Thread:Fossiliferous/@comment-27234821-20151201035545/@comment-24668482-20151202144310

I've edited the Silver Setting collection page to my own preference, so you can see (and compare to either Earth's Wealth or Law and Order pages as they still follow your original).

It has taken me time to respond as I needed to stop and consider what was truely important when it comes to a collaborative project. By that I mean, what is just differences in personal preferences and should just be shelved and ignored in the name of collaboration (there is no way that different people will ever look at the same page and agree on styling issues, compromise is the only way forward), and what I feel is actually important for the content of the wiki and is worth discussing further. As far as I am concerned, up until a certain point, if someone is willing to put the work in and make the edits then they should be free to do so in their own way. We are not yet big enough (and will probably never be formal enough) to have a stringent style guide. Wikis that use them need a huge team to enforce it on all contributions. This place will hopefully always be a bit more laid back than that, and allow for the inevitable inconsistencies across pages that comes with not using one, in the name of encouraging everyone to feel like their contributions, big or small, are welcome.

And a note about that: If your hope is that every single collection page will always look identical to each other, please remember that, as a community collaborative project that anyone can edit, and has a lax set of editing guidelines, that will never be the case. It is inevitable that someone will change one page. You might even get lucky and that person will then make the same edit on maybe 2-3 other pages. But they will never do all 360+. And then another person will make a small change on another page and so on and so forth. They will evolve, sporadically and randomly, and although all edits will be reviewed, they will not be automatically be undone just because they make the page different than template used for others. If the information is worthwhile and useful, then it will stay, and maybe one day someone will go about bringing them all back into check again by adding to the other pages, but they will then just continue to diverge from that point forward as new people make new small edits. You have to accept that sort of thing with community projects (at least, with ones like this one). It is possible to avoid, but doing so tends to create a more intimidating and shut-off editing environment that doesn't encourage people to try editing for first time as they are afraid of breaking the many, many style rules (which may all be useful, and there for a reason, but are intimidating nonetheless). That is fine for large wikis with many dedicated editors. Small ones like this need all the help they can get, and need to be careful to never put people off.

I'll admit, I did make some 'personal preference' edits to the Silver Settings page (hard to resist). I'll try to be careful to highlight what I think is just a personal preference thing and can be changed back (I am happy to go with your choices since you are making the effort to make the pages), and which are things I actually feel need to be done for wider wiki-related reasons.

Starting at the top: Intro

Every page here follows the same structure, and it is a fairly standard wiki-esque type structure that may be familiar: There is a introductory/summary paragraph, with a picture at top of page. This introduces the topic, and ideally gives all the main points that might be covered in the page (though often the latter isn't that easy to implement without disrupting flow/causing too much repetition, particularly on the shorter pages).

This introduction comes before the first heading. Then headings are used to section off the page into relevant topics. The wikia software automatically adds a table of contents (based on headings) directly before the first heading since this is such a standardised way of starting a page.

The problem with this system? The text wraps the image. So if the introductory text is too short, and ends before the limits of the image, then the gap created before the TOC when it is added, along with the white space from where the intro paragraph ends, looks god-awful on the page. I mean horrific. So often you will see on pages here that extra text has been unceremoniously shoved into the intro paragraph in order to up the word count a bit and get past whatever dimensions of the picture on that page (or strange images being used at top of page purely because shape lends to being used next to a shorter intro). Typically, I check the page on multiple browsers on multiple devices (since the site is somewhat responsive so can look different depending on how being viewed), and if make adjustments if any of those show the white space of death/awkward image placement.

And this is what probably happened to the original collection pages. The original, un-cropped, images of the collections were too square, and required too much intro text for a short page, so the combine information was shoved in to get the bounds of the text to go past the bounds of the image. It should have been elsewhere on the page really.

Where am I going with this... right, so when you add more information above the first header, or remove the 'this is such and such collect' into to page, while trying to tidy things up, you are essentially adding more and more main content to what should just be an introduction (it all comes before the TOC). The TOC starts falling further and further down the page. And it just seems like the page starts off in the middle? Like the very beginning just dives right into the topic? And then of course things get repetitive in the sections below because most of it was covered in the first few paragraphs before the TOC and page officially starts.

That was mostly my fault, again from shoving text in when image was annoying.

So I have put back a more introductory paragraph there (and split the rest of text through other sections instead).

Ideally? It would just be 'This is such an such page about whatever collection (with link if you really just meant to find out about collections in general).... (optional) This collection is also part of an artefact (link)..... Here is where you can get back to all collections if you don't really want to be on this page'.

But it once again borders on annoying image placement problem zone, particularly for most collections that would be missing middle sentence. So I am shoving more text in again (old habits die hard). Hence the 'this is a painfully obvious description of a basic mechanism in the game' paragraph. Yes that information would be repetitive when used 360+ times, but only assuming whoever is reading it also looked at other collection pages, rather than going directly to one as had a specific question. I doubt anyone will ever look at more than 5-6 different collection pages in a row. It also serves as a great 'link dump' opportunity, which intros are often used for. e.g. go here to get back to all the pictures, or all the puzzles, go here to get the to the detailed list of what can be won in each picture at each level, go here for the basic how game levels work. If I could have thrown a reference to the 'home desktop' to link to the basic game mechanism explanation page I would have. And I was tempted to list of the sort of things you win combining collections solely for the opportunity to link to common question topics like tools, anomalies, special items etc., but decided to go with brevity in this instance. But that really is what intros are best for - getting people to the page that gives the broader info they really wanted when they stumbled on the current page.

I think this isn't a personal styling thing. Every page has an intro. Adding 300+ pages without one would not be great. And yes, starting the page off with the very basic 'x is a collection (link)' is an important 'this is what the page is about and the basic answer to what could be the reason why you searched/clicked on that name... what it is'. What is Silver setting? It is a collection that can be combined in the game. Simple.