DISCUSSION General Wiki Discussion

^ Anyone? ...anyone? -echo, echo, echooo-

If I were to create a "manual of style", what formatting rules should be standardized?

 

Honestly, I think what I had in mind for the previously-discussed "Manaverse instruction manual" or "Beginner's Guide" would be best suited to the forums as a setting. It being on the forums allows it to attract the attention of people who are already here. If it does its job well, it gets people to care about the Manaverse more and, consequently, gets them to check out the Wiki. I am also most familiar with the formatting of the forums, which is admittedly a factor for me (since I imagine that I'll be doing the majority of the legwork on the guide, just based on past endeavours of a similar sort).

If/when I do make a Manaverse guide, I'll be sure to include a glossary for the common terms (both in- and out of character).

Mostly what comes to mind is stuff like what gets put into boldface, what gets italicized, what constitutes a roleplay versus a canon (for example, in a couple planet pages, the "Primary Canons" field has roleplays listed), when to redlink, when to list things with bullet points and when to condense it into a paragraph (as is the case with character pages and the Inherent Abilities section), the overall "tone" we are going for... Rulings on various technicalities that have arisen.

An overall "manual of style" would, I feel, double as a guide for editing that could also include informative/useful things, like Giga's "How to Table" thread.

Although as I think more about it, maybe I'm trying too much to splinter the methods for discourse about the Wiki. We do already have the Talk pages, the IRC, and this subforum to discuss these things... and all channels are somewhat starved by each other. Particularly, the IRC absorbs the majority of the discussion because it's the easiest and is in real time.

 

On that note, I feel like the monster thing should be dealt with sooner rather than later. Although the "need" hasn't really arisen recently, it seems to me that if @Shadow is still in the process of slaving over a "reworked definition" then maybe we should bring that discussion into a public setting. If only so the burden doesn't just lie with one person.

 

Noting @"Ziolang"'s recent edits to Ziolang Hirasu's page, are we going to adopt the name Vodera for widespread use? If so, then we should probably move the page and make some changes to the CoU-related pages, as well.

 

Would it be worthwhile for me to start posing some general "thought-sparking" worldbuilding questions in various planetary threads? I think that it could help develop some worlds or maybe incite an interesting train of thought, but I would only want to do that if people were interested in responding/playing along. If I'm just shouting these questions into the abyss then it somewhat defeats the purpose, I think!

But I do think that this section of the forum could use some development. I know that the "Talk" pages serve similar purposes, but for some reason the forum feels like it lends itself better to the "conversational" nature of dev discussion things.

So yeah. If you guys would be interested in having me pose some questions in your thread(s) informally (like a planetary AMA) to get the creative juices flowing/to inspire you to write down some information that's already in your heads, let me know and I'll do it.

 

Here's a neat little "lecture" tutorial about mapmaking principles. I thought it might be interesting for anyone who is planning to make their own map for a planet.

 

I keep forgetting to bring this up, so I might as well do it now. What do you have in mind for the standardization of categories? Do you think we should have navigational categories for pages that are Stubs (or other meta information for the Wiki)?

I'll probably split this into its own thread so we can all kind of weigh in on it...