Talk:Cabirus

First pass at standardized character page

Finally back on the Wiki wagon after PAX South and windows client testing! Splitting these questions up into sections, for easier answering and editing.

Look and Feel

I think we've agreed that we want character pages to have a standardized "look and feel", but that still needs design. I am very bad at graphical design and layout (yeah, it's obvious, shut up), so any help there is much appreciated.

What is our audience? https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Madison_Li is, to me, an example of a "really very good character page". But do we have the same audience? For example, as a player looking for a quest solution, I find the location, interactions and quests sections useful. As a fan of the Fallouts, I find the Background useful. As a modder, I find low-level information like "Base ID" and "Ref ID" useful. Do we expect the same mix? Or are there categories of information that we are uninterested in presenting? I can see arguments against the "low-level stuff", but I very much want to encourage and help modders. But is that the intended audience.

Once we know the audience, the next question is: what should the tone be? I've changed the tone in this page somewhat from speaking "in-character" to "out-of-character". I break the fourth wall with phrases like "Before the events of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss" and "in Underworld Ascendant...". Before my edits, the page was written more in the narrative voice of a journalist living in the Abyss.

What about tense? It was previously written more in the present-tense. I feel the lede should generally be in present-tense (who the character is now), and any Background section can be in past tense. So I should probably rework that. - DewiMorgan (talk) 20:47, 16 February 2019 (MST)

I don't think we will have as much information, nor as big of an audience, as Fallout players. For example, very few have access to the console commands, and there are no mod tools available. So storing that information may be useful, but there is really no need to expose it on the page (at least, not yet). If we have it, there is no reason not to add it to the template so we can query it later.

I agree with your tone and tense shifts. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 10:11, 18 February 2019 (MST)

Infobox

What other standard data items should the Infobox have?

Which should we omit?

I'd like to add in more specific and low-level info, like exact x/y coordinates of all their spawnpoints and such (which would also be useful for placing map markers, once compiled), but not sure if this would fit the tone you're going for. For cabirus, this would be a lengthy list, though for everyone else it'd be at most one per level.

Ideally there'd be a map as well, of course :)

Is it worth making a new template "CharacterBox", or modifying the existing infobox template to add optional fields like `Location=`, `VoiceActor=`, etc? At the moment we are limited to 9 pieces of data, and I've hit that limit. I also found the TitleN=<foo>|DataN=<bar> syntax very painful when trying to insert, delete or reorder lines, so this would make maintenance and creation easier. - DewiMorgan (talk) 20:47, 16 February 2019 (MST)

The current Infobox template is a generic one to include information that cannot be organized elsewhere. Once we know what we want in each area, we will want to create specific templates for those page types. So an {{Infobox Character}} page for characters, which uses the standard Infobox style but has inputs we need for character types. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 10:11, 18 February 2019 (MST)

Page Structure

What standard sections should a page have? I went for as you said in our earlier discussion, but with some extra sections, and omitting any section if empty:

Lede - basic description of who the character is at the beginning of the game.

Background - what's known about the history of the character.

Lore - Quotes about them from other places (newsletters, other games).

Previous Appearances - where else they were seen (other games, books, etc).

Trivia - if there's any interesting trivia, this may be worth a section, though only if it can't be gracefully worked into the rest.

Ingame Quotes - stuff said or written about them ingame. More on this below.

See Also - a standard wiki section.

What to change/add/remove/rearrange? - DewiMorgan (talk) 20:47, 16 February 2019 (MST)

Thats a decent start. It will be hard to get a comprehensive list until we have a couple NPCs entered and cleaned up. Cabirus will probably be a good starting point, as he will undoubtedly hit all the sections. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 10:11, 18 February 2019 (MST)

Ingame quotes

There's a lot of problems with how I have it now. Enough that it deserves its own discussion section :)

1. For a start, should I templatize all quotes? It feels like a smart idea, but is it really?

My main concern is that it would be nice to have ALL quotes available. All memora with their titles, all quest descriptions, all items and item descriptions, etc. And those quotes may be referred to in many places, if they refer to multiple things. And duplication is BAD.

So one way I see to "fix" this is to take each memora and put it into a template, which could then be referred to using its string title, like {{Logs/CABIRUS_TYPHON_2}} - that would expand out to the correct text in the LoreQuote template or whatever. Would this be a sensible approach? Or a horrible pollution of the template space? I'm willing to make all those templates, but want to know it's the right way forward, first.

There'a also a copyright concern to copying all their text verbatim (is it "fair use"?), but Sam reckoned it'd be OK "for archival purposes", kinda like https://www.imperial-library.info/books/all/by-category but for UA. Andkinda like your existing copies of their newsletters, I guess :) You're the closest they have to an official archivist!

Also, when I originally did the Monsters page, MediaWiki complained about the page's processing requirements, because there were too many templates. This is why I created the QuoteList template. But there's no clean way I can see to make a QuoteList when each quote is a template in itself, so we might run into this problem again, particularly if we make, say, a page which lists all Memora. This can probably be solved by splitting the pages up, though, so there are never more than a few dozen quotes per page.

