Help talk:Contents
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Help Section Structure and Contribution Help Files
We need to build some structure around the contribution process. Xevious has made a really good start with the two help files that are currently at Help:Contents but feedback from some people who have tried to edit new information has shown that it's still not clear. The problems we appear to have are:
- ambiguity surrounding the way people should edit information
- more than one way to do things
- overall lack of Help documentation
- lack of information in the GamerWiki:Community Portal
So where to start? Well the first thing is to decide on The One Way of doing things. We've got a good framework of templates that can build a reasonable system for editing. The Template:GameInfobox is a good start and seems to be working well. To make this template more widely applicable, we need to sort out the Disambiguation process, which I am thinking about at the moment, but more contributions are welcome.
With those two things sorted out, we can document up ways of adding games quite easily. Once this is decided, we should remove (i.e. delete or merge-in) all other pages related to editing game information, including the infamous Game Information Template that we originally started with.
Another area is the hardware information template, which hasn't received the same level of attention as the game information template.
-- tyagi 21:06, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
One further thing we ought to think about is how the categories are presented. Looking at the list of categories, there are a hell of a lot of categories in there that shouldn't exist. Where are they coming from? And how can we correct that? In the final version, I think we should have categories for eac format, for each genre, and that's it. Unless there's something I've missed? Xevious 17:08, 25 Jul 2005 (UTC)
- I've had a look around, and added all helpful pages I could find to the help section. I moved the previous "GameInfoBox Test" page into Template for Single-Format Games, a name which makes much more sense, and revised it somewhat. I've also made that page contain a whole bunch of useful information for those entering information.
- One question I still have is whether games that will only appear on a single format should have the page name "Gamename" or "Gamename (Platform)" (eg should the Donkey Konga page be Donkey Konga or Donkey Konga (GameCube)). The help page uses the latter, but the prior is mainly used around the site. Halo 09:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
- I think that even if they're on one format, they should still have the platform afterwards. What if Nintendo announce Donkey Konga for the DS? Then we'd have to go and change all the links and move the page.
- When changing title, however, don't forget to make sure that you also change any page which links to that title. Xevious 13:10, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
Absolutely, the one thing that is required is consistency. If we are going to have Gamename (platform) for multi-platform titles, then this should be carried through to single-platform titles too. tyagi 19:47, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
- Ok, that's great. You should add that to the policy page. Do we want "Donkey Konga (Nintendo GameCube)" with the full names of consoles? I'll try start moving stuff about... in a bit. Halo 20:36, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
- No, we want a shorter name I think, otherwise the titles can get too long. I started putting together a list of shorter names on the Formats page - linked to in the "Help creating" pages. Xevious 11:57, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
- I agree with Xevious that we should use shorted names in the titles. If the short names can be listed in a Help page and clearly linked from any other Help files, walkthroughs or template examples, that's great. -- tyagi 20:25, 19 May 2005 (UTC)
