Lostpedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 2

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Cite.php

I just wanted to mention that Admin has agreed to install User talk:Admin#Cite.php on Lostpedia. This may simplify/centralize/standardize the way we handle episode references, etc. I am hoping to have a lively debate about its use after it is installed (not sure when Admin plans to install it). In the meantime, I have already created a sample template to get the ball rolling: Template:ref ep.--Dagg 07:36, 13 December 2006 (PST)

Looks great. I'd still like there to be an option to reference just the episode in general (link to episode article) or to a specific scene (anchor on transcript page).--Jackdavinci 11:16, 13 December 2006 (PST)
It does seem like a good idea to have the option of linking to a specific scene. Do any of our current transcripts have anchors?--Dagg 12:13, 13 December 2006 (PST)
I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of putting anchors into the transcripts to use as reference points. There seem to be two good ways to go about it: 1) Plant the anchors where the DVD chapters start; or 2) Plant them at Act and Scene breaks like this. Any thoughts? -BearDog 14:28, 13 December 2006 (PST)
I love the second option! Funtastic :-) Let's do it. When is the cite plug-in getting installed? --Jackdavinci 23:03, 15 December 2006 (PST)

That looks great! We should turn it over to a vote to do that. --Marik7772003 14:38, 13 December 2006 (PST)

  • I like the idea in principle, also, though I think we shouldn't make any changes that are too drastic without Spooky's permission, since she does the transcripts, and does not like the idea of them getting edited to the point where they no longer fit her standard format (that is why they are protected now--also because she donates them to other sites, so that causes another issue). However, she's not around lately, and there are natural breaks in the transcripts where she marks commercial breaks. These are not inclusive of all scene breaks, so we couldn't say "SCENE 1", "SCENE 2", but I think we could justify writing it in as "SECTION 1" etc--have those as anchors. I don't think this is something she'd object to, and it might help with the citations idea, which I think is a good one for referencing purposes. Is there no way to embed citations (for ease of searching) that do not change the appearance of the scripts themselves (visible divisions)? --PandoraX 13:18, 20 December 2006 (PST)
  • How about something like ===[[S1E01#Act1| ]]=== ? I think it might reference a page that doesn't exist, but it wouldn't show a line break or any text, so there wouldn't be a red link. Are there any obvious downsides, or maybe just cleaner, simpler ways?-BearDog 14:15, 20 December 2006 (PST)
  • Nevermind, I found the obvious downside. It just didn't work. Anyways, even if we just label the commercial breaks as "Commercial Break 1", "Commercial Break 2", and then use 3rd level headers, it shouldn't make any pagebreaks.-BearDog 15:45, 20 December 2006 (PST)
  • I think the divisions have to be visible. Otherwise, how will people know how to refer to them? Right? But if for some reason it doesn't matter if people can see them, then you could do this I think: <span id="Scene_3_2"></span>.--Dagg 16:04, 20 December 2006 (PST)

Bloat & Section Merging

Though this MoS talks about avoiding bloat, I think the article itself is getting kind of bloated, and getting away from the purpose of the article, which is to talk about style of writing: Issues such as how to title articles, when to wikify links, etc. I feel that the two headings at the bottom about merging, redirecting, etc. and netiquette aren't really about style; they are becoming redundent to the info already in the Lostpedia:General usage guide and should be taken out and redirected there. --PandoraX 03:27, 28 December 2006 (PST)

  • I nominated some sections for merging with the General usage guide; not the whole article, which deserves its own page. But it's getting too long with general LP rules and suggestions, which should go in the general guide. I put the merge templates just over the subheadings I'm refering to. This is quickly becoming an article about anything and everything on the site, which is getting beyond the scope of just guidance as to writing style. --PandoraX 07:44, 28 December 2006 (PST)
  • Merge: All the sections in questions deserve to be merged.--CaptainInsano 07:20, 2 January 2007 (PST)
  • Merge: I agree on all the sections. It's pretty ironic that a guidline reminding us to be concise would be so long! ;) -BearDog 08:46, 2 January 2007 (PST)
  • OK, thanks, glad you guys understand... I moved some of those sections over to Lostpedia:General usage guide. If you see any points of overlap I didn't catch (on either page), please edit it out... but I tried to make it so that there's little redundency. --PandoraX 10:10, 2 January 2007 (PST)

