Talk:Cabirus

First pass at standardized character page

Finally back on the Wiki wagon after PAX South and windows client testing!

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.

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...

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.

Page Structure

What standard sections should a page have? I'm thinking something like so, 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.

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)