BattleMaster Wiki talk:Style Guide

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.

Article Length

We should really come to a decision on this topic. Namely, should we have long articles seperated into differant sections, or should we have short articles, with links to related articles? To use a more concrete example, I recently created the Meta:Page Name Guidelines, and then linked to them from the Style Guide. Should the style guide be long, explictly spelling out exactly how to do everything, or should it be short and a good overview, with links to more specific information on each topic. I'm leaning towards the latter (hence the seperate page), but what do you think? -- Nicholas July 19, 2005 19:46 (CEST)

I tend to prefer larger articles, broken up into sections which can be referred to separately. I think it's more attractive and easier to maintain than a bunch of short articles, and easier on the reader who may not always know exactly what he's looking for. For example: There's going to be a region article, but there's something to say about region commanders, gold and food production, and the various stats. It'd be better, in my opinion, for all those things to be sections under the region page. It includes all the necessary information without a lot of clicking around, and makes it less likely that someone misses an important topic by not noticing a link. --Dolohov 19 July 2005 19:59 (CEST)

A very good point, but:

• The article on taxes already covers region gold production.
• IMHO, it makes more sense to talk about food production in the food article. You can just add a link in the region article saying: Rural regions are the main source of food for a realm.
• Region commanders would probably be better off described in a "lord" article.
• You're probably right that the various stats should be described in the region article.

As far as missing an important topic. So what? Maybe a knight doesn't know why his realm needs all of those insignificant rural regions. He knows they don't give much gold to him but he wasn't interested enough to click on the food link in the region article. Oh well, he doesn't really need to know that. When his realm starts starving to death, he'll find out. Besides, ignorant nobles is probably historically accurate. :-D -- Nicholas July 19, 2005 20:37 (CEST)

There's a quite long discussion about this somewhere on the MediaWiki site. They make good arguments for long articles. The point is that it makes searching easier, it keeps stuff in one place, and prevents fragmentation, and a couple of others.
Remember that the wiki can seperate one logical page into several physical pages, and that with sections, the table-of-contents, etc., even a long article is quite accessable.
I am very much in favour of long articles. Maybe we can add short articles that only explain certain words, much like a dictionary. However, I would prefer a different style: A very short explanation at the beginning, and an in-depth discussion like what it's for, how to use it, strategy hints, etc. further down, a bit like started in the bonds article. --Tom 19 July 2005 20:52 (CEST)

Also see the new page I made about this Meta:Article structure. --Tom 20 July 2005 10:46 (CEST)

What if we had both long and short articles? Then parts of the short article could be included in the long article, where appropriate. For Example:

Regions

A region is a ...

#TOC

==Atributes==
Regions have ...

===Morale===
{{:morale (region)}} <!-- This should include the text of the morale (region) article -->

===Production===
{{:production}} <!-- This should include the text of the production article -->

-- Nicholas July 20, 2005 22:49 (CEST)

After thinking, about the above idea, I have decided it's not very good. A disambiguation page and seperate articles would probably be a better idea. -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 19:39 (CEST)

A good list of the pros and cons of long vs. short articles is available on wikimedia. -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 19:39 (CEST)

Multi Word Links

Which is the better way to name multi-word pages: TwoWords or Two_Words? It would be nice to have a consistent naming scheme for these things. -- Dolohov

I strongly think it should be [[Link_Style]]. It makes it easier to read, as the two words have some space between them. -- Nicholas July 18, 2005 22:49 (CEST)

Mediawiki doesn't do CamelCase. Use proper names. The correct page name is [[Link Style]]. Mediawiki will do the proper replacements itself. --Tom 19 July 2005 17:42 (CEST)

Mood

I think that the wiki should try to avoid using technical vocabulary as it spoils the feel of battlemaster. For example (This is all stolen from Dolohov's article on taxes. It's a great article, it just happens to be the only one available to critisize.) instead of "region's gold rating" use "region's wealth". -- Nicholas July 18, 2005 23:06 (CEST)

Oh, I agree about the technical vocabulary -- I just had no idea what to call that particular stat. I wanted to call it "production at capacity" but I didn't want to confuse it with "production". It might be useful to have a guide of RP terms for certain aspects of the game. -- Dolohov 18 July 2005 23:10 (CEST)

We might even agree to use a more "welcome my lord, I am a servant of your late father's, let me explain a few things" style... --Tom 19 July 2005 17:42 (CEST)

I've been thinking more about mood, and this suggestion in particular. I think that it would be very useful to have a narrative for the BattleMaster basics pages, since that is going to set the tone for the game for a lot of people. For the more informative pages, it's still useful to have individual roleplays as in my experimental page on paid work. I think the RP works, but I don't like the formatting. Maybe a colored text box?