Caps vs. lowercase in subsections

Can we reopen this subject, please? I know Dagg feels strongly that we should keep it lowercase, to conform with wikipedia conventions (and I do see his point, which he left more detailed on my talk page, I'll let him make the argument below), but I and some others still find the caps more aesthetic, and this was always the convention I was taught in H.S. and beyond for subsection titles (the only reason we have the article naming convention is a pragmatic one, because of the wiki search engine). As I told him, I wouldn't mind going with whatever is decided, but I'd like to see that there IS a consensus first, for consistency. I just went through a whole article and converted to lowercase (despite my feeling against this), and someone went back and changed it to all caps again, LOL. Straw poll? --PandoraX 15:23, 6 January 2007 (PST)

First word capped only

  • Yes, see my arguments below. In short, I like the consistency.--Dagg 15:37, 6 January 2007 (PST)
  • Vote. This standard would also obviate the infinite confusion and debate that inevitably sprouts up over whether some word is, for example, an adposition or article, and deserves lowercasing, or part of an infinitive (is it "How to Be a Survivor" or "How To Be a Survivor"?) or whether the heading should follow some other arcane ruleset in the myriad special cases that might crop up. (As an immediate example of this, note that in the subheading below, I would argue that "Etc." would never be capitalized.) Robert K S 05:01, 7 January 2007 (PST)
  • Yes I really think it looks better, with an exception for proper nouns, for the headers to conform to the titles. -BearDog 08:53, 8 January 2007 (PST)

All Words Capped (Except for Adpositions, Articles, Etc.)

  • Yes --PandoraX 15:23, 6 January 2007 (PST)

Consensus: First word capped only

There was not a lot of activity in the vote above, but Santa pointed out that this issue was decided previously. This guideline has now been added to the proposed manual of style for Lostpedia.--Dagg 12:32, 22 January 2007 (PST)

Capitalization of headers

Hi all; should all words in headers be capitalized? We should standardize something to avoid revert-wars. I personally like the convention ultimately decided in Wikipedia's MoS (headings)#Capitalization:

Capitalize the first letter of the first word and any proper nouns in headings, but leave the rest lower case. Thus "Rules and regulations", not "Rules and Regulations".

The convention seems to make sense. Afterall, we lowercase level-1 headers and titles already, and we lowercase "See also" and "External links". Besides consistency, there are other advantages as well, but (I think) they are relatively minor, so I won't list them. What do the rest of you think?--Dagg 15:32, 6 January 2007 (PST)

