Mass Effect Wiki talk:Manual of Style

Devconfirmation
I have no problem with listing items that have been confirmed by developers as fact, but how will we get this confirmation? My concern is that we will have people entering random things and then tagging it as devconfirmed. SpartHawg948 21:03, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * That's a good point. We could limit the use of devconfirmed tags to admins or something. DRY, thoughts? --Tullis 21:07, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I linked the tag through to a category page (which I haven't actually created yet in case you can think of a better name for it) which would act as a monitoring point. The idea really was to try to reduce administrative burden of policing removal of devconfirmed text (as a small number of recent edits did). However, it could be that the cure is worse than the disease . I certainly don't feel particularly strongly about it one way or the other. As I mentioned we could also just go with an unobtrusive HTML comment. --DRY 21:25, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Or a comment embedded in the wiki code? (That could have been what you meant.) That might work just as well, though it sometimes didn't for the Races page before the Citadel / non-Citadel shuffle. We can try. --Tullis 21:32, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, I was thinking along the lines of  or similar in the wiki markup. Users would only see it if they opened the page for editing. On the other hand, as you point out, it's a lot less attention grabbing - and is quite subtle for non-technical users - so it might not be as effective. Whatever you and SpartHawg think is fine with me, though (including the omnipresent "leave it as it was before I messed with it" option ). --DRY 21:42, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm less concerned with the technical aspects of it than I am with ensuring it isn't being abused. If someone just enters some random, made-up factoid and then claims it's devconfirmed, what can we do to disprove it? It becomes sort of a he-said she-said kinda thing, without any real resolution short of talking to the developers. SpartHawg948 22:58, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not too sure how that differs from the current state of affairs with speculation disagreement resolution in general . My motivation is primarily administrative, so to my mind an administrative solution would be fine. --DRY 23:37, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Optional Missions
I don't see a section regarding how to deal with things Shepard can do but doesn't have too. I want to add a section about Shepard taking a drink from the bar in the Afterlife Club and falling unconcious to the Club's article, but I don't know if "if Shepard orders a drink from the bar" is ok, or if I should just say "when Shepard orders a drink from the bar". Any insight would be great. Cheers. JakePT 11:05, November 20, 2009 (UTC)
 * This stuff shouldn't be added until the game is out so we can see how it works. Also: spoiler warning? :s --Tullis 15:07, November 20, 2009 (UTC)
 * First off, yeah, this is something that should wait for confirmation, and yes, some indication of spoilers may be nice. Also, as for insight, refer to Flux. That article seems pretty well laid out, I don't see any reason that can't also work for the Afterlife article. SpartHawg948 19:51, November 20, 2009 (UTC)

Adding to welcome message?
Would it be worth sticking links to the Style Guide and Community Guidelines pages into the autowelcome message? Might save us a lot of grief.

Also, the Style Guide needs updating, especially that screenshot of an edit-in-progress. It might also be worth underlining how we handle squadmate / critical character pages compared to normal ones. --Tullis 14:13, December 4, 2009 (UTC)

Image Size Standards
Paper Street's recent adding of images to Elanos Haliat and Lieutenant Girard got me thinking about establishing image dimension standards for different kinds of pages. Like a set resolution/aspect ratio for minor character images, squadmembers, major characters etc. Just to have some visual consistancy across pages, which we are generally lacking at the moment.

I don't know what they'd be, though my preference for major character images (i.e. ones with info boxes) would be that they should be 320px wide, so they fill out the info box. If you compare the Garrus page to the Mordin page, I'd argue that the Mordin info box looks significantly better, if a bit bigger, simply because the image doesn't have two large borders on each side, so that the image, name box and the info text are all aligned the same way.

Case in point:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v637/NeoRicen/InfoBoxImageCompare.png

Aspect ratio is a different issue, but I'd argue for something more like the Mordin page with a greater width than height, as opposed to the Thane page which is the opposite and makes the info box much larger. A consistent aspect ratio would also be nice.

As for minor characters, my only preference would be that they are consistent across all pages. Though something like the Elanos Haliat and Lieutenant Girard pages would be good, though maybe a bit smaller.

Just a pet peeve of mine, but it's something to mull over.

JakePT 08:37, December 26, 2009 (UTC)

Images of Shepard note
I guess it doesn't hurt to mention it twice, but there's also an explanation of the no-images policy under Canon. Maybe this aspect needs its own section on here? It is kind of important. --Tullis 11:06, December 27, 2009 (UTC)


 * Oops... totally missed the note in the Canon section. I do indeed think that the no Shepard images policy needs it's own section. It is rather important, and it's one that has popped up quite a bit as an issue lately. SpartHawg948 21:31, December 27, 2009 (UTC)

Manual of style section for Squad Members?
I would like to gauge any interest in add a new style for squad members from the games. Such details like Location/Mission Found, Race, Affiliation (Alliance Military, Migrant Fleet, C-Sec), Paragon/Renegade (cause all squad members, when they are squad members, do have specific personality traits that lead towards Paragon or Renegade). Stuff like that. Since squad members are above the usually NPCs you interact with. -- (Lone Hunter 16:28, February 27, 2010 (UTC))

Proper Noun for Husks?
Is the Husks among the capitalized name? It seems some pages has it capitalized and some doesn't. Case in point is in the Husks page where all instances of "Husks" are capitalized but in some other pages (eg, N7: Abandoned Mine), it is not. Also while on this topic, perhaps the gender-neutral section in the manual should be updated to capitalize "commander", as it is indicated as a proper noun by SpartHawg948 in one of his previous edits. Teugene 09:03, March 2, 2010 (UTC)