TaRapedia talk:Formatting/Missions

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I've put up a draft for the formatting guide. Please comment. If nobody objects for one week, I'll consider the guide accepted for the start. Of course, we may always modify it later when more contributors have entered the wiki. --Tetris L 03:14, 3 July 2007 (EDT)


 * A few comments:


 * When we standardize this, we should put it in a template to use as a template to make things a little easier.
 * The dialog shouldn't be in italics or enclosed by quotation marks. It's harder to read, and there's not really any grammatical or lexical reason for it to be since it's already set off as quoted text.
 * I don't like the term "Walkthrough," as it implies that each mission will have a step-by-step guide associated with it. I prefer either Tips or Notes, as I envision most of the things in there to be stuff like, "such-and-such can be found at coordinates ."  If there is a step-by-step guide to doing something unusually complicated or hard, I'm thinking it should be in a separate section entirely.
 * I know the game uses the word "Briefing" to describe the mission description text, but I like "Overview" better. It's more consistent with what's used throughout the rest of the wiki.  As a holdover from the Paragon Wiki, I've been using Briefing and Debriefing to refer to the start/end text of a mission.  Give that the word is used for something else and could be confusing, I'll stop using it in that context.
 * I'd like to keep the dialogue integrated with the objectives. I like the idea of having a "quick list" of objectives, though.  I'm thinking that the Table of Contents makes a pretty good list, if the objectives are listed as headings.  And speaking of the Table of Contents, I keep seeing  tags in articles and templates.  I don't think that the Table of Contents should ever be suppressed except in special circumstances.  I typically move it below the Overview section in an article.
 * The mission box on the right side of the page is somehow causing the text that it's supposed to be floating right of to be pushed down a line or two. I'll take a look and see if I can correct it.


 * I've got to run, but I'll add more thoughts and try to come up with a suggested template later.


 * --TonyV 10:18, 4 July 2007 (EDT)


 * A few replies:
 * The template for the infobox and the template for the whole article are two totally different things. The template for the infobox should not be used with, because of the variables and because of possible future design updates. And using  for the whole article seems like overkill to me, because it is basically just a different way of copying the syntax text from TaRapedia:Formatting/Missions into a new article. Doing it the old-fashioned way (copy and paste) takes 5 secopnds, so I don't really see a big advantage or simplification for the user.
 * I tend to agree about not using italics for quotes, even though it is a common formatting standard to indicate a quote. But I agree that it makes the text harder to read, so I've left the italics away myself a few times already. I don't agree about the quotation marks though. It's a very simple and quick indication of a quote, and it doesn't make the text harder to read at all. Especially if we dump the italics we should keep the quotation marks.
 * I like the term "walkthrough", and I think that in general the section should be just that: A full guide - not necesserily step by step, but covering all the important details. It's more to me than just "tips" or "notes".
 * I'm aware of the problem of the double use of the term "briefing". I, too, did prefer the term in the dialogue section until I noticed that the ingame mission log uses the term for the summary. I agree to call the summary "overview", as long as we make clear that the text in it is a quote from the game.
 * I don't understand what you mean by "I'd like to keep the dialogue integrated with the objectives. ".
 * The reason why I often suppress the TOC is because I feel that it clutters the article and serves little purpose because the article is little over one page of text, so the user can easily see the whole article with very little scrolling, so not TOC is really required for orientation.
 * Regarding the position of the TOC, unfortunatly it seems that my feelings are not in line with those of MediaWiki, Wikipedia, and yours. I feel that, if a text has a TOC, it should be the very first element of the text, i.e. at the very top of an article. But MediaWiki places the TOC above the first heading, not at the very top of an article. That's why I like the idea of beginning every article with a heading ("Overview", "Summary", or similar), because that forces the TOC to be at the very top of the article. But if you place the TOC below the "Overview" section, i.e. above the second section, as you sugest, then what was the point of giving the overview a heading in the first place? You might as well have left it without any heading, which is Wikipedia's standard (which I don't like at all).
 * --Tetris L 16:51, 4 July 2007 (EDT)


 * Five days since I wrote this, and no reply yet. :( Tony, I know you're busy, but I'd like to proceed with creating new mission articles, so we should really fix a standard urgently.
 * Now that I've seen a few more of your mission articles, I think I understood what you mean by "I'd like to keep the dialogue integrated with the objectives. " Sorry, I don't like that structure at all. It's confusing.
 * As a compromise, may I suggest the following structure:
 * Overview
 * Objective(s)
 * Dialogues
 * Briefing
 * Intermediate (if any)
 * Debriefing
 * Walkthrough
 * Notes
 * Note that I changed the names of the overview and dialogues sections to meet your suggestion, but kept the walkthrough section. The formatting of quotes and the position of TOC are not major issues, so leaving these open shouldn't stop us from going ahead. -- T ETRIS L 09:07, 9 July 2007 (EDT)


 * Check what I did with A Father's Goodbye. I added some icons to the headings. It's only eye-candy, but I do quite like it. -- T ETRIS L 18:35, 9 July 2007 (EDT)

Sorry for the lack of reply, I've also been pretty sick the past week, too, and have barely felt like doing anything except adding user accounts. Also, I had a pretty good reply going (spent a few hours on it), then my computer crashed and I lost it all. :-( We're up to 156 users now, by the way, which I think is pretty impressive, considering that it's not even a public wiki yet.