Oops, PandoraX beat me to it... see discussion above instead :).--Dagg 15:37, 6 January 2007 (PST)
  • While I totally respect Dagg's opinion, I'll put a rebuttal here. :) The reason we use the "first word capped rule" for article titles is because of a pragmatic reason... they cause confusion with the wiki search engine. Subheading titles are not affected by this rule, so I'm not sure why wikipedia has this standard, or that we should adopt it? Maybe if someone could give a practical reason for it, it would help me understand better. I wouldn't mind following a convention for consistency alone, but my issue with it is that it seems like many people seem to think the All Caps idea is standard, so I end up getting reverted even if I follow lowercase. --PandoraX 15:45, 6 January 2007 (PST)
  • I also used to use All Caps in headers, but I found it clumsy. For example, should I capitalize The, and An? What about But, or Or, or His? I like not having to worry about that :). Wikipedia's rule is a very easy rule to learn: only uppercase the first word, and proper nouns. If we are going to use this rule for the title, and level 1 header, then it is non-consistent to use another rule for the level 2 headers. Some articles would end up with verbose stuff like this: ==[[The Other's boat|The Other's Boat]]==. And/or we would have mixed confusing case like this: ==Tree Frog==\n''See main article: [[Tree frog]]''. I know these things aren't the end of the world, but I'm pretty happy not having to deal with these inconsistencies on the other wikis I work on :).--Dagg 16:14, 6 January 2007 (PST)
  • Actually, there's very standard international grammatical rules for this... you simply do not capitalize articles, prepositions and conjunctions unless they are the first word. This is the standard for English compositions. See [1] or [2] --PandoraX 12:56, 19 January 2007 (PST)
  • That wikipedia Capitalization link is one of the pages that started me leaning towards the "only proper nouns and first letter rule". It happened when I read about all the variations used at different places: Wikipedia:Capitalization#Headings and publication titles. This is only a slight lean though :). I want to go with whatever the consensus is, but I do not see a lot of activity in the voting yet.--Dagg 14:32, 19 January 2007 (PST)
  • I thought this case was closed long ago. We changed almost the entirety of Lostpedia through the fall and winter. It should be initial caps only (other than proper nouns). Headers are not in themselves truly titles, and do not merit title capitalization, and as further support, even article names are not thus capitalized, so it makes sense that articles' subordinate headers would not be either. Case long closed, we can't keep re-opening issues because the MoS article didn't keep up with it; there's a reason why the MoS isn't policy yet, and it's because policy is evolving, and the MoS is not the vehicle driving it-- the MoS article is serving to record our consensus once it's achieved, but since Lostpedia is so (fairly) new, this is an ongoing process with regard to many formatting issues. More on this later if there are questions.-- C¯ _Santa_ ¯T 14:42, 19 January 2007 (PST)
  • OK, that's cool by me... as I told Dagg, I just wanted to double check that there was a firm consensus on it, because I had started changing the titles to the MOS leaning (first letter only), and then a few other users reverted it back. It confused me, but if this has been brought up a couple of times (and it appears many of the regular users do lean towards following it), I'm fine with enforcing it also. Someone please do A-Missions, I did that entire page in lowercase headers, and someone else made it all uppercase again, lol. Thanks! --PandoraX 14:44, 19 January 2007 (PST)
  • Sounds good folks. I went ahead and added this guideline to the MoS. I also changed the existing headers on that page to follow this rule. Feel free to correct if I screwed anything up, or if I jumped the gun, etc.--Dagg 15:15, 19 January 2007 (PST)

Table Happy?

There's a lot of articles that have been virtually replaced with infoboxes and tables (see A-Missions, Children, Deceptions and Cons, Premonitions, Relationship Issues, Rivalries, and Secrets). Articles that were mainly lists or outlines to begin with seem particularly susceptible, and I have some concerns I'd like to mention and see what other people think:

  • Stunted Growth: I see an outline-style article as a pupal form of a prose article. If people keep adding to the list or outline, eventually someone realizes that the information will organize better as prose. However, having infoboxes and tables can give an unfinished article a finished look, which I'm worried might discourage the drive to contribute further.
  • Complicated: While I in no way intend to disrespect all the time and effort that's gone into creating and adding all these templates and tables, the time and effort is one of my concerns. In just a few weeks the show will be starting back up, and we can probably expect a massive influx of new editors. If our pages are too complicated we may intimidate away those who are inexperienced with html or wiki-syntax, but could still make real contributions through insight, research, or writing skills. Since the format of a table or template can be munched by a single keystroke, deletion, or misplaced variable, it could also add frustration towards the newbies who do try to contribute, but make errors.
  • Form without Function: While I understand the desire to add color to a visually unappealing list, I strongly believe that adding content is a better contribution. Making a big beautiful table out of a stub article strikes me as polishing the proverbial merde (Please pardon my French). No matter how smooth and shiny you make it, it's still just a turd at heart. A table or infobox can make a wonderful illustration to a more developed article (see Character Connections, or any of the Character pages for examples), but as an entire article it seems a little flat. They're pretty, but lack the information of a complete article.

