Tardis talk:Guide to writing Individuals articles

Headings

By way of gentle reminder, all headings must follow Tardis:Manual of Style#Headings. Please make sure when you finish your article that all headings and subheads are in "Sentence case" — not, as is currently true, "Title Case". CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:26, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT

This guide must also, when complete, stress the importance of using {{DEFAULTSORT:Last name, First name}}. It's absolutely vital for easiest categorization of articles that people get in the habit of using that instead of adding a sortkey to each individual category. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:30, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

Preloadable templates

This article should also stress the convenience of preloadable templates, which come with this formatting intact. You should make sure that you're writing to that preloadable template's format, as well. See the newpage individual template. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:30, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, no, of course I have that wrong. The vast majority of characters will not abide whatever format you write up. So the newpage individual template is somewhat irrelevant. Your instructions should actually include several different cases. One for the "average" character, about which we know nothing. One for the co-starring character, about which we may know a bit more. And one for the true leads. You seem to be writing a format for the Doctor and companion pages, at the moment, and that's just not gonna fly for the vast majority of character pages. You really should attempt to provide alternative formats, otherwise we'll end up with a lot of pages that say "to be added" for every subhead — and of course that information will never be added.

Now that I think about it, I'm kinda opposed to your continuing this page in the Tardis: namespace. It's too far away from actual policy to be here. Individuals are, well, individual, and trying to shoehorn in a format may not be particularly wise. This page definitely should not be live right now. Please take it back to your user page and work on it there, or at the forum page. This is trickier than it might seem on first blush. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:40, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

Delete

I'm recommending deletion, even though you've got an in-use tag up. You're writing policy without a clear idea of where you're going. Not saying this thing can't come back, but its particulars really need to be hashed out first. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 18:41, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

Could you not help, and readjust this article to how you think it should go? It would save time from having to do it again in the future, and I have ask Tangerinedue to look over it, but I think it would be better if you went though it and improved it to how you think it should go. Cheers Mini-mitch 19:48, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

There are several issues I can see with it, it's gone the route that a lot of templates have gone on this wiki and that is to copy and adapt and there is nothing wrong with that (there's a however coming though), however when doing this you need to recognise the differences between various elements on the wiki.

This guide is for an in-universe element. Unlike the other guides they're all written in the same way and that's because the information that goes into them basically sticks to the same format, it all follows the same general format of; some form of summary/synopsis, some form of character list, references, notes, continuity, etc.

In-universe articles don't work like that because the information is going to be very varied, some articles will have just a few lines of information whilst others will run to several sub-headings and various other elements.

This is the partial reason why there isn't a format guide for Places, objects and whatever else, because they're very varied things that often take on their own layout based on what information is available.

I think for this form where there are so many variations between how articles are laid out it may pay to go with a hybrid of examples and layout (help people understand by seeing particular articles) that are examples of the various layouts. As CzechOut has stated above there may need to be different layouts for different levels of information.

Having said all this, I think it was somewhat hasty to add the delete tag within the 72 hour window the inuse tag affords. The page could have been de-linked from the layout guide (the only page that currently links to it) and a note placed on the talk page stating this noting an intention to place a delete tag on the article (acknowledging that the editor may still be working on it). Sometimes writing things like this is about making mistakes and getting other users' attention and getting people to look at a starting point.

Currently the page could be salvaged, but it'd mean stripping out 90% of the article down to the bare bones, with links out to example articles of a long, medium and short length article, just leaving in the first lead sections about infobox etc. --Tangerineduel 11:55, June 4, 2010 (UTC)

Do what you feel is the best way to go about it. I don't mind what happens to the article - after all i ask if we had one in the Forums, and got no reply, so decided to try and make one and see what you said. Mini-mitch 13:03, June 4, 2010 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and re-written the article and removed both the delete and in use tags as the article has changed significantly since both were placed, I've also added a note at the top stating this guide is in-development and that discussions should go on this talk page. --Tangerineduel 17:11, June 4, 2010 (UTC)