Talk:Liberty Tree Articles in GTA III

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Articles

Is there a reason to merge these articles together now? They've been separate for quite a long time, without a problem, and in all honesty I think they're better off being separate. There is no need to bunch them together in my opinion. A-Dust 16:06, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

The lack of reader comments may have more to do with the pages have less exposure because they are very fragmented. Only a handful of these pages are actually mentioned in other topics, and the only other way to access them is through the articles category, which does nothing to sort them by chronological order or by relevance, and jumbles them together with articles in GTALCS (which would also benefit from a bit of centralization). In fact this disorganized arrangement doesn't help provide a proper narrative of events leading up to GTA III's storyline, as the developer intended. - ZS (talk) 16:16, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
Sorting them into an order in the main category could easily be done and isn't a reason on it's own to do it. The ones for GTA Liberty City Stories are also separated on the main Liberty Tree article and could again be separated in the main category. I'd also suggest that sorting by relevance is not important, in particular if you want to create a narrative to the events leading up to GTA III. A-Dust 16:22, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
But what about the fact that readers have to navigate through multiple pages in order to connect events together, and the time needed for editos to maintain them? It may not be any different from individual pages for each news report, but they would be less of a hassle to deal with. Plus we could make good use of redirect links to send readers straight to a relevant news report. - ZS (talk) 16:30, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
If users want a grand narrative for events the GTA III Era Timeline is the place to go, and maybe a link should be provided for it linking them to the events leading into GTA III on the timeline. I think the articles themselves are significant enough to have their own articles. A-Dust 16:40, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
Here's the problem. Not all readers will want to consult a lengthy timeline page for valid reasons; instead, some of them may concentrate on a smaller pool of articles, which is why it's necessary for individual pages to be sufficiently informative on their own. If we rely heavily on specific "hub" pages to provide crucial bits of information, we fail to provide accessibility to certain readers who search using other methods. If a reader happens to stumble across the category for news articles, for example, where are they supposed to start? If they refer to the timeline page, will references of news reports be hard to find among the flurry of other events? If they couldn't find it there, do they have to check a chunk of pages in the category just to know which one is the earliest or latest? What about readers who find the article using an external search engine?
Again, I brought forward the idea to categorize redirect pages, which should keep the article titles listed in the category. Also, do we need a third-party opinion on this? - ZS (talk) 17:09, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

My idea is to have the news articles be under an author, like what I have done in TJ Barry. I had that page layout like that for practical reasons but I feel like that a similar layout can be applied to all the other author pages. It would make the pages feel less empty than they are right now since most of them are only a few lines long. A list of all Liberty Tree articles can be made on this page linking to the articles within the authors' pages.--spaceeinstein 22:22, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure. The name of an author isn't exactly the first thing that pops into a reader's mind when they want to find Liberty Tree articles; normally they search for news articles by the headline or by the date of publication. Besides, if there are articles written by the same character (which is much rarer than thought), none of them would have any connection with each other other than being written by the same character (except Morgan Merryweather's column of course), and related articles aren't always written by the same author (i.e. Porter Tunnel Six Months Behind Schedule and Porter Tunnel Delayed (Again)). So the current arrangement where the individual pages discussing the authors contain links to articles that they have written is good enough as supplementary pages to the main Liberty Tree articles. There are also certain articles that have no authors. - ZS (talk) 14:53, 21 November 2011 (UTC)