We'll need a standard formatting for RP for the wiki. I personally like to use italics for everything that's not speech -- BM is a very speech-heavy game (since it's mostly in messages) and I think this makes everything more readable.

--Dolohov 22 July 2005 18:21 (CEST)

I'd like to start the Battlemaster basics page if no one objects. I like the idea of a narrative, I'll try and apply my rather terrible creative writing skills to it, then you guys can swoop in and edit it, ok? ;) -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 18:53 (CEST)

As far as italicizing roleplay, trying to read that much slanted text cuases my head to hurt. I think you're overusing italics. I'm going to try formatting it with all of the speech in seperate paragraphs, tell me what you think. -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 18:53 (CEST)

I personally find that much more difficult to read. A colored background might make it a little easier, though. --Dolohov 22 July 2005 19:20 (CEST)

Ok, what do you think of my most recent change? -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 19:29 (CEST)

Much better. It would also be nice to combine that with a colored background to make it stand apart from regular article text. This, however, I'm not sure how to do. --Dolohov 22 July 2005 19:56 (CEST)

It could be done with a template, but I'm reluctant to try it, as it would make the code look very messy IMHO. I also don't think it is really needed. -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 20:24 (CEST)

What do you think of having the standard formatting for roleplays being indented speech? I can't think of a better way to describe the formatting. (e.g. →paid work) -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 20:24 (CEST)

Capitalization

Should titles (eg Judge, Ruler, General) be capitalized? -- Dolohov 20 July 2005 02:47 (CEST)

All page titles should be capitalised, but in normal text, the normal spelling should be used, so even if the page is named "Ruler", the link is ruler. Because Mediawiki automatically capitalises the first letter of a link, this works reliably. --Tom 20 July 2005 10:45 (CEST)

And yes -- section and subsection names should be capitalized. --Dolohov 20 July 2005 20:46 (CEST)

I strongly support one consistent style. My proposal (now on the article page) is to use headline style for the names all the time, both for page names and sections. And to use proper capitalisation (usually lowercase) in running text. --Tom 25 July 2005 18:05 (CEST)

of Sections and Subsections

In general, we have two differant options for capitalizing section names. We could use sentence style capitalization, that is capitalize the first word, and only capitalize proper nouns from then on. Or we could use Headline style, which is a lot more complicated. The basic rules, taken from the Chicage Manual of Style, are:

1. Always capitalize the first and last words, and all major words
2. Lowercase the, a, an
3. Lowercase prepositions (e.g. as, at, for, from, in, plus)
4. Lowercase and, but, for, or, nor
5. Lowercase to, as

In general, words which would be stressed when spoken should be capitalized, unstressed words are not.

I reccomend using sentence style (i.e. capitalizing only the first word ) becuase it is so much simpler :) -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 18:29 (CEST)

Eh, I find sentance style kinda ugly. But then, I'm the first to admit that I incorrectly apply Chicago style. --Dolohov 22 July 2005 18:36 (CEST)

Well, to be honest, they're more like guidelines. But, I think it might be a little hard to use headline style if English is not your first language. But even I'm inconsistant, look at the title of this section. :D -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 18:42 (CEST)

All for it. I didn't even know this officially existed. Yes! Let's use that. --Tom 25 July 2005 17:55 (CEST)

template positions

I don't think anyone will speak out against having the categories at the bottom. But what about stuff like the {{stub}} mark? I've seen a few pages where it's at the bottom, and I think that is the better place, but what do you think? --Tom 20 July 2005 10:44 (CEST)