Again, I mean absolutely no disrespect to the effort that so many editors have made in putting these boxes and tables in place, I just think that Lostpedia would benefit from a discussion of how and when they're best used. -BearDog 10:48, 15 January 2007 (PST)

I've have seen this take place too, and I do believe we shouldn't use this many templates on pages that had no problem. Just adding templates to add templates is insane. Plus with templates being confusing to some new users it will discourage them from editing.--CaptainInsano 11:13, 15 January 2007 (PST)
  • Im one of the people you mentioned who has been trying to do this. Basically, I dont like list articles that much. I think that a lot of the time they look messy and deorganised, which is why Ive been doing sectionboxes. That's all I have to say. --   Lost Soul   talk  contribs  11:19, 15 January 2007 (PST)
I've been watching and have contributed to this "table-happy" phenomena, and I agree it could get out of hand. I'm not sure where to draw the line. I've been writing up this doc: User:Dagg/Article types to try and understand the flavors of style and their benefits, drawbacks, etc.--Dagg 11:28, 15 January 2007 (PST)
  • I think this has pretty much all been said, but I do agree and brought this up, too. There's a time and place for sectionboxes (I think Literary works is one example, where there are very standard fields that should be filled in for every piece, and no long paragraph fields), but sometimes they make things needlessly complex, when the ordinary format is already organized, just not as "glamorous". I think we should shoot for content over appearance first. But anyway, it's nothing personal to anyone either, just personal style. --PandoraX 13:04, 19 January 2007 (PST)
  • I'm a bit concerned when the templates hinder simple editing of the article. As illustration I'm still not convinced the red/green coloration is sufficient justification for the difficulty in editing A-Missions. The same balance should be weighed carefully in other cases where cosmetics may hinder the mission of the wiki, which is community collaboration in adding information. -- C¯ _Santa_ ¯T 14:44, 19 January 2007 (PST)
Perfect example of how the templates hinder Lostpedia, Animal article before templates; Current Animal article. Soon it is going to 60 sec on DSL to load pages.--CaptainInsano 15:56, 30 January 2007 (PST)
I believe it has more to do with the size of the page than it does the fact that templates are used. When I test those pages from the data center (on a very fast connection) They both load instantly. Maybe we should create a policy on physical page size. --Admin 17:25, 3 February 2007 (PST)
Sounds good Admin, but how long is too long? Also, how would long pages be split? Talk pages are easy, but actual articles? Perhaps split them into Seasons where possible (e.g. A-Missions) --Blueeagleislander 17:34, 3 February 2007 (PST)
  • I believe the issue was 1) messiness, i.e. reading difficulty and 2) editing difficulty, and that captain's "load-time" comment was mostly in jest. The original criticisms still are valid IMO. As another example see a sectionboxed version of Bars, in which relatively simple content is obscured. -- C¯ _Santa_ ¯T 12:33, 5 February 2007 (PST)

