Talk:Main Page
Welcome to the RS wiki!
Please use other articles' discussion pages; if you have a question about the RS or this wiki, email io@rebelsquadrons.org.
Organization
The RS wiki contains a wide variety of articles and attempts to accomplish many things. One result is that there is noticeable dissonance between IC and OOC articles when navigating the wiki.
To facilitate clearer organization, the following overarching categories are proposed:
- Category:Universe - contains all in-character material, such as planets, ships, and so on;
- Category:Rebel Squadrons (a subcategory of Category:Universe) - contains material that reflects the current state of the RS, from both IC and OOC perspectives.
- Category:OOC (a subcategory of Category:Rebel Squadrons) - contains OOC material which has no real IC explanation and reflects the current state of the RS. (An example would be Beginner's Path.) Such material should have an "OOC" heading to alert the reader entering OOC territory.
- Category:Projects (a subcategory of Category:OOC) - contains OOC material that reflects the future state of the RS, not yet officially introduced. Such material should have also have an "OOC" heading.
This organization does not solve the IC/OOC problems inherent in articles about RS units, characters, missions, and so on. For such articles, the following structure is proposed:
- A brief OOC introduction and summary of the article. (For instance, it is necessary to establish that ABG uses D6 roleplaying before describing the material thus derived.)
- The complete IC version of the article. (Items referred to by battle names (e.g. Battle of Blerthmore, planets, GrS years, and so on.)
- The complete OOC version of the article. (Items referred to by mission names (e.g. VSG 1.01), RL years, RL discussions, and so on.)
An article that meets this example is Dave Trebonious-Astoris.
- This almost means setting a left side brain and right side brain wiki. I do think this needs to be addressed. It may take a bit more than categories to pull of the desired effect. Many of the articles are interwoven between IC and OOC. How much of the metawiki code and we mess with at its core. Is there a way to add a new tab to each article? Like one tab for IC and one for OCC?
- We can also just do disamg pages for each and every topic, but that will be pretty labor intensive.
- The other thought I have is that whatever we do, it will be best if we can keep editing of the articles accessible to as many people as possible without being bogged down in code. — fcsuper (What?, Where!) (Inclusionistic Eventualist ) — 23:59, 19 January 2009 (EST)
- I think I have one possible solution that won't be too much of a burden on anyone. Articles that have both IC and OOC elements can be written briefly with just IC and OOC headings and short summaries under each. We can employ a hatnote (some sort of two or three cell table template) that will automatically generate links to /IC and /OOC pages of that article. Under each section page, the same table can be used to link back to the main article and the alternate page. On any articles that are strictly IC or strictly OOC, we can use a couple simple hatnotes just stating that fact. If the hatnote template is sophisticated enough, we can even automatically assign the correct category to each particular page and article (whether it is IC or OOC). — fcsuper (What?, Where!) (Inclusionistic Eventualist ) — 10:52, 21 January 2009 (EST)
- Hmm. I'd prefer to keep IC and OOC all in the same article; having only one side and requiring someone to click "IC" or "OOC" likely means we'll lose a lot of potential readers of the side which needs a click to access. I've found that people are surprisingly lazy about just one more click. I agree that code should be kept out of the way as much as possible.
- As to your suggestion of tabs, I've looked into the matter and it would be possible to add "IC" and "OOC" as tabs at the top (along with "discussion", "edit", and all the rest). I attempted just now to make a JavaScript version that wouldn't require loading another page (dynamic tabs), but that didn't work so well (the wiki didn't seem to allow JavaScript, which is understandable).
- I added an example above of an article format that matches my idea, amusingly enough Dave Trebonious-Astoris. Dave just mailed me to say: I like the idea in theory, but it sounds like a pain to fix all our stuff and force it into that mold. :P Much of it needs significant overhaul anyway, though, so I guess forcing us to go through and change all those categories will at least make us look at the out-of-date stuff and perhaps spend some time on updating it.
