Forum:Mission article content

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Copied from Talk:Pirate Medicine for community discussion

This article is way too complex. It's too difficult to navigate the information in the way it's presented, nor can we expect to have this information verified any time soon; all of the articles that we do this sort of thing with would have to include DB verification tags, and these tags would likely never be removed. It sets the bar for newcomers extremely high as well, and there's too many spoilers. I think the only dialogue choices we should document are those that alter the course of a mission and those that provide alignment points. I also believe we should limited quoted dialog to information that could be used to provide lore information elsewhere in the project. This include after-mission correspondence, which usually contains no new information and serves as nothing more than a plot spoiler. -- Heaven's Agent 18:41, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

I disagree. Isn't the wiki's goal "to become the most complete and wide-ranging information source for Star Wars: The Old Republic on the internet"? This article documents the relevant information of the mission, including affection changes which are important to some. The formatting can be tweaked if needed and even make the dialog section expandable if you want, but I feel the dialog and correspondence belong in the article. As far as verification, from what I've seen of the Jedi Knight dialog options, they are correct. Having information in there, even if it's incorrect, is better than no information. That way, people can edit what's wrong rather than try to figure out if something belongs and where.

I would like to see input from the community on this so I'm copying this discussion to the forum. -- Alianin T • C 19:20, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

I understand what you're saying, but there is such a thing as having too much information. If a wiki article becomes too long, it loses its purpose and function. We might as well not include such articles, because no one will get anything out of them. People don't usually look up a mission article for an in-depth analysis of its plot and content. They come for specific information, usually a difficult-to-find objective or mob, and if they can't find that information quickly, without much hassle, they go elsewhere.

If you want to include such options, then every mission article will permanently be branded with DB-source verification needed. Unless, of course, you go through each mission with each class with every companion in order to verify all information? We need to get away from simply copying content contained from the DB. It's lazy wiki work, the community sees that, and it doesn't serve to distinguish us in any way; the information is already part of the DB, and by including it here we are, in essences, competing with the DB. There are some things they do better than us. Some things they're designed to handle and we aren't. Let them take care of that. Dynamic options of this magnitude are one of those things; in some missions alignment choices alone can get out of hand.

With regard to dialogue in general, if we strive to include all information we risk alienating a large quantity of potential users. I don't usually read such articles, because I don't want to see spoilers. Granted, in our mission of documenting the game some spoilers are unavoidable, but we need to strive to stay away from them whenever possible; we should limit spoilers to instances when they are needed to explain some aspect of the Star Wars Universe that is not found anywhere else, or specifically to properly document the mission they are from. We need to cut the fat, otherwise the appeal of our project will plummet. Just as stubs are unwanted and can be harmful to a wiki so, too, can overtly and needlesly long articles. The design aspect of wiki work is finding that middle ground.

Lore articles are the articles that can be longer; users looking them up want a more in-depth summation of info. General game articles, such as mission articles, are inappropriate for such content. -- Heaven's Agent 20:01, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

I'd agree with Alianin here, I don't see why we shouldn't include it in the wiki. Alternately, we could spin these off to separate articles, e.g. Pirate Medicine/Dialogue, and not have them in the mission article itself, only linked from it. What do you think about this solution? Ausir (talk) 21:00, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Ausir's suggestion could be a good compromise. It'll include the information that some users want while hiding it from others that aren't interested or don't want spoilers. -- Alianin T • C 21:06, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

That could work. We could consider adding a link to the dialog subpage within the mission template. Or perhaps we could consider creating a separate namespace specifically for dialogue, since it plays such a big role in this game. Something like Dialog:Pirate Medicine, maybe with a tab next to "Discussion" along the top of an article if the page exists?

This would serve to truly separate spoiler content from a mission article's "face", something I've wanted to do for some time now; it's important to include some dialog as source information, but those lines of text are often the same lines that reveal major plot elements. -- Heaven's Agent 23:25, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and split out correspondence and dialog from the Pirate Medicine article (and created the appropriate categories). Let me know what you think. -- Alianin T • C 23:30, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't see the need for an extra namespace - subpages should work just fine. Ausir (talk) 23:42, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Usage concerns

Because of the interest in including expanded textual content I've begun developing a format for the dialog subpages, which can be seen here. That said, I worry that we may be overstepping our bounds by endeavoring to document, well, everything. Even before considering such complete documentation we were working well beyond the limitations of fair use. The only reason we are allowed to operate in such a way is that we serve as free positive advertising for the game; we should probably avoid testing our limitations, and the patience of LucasArts and Bioware, without reason.

It can be argued that in order to properly document the game much information should be included on this project in its entirety. That said, much of the text in the game serves no purpose, and its inclusion here is questionable at best. Should we draw a line as to what content we include, and if so what should that line be? Am I the only one worried about the copyright ramifications of including this content? -- Heaven's Agent 03:23, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

I've only been including dialog content that affects alignment or companion affection as seen here. The rest isn't really needed, imo. -- Alianin T • C 13:12, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

What about things like mob conversation dialog (the yellow dialog text) and mission correspondence? Should we only include these items if they contain content viable for the documentation of other articles? -- Heaven's Agent 05:19, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

I've included NPC convo dialog because it's been done on other projects and it's relevant to the NPC and documents fun flavor text. Same with correspondence as different choices in missions can have different results. If the consensus is different then I'll stop including it. -- Alianin T • C 19:37, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

With regard to the correspondence, if the different messages have any bearing on content then they should be documented. In most cases, though, they're no different than other dialogue that changes in a mission based on character decisions: it contains no unique information nor does it have an impact on how latter content is resolved. We don't document other forms of alternate text here, and similarly I don't believe it to be a valid reason on its own for the documentation of after-mission mail messages.

Remember one of the key practices of a wiki project: summarize content and put it into your own words. If there's no reason for content to be pulled directly from the source, then it shouldn't be done. Two examples that would require direct source information are citation and identification, but I can't think of anything other than this that would require such treatment. -- Heaven's Agent 05:55, 9 February 2012 (UTC)