Talk:Style guide

Singular or Plural pages?
I just renamed the Ship page to Ships and put a #redirect for ship. The page talks about all ships, multiple types even! As I started fixing links, I noticed most prose says simply "ship" so would use the redirect. We should definately have pages for both, one being a redirect. What should "policy" be on which is the actual page? I'm inclined to go plural for ships, skellies, and other things that are generally discussed in plural. Part of my logic is that this is like an encyclopedia, describing things, not a dictionary defining the word. Thoughts? 17:44, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I think your logic for the ship redirect is sound. Swords, skellies, etc. should probably be plural.  I think either singular or plural is fine, depending on what is used in-game most often.  For instance, I used elderberries rather than elderberry.--Yaten 17:50, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I'm a little concerned about using plurals for the page names. There are lots of times when the phrase "board a ship" would be useful, for example.  It seems like extra work to have to write "ships|ship" all the time.  Especially since Wiki makes it easy to write things like [ship]s to add plurals.
 * In the end, if there are redirects for the singular and the plural, it won't matter too much, but it does seem like a lot of extra entries. As for "elderberries", I'm sure there will be a few exceptions like that, but I'm really in favor of using the singular whereever possible.  --Barrister 18:38, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I agree with barrister. The fewer redirects the better and wiki provides an easy way of doing plurals while having the actual page be singular. --Lessah of Midnight 18:51, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I am going to come down very firmly saying that we should follow the general wiki guidelines as closely as possible for this issue. In paticular |The Wiki Naming Conventions on nouns --Shagie 01:48, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Got to admit, I still like the plural form, but 1) excellent argument is made for singular and 2) I do so love consistency in documentation... my minds been changed. 02:24, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Pirate names
Should entries for individual pirates use the Ocean:Name format? My gut reaction is yes. Anyone else? --Barrister 20:49, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Yep. Should also help in reducing confusion with accounts. --Shagie 21:09, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Then again, I'm not sure if there's THAT much content to be put for pirates, but hey! --VPeric


 * People are adding the governor's names for various islands, so it's begun. I do think we should leave Cleaver, Nemo, Peghead, :etc. as global names.  --Barrister 21:30, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * We should probably encourage a difference between User: and : . However, the distinction between them won't be easily grokked by the casual user. In many cases : should reference : (what a hackery of language/code that is!).


 * Cleaver is going to cause some problems given the sword too. Should swords or pirates be namespaced? --Shagie 01:00, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I think Cleaver should be the sword while Cleaver (Pirate) should reference Captain Cleaver. --Ihope 18:35, 6 Jul 2005 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of disambiguation pages/redirects at pages, but realistically, nearly every word in the dictionary is a pirate name by now. I like the idea of using ocean names as a namespace.  11:32, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah, defienately sort by ocean names. Now, through, could we have some guidelines as to what's enough for one to get "listed"? Governor of island, past/present, ok... King/Queen of a Flag that did something... I mean, I don't think shoppe owners and people like that "deserve" to be listed. --VPeric


 * Deserved or not, they'll start appearing. Limiting the domain of a wiki is difficult at best. 21:39, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * You don't think they deserve it? They'd just be another page in another wiki of another branch of the Wikimedia project! What's that worth that not many deserve? --Ihope could become a lawyer, eh? 18:35, 6 Jul 2005 (UTC)

One thought, relatevly related. Currently, flags use the format of Ocean:FlagName (ie. Cobalt:Vilya), right? I've seen the same thing for players, and for islands. Now while I doubt a player would be called "Olive Island" I think it's not impossible for a flag to have the same name as someone (ie. Euterpe the pirate and Euterpe the flag (as little sense as it makes, something like that could happen)). Should we have name "templates" such as :Pirate:; :flag: etc? Or keep the flag without it, and add stuff for everything else (shop, pirate...). Thoughts? --VPeric


 * I suppose standardizing on Ocean:Flag:Flagname makes sense. I just don't relish changing everything.  --Barrister 18:47, 5 Jul 2005 (UTC)


