Suggestions and Ideas for the wiki

[Beligaronia he/him]

There have been some suggestions made to improve and standardise the wiki. These may be found here:

http://www.17thshard.com/wiki/The_Coppermind:Suggestions_and_Issues

and here:

http://www.17thshard.com/wiki/The_Coppermind_talk:Suggestions_and_Issues

Anyone with an interest in the wiki should feel free to comment. You don't need to be an editor, so if any of our readers (he says optimistically) has an idea of how they would like the site to look or work feel free to chime in.

Also if anyone has anyone has any suggestions beyond those already mentioned they should feel free to mention them.

Thank you for your time.

[Joe ST he/him]

You should probably just copy the suggestions from over there and delete those two pages.

And when I said merge, I meant 'steal their information and close their versions down/redirect to The Coppermind', which makes more sense than having multiple site with duplicate data.

• So is it to be Elantris (book), Mistborn (trilogy) etc..., with in-universe pages having no ()'s?
  
• What about the Mistborn books; The Hero of Ages (book) rather than Mistborn: The Hero of Ages ?
  
  • or what about Mistborn_(trilogy) → Mistborn (with a {{redirect}} to Allomancy#Mistborn) and Mistborn/The Hero of Ages etc.

  I'd think (book|trilogy|etc.) would be the best suggestion.

but then where do chapter info go? since title are already quite long....

about "Rather than having pages for the series, Short Stories and Stand-alone Novels, should be made into categories.": I meant all 'series' pages AND the Short Stories and Stand-alone Novels pages should be made categories. which would get rid of the need for Mistborn_(trilogy) ??

Joe

[Chaos he/him]

You should probably just copy the suggestions from over there and delete those two pages.

And when I said merge, I meant 'steal their information and close their versions down/redirect to The Coppermind', which makes more sense than having multiple site with duplicate data.

Oh, I'm all for stealing their data (I'll check with Steve from Stormblessed about doing that with the Stormlight Archive wiki). Not sure if we could close down their versions. If we could, yeah, that'd work.

So is it to be Elantris (book), Mistborn (trilogy) etc..., with in-universe pages having no ()'s?

Elantris (book) for individual books. Mistborn Trilogy would be without parentheses since there is no need for a qualifier like that.

In-universe pages might have parentheses, too. For example, the main Elantris page should redirect to Elantris (book). That would mean there's Elantris (city), too.

What about the Mistborn books; The Hero of Ages (book) rather than Mistborn: The Hero of Ages ?

or what about Mistborn_(trilogy) → Mistborn (with a {{redirect}} to Allomancy#Mistborn) and Mistborn/The Hero of Ages etc.

I'd think (book|trilogy|etc.) would be the best suggestion.

The Hero of Ages (book).

about "Rather than having pages for the series, Short Stories and Stand-alone Novels, should be made into categories.": I meant all 'series' pages AND the Short Stories and Stand-alone Novels pages should be made categories. which would get rid of the need for Mistborn_(trilogy)

All series pages? I don't know about that. Imagine Stormlight Archive as a category page. Now, if we had pithy info on the Stormlight Archive, that would go in a Stormlight Archive article (which I now notice there is not one. But I digress), but the SA category would be so huge with the list of its members that that would be clunky.

So, I want there to be a Mistborn Trilogy article, for series-wide information, independent from the category page.

[Eerongal he/him]

So, I want there to be a Mistborn Trilogy article, for series-wide information, independent from the category page.

Just a thought, but with the upcoming release of the mistborn short novel, and the possibility of future novels that has been stated before, is saying "mistborn trilogy" really the best way to go about this? Series-wide info would cover these novels as well, i would assume.

Just sayin'

[Chaos he/him]

Hey, that's a really good point. "Mistborn (series)" then, would be a good title for that. That isn't a proper noun (unlike Mistborn Trilogy).

[Joe ST he/him]

Unpublished works of Brandon Sanderson → Unpublished works ?

Epigraphs should be made into a category?

Epigraphs (Mistborn: The Well of Ascension) should be deleted?

Joe

[Beligaronia he/him]

One question. Should subpages have a capital letter or should they be lowercase?

My instincts are saying the first letter should be uppercase but then I believe most things should be capitalised.

E.g. "Elantris (book)/Summary" vs "Elantris (book)/summary"

Also: What should the disambiguation note be for "The Way of Kings" (the in-universe text that Dalinar follows)? Book is already taken, possibly "in-universe text" would be suitable?

Are we going to be consistent and move all the books to "Book title (book)" or just those that need disambiguation? (I'm going to say we should be consistent). In the interests of making book linking easier would a link template e.g. {{b|The Way of Kings}} be useful instead of having to type out the full piped linking?

"The Stormlight Archive". Should we anticipate an in-universe object and move this to "The Stormlight Archive (series)"?

Unpublished works of Brandon Sanderson → Unpublished works ?

Agreed.

Epigraphs should be made into a category?

Agreed

Epigraphs (Mistborn: The Well of Ascension) should be deleted?

