BattleMaster Wiki talk:Style Guide

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)

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)

Could you clarify what you mean by RP? What kind of roleplaying would we be including in the wiki? -- Nicholas July 22, 2005 18:46 (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)

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)

Capitalization 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 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)