elanthipedia talk:Projects

Books

As I've gone through the books, I've noticed at least one book (The Legend of the World Dragon) that was entered twice under different call numbers. I'm wondering, is entering books under their call numbers the best categorization system? The call numbers are pretty close to arbitrary, making it difficult to link to them from a general article (eg, if you want to link to Focus on Magic in an article on magical devices). Is this worth re-doing? I'm not volunteering for the task, but I feel I should at least raise the issue. Other thoughts on resolving some of the current ickyness with the books would be appreciated. --Basselope 18:10, 6 November 2007 (CST)

I agree, I've always thought having call letters as the article title was really clunky and counter-intuitive. But I've always assumed that whoever made the big push to put in a lot of books had a reason to do it that way, but I can't think what it was. Anyone know why?

IMO we need article titles that match the book title, possibly adding (book) at the end so it's clear what the article is. In my view, the best way would be to make the current call-letter article titles redirect to the main book article, which would have the real title. I think it's infinitely more natural when reading the book article to look at the top of the page and see the title instead of a bunch of nonsense letters.

It's also my impression that books need a lot of work here in general. Many, many book articles need wikification, and haven't even been marked with {{WikifyBook}} yet. --Farman 23:11, 8 November 2007 (CST)

BTW Basselope, it's customary on a talk page to add new items to the end of the page rather than the top. --Farman 23:12, 8 November 2007 (CST)

Sounds good to me. I'll start us off. Whoever wants to help with this (shouldn't take too long at all), go to the Category:Libraries and take the next library on the list. I'll do the first library or two right now. --Kraelyst 06:05, 9 November 2007 (CST)

Guilds

I'm going to work up some infoboxes for the guilds, and I'm wondering what is the policy on using images from the Simu website? Specifically I was going to capture the guild illustrations for inclusing in the infoboxes. Farman 09:51, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

Any official images I've been using I've been putting a tag on {{Simu Image}}. This can be added during the initial upload in the Summary field. I assume any usage is fine as long as it's notated (with the tag on the image itself). We aren't using it commercially, so it should be fine.

--Naeya (talk) 10:45, 26 March 2007 (CDT)

Bestiary

I finished updating the bestiary and went ahead and changed the project entry here. I hope that's ok. --Grindinghalt 00:31, 27 March 2007 (CDT)

Perfectly ok! Thanks for the work you did. I think it looks great!--Naeya (talk) 08:45, 27 March 2007 (CDT)

Spells

The spell template with the infobox is excellent, however I propose taking the 'notes' field out of the template and making that part a normal wiki article section. In its current form it is cumbersome and anti-intuitive to edit the notes on a spell. This will become even more so if the notes field for a given spell grows larger than a few sentences.

I have started a discussion on this here: Template talk:Spell --Farman 22:00, 27 March 2007 (CDT)

I also marked the Spells article as a stub since it's a bit spare and needs lovin'. --Farman 22:05, 27 March 2007 (CDT)

After discussion with Naeya, I'm going to redo the spell template as described above. And having looked over the spell articles with an eye towards the work that needs to be done, here's what I'm going to start in on.

1. It's a big job, so I will create an Elanthipedia:Projects/Spells page so discussion and task completion can be tracked more efficiently without cluttering up the main Projects page.
2. Update each spell article to conform with the new spell infobox.
3. Spell descriptions seem based on the DR Website spells page info, which is out of date for at least some spells. Therefore all the spells need to be compared with current in-game data, and I will be marking all spells with a new template to indicate they have not yet been proofed. High-circle folk from each guild are needed to help proof the guild leader descriptions! Farman 14:57, 31 March 2007 (CDT)

Just a small note. I didn't finish inputing Warrior Mage Spells yet. Will wait until you've made changed to the template.--Naeya (talk) 15:23, 31 March 2007 (CDT)

Just want to give an update... I still plan on doing this but my work schedule has conspired to keep me away from my online hobbies the last few weeks. I'm getting some time off starting next week however and I'll finally have some time for it then. --Farman 14:05, 15 April 2007 (CDT)

Nations

I started in on a category for nations to try and educate the masses about the upper echelons of Elanthian government. I don't know exactly where to file the category and I don't know enough to do a writeup on Odcuru or Andreshlew. I just found it sad that nobody knows what the hell Kermoria is and decided I'd try and spread the word. It'd be cool to have a geography section on the main page instead of just provinces. --User:Kadru

Characters/NPCs

I've been working on entering my notes on various characters and noticed some categorization weirdness. Some of my old articles for members of the Theren family (eg, Jeladric_III and Jeladric_IV) have been collapsed into one super-article (The Theren Family). A similar thing was done with the Crowther Family].

I don't think this was a wise decision. It creates big, messy pages with information about characters with no common link save a common surname. For example, you'll have the full biographies for characters that lived in different times, in different places, and under different conditions. Why were the entries moved? I don't see it solving any problems.

The scheme I had been using was to create a surname page (eg, Theren or Crowther) along with individual pages (eg, Jeladric_III or Erzebet) which linked to each other. This way, if the reader was looking at the Erzebet entry and only needed that, the page was clean and easy to read. But, if the reader wanted more information about Erzebet's relatives, it was only a link away.

I'm going to hold off on putting things back to the old way for now, but what do others think? Am I missing the rationale behind these changes? --Basselope 02:08, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

I like your way better, Basselope. That is, I like each character to have their own page and then also have a family page, with mutual links going to the other page. I also prefer to have full character names used for article titles rather than just a first name. That's my 2 cents. --Kraelyst 12:44, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

I agree with you both. There's nothing wrong with having what is essentially a stub article for each personage, leaving room for expansion should anyone choose. I also think articles get unwieldy when they're too long. But this is one of the unavoidable "features" of a collaborative wiki editable by anyone; the person who changed it obviously had other thoughts. I see you've raised this point on the appropriate talk page; I think that's the appropriate place to discuss the merits of each approach. --Farman 13:39, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

Projects page needs updating

Seems like there's a lot of outdated info on the main project page. It could use a nice scrubbing. --Farman 15:38, 27 October 2007 (CDT)