elanthipedia:Town Green (policy)

Town Green policy discussion   post
This policy section of the Town Green is to discuss existing and proposed policies and guidelines here at Elanthipedia.
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Town Green
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New users with strange names

Four new users have been created within the last week with similarly weird, code-like names:

Gj0Vxn, LyuZsg, TycZzv, and CpaPqe. Seems kind of fishy to me. Is it possible to run an IP check on them and/or otherwise see whether they're legit or not? None have performed any edits yet. --Farman 16:51, 8 July 2007 (CDT)

If it becomes a problem we can utilize the captcha extension, and make new users enter a string. And/Or we can utilize SpamBlackList which protects us from malicious edits. --Callek 21:14, 8 July 2007 (CDT)

I noticed that too. We'll watch them.--Naeya ^(talk) 22:08, 8 July 2007 (CDT)

IG Secrets

I think it would be useful to state the policy on revealing in-game secrets in articles. Please correct me or add to this if I am wrong.

• Posting in-game secrets or solutions to quests is discouraged on a main article page, as this might reveal the information to someone who came to the article seeking general info only.

A good way to segregate info on secrets is to make a sub-page off the main article. --Farman 16:28, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

How does one make a sub-page? --Kraelyst 18:04, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

Simply have a "secrets" page linking from the main page somewhere, perhaps under the heading of "extra info." Then the subpage can be something like Article Name/Secrets. Or something similar. Just a suggestion.--Naeya ^(talk) 20:56, 20 October 2007 (CDT)

Yup, it's just like subfolders in Windows. Dummy Article would have a subpage Dummy Article/Secrets. The reason I'm bringing this up now is that I'm running across some articles written in the last month or two that include what look like quest walkthroughs. --Farman 13:28, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

Okay, I agree with Farman's original idea for our policy and I think the solution for posting secrets as a subpage is good, though I do have one additional suggestion. Although it may be a hokey old web design trick, we could just make the secret text the same as the background color and that way the secret text could remain in its appropriate place in the article. Let's finish up this discussion and get this policy posted in our help section and wherever else it needs to be. --Kraelyst 05:32, 5 November 2007 (CST)

Posting Policy in general

Actually, I think it would be a good idea to draft a simple posting policy to cover a few basic things:

1. secrets policy
2. language/respect for fellow posters etc.
3. opinion/commentary vs. facts (akin to wikipedia's NPOV?)
4. copyrighted material

Any other thoughts? I'm hoping this can be something pretty simple and casual as opposed to a huge legal document, and have a prominent link on the main page. Growth has been slowing down a little here lately but I still think it would be useful to have a clear posting guideline while Elanthipedia is still relatively new. --Farman 13:28, 21 October 2007 (CDT)

Script articles

I think we need a guideline for how to post scripts.

The problem is that current practice seems to be to post the script with the article title equal to the script name. This can be confusing since there's nothing in the article title that indicates that it's a script, and the potential for conflicts with other article types exists, especially as more and more scripts get posted.

I can see a few ways to approach this, and I'm not sure which is best:

• Put script articles as sub-articles of the main Scripts page, eg "Scripts/AScript". My gut feeling on this is that it doesn't go far enough.
• Put scripts in User space under the author of the script, eg "User:Farman/Scripts/Empathy". The benefit here is that indication of authorship is preserved, however should an account be deleted the scripts would be lost.
• Make a new namespace Scripts eg "Scripts:Scriptname". I think this is the cleanest way to do it but most people will have a hard time searching in anything but the main space.
• Put (script) after the script title, eg "Script (script)". I don't think this is a good idea since it doesn't go far enough in segregating script articles, but it is an option.
• Keep all scripts off-site, and link to the external page. The most severe policy, but it has the benefit of preserving a script author's code, which would otherwise be subject to editing as any other wiki article.

Any thoughts? --Farman 14:29, 4 November 2007 (CST)

Of those options my favorite by far is to add "(script)" to the article title. All the other ideas were good, but each of them also had a fatal flaw which was accurately described. I think the most important thing is that it be easy for people to post their scripts (and easy to find), so doing the subcategory, User namespace, or off-site are all out of the question. I vote "(script)" --Kraelyst 05:26, 5 November 2007 (CST)

I guess allowing the upload of .cmd files would be out of the question too? I think that would be easiest, especial for script users. Being able to download the file instead of copy/paste and creating a new script... just the opinion of a tired empath taking another long walkabout from Elanthia.--Naeya ^(talk) 09:03, 5 November 2007 (CST)