Talk:Manual

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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.

Categories

Because it is going to be very hard to change we should decide right now which style we will use. Are we going to have the equivalent of an article in each cateogry, or should the categories simply point to articles. Right now, I am leaning towards the former. For example, the Realm page is a redirect to Category:Realm. On the Category:Realm page, we can write an article about realms, what they are and how they work. By using the cateogry page, below the article, we automatically have links to all of the subcategories of Category:Realm and as well as articles about that category. -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 03:35 (CEST)

I'm also in favor of the former (having pages redirect to the Category pages), but it might be worth sleeping on it to let others have a chance to weigh in. --Dolohov 20 July 2005 03:44 (CEST)
I don't like that system, although it might be attractive. I would use the Realm page to give a basic description of the structure/purpose/basis/etc. of a realm, then the Category:Realm being a listing of all pages where it has to relate to realms in some way (individual realm pages, government systems, etc), remembering that one article can be in more than one category. However, I might have misinterpreted what you said. DorianGray 20 July 2005 08:41 (CEST)
Dorian - long pages are much, much better than many short pages. Splitting a page up over a category is not useful. If a single topic is too complicated to be included, i.e. if it runs at least 2-3 pages of text, then it should be simplified for the main page and gets its own sub page, but only then. --Tom 25 July 2005 13:01 (CEST)
I'm not complaining about the page length. I'm saying that I object to categories being used as core pages. For example, Realm could be there or at 
[[Category:Realm]]
. The former way, it would have a description of realm and link back to other realm-related pages (such as realm pages, should any ever be made, realm morale, loyalty, etc), rather than the same information at the category page then having a whole list of every page in that category.
I don't even know if I'm making sense or I know how to explain what I'm talking about anymore. DorianGray 26 July 2005 13:27 (CEST)

Redirects

We should probably create redirects for all of the categories. Basically, it works like this. The Realm Page is changed so it contains only this one line: 

#REDIRECT [[Category:Realm]]

This means that any links to the Realm page will automatically be redirected to Category:Realm. -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 03:00 (CEST)

Organization

Here's the organization idea I'm kicking around now. It's divided into three major parts

  • Economy
    • Gold, Bonds, Taxes
    • Food
      • Weather
      • Trading
      • Starvation
      • Warehouses
  • People
    • Families
    • Characters
      • Classes
        • Soldier, Hero, Cavalier, Bureaucrat, Trader, Infiltrator, Mentor
      • Communication
        • Roleplaying
      • Command
        • Region Command, Ruler, Banker, General, Judge
      • Tournaments
      • Death
    • Social Contract
  • Places
    • Islands
      • Atamara, East Island, ...
    • Realms
    • Realm Types
      • Tyranny, Monarchy, ...
    • Regions
      • Travel
      • Region Upkeep
  • War
    • Units
      • Infantry, Archers, Mixed Infantry, Cavalry, Special Forces
      • Line Settings
      • Paraphernalia
    • Battles
      • Fortifications
      • Hunting, Foraging, Looting
    • Diplomacy
    • Prison

This is just a first crack at it, but I think this gives us a good place for just about everything, and puts all the important stuff no more than three levels deep (anything more than that would not appear in the table of contents)

--Dolohov 20 July 2005 01:02 (CEST)

What if we made all of the upper levels into categories? That would make this system incredibly simple to implement. The only trick is that linking to a category requires an extra colon. e.g. [[:Category:Example]] -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 01:20 (CEST)

That would work, sure. --Dolohov 20 July 2005 01:38 (CEST)

While this looks like it will be a great catagorization system, I'm not sure if it should all go on the front page of the manual. The manual page should probably just link to the highlights, from which you can reach everything else. -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 01:40 (CEST)

Suggestion: Start page only lists highlights and short intros to the sections (1-2 sentences) and we have a seperate TOC page that lists the full TOC. --Tom 24 July 2005 22:20 (CEST)

I promoted economy to be a fourth major part, because it really doesn't seem to fit under Places. -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 01:48 (CEST)

In that case, the Economy section ought to be expanded (as above) --Dolohov 20 July 2005 02:00 (CEST)

I think that that might be too many sub-categories. Why not just stick everything in the category Economy? -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 02:05 (CEST)