1. I'm also not a big fan of the QuoteList template - it was a hack to solve a problem, but I'm hoping it's a temporary hack. If we do decide to keep it, I should at least not have it collapse unless there's a style="collapse" tag or something.

1. Finally, I've included here only those quotes that I previously used as references for his background in the Characters page. But it'd be nice for the user to have a way to see ALL quotes which are about someone, and said by someone. Should I add all relevant quotes to this page? It'd make for a huuuge list, but would be really useful for someone trying to research the lore on something. Though, if we go for making each quote a separate template page, then the search system would do this for them, I guess: they'd just need to search the template space for "Cabirus". I think I prefer that option. - DewiMorgan (talk) 20:47, 16 February 2019 (MST)

We shouldn't have a need to use QuoteList on character pages. That was really just to cut down on space on the combined page. Each of the memora will have their own pages, of course, but being able to pull that text into other pages is useful. There are really two ways we can handle this:

1) Put the quotes into templates so we can call them from multiple pages without duplication. The number of template calls will be far less on a standard page than on the initial one.

2) Alternatively, we could use semantic wiki properties for quotes, and then query them into the other pages using templates. This is more complex, but there are fewer templates to worry about. I'll try to put something together to show what this might look like, but imagine being able to pull all of the memora that Cabirus recorded by saying {{#ask: [[Category:Memora]] [[Authored by::Cabirus]]}} (with some extra formatting, of course) and getting a list of LoreQuotes with formatted text and links to each memora. (This is why I love SMW!) Again, this will require several types of templates to be created, and for Infoboxes to automatically apply properties we can use to query.

For now, lets just keep working on getting information onto pages and we can clean it up and cross reference once that is available. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 10:11, 18 February 2019 (MST)

"The"

Side-question: here in the Wiki, we seem to capitalize "the Stygian Abyss" fairly consistently, with a lowercase "the", so that's what I've used - but is this correct? Ingame, such terms are usually (but not always) spelled with a capitalized The, even in the middle of sentences which are not otherwise in title case, as The Stygian Abyss, The Abyss, The Abyssal Keys, The Underworld, The Lower Dark, The Ascendant, The Factions, The Seers, The Expedition, The Disenthralled, The Saurian, The Chthonian, The Shambler, The Deep Elves, The Hivemind, The Great Hig Harkens, The Great Work, The Challenge, The Father of Monsters, The Bellum, The Vault of Nyx, The Midnight Forum, The Memoreum, The Underswamp, The Circle of Portals, The Slasher of Veils, The Sun Key, The Silver Sentinel, The Silver Sapling, The Doom Counter, The Materia Modus, The Tempus Modus... - DewiMorgan (talk) 20:47, 16 February 2019 (MST)

Most of what is currently in the wiki was added during the Kickstarter, so we really didn't know what it was going to look like once it was done. I've been sorely pressed to find time to add things recently. So yeah, we should probably get these entered as they are used within Ascendant, and not necessarily as they were in UU1.

That said, don't use "The" in pagenames. It makes it hard to find, hard to sort, and unless you specifically note how it will be categorized, even makes finding it in those lists difficult. So the page might be Vault of Nyx, but it would always be written as "The Vault of Nyx" in the text. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 10:11, 18 February 2019 (MST)

Memora and queries

So as a test, I added the Father of Monsters memora, formatting it as a new infobox (that I need to turn into a template, but one step at a time). You might notice that pieces of information are filled in using the [[Property string::Value text]] format. When this structure is used, it sets a property with the value entered, which can then be queried for use elsewhere in the wiki. In this case, we are setting the Name of the memora, the Author, the text, the scene and coordinates of where it can be found, and I'll also add a semicolon-delimited string of keywords that we can also search on. We could add additional information to the infobox template that isn't displayed too, if you want to store the internal references.

I then created a template to query the memora pages (query memora) that have those properties set, and one to style the information. This is at the bottom of the Lore section on Cabirus' page. The text is extracted, and it has the link to the Memora page and its author. Most pages will just have a section header of "Lore" and then the {{query memora}} template, but for those with links in books and such, like Cabirus, they may have other LoreQuote templates as well.

This means we don't need separate templates for each Memora, just a normal page for each. I'll create an infobox template for memora pages so we can set all of this easily. Let me know what additional properties you would like. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 09:23, 25 February 2019 (MST)

Hahaha! I looked at the page code before reading your explanation and thought "OMFG! Is this doing what it looks like it's doing? WHAT IS THIS DARK MAGIC???" - turns out, yes, it really was exactly as powerful as it looked. Very elegant solution indeed! :D DewiMorgan (talk) 18:28, 25 February 2019 (MST)

Glad to hear! I did find one of the plugins that I need to get the "mention" variable working isn't installed, but this should be resolved soon.

Now, it's just a matter of creating templates for other things (characters, items, locations, etc) and populating pages. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 18:58, 25 February 2019 (MST)

Have you imported all Memora, now? If not, would you like me to? Shouldn't take long. --DewiMorgan (talk) 17:20, 26 February 2019 (MST)

I don't even have an extract if them, I just entered some of the ones I came across for testing. If you have them, be my guest! --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 21:00, 26 February 2019 (MST)