- I think an overall vision I have of this change would be for users to assume they're reading in-character things, unless there's an OOC tag (a nice nifty banner?) displayed above the text. I think that would be enough to differentiate the material - not sure if we need to split topics into multiple articles, although hatnotes is a nifty idea.
- Thanks for your input! Hopefully others will join soon, too. -Licah 12:31, 21 January 2009 (EST)
- Hatnotes are easy and fun. We can rip them from wikipedia and just change the wording and image. Speaking of images, we should rip the image template from wikipedia, too.
- Just as a comment about the split articles, I image them feeling disjointed. Where do headings like external links and references get placed? Do we have these as subheadings under the particular IC or OOC main heading, or combine them all at the end some how, like maybe with their own IC and OOC subheadings? — fcsuper (What?, Where!) (Inclusionistic Eventualist ) — 15:48, 21 January 2009 (EST)
- Yeah, I've placed hatnotes in many places here, like Rebel Squadrons Fleet Commander. Does Dave's article feel disjointed to you? To me, only "Former positions" doesn't quite jive with everything else, since it's suddenly a list. I think References - although we don't exactly...have those on the RS wiki :P - could be intermixed without a problem, and External links could stay at the end. Articles tend not to have that many external links here, anyways. I think the reader would accept the semi-OOC-ness of references and links all at the end. If you like, we could find an example article from each category - a Person, a Planet, a Mission, and so on - and present it several different ways according to the suggestions here. -Licah 16:24, 21 January 2009 (EST)
- We can make hatnote templates, but yeah, that's cool. I can create templates for those. I'm thinking of bringing over simplified disamb templates just for the fun of it, even though we won't often have use for them here.
- Dave's article doesn't seem all that much different that what we are already doing. I guess when I was thinking IC vs OOC, I was imaging more stark visual clues that the style of article is shifting at some point, so if someone was specifically looking for OOC, their eyes can just find the location scrolling through the article without reading every heading. This is what started me thinking about an automated hatnote template with links to other pages. If Dave's article is the more desirable course, then perhaps we can use standard heading for OOC section to make is easily identifiable from scrolling and from the table of contents; something like "Out Of Character" section, then broken into any necessary sub-headings?
A person is likely to be the most complex scenario, since it involves IC, OOC and RL. Spokes article would a fun one to play with.— fcsuper (What?, Where!) (Inclusionistic Eventualist ) — 22:57, 21 January 2009 (EST)
- Yeah, Spokes's article would be a good one to tackle. It demonstrates a very tricky part of RS fictional characters: he's bounced around from RSFC to being in multiple squadrons at once, the latter being especially tricky. I can't actually recall an official explanation for this - maybe pilots being shuttled around to different squadrons when not on missions? but that's not a great strategic move. I can ask The Brass about how to resolve this in general.
- I redid FireClaw Squadron to be more of what Iying around during down have in mind (although it lacks real fictional content, since we don't have a Vaughan to ask about that anymore); see what you think. I definitely see some advantages to having hatnotes/multiple pages for IC/OOC - the FireClaw intro is OOC, then the article jumps into IC, then an easier transition to OOC with "Behind the scenes", which is also recognizable from Wookieepedia. Besides the intro, though, I like the flow and transitions of the article. -Licah 22:29, 22 January 2009 (EST)
- PS, worked on Spokes a bit just now. Autobiographies are an interesting thing as far as wikis are concerned, but I'm inclined to let them stay for now; eventually it would be nice to have everything use the same viewpoint (i.e. a "neutral" one). -Licah 22:55, 22 January 2009 (EST)
Organization 2.0
The original proposal for organizing the wiki is probably old and notwithstanding (for the most part), and as such I will post a link to the category structure that I have set up (a while back now) for the wiki. It contains 99% of all the active categories.
Something I would like to see done, however, is a few people to hack through all of the member-related pages and bring them up to a quality similar to Spokes, Adam Mieter, or Licah Fox. A lot of the pages which require updating have been tagged and can be found in Category:Requires Updating.