I've always preferred the stubs at the bottom. DorianGray 20 July 2005 12:00 (CEST)

I'm just the opposite: I like to have the stub mark at the top, as an invitation for people to lend their expertise. But you're right, the usage should be consistent. --Dolohov 20 July 2005 19:14 (CEST)

I think it should be at the bottom. If you can't see it without scrolling, then the article is too long to be a stub anyway. P.S. Tom, you can create text which ignores wiki formatting using the third button from the right above the edit box. -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 22:05 (CEST)

Spelling

Bah, it's not my fault the British can't spell their own language :P --Dolohov 31 July 2005 16:38 (CEST)

It's not their fault you rebelled and started this problem in the first place. :-D

I do like the fact that we're using British spelling, yet we don't have an editor from Britain. I'm just running everything through a spell checker with a British word list, and looking the words up in a dictionary when I'm not sure on what the spell checker hands back to me. Heck, I didn't know about some of the British variants. -- Nicholas July 31, 2005 17:59 (CEST)

We didn't actually start the problem -- standardized spelling wasn't an issue until after the colonies were founded, when the first dictionaries were written. --Dolohov 31 July 2005 18:52 (CEST)

On a related note, a site on spelling differences between American and British english. -- Nicholas July 31, 2005 18:03 (CEST)

Region Pages

It seems to me that the standard for region names ought to be

[[Island/Region]]

. Does anyone disagree? --John 11 October 2005 20:54 (CEST)

I disagree. In a nutshell I just think it would cause to many rp conflicts like that. I think a better idea is to make Regions Subpages of Realm Pages. When/if a realm loses control of a region they can either put a note saying they no longer have it (like I did with Helsera) or just doctor it a little to show what the region was like under their rule -- Revan

Having them under Realms would mean too much moving of pages. There ought to be only one page for a given region, so that it's perfectly clear which one described the region as it currently is. The histoy is not lost when a page is moved, so if the region is re-captured, then any changes by the "enemy" can be rolled back or (better!) incorporated into a new version. --John 12 October 2005 03:19 (CEST)

I tend to agree with John, region pages should have a permanant categorization, they should be subpages of their island. Perhaps you could clairify what you mean by RP confilcts? --Nicholas October 13, 2005 06:47 (CEST)

I think he means that when an enemy realm takes a region, then they're going to want to change the region page, against the wishes of the original author. Personally, I think that's an argument in favor, rather than against -- it'll make people more attached to their regions, and not quite as willing to give them away or trade them off in tactical exchanges. Besides, my Secret Plan is to eventually ask Tom to link to the wiki pages directly from the in-game region pages. --John 13 October 2005 16:20 (CEST)

It's possible to do redirects, isn't it? Why not have the permanent locations for regions be Island/Region, but use Realm/Region to redirect to it? --Anaris 13 October 2005 14:48 (CEST)

The Island Region redirect solution above seems best, with only a redirect page to be changed if a region changes realms, otherwise it would be a page move. Can't quite figure out why we need the slash, I find the slash notation ugly, and I can't understand why we use it. Wikipedia seems to be able to manage their much larger name space without using slashes. -- mcsporran 13 October 2005 16:56 (CEST)

Trust me, when there are two hundred region pages, you'll appreciate the slash notation indicating in the name where it is. If you find it ugly, then change the link text: [[Island/Region|Region]] will just show as Region. --John 13 October 2005 17:15 (CEST)

No I understand the logic behind it, and I can rename links, but what I don't get is the advantages of [[Island/Realm]] over [[Island Realm]] -- mcsporran 13 October 2005 17:29 (CEST)

Automatic links from the subpage to the parent page, right now. Also, when something is a recognised subpage, I think that there are additional things that can be done in the wiki code to take advantage of it.--John 13 October 2005 20:14 (CEST)

So, are these are the correct naming Formats ?

[[Island/Realm]] and [[Island/Region]] 

Dont want to have to rename twice.