Sure.

[Eerongal he/him]

One question. Should subpages have a capital letter or should they be lowercase?

My instincts are saying the first letter should be uppercase but then I believe most things should be capitalised.

E.g. "Elantris (book)/Summary" vs "Elantris (book)/summary"

I'd say capitalized. I think it looks better. But then again, i'm in the same boat where i think most things should. (my lazy typing and not hitting the shift key as much as possible excluded from "most things" naturally)

[Joe ST he/him]

Elowercase makes much more sense...all we are doing with Page\subpage is Page_(subpage) but in a different way, so they should be lowercase. IE its the same discussion that we had over Mistborn_(Trilogy) vs  Mistborn_(trilogy),

(it also makes it easier to make normalized, since you can just do {{lc:{{{1}}}}} which lowercases that variable. if you wanted to have just the first letter uc'd youd have to nest lc: with ucfirst: which makes 2 calls when 1 is sufficient)

EDIT: also!

Category:Series merged into Category:Book with the Series pages (not categories) being key-sorted on another special key (currently publishers are sorted on * and Unpublished works/Standalone novels are sorted on ' ' (blank space). Maybe move publishers out to subcat of Books, and use * for series pages?. Cause publishers aren't really books, but series are...

[Beligaronia he/him]

Elowercase makes much more sense...all we are doing with Page\subpage is Page_(subpage) but in a different way, so they should be lowercase. IE its the same discussion that we had over Mistborn_(Trilogy) vs  Mistborn_(trilogy),

I would argue that in "Page (subpage)" the "(subpage)" is a continuation of the title and thus is bound by the restrictions of what I will call "title case" (only first words, book titles and proper nouns are capitalised) whereas in the case of Page/subpage, the "subpage" is itself a new title of the subpage and thus should have the first letter capitalised as per "title case".

(it also makes it easier to make normalized, since you can just do {{lc:{{{1}}}}} which lowercases that variable. if you wanted to have just the first letter uc'd youd have to nest lc: with ucfirst: which makes 2 calls when 1 is sufficient)

My apologies for my lack of wiki knowledge. Could you give an example of an occasion one would have to use {{lc:}} or ucfirst nested with {{lc:}}. I assume you would use them in some template but fail to see their necessity.

[Joe ST he/him]

I would argue that in "Page (subpage)" the "(subpage)" is a continuation of the title and thus is bound by the restrictions of what I will call "title case" (only first words, book titles and proper nouns are capitalised) whereas in the case of Page/subpage, the "subpage" is itself a new title of the subpage and thus should have the first letter capitalised as per "title case".

I guess, never really liked the case-sensitivity of mediawiki titles

My apologies for my lack of wiki knowledge. Could you give an example of an occasion one would have to use {{lc:}} or ucfirst nested with {{lc:}}. I assume you would use them in some template but fail to see their necessity.

Yeah, its templates like the one I suggested in {{b}}'s chat

[Joe ST he/him]

Reference from pages (deleted)

A list of (user found) things that could do with fixing/discussing/etc.

==Pagetitle consistencies ==

# The Mistborn books pages are prefixed with ''Mistborn:'' E.G. [[Mistborn: The Hero of Ages]].

# [[Mistborn]] & [[Mistborn_(Trilogy)]] vs [[Elantris]] & [[Elantris_(city)]]. (also, shouldn't trilogy be lowercase?)

# [[summary_of_Mistborn:_The_Well_of_Ascension]] move to [[The well of Ascension/Summary]] ?

# Rather than having pages for the series, [[short Stories]] and [[stand-alone Novels]], should be made into categories.

==General==

# Maybe a Book: namespace to differentiate titles from in-universe content?

# [[:Category:Series]] as subcategory (with empty sort key) of [[:Category:Books]]?

# Are we in-universe or more like Wikipedia?

# Is subpages turned on? [[Example/subpage]] (would have a breadcrumb back to example, [[example]] could link/transclude using [[/subpage]] or <nowiki>{{/subpage}}</nowiki>

## This would mean the epigraph pages could be at [[Hero_of_Ages/epigraphs]] for example.

## Much like wot.wikia.com does, with their subpages for chapter summaries

# Merging with the wikia versions?

and

Ok, thanks for your input. I've just finished exams so I should be around a bit more now. Just to clarify and respond to some of your points:

Chaos's note: Talk pages are less efficient than forums to respond to individual things. Please bring up such notes in

==Page titles==

#'''Mistborn:'''Are you suggesting a "Mistborn:" namespace? The books are titled like that because that's the way it appears on the cover. (Sort of)

#:no, I just wish....ahh ok, well at least if they were under the "Book:" namespace, they wouldnt need the "Mistborn: " bit...meh w/e

#'''Article naming''' Yes trilogy should be lower case, feel free to move it if I don't get there first. Elantris should be a disambiguation (or a redirect) with the book moving to "Elantris (book)". Unless we set up a book namespace which has its own problems (see below).

#'''Book/Summary''' Moving things to "Book/Summary" would make sense.