I really like the icons you've added, they look really sharp. And thanks for losing the italics; those are the main thing I was talking about when I said that it's hard to read.

I still think we need to lose the quotation marks, though. The article is a reference, not a narrative, so I really don't think they're needed. Also, the text is already indented, indicating that it's a quote. Plus, I'd be willing to bet a large sum of money that when there's a quote within the text, we'd usually end up with grammatically incorrect double quotes within double quotes ("He said, "I won!" before heading back home.") instead of single quotes in double quotes. Also, you'd be surprised at how many people don't know little things like how punctuation marks are always supposed to go within quotation marks.

I prefer the style of, for example, the Wikiquote site (e.g. Fahrenheit_451, where stuff that is in quotation marks in the text is in quotation marks in the article, and stuff that isn't isn't.

I still prefer "Tips" or "Notes," but I can live with Walkthrough.

I also still think we need the TOC in the articles. For short missions, the TOC is short, which mitigates clutter, and even serves the purpose of visually separating the overview from the bulk article text. For long missions, though, articles will quickly get very unwieldy without it. I think we need to format the article in such a way that the TOC is navigationally useful. That's what I was referring to when I mentioned integrating objectives and dialogue. As it is now, the article outline (and the TOC) will look something like this:


 * Overview
 * Objective(s)
 * Objective 1
 * Objective 2
 * Objective 3
 * Dialogue(s)
 * Dialogue for Objective 1
 * Dialogue for Objective 2
 * Dialogue for Objective 3
 * Walkthrough
 * Walkthrough
 * Walkthrough

I think that it's a lot less confusing, a lot more navigable, and eventually, a lot easier to expand if we keep everything for each objective together. For example, here's what it would look like if we had a complex mission with a few more informational items added:


 * Overview
 * Objective(s)
 * Objective 1
 * Description
 * Item(s) of Interest
 * Notable NPC(s)
 * Dialogue for Objective 1
 * Objective 1 Notes
 * Objective 2
 * Description
 * Item(s) of Interest
 * Objective 3
 * Description
 * Notable NPC(s)
 * Dialogue for Objective 3
 * Objective 3 Notes
 * Mission Notes
 * External Links

Note that I've deliberately left out some of the headings for various objectives above. For example, Objective 2 might not have any dialogue associated with it. As soon as you accomplish the objective, it might send you off on a new objective with no fuss, no muss. If the dialog is split up from the objectives, that can get really confusing if you're trying to match one up with the other. Not all of the above necessarily needs to literally have separate headings using the === Heading === tags; it could be as simple as setting stuff off in bold text to keep the TOC clean and efficient, or it may not have a heading at all if it's something small such as Item(s) of Interest. But if someone wants to know everything there is to know about Objective 2 of such-and-such a mission, I really don't like the idea that they'd have to scroll up and down the page to see it all.

Honestly, I think that that is how most people would browse these articles, too: looking up missions before they go off and do them to see what they're in store for. Also, I see people using the wiki as a reference to link to. If I want to talk about Objective 2 of some mission, it would be much easier to link to wiki/Foobar_Mission#Objective_2 than to try to figure out if I want to link to Objective 2's description, dialog, or whatever else eventually get added to these articles.

--TonyV 23:14, 9 July 2007 (EDT)


 * Oh, didn't know that you were sick. Sorry for bugging you with my stuff. I hope you feel better now. I guess you're still busy at work though?
 * Yes, 156 users is pretty impressive. I wish a few more of them would start contributing though. Right now, it's me who is doing more than 95% of the edits here. Well, I don't mind doing the work, but I could really use some help with making general design decisions, like the one we're discussing here right now. Otherwise the whole wiki layout and structure will eventually be based on Tetris L's very subjective opinions, taste and feelings, which is not a good thing.
 * I'm okay with leaving the TOC in the article, but please put it at the very top, not below the Overview section. This is something we should discuss in TaRapedia talk:Formatting/General.
 * Okay, I can live with getting rid of the quotation marks. As you said, the text is already marked as a quote quite clearly. This is not a big deal anyway. One question though: Are you generally against putting quotes in quotation markes and italics, throughout the wiki, of just in sections clearly marked as "dialogue"?
 * I'm one of those who don't always put punctuation marks within quotation marks. That's because I'm German, and my native language handles this differently. Also, in school we learn British English, and the Brits handle this differently, too. It is something that I've always found utterly weird about American English grammar, and it is totally against my logic, so I refuse to do it. ;)
 * As for the article structure, I much prefer to keep the objectives a separate, short section. I disagree that it is easier, less confusing, or more navigable to mix the list of objectives with the others stuff. Quite the opposite. To me, the easy and intuitive way to structure mission articles is too keep the layout as close as possible to the mission log. And especially if we get rid of marking quotes, then verbatim quotes from the mission log or dialogues should not be mixed with eachother, and especially not with subjective user notes. Linking to a specific objective is not a compelling argument to me, as this won't be required very frequently.
 * Well, I see we have a pretty strong disagreement about the structure. How can we settle this? -- T ETRIS L 03:00, 10 July 2007 (EDT)