Talk:Community portal

Archives:
2011

Contacts

Since we restricted editing to those who are in the members group in order to combat spam, we've had a decline in contributions (or so it seems at least.) I think this probably relates to people not understanding that they need to be manually moved to the correct user group after registering. (There was a question about this in the SWC Questions Center recently.)

Perhaps we should set up a page somewhere on the HoloCron, and visibly link to it from the Main Page and/or Community Portal (and possibly other places where it would be useful) with a list of users who are able to change the status of newly registered members to the proper setting. Each name could have a hyperlink that opens the SWC DM window with the recipient name already added, thereby letting the prospective editor shoot off a request for status change right off the bat. --Alex Tylger 19:31, 30 August 2012 (GMT)

Agreed. I guess we would create a sub-section with the Contact List at the top of the Holocron:Guide page and then link to section from the Main Page in a prominent, can't-be-missed way. -- Rupert Havok 20:26, 30 August 2012 (GMT)

OOC Terminology in 'legal documents' or sources

A few days ago Rupert Havok replaced OOC terminology in Mindabaal League Charter, which from what I gather is just a copy and paste of the constitution-like document of an alliance of factions. My question is should we replace OOC terminology in source material? Would we not thus 'falsify' such documents?

I think that a boilerplate message or a footnote indicating that this document may use different terminology and by a word "faction" may mean an "organization"... or something along those lines would be more appropriate.

Another question is whether or not such source material has a place on Holocron. IMHO yes, but it should be marked as such via a different namespace or other indicators. --Xesh Randell 11:49, 5 September 2012 (GMT)

I agree that the source materials should be left intact and at best (imho) be moved to a seperate namespace making them easily distinguishable from the main articles. As discussed here already as well. I do think that (as discussed there) a category would be easier to handle, I'd still prefer a namespace though as to make people see that OOC language is ONLY okay there as to not drag it over to any article pages again. --Qatar Shendo 15:40, 5 September 2012 (GMT)

This was my point-of-view on the question: Overall, I am worried this will set a dangerous precedent. According to Dreighton's instructions regarding the Fizzban article and later community discussions among Holocron editors, OOC articles are only permitted if they are of "exceptional importance" (such as the Combine Commander article). Unless the Charter article warrants exceptional importance on par with the Combine Commander article, I believe the content should be changed or the article should be removed from the Holocron. More importantly, if the Charter article is not deemed "exceptional importance" yet is allowed to include OOC information, this would set an alarming precedent that would allow many articles to likewise contain OOC content. If this occurs, the Holocron would be no more different than Compedia. -- Rupert Havok 19:20, 5 September 2012 (GMT)

I tend to agree with Rupert here because I feel that if we do not set a certain standard now, we open for more issues of this kind down the road that would require arbitrary consideration of all new articles with this problem. The term "faction" is OOC in some manners, but I don't see it being excluded entirely from proper IC articles. For example, an article describing a civil war of some sort might very well refer to factions, but you guys know all that. In terms of the article in question, I can't really say for sure what is most appropriate. On one hand, editing the document from its original form means it is not really an accurate representation of how it was originally written and that spoils it. On the other hand, I am not sure that a document that was written in an OOC manner should be allowed on here, regardless of its overall IC significance. Then again, is the usage of the term faction in the article really so inappropriate? I see a few options. 1 - Add a header to the article stating the content has been revised from the source material for the sake of IC purposes; 2 - Contact the owners of the document and ask if they'd consider changing it so it might warrant inclusion on the Holocron. 3 - Make some sort of distinction - such as brackets - in the text to reflect what has been edited from the source content. An example of this would be the quote on the right in this article where the source content was somewhat poorly written and necessitated some small edits to make it clearer. --Alex Tylger 19:55, 5 September 2012 (GMT)

In my opinion the document owner(s) should be contacted first(before anyone changes ANYTHING in the article). They should be notified that the article contains OOC terms. An appropriate header should be placed above the article and they should be given an opportunity to change the article so it meets the standard.Then perhaps, after a designated waiting period(maybe two weeks), we can add "footnotes" for clarification. —Unsigned comment by Drak`ora Sabosen (talk • contribs).

