Ultronomicon talk:Editing Essentials

Now that it's been made clear that we're using general wikipedia neutral voice and all, I still have one question about tenses and timing. From what point in time should we be writing articles? Do we refer to all events in UQM as having already taken place? Example: "The Captain found Earth surrounded by a slave shield." Or from some other temporal point of view? Example: "The Captain will find Earth surrounded by a slave shield." Setting our persepctive to have the entirety of the game in the past makes the most sense to me.

Also, are we using a mostly "out of game" perspective or a mostly "in game" one? The article on humans is awesome for an in game perspective, as is the Spathi Eluder page, but things like the Dreadnought are from a player's perspective. Obviously some entries force themselves in a certain direction (such as anything about FF and PR3 or the publishing history of the game). Frankly, I prefer the "in game" voice.

I think we need to have consistency and that has to be enforced (or at least stated) by the leadership of the site (the folks what own the server), just so that we all know what direction to be working for.

Mmrnmhrm 15:14, 7 Oct 2004 (CEST)

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I agree that we need consistency, but I think that any convention should come from consensus among the contributors, and not from any "leader". To achieve consensus, we would need something like the "Village Pump" that Wikipedia has to discuss these issues (but probably with some SC related name). I'll see if I can add the basic structure for something like that in the next few days. -- SvdB 08:41, 8 Oct 2004 (CEST)

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I think this page should be as concise as possible, only mentioning the things that differ from Wikipedia or are often done wrong. But it should also be so for the text itself. No extra words if they can be avoided. My reason for this is that it is important that every contributor reads the entire text, and the smaller this page is, the larger the chance that they will actually do that. --SvdB 08:41, 8 Oct 2004 (CEST)

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As I see it, there are (at least) two major purposes to the Ultranomicon: to house general Star Control background, history, and other information which deals with the Star Control universe; to house hints, spoilers, credits, links, and other information which deals with the Star Control games.

That being the case, I think it's important to have some separation of the two, particularly so that someone can enjoy reading about the SC universe without spoiling the game. Ideally there might be a separate "Topic (spoiler)" page (e.g. "Spathi (spoiler)") where information such as home world coordinates, the story as revealed during SC2, etc. can be put. The main article would have a line such as "For spoiler information, see [[XYZ (spoiler)]]". At the very least, {{spoiler}} text should be placed in all articles which contain spoilers, either at the top or just before the spoilers appear.

On another note, some consensus should probably be reached about whether or not information from SC3 (aka the Third One) is valid or not, particularly when giving information about the SC2 races which does not appear until SC3 (the nature of the Precursors comes to mind as a potentially controversial issue...). -- Jacius 09:10, 10 Oct 2004 (CEST)

suggestion for annexation

As far as I know, SC3 is not considered Star Control canon, namely because TFB did not write it. As for the segregation of the site, I think that the best way to do it might be to maintain the regular and a spoiler-free section. This is already being done with the game hints section, which doesn't link to alien race pages, etc. This would make maintainence a lot easier, as we wouldn't have to worry about the 'spoiler content' of the main body of work, only about the content of the spoiler-free annex. It could be totally closed, with no links leading out into the main Ultronomicon.

Why would someone want to look up something in the Ultronomicon while they're still playing the game? Only for hints I'd suspect. Having seperate spoiler pages for each subject only makes the Ultronomicon more difficult to use. There are or will be hints pages and walkthroughs which shouldn't spoil things you aren't looking for. It would be good to have some sort of index of these pages though, linked from the main page. I also disagree with placing {{spoiler}} everywhere. If you look up something game related, you can expect to get spoiled (though I guess that should be mentioned on the main page too). We would otherwise be placing these tags on almost each page.

And indeed, SC3 is out, except perhaps for a "Star Control 3" page which mentions SC3 and the history of how it came to exist. But no story info.

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I don't know about the majority, but I would want to look up things to learn more about the Star Control universe, for example what happened in the first game. Not everybody who visits this site will a) have already beaten the game or b) be looking for hints or spoilers.

Totally separating the "spoilers" and "no spoilers" sections (e.g. no links between articles in different sections) is not necessary, as long as it is made clear that a page contains spoilers (so as to warn people trying to avoid them). Having a link from the article about Race X to a page containing spoilers regarding this race would only make sense for ease of navigation. The problem that I forsee is somebody unfamiliar with the policy (if there ever is one) putting spoilers on non-spoiler pages, which wouldn't really be prevented by having two separate sections.

Also note that there is a difference between hints ("Race X doesn't like Race Y, and violence may ensue if they were to meet") and spoilers ("To get item P, go talk to Person A at the Nth planet of the system at coordinates X.Y, and say..."). In general, spoilers tell you exactly what to do or what happens, and thus spoil the experience by not letting you explore it by yourself. Hints give you a nudge in the right direction to keep you from being frustrated. (Obviously, I think one is much worse than the other.) I'm not worried about a few hints showing up in the articles, and in fact knowing some general information about something can help you realize a good way to do something.

Of course, this is all assuming that anybody besides me cares about this. If not, spoil away.

Re: SC3; the general consensus (on this site and other SC fan sites) is that SC3 is not canon. I agree, but I think this is the sort of thing that should be mentioned in a "site policy."
--Jacius 06:03, 15 Oct 2004 (CEST)