 * That looks rather weird in my opinion. I'd like a disambiguation instead: Ocean:Name (Title) --Ihope 18:35, 6 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Style Guide
We need a style guide for new people coming to this site to figure out what the best practices are for certaing material and things that have already been mutualy agreed upon. This should reduce the time it takes for a new person and also acts as a consistent guide for us when deciding if we need to edit something or not. --Shagie 22:53, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Acronym or spelled out?
PvP or player vs player? NPP or non-player pirate? Of course both should have the proper redirects for one to the other, but I believe that the fully spelled out form is the better one to use in all cases. --Shagie 00:07, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Naming conventions (acronyms) says to prefer the full name. 01:01, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC) (learning to use wikipedia)

Caps
On rum there are many capital letters that seem out of place. These are mostly in the links so that one would see "of the Sailing, Carpentry, and Bilging puzzles". Is there any reason to have these be capitalized? This actualy causes problems when you get to two word links such as sea battle in that it does not link to the same page as the capital version (and thus you get a redirect). Should this get cleaned up sooner than later? --Shagie 02:15, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Excessive capitalization should be avoided. The names of the puzzles and the types of stores (tailor) should always be lowercase.  --Barrister 04:12, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Speaking of caps, I keep watching articles move from all caps to sentence caps style. i.e. Fleet officer -> Fleet Officer -> Fleet officer and so on. Perhaps we should pick a method and then pop it on the Style guide article? --Guppymomma 00:47, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * Absolutely, we need to resolve this and be done with it. I think the rule should be: everything is lower case except names of pirates, crews, flags, and islands.  --Barrister 01:20, 1 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * Agreed, this is common practice on wikipedia, and makes sense. Sentence case except in the case of proper nouns. 14:02, 9 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Speaking of speaking of caps, I keep noticing at least two mid word caps issues. Deathdrakkar vs DeathDrakkar. It's the latter officially in game isn't it? The other one is RobertDonald vs Robertdonald. I've been switching it to Robertdonald as that's the article name, but doesn't he use RobertDonald as his forum signature doohickey? Although in game there's no method of doing the mid word caps.... thoughts? In the same pirate name vein, there is atteSmythe/AtteSmythe/Attesmythe as well which can have difficulty. --Guppymomma 17:18, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * While I admit to vastly preferring atteSmythe (as the full name is Stephen atte Smythe) the lack of available midcaps in-game and the forcing of leading caps on the wiki (stupid Mediawiki) imply to me that we should probably (sigh) use game-style capitalisation for the article names. It's probably unfair to ask contributors to remember everyone's midcap preferences for piping links, too, sadly. --AtteSmythe 17:27, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)


 * I prefer to use the in-game names. Which means that Attesmythe and Robertdonald are the "correct" versions.  That being said, both "Deathdrakkar" and "DeathDrakkar" are correct.  The flag existed as Deathdrakkar and then merged into Epic.  When they spun out again, the new version was DeathDrakkar. --Barrister 20:42, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)

consistency
I'd like to see us settle on a few issues.


 * "cannonball" vs. "cannon ball". (I prefer the "cannon ball.")
 * "ironmonger" vs. "iron monger". (The game uses the latter, but the dictionary doesn't.)
 * Labor amounts listed with basic first vs. expert first. (I prefer basic.)
 * Unless there's a strong reason to do otherwise, lists of items should be alphabetized.

Thoughts? --Barrister 04:25, 28 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Sounds good on all accounts. You are more likely to see someone searching for "cannon", "ball" or "monger" and making it two words improves the search.  Basic first seems to be the standard when quoting pay and in shops.  Alphabetized and chronological removes suggestion of bias. --Shagie 04:40, 28 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I'm in agreement with both of ya. --Guppymomma 16:41, 28 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Okay, I'm going on a search and replace for all occurrences now. This might take a while.  ;-)  --Barrister 01:44, 29 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * *takes a peek at the Recent changes page and salutes Barrister* There's a bunch of us that should start some sort of weird OCD alphabetizing/ordering/consistency club.  :) --Guppymomma 03:04, 29 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I think that club is called "wiki". --Barrister 03:23, 29 Jun 2005 (UTC)