And yet that charter (and similar documents) unlike Combine Commander is an IC document, and reflects only to well that the majority of the combine does not differentiate all that well between factions and organizations, as evidenced by plenty of GNS articles, and many public IC documents (e.g. see article 1 section 1 of Treaty of Coruscant).

My point is that I do not think an editor should change terminology of an IC legal document without any indication for such change! Options 1 and 3, that Alex mentioned above should certainly be carefully considered on one hand, while on the other a policy or a guideline for posting source material on Holocron should be agreed upon and implemented ASAP. --Xesh Randell 20:37, 5 September 2012 (GMT)

If it hasn't been done yet, I think we need a temporary stub or category to mark articles that are about 'legal documents' and sources. It would help us figure out how many of these articles there are and how much OOC terminology there are in these documents. With data in hand, we can figure out a policy or guideline that covers most scenarios. The options that Alex mentioned are all viable and as long as the original document is linked externally, we should be fine. As for a special namespace, if I'm not mistaken, someone mentioned the need to edit the server file in order to add a new namespace. --Raith Starlight 03:09, 6 September 2012 (GMT)

Yes LocalSettings.php will need to be edited. Instructions can be found here - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Using_custom_namespaces. --Xesh Randell 13:03, 6 September 2012 (GMT)

The Holocron has always been an IC based source of information. All OOC terminology should be altered (if possible into an IC sense) to keep it all IC. As Alex has said, factions can exist in certain cases, but if it's obvious that it should be company/organisation then the change should be made. If its an OOC then at bare minimum should be stubbed or rewritten to be IC related. Ignatius Paak 6 September, 2012

So implementing Orphaea's suggestion (thanks for reminder Qatar) would something like this work? --Xesh Randell 13:03, 6 September 2012 (GMT)

This article or section contains a modified source document. The original document can be found here.

That definitely is a workable solution. I like it -- Drak`ora Sabosen 13:13, 6 September 2012 (GMT)

I do like this solution, although to me personally the issue still stands as of if source materials/gns posts really warrant to be copied to the Holocron 1:1 as "real" articles, as they obviously don't meet an encyclopedic standard and are a primary source that shouldn't even be referred to at all times. As suggested in the old discussion something like wikisource would be needed to make clear that that's not how an article is supposed to look (lack of Intro sentence, no explanations etc.) and as already stated in the old discussion this is not a good idea considering it would split up our limited editing power even more, henceforth the suggestion of a seperate namespace to make it clear they are not "real" articles. I can live with the boilerplate being added instead, but I'd still vote for a namespace if possible. --Qatar Shendo 19:25, 6 September 2012 (GMT)

I agree with Raith, in the sense that, I support the boilerplate solution so long as the original document is linked externally. -- Rupert Havok 22:30, 6 September 2012 (GMT)

I agree that 1:1 copies of source materials are out of place in a normal encyclopedia. On the other hand normal encyclopedias also do not have articles on topics that do not have sufficient and readily available sources, which can be verified by whomever wants to do so. And that availability or absence thereof for [m]any sources pertaining to history of SWC factions and peoples, is in my opinion exactly the reason why we need to have unmodified source documents on Holocron, because whatever was "external" ten or even five years ago is likely to be only accessible via web archive and then only if you're very, very lucky.

Wikisource is just another wiki, and would be a 3rd one for SWC should we(?) decide to go that route... I'm not quite sure there was a need for two separate wikis in the first place, as everything can easily be accomplished on one via different namespaces, portals, and something similar to era icons you see on wookieepedia. --Xesh Randell 09:31, 7 September 2012 (GMT)

Xesh, you've brought up a valid point. Most of our activities are centered around the internet so if the faction implodes and no one (not even the web archive) kept a copy of the original documents, we would essentially lose the originals. A different namespace would work for keeping the originals somewhere without sacrificing the IC intent of the Holocron. For the original documents, we have the question of whether to introduce policy/guideline on what could be stored under the namespace. --Raith Starlight 00:52, 8 September 2012 (GMT)

