing important missing from the article. -- Nicholas July 28, 2005 21:59 (CEST)

Going Live

What still needs to be done before we can "go live" (that is, open up the wiki to the rest of BattleMaster)? --Dolohov 30 July 2005 19:54 (CEST)

Some "cleaning up" and getting the Manual fairly complete. --Tom 30 July 2005 21:16 (CEST)

Things have been slowing down quite a bit. It would be useful to get some more people in here to read and comment and let us know what's lacking. Maybe open it up to the discussion list? --John 10 August 2005 20:16 (CEST)

I'm torn. I'd like to open it up soon, but I'll be away for 2 weeks starting Saturday... --Tom 11 August 2005 12:01 (CEST)

How about pick a couple people who you're already working with (like the Titans or the new coders) and ask them to try it out? --John 11 August 2005 14:13 (CEST)

Good idea. I'll invite the Titans. --Tom 11 August 2005 17:45 (CEST)

Writer

Are we getting writers or are we it? What is the relationship between us and the writers? Can we have some now? --Eric S P 2 August 2005 11:51 (CEST)

You are the writers. I have invited the people who are doing newspapers, but aside from that... well, once the wiki is open, everyone will move his "pet pages" over, so we should be ready to do a lot of cleanup work at first, to help them along. --Tom 2 August 2005 12:50 (CEST)

Slave Driver! Sure! You give us fancy titles and and make us feel special and than you make us common grunts on the assembly line of BM Manual rewrites! Well once you open this little gem up I am forcing other into my employ and I will be an actual Editor! Mwaahahahaha! JK ;) --Eric S P 2 August 2005 22:33 (CEST)

Ridiculous Edits

The South-East News edits just take the cake. Not one of those 37 edits contributed anything to the page in question. It's bordering on defacement. Can one of the chief editors please warn this person? He's not listening to any of the people asking him to please use the preview button. --John 7 October 2005 21:30 (CEST)

Unique Items

So, I know this page is pretty much defunct, but this seems like the best place to go:

With Unique Items, and the recommendation to create a wiki page, we have a lot of orphaned pages. Should they be linked to in some way (other than the category)? Can't help thinking they look a bit forlorn with no-one going to look at them. --The1exile 20:23, 12 March 2008 (CET)