UESPWiki talk:Style Guide/Place Layout

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[edit] Tamriel Place Pages

I'm playing with some revisions to the officially sanctioned places template. I started with a suggestion at Oblivion Talk:Places#Suggestion. I've now proceeded to modify the Template:Ayleid Ruins Summary. I'm thinking of continuing to tweak the Oblivion Places pages, so that they do what I think they need to do within the Oblivion namespace. But I'm a bit confused as to the bigger question of how localized (i.e., Oblivion-specific) place pages should relate to Tamriel pages, and how to proceed on that front.

It seems to me that the Tamriel Place pages should not be automatically transcluded onto the localized (i.e., Oblivion) Place pages. Right now that transclusion system is not working too well. Most people don't know what to do with the pages. When the Tamriel pages are being filled in, it seems impossible to fill them out in such a way that works in all the situations where the pages are transcluded (i.e., where they've been set up for the Tamriel geography page, they generally don't work for Oblivion pages, and vice-versa). So I was hoping to get some feedback on:

• what should be on the Tamriel geography pages (i.e., Tamriel:Places A)?
• where should the Tamriel Place pages be transcluded?
• what should be on the Tamriel Place pages?

As far as I can tell, the main intended use of Tamriel Place pages is to transclude into Tamriel master geography pages. But right now, those geography pages aren't working too well. At Tamriel:Places B, for example, the road entries such as Tamriel:Black_Road are only half-included. At Tamriel:Places L, the most of the Leyawiin entry is being included, whereas other cities only have a one-liner.

In my opinion, the geography listing pages should really just be one to two line minimal descriptions of the places. There should be some mention of what game the place is included in, and then a link to a more complete page (presumably the game-specific page). So, for example, an entry on Belda might read:

A medium-sized Ayleid ruin occupied by conjurers, located in Cyrodiil between the Imperial City and Cheydinhal. See the Oblivion entry on Belda for more information.

This entry could easily be the contents of a Tamriel:Belda page, which then gets transcluded into the Tamriel:Places B page.

But then transcluding that entry into Belda doesn't work so well: in the Oblivion page, you don't need to be told that it's in Cyrodiil, and you don't need to be referred elsewhere for more information. So that's why I'm inclined to make the Oblivion and Tamriel versions of the place pages independent, without automatic transclusions back and forth.

Does any one else have any thoughts on these topics? --Nephele 18:55, 17 July 2006 (EDT)

The Tamriel pages are supposed to be encyclopedic. What I mean by this, is that it is supposed to contain basic information (a paragraph or two) about everything, and should link to the bigger article. That being said, information should only be transcluded from the Tamriel pages upon the discretion of the authors. Transclude it if it makes the article better, and don't if it interfers with the content or if it isn't needed. I'll be researching some of the work you've been doing on these pages to try to better understand your problem. --Aristeo 19:48, 17 July 2006 (EDT)

The problem is if you do that the Tamriel: pages will be largely ignored (just as they were before this was implemented). I agree it isn't a perfect solution, but otherwise there will inevitably be duplicate info. Garrett^Talk 01:57, 18 July 2006 (EDT)

In IRC, Nephele, I, and later Lurlock discussed this issue. We agreed that the Tamriel namespace is for lore, and things that are found in multiple games. Perhaps Nephele can explain our discussion better than I can. --Aristeo 02:29, 18 July 2006 (EDT)

My take on the IRC discussion is that the Tamriel encyclopedia should only have entries for the "well-known" places in individual games, i.e., places that either appear in multiple games (Imperial City), pop up on maps from other games, or come up in books used in other games (i.e, have some historical relevance). Any places that only appear within a single game should just have entries within that individual game's namespace. The problem with applying that is that I haven't played any game other than Oblivion, so it's a bit hard to be sure what places are universally known. But my guess is that basically just the major cities (nine in total, if you include Kvatch). That's all that's shown city-wise on the Cyrodiil map at Cyrodiil; plus a few landmarks like 'colovian highlands'. (Besides Aristeo, Lurlock, and me, Black_Ninja and Magnus also chimed in on this conversation; this seemed to be the consensus opinion on places in the Tamriel namespace).

So I'm thinking the various place templates should not try to transclude Tamriel:place pages, because those Tamriel:place pages in most cases won't exist. In the few cases where Tamriel:place pages are needed, they can be manually linked to/transcluded as appropriate.

There was also some discussion of books which I think came down to: most books are shared between games and definitely belong in the Tamriel namespace (although some unresolved problems with books that change content from one game to the next). There are some game-specific books that pop up, too, but it seems easiest just to keep all the books in Tamriel namespace instead of figuring out which ones are game-specific.

Apologies if I've misrepresented anyone's opinion, or overlooked something; feel free to provide corrections/amendments.--Nephele 03:00, 18 July 2006 (EDT)