Gswiki talk:Style guide

Has anything been decided on this? I think most current editors prefer writing things that are current in current tense. VANKRASN39 (talk) 11:26, 8 January 2015 (CST)

I have removed the H from IUHPOV so that articles are officially acceptable in present tense if something still exists, like Wehnimer's Landing. Thanks to Scribes for his input. VANKRASN39 (talk) 13:45, 15 June 2015 (CDT)

It would be good to have a guideline for whether category and article section headings should use the same style as article titles. Personally I feel it would be more consistent that way going forward as it matches native wiki style better (though it's not necessary to retroactively change existing categories, which are split half and half at the moment). ZHOUY1 (talk) 16:14, 19 August 2015 (CDT)

Saved Posts

I talked this over with Kaikala and she concurred, but I wanted to see if there were any strenuous objections to saved posts being turned into subpages (article name/saved posts). Here's an example. I'll also be consolidating more of those pages as I go through them. VANKRASN39 (talk) 20:47, 9 March 2017 (CST)

Verbs

After the Sylvanfair verb list was preserved for historical reasons (let's not revisit that debate here) there hasn't been a good up-to-date master resource on verbs. With labeled section transclusion we should be able to make an improved version. It would involve some preparation work in giving the verb pages a uniform format and marking off "usage" and "info" sections to be transcluded into a master list.

Here's a possible common style based on in-game help files. Any additional information about the verb can go below this and would not be transcluded.

BRISTLE

Usage

<section begin=usage />

• BRISTLE SELF - Bristle at yourself.
• BRISTLE {option} - Bristle with the following options.
• BRISTLE {target} - Bristle at someone or something.

Where {option} is one of the following:

ANXIOUS EXCITED HAPPY IMPATIENT NERVOUS PROUD SATISFIED SLEEPY SMUG

<section end />

Information

<section begin=info />

No target:

STANDARD - Vanah tries to bristle, but only succeeds in grimacing.

Self target:

HALF-KROLVIN - Vanah turns her head slightly and tenses up, bristling.

Styles (Half-Krolvin only):

ANXIOUS - Vanah glances around, bristling with anxiety.

EXCITED - Vanah bristles with excitement!

<section end />

For a trial I updated the LISTEN page to work like this. ZHOUY1 (talk) 21:30, 9 February 2017 (CST)

While I agree that the verb pages could be a lot nicer and I would love the pages to feed into a verb list, one of the big advantages about the "current format" (e.g. something like BOW (verb)) is that the pages are easy to make and mostly made up by copy/pasting from the game window. I feel like if we're going to move away from that and rearrange the messaging, then it should be formatted more cleanly like this. Can we preserve the ease of the "current format" and still feed to a list? This is a considerable project and not even close to all verbs are on the wiki, are you sure about taking it on? Should we try to actually make easy format pages for all the verbs first and go from there? I don't want to discourage, I would love for it to happen, but at the same time I want to be realistic. Vanah made this verb list, which I assume is an actual complete verb list. There are a lot of issues involved here, I'm sure I'll have other thoughts/changes but it's super late. VANKRASN39 (talk) 01:03, 10 February 2017 (CST)

Tables might be hard to format if there are many branching conditions. Output could depend on any combination of {target}, {target state}, {style}, {demeanor}, {race}, {profession}... Looking at the options, I think nested trees like the original list would be the best presentation, and they are easy to convert from the game window by putting some asterisks in front of each line. Another advantage is that we would be able to use different text formatting in the master list vs. the individual pages by wrapping the transcluded sections inside divs (with tables the native table formatting would not be as easy to override). To save on having to type FIRST PERSON etc. we can make some small templates for 1p/2p/3p like 1P? Or more conditional markers like Sylvan? ZHOUY1 (talk) 15:33, 10 February 2017 (CST)

Math section

Proposed text for a section on math formatting before we introduce too many different styles— ZHOUY1 (talk) 14:36, 19 September 2016 (CDT)

Non-inline formulas should be indented or wrapped in a box:

:<math> ... </math> or {{Equation box|<math> ... </math>}}

Multi-letter variables should be wrapped in a mathrm or mathit tag:

• \mathrm{SkillRanks} — $\mathrm {SkillRanks}$
• \mathit{SkillRanks} — ${\mathit {SkillRanks}}$

For truncation/ceiling operators, use \lfloor ... \rfloor and \lceil ... \rceil. To wrap a multi-line expression (such as a fraction), use \left \lfloor{...} \right \rfloor.

For multiplication, use a dot \cdot ($a\cdot b$) where necessary to avoid ambiguity. For purely arithmetic expressions, \times is also acceptable ($2\times 3$), but prefer using a dot in algebraic expressions to avoid confusion with the letter x.

For division, use a slash / or fraction notation: \frac{...}{...}

With the Redux page I went to the pages with your math contributions and tried to copy whatever you did, so this is good for me. I'd prefer everything to be in Roman instead of mixed with italics. VANKRASN39 (talk) 15:04, 19 September 2016 (CDT)

Any examples where you'd want a slash over a negative exponent or a \textstyle fraction? PFLATS (talk) 18:21, 19 September 2016 (CDT)

I feel it's easier to understand slash than negative exponents, and inline \textstyle or \tfrac can be hard to read. (See also: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematical_writing.pdf#page=21) ZHOUY1 (talk) 18:53, 19 September 2016 (CDT)

pssh, what does this knuth guy know about typesetting? PFLATS (talk) 19:45, 19 September 2016 (CDT)

HTML proposal

I'd like to offer a different perspective with the option to change out from using LaTex. I'd offer the following points for consideration:

• The current <math>...</math> featureset has challenges. It does not dynamically size - it cannot as it is an image.
• The image could be generated locally, but we're not configured for that. So if there's a hiccup in communications, we get the ugly red text that <math> throws at us.
• The image cannot have links or stylized (italicized / bolded) text imbedded.
• I'm not concerned about 'type-setting' as I don't believe we're printing a book, I believe we're attempting to make a useful and easily viewable collection of articles that is agnostic to the viewer's choice of mobile, laptop or desktop machine and OS / browser.

To that end, I've created / copied & modified a series of templates that we can use to generate HTML / text based mathematical formula. An example of the two styles for comparison can be seen here: Talk:Enchanting_potion.

An example of one of the templates can be viewed here: Template:*

What these templates do not do exceptionally well (yet) are very complex higher mathematical equations (integral functions and the like). These templates could be expanded, but I believe there are likely some use cases where a picture (LaTex) is worth the thousand words needed in a template to express the formula.

My question: Does it make sense to finish out fitting the help information for these templates, complete the assessment of the existing pages and decide / plan for a possible conversion from LaTex to HTML text to gain these advantages? DOUG (talk) 18:42, 12 October 2017 (CDT)

Definite/indefinite articles in titles

This is about titles with leading 'a/the'. I think it makes sense for articles which are purportedly in-universe literature to allow a leading article (as well as be fully capitalized) if it is there in the original work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit the book vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit the people described in the book). To make sure they are sorted correctly in each category, they can use the DEFAULTSORT magic word. ZHOUY1 (talk) 17:59, 26 July 2017 (CDT)

Article Titles

There appears to be confusion about article titles for item pages and what should and shouldn't be capitalized. I suggest adding a section with regards to item script names. VANKRASN39 (talk) 09:56, 3 September 2022 (CDT)