Category talk:News

Titles for News articles

As we create more and more News items and policies get added, I think we should standardize on a naming structure. I think it would be best to be consistent with other conventions on the forum (e.g. Posts) where we do two things:

• Dates in titles should be MM/DD/YYYY as they appear elsewhere on the wiki.
• I'm not sure that the "Dateline" that is in most articles is valuable either for searching or sorting items within the category, could this be dropped?
• Do we need to have the names in ALL CAPS?

  Should we just follow standard naming policy where you capitalize the first word, and then only proper names?

I'd like to propose a new format such as News:<title>_-_MM/DD/YYYY. Example: News:How_to_transfer_characters_between_accounts_-_08/16/2011

By no means should this be seen as the standard, I'm just trying to open a discussion that hopefully one day makes it into the Manual of Style. - padhg (talk) 10:12, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

I'm fine with changes. As I started the current project rolling, here was my thought process:

I changed the date to the one we're using (YYYY/MM/DD) so that viewed on a category list, things will show up chronologically. That's just a personal OCD peeve I have, when things are grouped together by months but are years apart.

I just took, verbatim, the title line from the actual in-game NEWS articles and made that the page title (with the above DATE modification), with the addition of "NEWS:" preceding it. So, that includes the word "Dateline".

As per GM Lyneya's recent post, all the policy changes, and I suspect the related NEWS articles, are going to be updated. So it might even be a good time to make suggestions that get rolled into the IG POLICY and NEWS systems for better formatting there that makes wiki-ing those articles more streamlined.

Also, I feel that getting these articles up is the 1st phase of this project. Each of the current REDIRECT pages (ie. News 5 1) I hope in phase 2 to turn into DISAMBIG pages as updated NEWS articles replace the current ones.

--Kythryn 10:24, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

Perhaps we just make this easier and take the date out of the title? For example, in game there is only one version of NEWS 4 10 that is updated every month. If we only keep the latest NEWS/POLICY on the page News 4 22 - <title> and let the page history take care of the versioning? In this way, if someone types "news 4 22" into the search bar, the result is auto-suggested. It also means not having to update any redirects every time the NEWS/POLICY is updated. Thoughts? - padhg (talk) 10:48, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

Unfortunately, I am heading out of town here in a couple hours and won't have internet access, so this will be my last "chime in".

We can certainly do the above suggestion (no date), or change the title layout. I was following the general idea of "exact documentation", like we do with forum posts (we don't MOS those titles either (ex. Post:IMPORTANT: The EXP system, Elanthia, and you. - 5/13/2009 - 23:02:07)), simply use the title of the actual forum post + <date/time>.

If we do choose to have the HISTORY log changes, can that be found via a SEARCH? For example, if someone searches for "Bard Hodierna's Lilt" and the current News 3 3 comes up, will it continue to show up on a SEARCH once that article has been written over? We had talked about this when making up pages...some of these that are pretty static (like the category 5 ones) could be "stand alone" with no dates. But, there are other categories that get new articles frequently. I was thinking about those for the long-term documentation. So, since the NEWS system as a whole should be consistent with all the articles over all 5 categories, we need to have a naming system that works for all the types of articles IMO.

Anyhow, whatever you and Mistanna (and anyone else that chimes in on this) decide to do is fine with me! --Kythryn 11:25, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

Page history is not typically searched, so if we treat NEWS items like a command pages and it was changed, the old content would not show up. The real question is do we tread these pages like Posts (with dates, and have to maintain a redirect to the latest one), or do we treat them like command pages? Right now we're doing a little of both. - padhg (talk) 11:29, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

Re: archiving historical news article contents - News articles can be archived using via use of an archive sub-page. See User_talk:CARAAMON/Archive for an example. These still show up in a search, with the archive sup-page clearly visible. A link at the top of the page can link to the archive page indicating that there are archived versions available to peruse. See User_talk:CARAAMON for an example of such a link. I recommend using this format of archival.

As for page naming, I think we should take out the date as well since the date is not in the title of the news article. I.e. we don't see the date when typing NEWS on its own, only seeing it when we actually type NEWS 1 1 for example. (To compare, posts sort of have the date in their title on the forums.) Post dates are also fixed, whereas news article dates change despite being named the same. This is better suited to having the date be in the body of the article rather than the title so that we don't end up with multiple copies of each news article floating around out there.