I am 100% with Xesh on this. I have seen tons of material disappear from faction servers, even from the SWC server itself. So using this wiki as a repository is a good idea in itself. The boiler plate would be a great way to keep main articles IC, yet make it easy for people to find the original material in a separate namespace. As I am a historian IRL you can possibly guess that it almost physically pains we to change as much as a typo in any source, yet all texts - including Holocron articles - have a specific audience and intention, and this rather requires a moderate and careful rewrite. I am glad that so many people are concerned about this, aware of the problem and willing to work on a soluton that tries to be true to the source and the intention of the Holocron. I have to say that I am also a lot more relaxed about the whole matter now than I was a year ago. I take a look at many, many edits in this wiki. I see how people change names of ships, NPCs etc in articles, for example because they decided it would be more fun to have their IC mother named "Lara" than "Sandi" (or vice verse). So replacing "faction" with something more IC in a source document - when done carefully - is by now way down on my list of concerns when it coems to historical consistency of our universe as depicted in the Holocron. We will never be able to police all those edits, even if we wanted to. We can ask people to be reasonable. But we have to keep in mind that our main focus is story telling and giving orientation, not factual information as a "normal" encyclopedia. Yes, we also try to record and sometimes write the history of the universe we play in and this calls for some good practice, just as for a real life historian, but we will not be able to train those standards into all our users and editors and it will sometimes be at odds with the purpose of story telling. As this is not only a problem of documents, but also other OOC material that is included because of its exceptional importance, I decided to set up a namespace "OOC" and "OOC_Talk" for the respective talk pages.--Dreighton 16:21, 12 September 2012 (GMT)

So what kind of articles should go to OOC namespace? Would the original Mindabaal League Charter go there and the holocron-ified version stay in (main) namespace? Would Combine Commander and similar articles be moved into OOC namespace? --Xesh Randell 21:13, 12 September 2012 (GMT)

That is the idea. Let's try it and see, if it works.--Dreighton 21:23, 12 September 2012 (GMT)

new infobox race variant

I've made a conditional variant of infobox race. Please have a look at it and let me know what you think.
The template can be found at Template:Infobox_Race/v2, and I've switched infobox on Hapan page to showcase it. Basically what it does now is omit any field without information.
I'm not really happy with how the known members work, but for now left it mostly intact.
Now that the template is conditional other fields could be added for various species, see http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Species for an example... --Xesh Randell 14:25, 5 September 2012 (GMT)

That looks great. -- Rupert Havok 22:30, 6 September 2012 (GMT)

multiple ship infobox templates in use / modifications to one of them

This was already discussed earlier this year on Talk:Holocron:ToDo#Different_Ship_Templates, but I guess not everyone has seen it. We currently have FIVE templates for ships: {{Infobox ship}}, {{Infobox Ship}}, {{Starfighter-Current}}, {{Freighter-Current}}, and {{Special-Ship}}! First FOUR are (almost) identical!
It was agreed that we should use one. User:Rupert Havok created the latest ({{Infobox Ship}}) and attempted to unify everything in one template. I have further modified the template adding a few fields and making it conditional, i.e. if fields are left empty they will not show on the page that uses template. Please review my modifications - {{Infobox Ship/v2}}, before they are implemented in the main template. Example Infobox can be seen in Pulsar Battle Cruiser article.
Further modification I've considered, but did not implement at this time - displaying amount of escape pods, medical room and various other characteristics like hangar/docking bay, repulsor etc.
Once changes are reviewed and further modifications are implemented and tested, I would like to ask Rupert, who may or may not use special bot script to replace other templates in all ship pages. Or we can divide ship classes and do it manually... --Xesh Randell 04:25, 9 October 2012 (GMT)

I've added a few more fields and moved some fields around.

Still unsure about the field/variable "affiliation" - IMHO a ship class can be associated with multiple factions... What the SWC rules page means is "owner of the datacard" - does anyone have suggestions as to how to phrase that sort of entry in an IC encyclopedia? Manufacturer doesn't quite cut it... Designer? Blueprint owner?

Anyways I would like some feedback before replacing all of the ship templates with this one.

Also any thoughts on whether or not we want to include fields from {{Special-Ship}} and thus remove all but one templates? --Xesh Randell 19:13, 29 October 2012 (GMT)

article deletion discussion

Do "we" want to setup a special page for discussing article and file deletion suggestions?
At the moment many deletion suggestions do not provide any reason at all, and getting involved in discussion of deletion is somewhat complicated with admin and whoever wants to get involved needing to discuss it on the talk page of each article/file. Maybe having a centralized location would allow for better visibility and participation.
Also as some of you may have noticed I've modified {{delete}} to include a reason for deletion right in the header. The usage is simple: {{delete|This file is unused.}} --Xesh Randell 19:21, 29 October 2012 (GMT)

recruitment links

I was contacted by an SWC member and asked about organisation recruitment links in the personal pages.
It seems Infinite Empire is doing stub profiles of their people and adding recruitment links to them. Here are some of the examples:

• Amdaren Hakaari
• Adin Cole
• Alana Barrr
• Jaren Maximus
• Ra Kursadati and so on...