My instinct is always going to be to have more sub-categories, rather than fewer. -- Dolohov
Actually, I didn't realize that you were actually creating Category:Foo for the different sub-levels. I'll work on that. --Dolohov 20 July 2005 02:15 (CEST)

Feel free to help me create the various categories. They all start at Category:Manual and branch out to the four main categories. If you use the ones I've already created as a model, it shouldn't be very hard. -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 02:07 (CEST)

I thought about it, but since you're obviously working on them, I didn't want to risk stepping on your toes (especially since I don't know what happens if two people try to create the same page at the same time) --Dolohov 20 July 2005 02:11 (CEST)

It has acutally already happend to me with this very page. It's called an edit conflict. Basically, it just shows you what you wrote, what the page was changed while you were writing and it says, ok, you figure this out. But don't worry about that, I'll be making supper for the next hour or so, so go wild. -- Nicholas July 20, 2005 02:19 (CEST)

P.S Happened a second time to me while writing this very message :-) -- Nicholas

I'm not liking the whole linear aspect of it. I know that it's just a picture of what we need and what the primary categories should be, but articles like Units could fit into War, Battles, Travel, Gold and Class categories/subcategories. I said above what I thought a category should be. If it's for a list of contents/articles (like all economy-related pages listed as above as a list on the Economy page), it'll end up being filled and messy. Major sub-articles should be listed like this, but you can inline-link to pages and people can go to them. This is easier to do here than on the Tiki, I think. If it was just a crack at how things should be organised and how to go about them, then its fine :-) DorianGray 20 July 2005 08:41 (CEST)

Tom's Thoughts

A couple thoughts on the collected wisdom here:

  • Don't make too many categories. A category is not useful if it contains only 3-5 articles.
  • Make sure that there is some useful text on every page. Many people who are not so comfortable with the whole Internet thing are frightened by pages with no text or explanation.
  • Yes, many parts can be fit equally well under several topics. This is where we need to use either links, i.e. link to the page from the various sections, or templates that we can include in several pages. Do not underestimate the template concept in Mediawiki, it is extremely useful.
  • My personal opinion is that we need to come up with a basic article structure first, because the larger structure will mostly fall in place then. In fact, I think this is so important that I've included it in the style guide.

Classes, Government systems, etc.

I am absolutely opposed to having a Soldier page, a Bureaucrat page, etc. etc.

No way. There should be one Classes page and every class is a section on that.

--Tom 25 July 2005 13:06 (CEST)

Sure, but the only drawback I can think of is that it makes it harder to link to information. Instead of Soldier it has to be Classes:Soldier. --Nicholas July 26, 2005 05:53 (CEST)
Classes:Soldier doesn't work. You can't create namespaces like this, this is not C++. :-) - and all the drawbacks in the wikipedia article fit. Most importantly, when you look up a class most of the times you will want to compare it to other classes anyways. --Tom 26 July 2005 12:11 (CEST)
I meant class#soldier, it's a typo. I know that :-) -- Nicholas July 26, 2005 18:34 (CEST)
You can either have Class#Soldier or just Soldier and rely on the redirect. DorianGray 26 July 2005 13:27 (CEST)

Realm Types

Should democracy, monarchy, etc. be on seperate pages, or on the same page? -- Nicholas July 26, 2005 05:59 (CEST)

Never mind, I see you've set up Government System. -- Nicholas July 26, 2005 06:14 (CEST)

Tom's Structure

I'm now writing down my own structure. I've just overwritten the page because if nobody really likes it, it is easy to revert anyways and that way I can show better what I mean. --Tom 3 August 2005 13:46 (CEST)

This is really just a beginning. I don't consider it complete, I just want to lay down the structure that I consider useful, and that follows closely the in-game experience (where, for example, actions and orders and command are seperate navigation points). --Tom 3 August 2005 14:08 (CEST)

GameFAQs

While I was browsing GameFAQs, as one does, I noticed they now have a section for Online/Web games (as in browser games I assume, since heavier games such as Ragnarok appear in the PC section). I was wondering whether it might be interesting to see what happened if we take a copy of the manual as it is, format it to their standard and put it up (occasionally updating it as the wiki is updated of course). Could be interesting indeed... --DorianGray 13 September 2005 10:37 (CEST)

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