Author Topic: Lore Project  (Read 8395 times)

Felderburg

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Re: Lore Project
« Reply #20 on: June 04, 2010, 04:07:31 AM »
not confusing... Confused. As in it doesn't know what it is trying to convey to the reader so it ultimately conveys very little.

It conveys the same thing it does for every other person: a background (which is much longer for him), badges associated, where he's found, and like the other TF contacts, a link to the TF itself. There's not any sort of conflict between lore and game mechanics, and it provides both quite well, in my opinion.
I used CIT before they even joined the Titan network! But then I left for a long ol' time, and came back. Now I edit the wiki.

I'm working on sorting the Lore AMAs so that questions are easily found and linked: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA/Sorted Tell me what you think!

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TonyV

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Re: Lore Project
« Reply #21 on: June 04, 2010, 04:20:39 PM »
I've got to admit, all along, I've had it in my head that the intention was to fill out some of the lore on existing pages, not have pages dedicated exclusively to lore.

I'm looking at, say, the page on Statesman.  I do like the "stats" box, and the information that's in the article itself is pretty good, but I do have some concerns about it.

First, I'm a little confused why the page is name "Marcus Cole" instead of "Statesman."  Statesman is by far the more popular name he's known as.  Personally, I would have named the article Statesman and had a redirect from Marcus Cole to the Statesman article, as we do in the main wiki.  Remember, always think of how your average user is going to access the information.  Even though Marcus Cole may be technically correct, if someone is looking up information on him, they're almost assuredly going to be looking up "Statesman."  It's kind of like how in the Wikipedia, "Robert Zimmerman" is just a disambiguation page, but "Bob Dylan" has all of the nitty-gritty details about the famous singer.

Second, and I know I might be sounding dense here, but I'm still a bit confused about why we need pages dedicated exclusively to lore.  I mean, some pages will by their nature be almost or all lore, such as "Brass Monday," because they're not addressed in-game.  But for articles like Statesman, it seems to me that having pages dedicated only to lore seems a bit of a waste, as the information fits really nicely on his main page.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't want people to get confused when looking up information in the wiki.  Whether they're looking up badges you can get by helping (or defeating) Statesman, what his background is, what powers he has, information about his task force, or whatever, I really like that people can just look up Statesman.  The only exception I can mentally make to this is if some aspect of Statesman would make the article so long that it would be hard to find stuff, e.g. all of the nitty-gritty task force details, then I don't mind splitting it out of the article, kind of like how the Wikipedia has articles on Tennessee and on Memphis, Tennessee.  But it doesn't have an article specifically on the best fishing holes in Memphis, Tennessee.  That would be a really, really short article, and if there were any reason to specifically mention the best fishing holes in Memphis, it would probably be best represented as a note in the main Memphis article.

I'm still not really sure what the goal is with either a lore-specific wiki or lore-specific pages (other than, as mentioned above, about topics that are only primarily known through their lore).  I don't think lore is particularly hard to find in the Paragon Wiki, other than the fact that to some extent, the information either doesn't exist or hasn't been entered by anyone yet--in which case, I'd highly encourage folks to enter it, of course.

I'm not saying that I hate all of these ideas, I just think it's kind of weird to kind of be running two wikis within each other.  I'd like to find some way to better integrate the lore information within the existing articles and/or wiki.

P.S.  If you're really interested in lore, I'd suggest poking around the City of Heroes main site and subsite pages in the Internet Archive.  There's a ton of stuff out there.  For example, ever heard of the hero Herald?  Browsing it can be slow and painful at times, but sometimes you can stumble onto some really amazing stuff.  I really wish that NCsoft would do a better job of keeping their site archives intact somewhere.

Felderburg

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Re: Lore Project
« Reply #22 on: June 04, 2010, 07:40:27 PM »
I always thought the intention was to streamline the process of getting to lore. I used the example of the Rikti at some point: when you type "Rikti" in the search box and just hit enter, you go to the page on the Rikti, which has all the lore you'll ever need. However, when you search for the word Rikti, the lore related article is halfway down, after a bunch of other things.

In the official boards, I mentioned having a little set of drop down style boxes on the main page, that have links to the lore sections of articles. This would help people unfamiliar with the wiki idea of "categories," and finding things to put in the drop down sections would also help fill in missing categories for articles.
I used CIT before they even joined the Titan network! But then I left for a long ol' time, and came back. Now I edit the wiki.

I'm working on sorting the Lore AMAs so that questions are easily found and linked: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA/Sorted Tell me what you think!

Pinnacle: The only server that faceplants before a fight! Member of the Pinnacle RP Congress (People's Elf of the CCCP); formerly @The Holy Flame