Review talk:A's List of Recommended Mods

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[edit] Inception

A little while back it was pointed out that A's List had become badly dated simply because most of it's links (to TesSource) were now unworkable. Aelius put the list together over a year or so, but suddenly deparated from the community around August 2007. (There was no departure notice, he just disappeared. There may have been health prolems, or he may have just left.) I sent email to him regarding archiving the list here, and did not receive a response, so I'm assuming this is okay. Naturally, if he turns up and objects, we'll remove the page. --Wrye 21:17, 6 June 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Moving

Sorry about the whole moving mess, just I'm not sure we're really using the Review namespace, even though it does technically exist. It contains only two pages, both of them created by Wrye. Other reviews are listed on General:Reviews, but are all stored in the User spaces of the people that made them. Since this review is by someone who is not a user on this site, I'm not sure exactly where it belongs. Just wondering if we want to make the Review namespace official? Or move this (and the other article in it) into a more widely-used location? --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 00:16, 7 June 2008 (EDT)

I think that we should leave these articles here in the review space, but continue to use it very sparsely. In particular, glancing over it, none of the reviews linked to from General:Reviews are of sufficient utility/quality to justify "official" recognition.

More general principle: I think that the Review space should be for "officially sanctioned" subjective articles. Those articles should be pretty rare and should be of fairly high utility. They should be subject to review/veto by experienced members of the site. (E.g. when I started Wrye's Fund Videos, I recall that I explictly asked for other admins to check and do veto it if they found it inappropriate or simply of insufficient quality/utility.)

Regarding the use of that for mod lists (one of the primary things I was thinking of since popular mod lists are often abandoned after a while), I originally posted the suggestion on the community portal: UESPWiki:Community_Portal/Archive_8#Proposal:_Recommended_Mod_Lists. (Ironically, the immediate impetus for that list was my desire to see more competitors with Aelius -- since Aelius was compiling his list without actually playing the game.)

Anyway, in Proposal: Recommended Mod Lists, I cover a couple of suggestions for keeping things from getting out of hand. But those largely come down to "common recognition of strong utility". In keeping with that, my votes/comments on the two pages currently in the space are:

• A's List: Keep. Very well regarded, established list.
• Wrye's Fun Videos: Abstain (Bias). I think it's useful, but not a huge deal. (Certainly not as useful as A's list and other good list mods.) I put it together as a kind of a test case for the Review namespace. I actually rather wish that someone else had done such a list (so that I wouldn't personally be involved) -- but there's no other such list that I know of. And they are fairly cool videos.

--Wrye 01:16, 7 June 2008 (EDT)

What exactly do we define as "officially sanctioned"? I mean, what that isn't going to run into copyright issues? We obviously can't just copy reviews from other websites here, since almost all of them are subject to copyright. (And even in cases of reviews on other wikis, we've had a general site policy of not copying things from other sites, regardless of their licensing issues, because only a site with the exact same license as ours would be compatible.) I have no problem with either of the articles in this namespace (even though they're really more collections of mod links/videos than actual reviews), but as it is, these two pages are very-nearly orphaned (only linked from Oblivion:Recommended Mods and a few User/talk pages), so the odds of any visitor to the site actually finding them (and thus the odds of anybody adding any other articles in this section) are pretty slim, as evidenced by the fact that the namespace has been in use for over a year, but only one person has made any real contributions to it. I think if we're going to be using this namespace, we should find some way of increasing its visibility such that it can be seen by more visitors to the site. If we don't, the articles would probably be better off in another namespace, either General as I suggested earlier, or since these are both Oblivion-specific, they could be in the Oblivion namespace. General probably makes more sense, as we try to keep the articles in the game-specific namespaces strictly objective and informative, while the General namespace allows for a little more personal expression. (Hence all the Fanfiction is stored there for example.) If you're worried about these getting lost in a sea of Fanfics, we can always add navigational aids - categories, breacrumb trails, links on a General:Reviews (we could make it clear that the other pages on there are of lesser quality somehow), etc. Just a little bit of infrastructure to hold this section together a bit better. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 21:06, 7 June 2008 (EDT)

I gotta back Lurlock on this one. We just got our first edit. I can't justify having a personal opinion namespace when we can easily use user space for that. --Ratwar 23:12, 8 June 2008 (EDT)

I sense a long discussion coming on... Let hold off until this weekend. I was just in a long, contentious community discussion on the forums, and I'm going to be busy probably until the weekend. There are good reasons for not userfying it. (E.g. list is by Aelius, but he doesn't have an account here, so he doesn't have a user page to put it on. Also we generally discourage users from adding mini-wikis on their own pages -- moving this to his or my user page would sanction such a policy. Also, the prospect of doing was raised and not objected to quite a while back on the Community Portal. In other words the existence of this page is in compliance with UESP policy -- it's just a little used part of the policy.) But yeah should be discussed since this is a more involved test of the idea.

I'll have time this weekend to talk about it a bit more, so please hold on until then. --Wrye 01:50, 10 June 2008 (EDT)

Found some time. For continued discussion, see UESPWiki_talk:Authored_Lists. --Wrye 19:42, 10 June 2008 (EDT)