Adoption

  • Due to some confusion on the issue, I wanted to try to make the purpose of the MoS(proposed) explicitly stated:
  1. The current standard practice of Lostpedia with regard to styles is precedence and consensus.
  2. The future goal is that it will be based on a MoS.
  3. The MoS(proposed) is being created to the end of developing a final and usable MoS as a primary resource for editing questions.
    • The MoS(proposed) is not policy
    • The MoS(proposed) should not be cited as an argument supporting/contradicting any editing policy
    • The MoS(proposed) Talk Page may be cited, in some cases, as a page where the primary discussion toward consensus is taking place on a particular editing issue.
  4. The MoS(proposed) is being developed in two fashions:
    • Individual arguments based on its talk page
    • Compilation of current standard practice in Lostpedia, as established previously by consensus and precedence
      • It is important to note that this compilation is still incomplete, and the main MoS(proposed) article may not accurately reflect current standard practice, which is the main reason why the MoS(proposed) should not be cited to support/contradict any editing decisions.
  5. The adoption of the MoS as policy has no timeline. Note that Lostpedia is relatively young, and has a relatively smaller pool of editors contributing to policy discussions compared to WP. As a result, even much simpler policies such as Lostpedia:Canon are still in discussion (and again attempting to reflect current standard practice rather than the prescriptive other way around) and yet to be adopted-- more complex and multifaceted issues such as a MoS may take much longer and may have to be split into separate parts that are adopted separately.
(Will add more and edit the above as we consider this further)-- C¯ _Santa_ ¯T 18:25, 3 February 2007 (PST)
Hm. So it's not policy, it can't be referred to in support of certain style conventions, and it has no timeline for adoption. This means that the MoS (a) is ineffectual and (b) has no compelling reason to ever become effectual. Robert K S 10:58, 5 February 2007 (PST)
No. It means that the proposed MOS is ineffectual. When it is finalized and adopted it will be effectual, and that is the compelling reason to finish. The project is half done, so the glass is half full. -BearDog 11:54, 5 February 2007 (PST)
  • RobertKS, I see your point. To clarify, I was trying to address the fact that some users are referencing the MoS(proposed) to justify their version of changes, and often what they are referencing are issues that were only very recently inserted (sometimes by that user), and was either 1) not discussed at all, or 2) actively in dispute, on this talk page. Also, I wanted to address the issue that we have already had unproductive disputes when attempting to force a timeline, e.g. on issues such as Lostpedia:Canon, and Lostpedia talk:Quotes within articles (proposed). As I mentioned immediately above, we simply don't have the vast userbase (size) resources (nor history) of the WP community, so forcing a timeline simply would not work at LP. As an illustration, what if our deadline had been today? Who decides what to put in the MoS? Do we institute policies in dispute, resulting in the change of the entire wiki? Then re-change the entire wiki after these policies are decided on this talk page? (Of course that would not be desirable.) I opened this discussion topic because I saw this problem, and you have pointed out some related problems too. If you could chart out a solution to an actively operating MoS, you may do so here. My opinion was that this was not possible in the short term, and I gave my reasons why, and further wanted to state the timeline problem explicitly to the editorship, so that the MoS(p) would not be mis-used as it has been. Furthermore, the lack of a true MoS is not a problem: Lack of a MoS is how Lostpedia always has operated. In other words we have other means (consensus & precedence) that have served us so far, so being in a holding pattern while the MoS(p) is being developed is not a "disaster". It is true that we would all like a MoS, but it is also true that LP is fairly young-- less than a year ago, we had relatively little content that we hardly ever thought about consistency in the types of issues we are discussing today. We'll get there, but we're OK without a MoS until that time, and the MoS(p) should not be mistaken for policy until that time either. As an illustration, we've seen that Lostpedia:Canon, also supposedly "stuck" in that limbo of non-adoption, is now very close to being ready: The problem (again) was that relatively few editors were participating, so the going was slow. MoS will also get there, don't worry. In short, we need more active contributions in these discussions from editors like yourself (i.e. contributions from others like you have already made) and others. -- C¯ _Santa_ ¯T 12:45, 5 February 2007 (PST)

Images

The British U

I believe all british "U"s should be removed from articles (Colour, Honour ect). It's not that big of a deal, but seeing as its an American show and to be consistant, I'd propose that we add this to the poilicy.

At the same time, not going on some sort of massive witch hunt for "U"s, but just changing them when we see them.

What do you think? -- Iron Man  Send a message  View contributions  12:28, 2 May 2007 (PDT)

I think it's a good idea, it's an American show, the site is updated to the American airing's, why not?--Baker1000 13:02, 2 May 2007 (PDT)
The policy has been for a while that whilst the British U in the site isn't a problem, its fine to correct it into US English spelling but not back to British English  Plkrtn  talk  contribs  email  14:57, 10 February 2008 (PST)

Typo

"Correct: Desmond apparently killed Desmond accidentally." should read Desmond apparently killed Desmond Kelvin accidentally. -- LOSTonthisdarnisland 16:12, 18 March 2008 (PDT)

Would someone please fix this as the source is locked. Thank you -- LOSTonthisdarnisland 21:12, 1 April 2008 (PDT)
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