Grand Theft Wiki talk:Style Guide/List pages

Revision as of 01:17, 27 April 2011 by Gboyers (talk | contribs) (additional)
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This is to discuss the issue set out at Grand Theft Wiki:Style Guide/List pages

Please add your comments to the bottom, like a normal talk page


I'm not completely sure which way is best. I like individual pages, and I think it's a lot easier for new users to find and edit a page, instead of navigate around a HUGE list or tables. However, I'm not a fan of having thousands of useless stubs - nobody is ever going to read them - and it just means more work to edit lots of them, more pages to check for problems etc. However, I think I'm maybe leaning towards having individual pages for everything now, so long as we ALSO have lists and tables, to make sure there are lots of ways people can find the information they want. Gboyers 20:35, 24 April 2011 (BST)

If it takes a few sentences to describe something entirely, then I prefer them to be in a list. I made a test page but A-Dust made a point to have them separate.--spaceeinstein 01:30, 25 April 2011 (BST)
I agree with Gboyer's idea. There should be a table of a particular category (eg. Clothing in GTA Vice City) and make seperate articles on each type of clothing so a user can see what an article of clothing looks like and then look at the article for more information. --MrLanceVanceDance 01:57, 25 April 2011 (BST)
I used to be against separating fair size pages into short, seemingly pointless ones (with alot of duplicate content), but as time has progressed I've grown to like individual pages more and more. When things are placed in a table, the information that can be written about each one is predetermined by the headings in the table. I've seen cases where information has been repressed for this reason. If each item has a separate article, while yes, they are mostly duplicate content, it is possible to add an extra sentence containing some additional information. Although, I agree that the list pages definitely need to be kept, and each individual article needs to link back to the list.
As for "nobody is ever going to read them", I don't think that's true. In the past I have spent time reading articles just for interest, to find details that I missed/never paid attention to (or cared about), and many times it was the stub articles that had pieces of information that I found more interesting. JFletcherTalk (formerly User:Biggest gta fan ever) 02:04, 25 April 2011 (BST)
I agree JFletcher.I agree that the list pages definitely need to be kept, and each esction has to have a seperate article and that article needs to link back to the list. I also think that stubs can give more information than tables as they talk in more depth about their subject--MrLanceVanceDance 11:19, 25 April 2011 (BST)

Some good thoughts there. So I think we are all saying that EVERYTHING on this wiki should have its own page, even if it's just mentioned on the radio or shown on a poster; and that we should make lots of nice tabular lists to provide lots of different ways for it to be found. Is that right? Gboyers 11:31, 25 April 2011 (BST)

I agree with JF as well. But in my opinion, 2D shopfronts don't need their own pages. Things mentioned on radios are fine, because it's voice, you're hearing and usually paying some attention to it. Shopfronts though? I don't know... Chimpso (Talk) 12:01, 25 April 2011 (BST)

A line has to be drawn somewhere. Next we will have pages for each pedestrian model.-spaceeinstein 18:09, 25 April 2011 (BST)

I agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere and that is with mods and things that seems too silly to create an article on. I think we create an article on EVERYTHING on this wiki, even if it is mentioned on TV ,radio, poster or mentioned by character except for mods or anything that seems too outright silly to make an article on.--MrLanceVanceDance 01:23, 26 April 2011 (BST)

And then we get to the point on how vehicle pages should be treated. Based on your argument, each vehicle model should have its own page, similar to the German wiki, because currently the vehicles are all grouped together based on their similarities instead of having their own articles.--spaceeinstein 06:18, 26 April 2011 (BST)
Actually, I think different models of each car COULD have their own page, but that would act like a detailed-technical-information subpage, as if it was something like Police Car/GTAVC (even if it wasn't a subpage). 99% of users would still go to Police Car to see all the different police cars, and the people who want to know the deep technical details about every different one could go to their individual pages. The individual page would show spawn point maps, have details about what vehicles it is based off, show which missions it is involved with, and provide detailed screenshots. (We could even tie it in with the up-and-coming Grand Theft Mods site)
I think the wiki is ready to expand, and I think now is the time to encourage more detailed information such as this. HOWEVER, this must never be done at the expense of usability or having things easy to find - that is MUCH more important. So we have to think about how people are likely to try to find information.
For police cars, I doubt people will type "Police" and expect to be taken directly to the GTA SA squad car. Equally, I don't expect anyone to try typing something like "Police (GTA SA)" or "Police Car in GTA San Andreas" to find the specific model. Most people will find their way to the Police Car page easily enough, then we can diversify from there. So for that example, we might have Police Car in GTA San Andreas just showing the information specific to that vehicle, things like spawn points and detailed photographs etc.
We can apply the same principle to other cars across multiple games, and have pages like Washington in GTA Vice City, but these would still be secondary to the main Washington page (which 99% of people would go to first).
The difference with businesses is that people looking for a specific version would search specifically for the names (like 24/7 or Rod's Electronics (idek) and go directly to that page. However, other people will want to see a list or map of businesses and browse that way. It just means we focus on different things.
I think we can start to grow like this, so long as we stick to our easy and open principles. If we make this wiki the preserve of the uber-technical or the wiki-expert, then that's completely wrong. I want my own mother to be able to find the right thing easily, by typing in a guess and being correctly redirected, and not have to navigate through a mess of unnecessary disambiguations and hard-to-guess page names. We need to remember that different topics (cars, shops, peds) will need to be treated differently, and we need to make good decisions now to make it work. If we can do all this well, we can become SO much better - Gboyers 02:08, 27 April 2011 (BST)