More categories?
Note that it is also ": island". So Midnight:Jorvik island and can be piped to just Jorvik. Though I have to wonder why we are putting in the extra "island" part. Why not just the name?--Lessah of Midnight 22:19, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Adding the extra 'island' is the isles proper name. Some islands don't have that, such as Flow or Waterberry. --Callistan 22:37, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * ...Though I think it makes perfect sense to redirect the short names to the full names. --Callistan 07:49, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Good idea. How do we redirect for Cobalt/Viridian islands that map to different pages?  --Barrister 07:50, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Covered by disambiguation pages. --Guppymomma 20:18, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I was thinking making short and unambiguous short names point to full island names. e.g. Jorvik and Midnight:Jorvik redirect to Midnight:Jorvik Island. Though there was an Azure:Jorvik, it's not likely to be sought, so perhaps a "See Also" link on the Midnight:Jorvik page would be enough.
 * In thinking about ambiguity (disambiguation We should probably make pages like Dragon's Nest be a disambiguation page for the Cobalt/Veridian versions. This helps searches, but allows disambiguous links to be shorter too. Also adds lots of redirect pages though. --Callistan 09:19, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I've disambiguation paged all the Cobalt/Viridian Islands. Sorry for all the disambig spam! --Guppymomma 20:18, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

While adding to Eta Island I used : : when adding the section for buildings to Eta. Which led me to the Midnight:Silver Dawn page where I linked the crew names with placeholders, using :crew: because : is bound to cause conflict with :. Any suggestions? --Clinton 16:04, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Is there enough information to justify a separate page for each specific shop? --Barrister 19:02, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Some shops have a lot of history, and some pirates love them very dearly. We'll either need a "policy" to deal with them or be ready to get admins to delete them. I don't care for the latter. --Callistan 19:09, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * We certainly don't "need" them and I wouldn't bother with it for most purposes. But trying to restrict a wiki is just futile and will drive the admins batty. If people want to link them then I don't see a problem so long as people stay civil and factual. Silver Dawn has a couple of people, including myself, that would like to see this be very encompassing. The only thing that I would like to see is that shops get namespaced to the island that they're on. Makes the link longer but helps make the organization clearer. --208.60.252.108 16:48, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Conflicts happen (as opposed to barnacle?)! I don't expect the casual wikizen to use namespaces. They add quite a bit of effort, folks won't know about it, and it sullies the nice mechanism of just wrapping ... around some text to get a link. I say let the good wikizen (with plenty of time) place things in agreed upon namespaces, but to always leave redirect or dismbiguation page in it's wake, and to (less importantly) qualify links that point to disambiguation/redirect pages. --Callistan 19:09, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Does anyone think it might be useful to do island size categories? That way someone wanting to look at a list of mediums or whatnot could do so easily. In the same vein, would it be useful to also do uncolonized/colonized categories? --Guppymomma 01:16, 6 Jul 2005 (UTC)


 * Hmm, how about just turning the island list (for each ocean) into a table?, , --Barrister 01:39, 6 Jul 2005 (UTC)


 * I like this idea, but only if there is a way to have sortable tables (i.e. by size and colonisation status); otherwise, this table might prove unnecessary.--Yaten 02:02, 6 Jul 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't think wiki allows for anything nonstatic beyond the category & special pages. A sortable table would be the best, but it doesn't seem to be an option.  I was just trying to think of easy methods of doing that kind of info as a category tag could be incorporated into the island template based on the islandsize variable and that would only require that the template be kept updated for each island page instead of something separate from the island page. --Guppymomma 02:33, 6 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Flag names
Please don't kill me for suggesting this... Book and movie titles are italicized. In television, the series name is italicized and the individual episode titles are not. Do we want to consider italicizing flag names? And leaving crew names as plain text? --Barrister 06:08, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * It's an interesting idea, and certainly not one without merit, but I don't think it would be all that practical. Flag names aren't italicized on the YPP forum, and that's where most of our users come from.  They're also not italicized on flag info pages.  I'm not sure what the advantage would be, but it doesn't seem to be worth adding italics to a whole bunch of pages.--Yaten 06:18, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * /me gets out a stick and lights it on fire, staring at Barrister. ;) I think it would be a nifty, but too difficult to implement idea. Strictly speaking, in bibliographies, book titles are underlined and Magazine/journal names are italicized.  Group names and publishers are just normal text.  At least that's how it is in biology.  With the vast number of times flag names are mentioned throughout the whole wiki, I vote nay as keystrokes that could go toward more useful projects. --Guppymomma 12:36, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * I have to agree with the frugal use of keystrokes. :P 23:31, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)
 * And that settles that. Thanks for the feedback.  --Barrister 23:47, 15 Jul 2005 (UTC)