Also what happens when we have another New World/Beluaterra ? -- mcsporran 13 October 2005 20:29 (CEST)

Just the regions. So, (unless Tom objects) it's [[Realm]] and [[Island/Region]]. As to what happens... well, the Editors become very, very busy. And possibly revolt ;) --John 13 October 2005 22:22 (CEST)

Multiple Links

Can we make multiple links to the same page discouraged? I don't see a need for a page to have 10 or more links to the same page just because we *can*. I think there should be the link to parent page if its a subpage, any links that come with a template, and the first available section in text for a link. Any more is really just overdoing it. --Vita Family 20:22, 5 November 2008 (CET)

1. A subpage is automatically linked to the parent page by the backlinks at the top, just below the title. There is no need for a page to have a manual link to the parent. In fact, a link to the parent page (such as "Back to <parent>") should probably be discouraged unless it is part of a navigational template block that is included on several related pages.
2. In general, I do think that multiple links on a single page, all to the same destination page should be discouraged. This is especially true on shorter pages. However, there are times when it is the correct thing to do. For example, when writing for an IC newspaper, each article should be considered separately. While a single article should only link to a realm name once, there could be multiple articles on a single page, each article having it's own link to that same realm. Also, if the page consists of multiple long sections, it could be permissible for there to be one link per section.

--Indirik 20:42, 5 November 2008 (CET)

I agree with you. I think you misunderstood or I wasn't clear enough. The link to a parent page I meant was the automatic one. And I would agree with you regarding newspapers. I'm not sure on the case of longer pages. If it's too long, it should probably be broken up to subpages anyway. Longer articles are preferable, but we should avoid being too long that more than one link is necessary. And it shouldn't be too hard to open another link in a tab once you come across it. Though I do understand the concern you have.

To summarize what has been agreed on so far for future people: Links should be automatic link to parent page, any links coming within a template, and the first available section in text should be linked(not hard rule, but it should be reasonably sooner than later). This is applied to newspapers by article, not entire page. Agreed, disagree? Editors opinions? --Vita Family 22:59, 5 November 2008 (CET)

Disambiguation

Wikipedia usually puts a sensible "main" article on the name, and the disambiguation page on a disambig name. Do we want to use that as well? For example, "Sirion" could point to the realm, with a header saying "This is about the realm, did you mean 'Sirion (Region)'? And a likewise header on the region page? I'm not really sure. --Tom 21:17, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

That's what Indirik and I discussed on IRC. I prefer it the way it is currently, but he disagrees. Either way, we've already started doing it with Sirion as disambiguation and it will be a bit of an effort to change it again. I don't see the effort being necessary. In addition, if a page has a lot of disambiguations the header could become quite long. --Vita Family 23:12, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

If there will only be two different terms, then you shouldn't need a disambiguation page. You just use "hatnotes" to point from one to the other. (Well, that's the Wikipedia convention.) Disambiguations aren't used until you get at least three uses of the same page name. If we're not going to plan on having duchy pages, then we really only have two possible uses of each: Realm and Region, and most will not even have that. My first thought was to have the main name point to the realm, and have the region have an alternate name, on the theory that most people will be looking for the realm. Timothy's idea was that the region will always be there, and the realm may not, so the region should have the main name. Also, if a realm is later formed based on a city name, then there may already be a region page and many links pointing to the region. Making the realm page the alternate name will prevent the need for moving the region page, and having many bad links to the wrong page. --Indirik 04:09, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I was thinking along similar lines, and that's why I can't make up my mind. The realm will certainly be what people usually expect to find, but the region is the more reliable page. In addition, we do have a few conventions to think about. For example, the city "Sirion" is commonly referred to as Sirion City and that could be an alternate page name (I think it's a redirect now, I'll check after submitting). Technically, I'd say the region page should be the main page. I do agree that when we have just two alternatives, hatnotes would be better, though I would prefer having them in a box like the top example on the wikipedia page, just to make sure they are not missed. --Tom 10:32, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Made up my mind now. Region pages, and Template:Otherpage to point to the realm page. The main reason being that we also have a couple dead realms where we want to keep the realm page, but it clearly should be "second" in a disambiguation. And this way the rules are the same everywhere. If someone wants to spice up that template a little (adding the disambig icon, maybe?), please feel free to do so. --Tom 15:31, 16 February 2009 (UTC)