With regards to using all caps or not in the page name, either way works for me. The news article in game is titled in all caps, and when quoting in game things we typically tend to retain capitalization. E.g. post names, messaging quirks, etc. As a personal preference, however, all caps does look annoying so I would actually be okay with formatting it with proper sentence form like we do with most page names. Taking both of those into account, if I was making the sole decision I would lean towards proper sentence form. E.g. [[News:Dateline_2002/01/02:_ACCOUNT_INFORMATION_UPDATES]] should be [[NEWS 5 20 - Account information updates]]. (Note the removal of the colon. This is a troublesome character to have in a page name due to how it gets used by the wiki.) Or if simply using the shortest possible form then just NEWS 1 1, although I do think that is too short of a name since it's nice to have the brief descriptor of what the news article is about.

P.S. I will add this to the manual of style once we can agree on a good format and method of archiving.--ABSOLON (talk) 11:46, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

If we have the article title in the url aren't we just back to having to have redirects from the main NEWS page? I'd think that just having the url as ie. https://elanthipedia.play.net/News_2_17 might be best, with the title and date of the article boldly at the top. We don't have to update news 4, that changes too often so I put a link to the DR Calendar there. For history, we could either just move down the previous news like we do on the vision list page and put the new news entry at the top, or do the archive page. Neither of those sound like too much work once they're set up. I do think having the year first for the 'category' helps with finding more relevant info though instead of sorting by month, but either way we decide to store 'old info' will probably be fine as most all of these news articles are probably going to see updates. --BLADEDBUTTERFLY (talk) 12:57, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

"If we have the article title in the url aren't we just back to having to have redirects from the main NEWS page?"

Maybe I'm not not understanding what you mean, but this is what it is now with the new format too. If we want to get rid of redirects on a specific page because it's preferable to link directly then we just change the links on the page to directly link to where we want it to go. And the redirect page itself would still be useful even on its own if it's not linked to on any page. For instance, you can type NEWS 1 1 into the search bar and the NEWS 1 1 page would redirect to the article with the full name such as NEWS 1 1 - Welcome to DragonRealms, assuming that was what pagename format was decided on, even if no page had a direct link to NEWS 1 1. Redirects themselves are a good thing to have on a wiki and shouldn't be avoided. The general rule of thumb is if in doubt, create a redirect.

The reason why I suggest having the article title in the pagename is simply for informational purposes for a wiki user. NEWS 1 1 on its own isn't very informative, but NEWS 1 1 - Welcome to DragonRealms is. Also, it's (effectively) what the news article is titled in game when you type NEWS and I'm inclined to use it simply on that basis because it's generally how we handle naming of pages of things that can be found in game.--ABSOLON (talk) 13:35, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

At this point is anyone against standardizing on NEWS_#_#_-_<title> for all NEWS/POLICY pages? - padhg (talk) 14:05, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

That sounds okay to me! Redirects seem pretty easy for if titles change, but I'll let you guys handle the first bunch of page changes, I'm pretty newb and just copy pasting mostly for the document migration. I finished a couple more sections, only News 5 is left. If you guys can get a few pages done that I can copy for the rest of the policy documents, I'll use the new format for those once I get back here in an couple hours. Yay almost done with the first part! --BLADEDBUTTERFLY (talk) 14:24, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

Happy to do the page movement and fixing redirects work, but it appears we can't Move pages now (see Elanthipedia_Bugs#Page_Movement_Errors). Until this is fixed, can we just make sure to create new pages with the new format? - padhg (talk) 16:00, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

Okay, 5-26 through 5-39 I tried to put in the correct new format. On 5 37 I typoed glass as class in the url, opps. Can whoever does the page changes also change the redirects with a : before the news to match the redirects I put in for 26-39? I left those : links on the page active for now. There's one or two in there where we forgot to put the year first, the very first one 'welcome to dragonrealms' has two identical pages so one could get deleted. Please let me know of any mistakes I didn't catch so I can edit better as this is going to be an ongoing project with lots of changes as things get rewritten. Yay first stage of data migration complete! --BLADEDBUTTERFLY (talk) 23:01, 31 August 2016 (CDT)

As far as the in game NEWS command and Lyneya's request for a discussion on the topic is concerned, I think that the articles could use some serious purging and updating on the whole. As it stands it's basically just a huge wall of outdated text. Things like guild updates are sparse and don't seem to contain some of the most important updates pertaining to guild releases. If these were actually updated consistently, they would be handy, but at the moment there's just not much valuable information. Anything regarding policy should be removed from NEWS and addressed under the POLICY command. I'd rather see options via NEWS that pertain to thing like GM Announcements so that I can check those in game without navigating to the forums. In game events are handy to have, but it doesn't show special events like Duskruin and HE. Overall I just feel like the current news articles are in need of a serious cleaning of house, NEWS should pertain to actual news and updates to the game rather than being used as a policy addendum. --WHITEBEAUTY (talk) 00:22, 17 September 2016 (CDT)