What do you think about it? Do or don't?
Personally I don't think it's (1) neutral and (2) something you would find in an encyclopedia.
--Xesh Randell 13:55, 29 March 2015 (GMT)

I agree that it is something that doesn't fit on Holocron, even less so on one-line articles. Its like cheap spam advertising.

--Lilith Delcroix 14:04, 29 March 2015 (GMT)

My first impulse was to agree, but I actually find it quite clever, how it makes the Holocron interact with Darkness. Maybe we should even use this more. But then it should become a standard that is applied to all people, facions and possibly other objects. Why not work it into the character and faction template? I would not see any fault with a last section (maybe even witha button appearance) that say either "Contact [character]" or "Join [faction]". It would make the Holocron more interactive and better integrated with Darkness. And if it is a standard efature of the template it is not breaking format as much as it does now.--Dreighton 16:10, 29 March 2015 (GMT)

I wouldn't terribly mind such a link on an organisation page, but adding it to the page of every organisation member? What if that person is also a member of several NFGs? Do we allow for adding advertisement for each of them? or any of the organisations that this person belonged to in the past?

A better integration and interaction of holocron with darkness is a worthy goal, but is advertisment promotion the way to go about it? I would rather for example see planet/system/entity description while in darkness be shown from holocron articles... it can be achieved by placing such description within custom tags IIRC, but would certainly require better cooperation with description/writer teams and probably policing as well. But it would add a bit more flexibility and allow more actual SWC history and flair to flow into such descriptions. But I digress.

--Xesh Randell 17:21, 29 March 2015 (GMT)

No, you don't. Your examples rather extend waht I wanted to say. I agree that a recruitment page for every faction member is not the way to go. Note that I rather suggested to add a contact/join link in the character/faction template box of a characer/faction. I think having a button for the join form on the Holocron page of the faction isn't unfair or inapproriate advertising. Doing it the other way around - linking from Darkness to the Holocron - would be another story, but an interesting one. I would not like to see any Darkness content incoporated into any Darkness pages, as we do not have the same level of control over them, but linking to it or maybe even putting up snippets in a way that makes clear that this is taken from the Holocron sounds interesting.

--Dreighton 18:49, 29 March 2015 (GMT)

SWC already has proper venues for recruitment. In addition to which, player pages already list their affiliation, and that link (or the faction's holocron page) link to the faction homepage, so this seems like a redundant and cheap method to scrounge for new members. I find it a detrimental use of the holocron, which is designed to compile information rather than to be used as a recruitment tool. You don't find links all over Wikipedia's people pages either that link you to the jobs databases for the companies they work for. It has nothing to do with the articles.

--Syn 18:45, 29 March 2015 (GMT)

In my opinion, a recruitment advertisement in the External Links section might be appropriate for faction articles, but is quite inappropriate for character articles. Furthermore, if factions wish to attract players via the Holocron, they should do so by writing quality articles and not merely one-sentence article stubs with recruitment links. In contrast to the Infinite Empire's approach, Alex Tylger's Hapes Consortium article is a good example of how a well-written backstory and appropriate imagery can serve as an effective recruitment tool. An informative article about a particular faction often makes me want to join them. However, I do agree with Dreighton that — in the future — Holocron templates could be more interactive faction-wise and database-wise. For example: When you mouse-over the Affiliation field of Infobox Character, "[HoloSite]" and "[Enlist]" links could fade-in (via CSS) at Size 7 pixel font to the right of the faction name. The two links would fade-out when your mouse moves away from that field. This would be less tacky than a "Join the XXX!!!" link at the bottom of underwhelming article stubs. However, we might need a few Wikia Extensions to do this. We could improve the Holocron's functionality and visual appeal in general if we installed a few extension modules. But I think that is a separate conversation alltogether. -- Rupert Havok 20:54, 29 March 2015 (GMT)