#'''Categories''' I could live with making them categories. I want to say that there'll be more information later and we need the artices but that's just a kneejerk reaction against deletion. If there does turn out to be enough information we can always recreate them (but it doesn't look like there will be.

==General==

#'''Book namespace.''' The only problem with a book namespace is that it excludes these things from the search. E.g searching "Elantris" wouldn't turn up Book:Elantris. This means we still have to have redirects. One option would be to have "Book title" redirect automatically to "Book title (book)" and then have a "''Book title redirects here, did you mean "Book title (other thing)''".

#:I'm sure it would be possible to put a namespace in the default search section

#'''In-universe style''': I believe we're generally in universe. There are few things that would need to be discussed out of universe and it is highly likely that anyone who arrives is probably aware that Brandon writes fantasy and would thus be able to distinguish an article on a character or object in the books to something in the real world.

#:What about a namespace for out of universe? (no idea what to call it)...

#'''Subpages''' Subpages is turned on and will create the breadcrumb trail.

#:Awesome, good stuff

#'''Merging with wikia''' I hadn't really thought about merging. I've seen the Stormlight archive wiki, are there any others around that have a sufficient mass of articles/users?

#:None with large mass, but duplicate communities only reduce productivity. Theres a Brandon Sanderson one, and a Mistborn one, and maybe a few others?.

These are just my first impressions, some of these will need to be discussed with the other users and admins, so I'll post something on the forums directing their attention here.

==Chaos's Notes==

Talk pages are less efficient than forums to respond to individual things. Please bring up such issues on the forum for quicker response. Talk pages are more tedious, y'know?

# I'm not sure how we should do the names of the Mistborn novels at the moment. I'm not a fan of the namespace idea. So, that means that the Mistborn books can either be things like "The Well of Ascension (book)" or "Mistborn: The Well of Ascension".

# If we're making Elantris redirect to "Elantris (book)", then we should use the latter naming convention for Mistborn novels, I should think. Also, is there any rationale for Trilogy being in parentheses? I'm uncertain, but perhaps the initial motivation for Trilogy being capitalized was to have the article be "Mistborn Trilogy". Since a parenthetical on "trilogy" doesn't really qualify anything, let's leave off the parentheses and make the article into Mistborn Trilogy. Parentheses work better when it requires qualification, like "Elantris (book)" or "Elantris (city)". No one is getting confused with Mistborn Trilogy.

# I like the idea of using subpages. Let's see how that works out.

# Good idea.

For general notes:

# Let's not use namespaces. "Elantris (book)" is much more Wikipedia styled than "Book:Elantris", so for aesthetic reasons, I like that better. I'm not sure any other benefit of namespaces surpasses that aesthetic reason.

# We could make that a subcategory. I'm always a bit leery about subcategory overload, but this is a good idea.

# Primarily in-universe.

# Subpages are a great idea.

# We won't be merging with wikia. Perhaps if the Brandon Sanderson wikia one got some members, it would matter.

[happyman he/him]

My suggestion is to not have the wiki as the main page. It's really disorienting and hard to navigate. E.g. IMO it's the wrong tool for the job.

[Joe ST he/him]

My suggestion is to not have the wiki as the main page. It's really disorienting and hard to navigate. E.g. IMO it's the wrong tool for the job.

That's a bug, I'm sure.

[Chaos he/him]

My suggestion is to not have the wiki as the main page. It's really disorienting and hard to navigate. E.g. IMO it's the wrong tool for the job.

Yes. I didn't know this happened until today. Obviously it is not supposed to be the front page.

[happyman he/him]

Yes. I didn't know this happened until today. Obviously it is not supposed to be the front page.

Oh, OK. Well, best of luck fixing it. I only commented because this was where the Wiki navigated me to most easily , and I was lost as to where to go to get to the rest of the forums. It's easier now. I hope the system gets fully functional again soon.

[Chaos he/him]

Oh, OK. Well, best of luck fixing it. I only commented because this was where the Wiki navigated me to most easily , and I was lost as to where to go to get to the rest of the forums. It's easier now. I hope the system gets fully functional again soon.

No problem. Turns out I'm just a moron. The ancient splash page is now what's there, but soon we intend to move to the new Pages system.

[Puck he/him]

No problem. Turns out I'm just a moron. The ancient splash page is now what's there, but soon we intend to move to the new Pages system.

All of this self deprecating lately, Chaos. Not good for you, not at all

[Zas678 he/him]

Question. Is there a way to get a massive Google Docs document (which can save to a .doc/pdf/HTML) and transfer it to Wikipedia style? I could do it by hand, but that would take a long time, and I'm all about shortcuts. Does anyone have an idea for me?

[Chaos he/him]

This may help you with that.

At that point, I think the hardest thing to do would be to make sure that the wiki syntax generated the right headers. So, that may help, but there'd still be work to do, especially with making other wiki-links.

EDIT: I think Joe is working hard to make it look pretty.

Edited July 6, 2011 by Chaos