Talk:Codex

TO ALL EDITORS!
'''Codex entries are to be kept pristine. That means NO information added or taken away from their entries on the in-game Codex. Once these entries are given links, any further edits WILL be rolled back. Please save your points of interest and insightful, useful edits for related non-Codex articles where they'll be safe, because I don't want to have to undo people's hard work.'''

--Tullis 23:40, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Links from other articles
How do we want to handle linking to this Codex info from existing articles? I don't want to overwrite existing articles, as a lot of them - mainly the asari and turian articles - have had their transcribed Codex info expanded with additional material. But people should know this is here. Most pages that rely heavily on the Codex have a link to it at the bottom under Sources, but do we maybe need a more prominent link as well? --Tullis 08:17, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't feel like it's necessary to have the text of the Codex entry/entries on a certain topic on its page verbatim... I'm all for paraphrasing and the like, but straight repetition doesn't seem necessary. While transcribing yesterday, I came across the Mass accelerator page, which ATM is just the codex entry on it.  Not sure whether we'd want to Stub it and see about expanding, or just delete it.  Regardless, I'd bet there are others in the same boat.
 * As for your initial question (how to link to the codex entries), I'd say we should make the Codex link a bit more prominent. Looking at the Turian article, it's way down at the bottom as a reference.  IMHO, it should be somewhere up near the top ("for the Turian Codex entries, please see link").  There's surely a better way to fit it in / word it, but food for thought.  Now back to Virmire. BTW, hope it wasn't too presumptuous of me to add the section heading... just wanna be able to keep this neat, for when there gets to be more on here. Hezekiah957 20:10, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Truth be told, my instinct is to redirect where possible and leave delete as a last resort. Codex info should definitely be here, but I want editors to feel free to add information, links, points of interest and trivia to articles as well, not feeling they have to leave out something interesting or relevant because they want to keep the Codex entry pristine. Yeah, I was initially going to add something along those lines under the opening paragraphs for the alien races, but I wanted to open it up to debate before I did anything. --Tullis 20:21, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * We could go with  and/or   near the article start.  My personal aesthetic preference is for placing these between the (hopefully brief) introduction and the TOC.  I am strongly in favour of keeping the Codex text itself pristine, to provide an obvious editorial distinction between "official" and "commentary".  (Likewise planet descriptions, survey texts, etc.)  I also strongly prefer, in general, that information not be duplicated so as to reduce maintenance burden.  Accordingly, I think that substantial quotes of the Codex text ought simply to be linked.  If an existing page consists of only Codex text, it should probably be redirected (or deleted if it has no links-here and does not serve as a useful search result). -- DRY 22:59, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * What if... we could add a line similar to the QuickNavBar template to the top of each race's page, with links for their codex info? That would ameliorate the problem for the main race articles. (I agree with you, DRY: my preference is also to keep links like that between opening paragraph and TOC.) As for articles like Citadel space and Mass accelerator, maybe redirecting is the way to go. --Tullis 09:21, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I've whipped up Template:QuickRaceBar as a starting point for discussion. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?  Feel free to modify as desired.  -- DRY 03:35, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

ME2 Codex?
A lot of the entries in the Mass Effect 2 Codex are exactly the same as their ME1 counterparts, but it appears right now that the Codex only covers ME1 entries. Will we be merging ME2 Codex entries onto this page or creating a seperate ME2 Codex page?
 * At the moment, we're hoping to avoid needing to split the page and hopefully the high degree of overlap will make this simpler. Most likely the page will be broken into two sections. (This also reduces the odds of breaking any incoming anchored links.) --DRY 17:10, February 1, 2010 (UTC)
 * I noticed that for whatever reason BioWare decided to "downgrade" some ME1 codex entries--eg. the Keepers are a narrated Primary entry in ME1 but despite having the exact same text in ME2 are in the unnarrated Secondary entries. Not sure if that would have an effect on classifing the entries, though. 67.162.113.118 06:27, February 2, 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing that out. That sort of thing does complicate things a little, but once we've got the full ME2 codex, we'll try to get it sorted.  --DRY 06:56, February 2, 2010 (UTC)