Talk:Manual of Style

From Traveller Wiki - Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far future

About article names being in singular rather than plural: I submit that the name of races and ethnic groups should be in plural (Darrians rather than Darrian). Vilani, Zhodani, etc. are also in the plural, it's just that in these cases the plural is the same as the singular. I would also think that there are other cases where the plural would be more correct than the singular, but I can't come up with an example off the cuff. Rancke 16:32, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

The reason for the singular titles vs plurals (and the older ordering style for the personal name articles) is for ease of wikifying (adding wiki formatting) to articles, primarlly links. You can create a link with different text by using a '|' separator (e.g. [[Darrians|Darrian]] will display the text "Darrian" as a link and when clicked will go to "Darrians" article). You can also turn a singular name article into a plural link by adding "s" outside the link. (e.g. [[Darrian]]s will have a full link of "Darrians" and connect to the "Darrian" article). Since it is easier to create plural links from singular article titles the prefered style is to request singular article titles. A similar argument can be used for the order of names for the titles of articles about people.

The "article titles are singular" style is used by Wikipedia and every other wiki on Wikia. Unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason for making the article title a plural, I would like to keep the guideline that all article titles are to be singular. Tjoneslo 16:51, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I checked how Wikipedia handled it, and they used "'Ethnicity' people", which sounds like a good solution to my problem. So, 'Darrian people' instead of 'Darrians' (and instead of 'Darrian' which just sounds wrong to me). Acceptable? Rancke 17:09, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Does this work for some of the alien names? For example, does K'kree people work? Droyne people, Hiver people, Jgd-ll-jagd people? Should it be Fteirle or Fteirle people? I'm not trying to be difficult here, just trying the options. I like the idea of including "people" to distinguish between the ethnic group and the language (e.g. Gevgh). Tjoneslo 23:00, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

It certainly work for distinguishing 'Aslan people' from 'Aslan species'. (And it shouldn't be 'Fteirle'. That's what those Aslans call themselves. We Imperials call them by their real name, Aslans ;-). As for the rest, yes it sounds a bit awkward. But so does 'Danish people'. 'Danes' would be my preference, but if that is ruled out, it's a workable alternative. I'd say the same applies to aliens. It sounds awkward, but it's tolerable. Rancke 13:40, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Correct grammer and spelling should be an compelling reason to alter the "singular only" rule. If an article title about Danish people should properly be titled "Danes", then we should use the proper title. The core reason for using the singular only rule is to aid in wiki formatting, but none of the alternatives address the ease of wiki formatting. I will add the race name exception to the manual of style (using the plural according to the language). Tjoneslo 15:44, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] InfoBox Entries

I've just taken a look at some of the pages for the various LBBs. We don't appear to have a standard for these yet. Examples: The InfoBox for LBB1 has Publisher Game Designers Workshop; the InfoBox for Mercenary (book) has Publisher GDW. Yeah, I know it's only a minor thing, as both links lead to the same page, but we should decide how we're going to write these sorts of things for consistency's sake. Gruffty 14:50, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

BTW, there's supposed to be an apostrophy at the end of "Designers" in the full GDW title. Or is the fact that it's missing to do with how Wikia uses apostrophies? Gruffty 14:53, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

The proper way is to use the Template:GDW, as in {{GDW}}, which expands to Game Designers' Workshop. Tjoneslo 20:13, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Images from books?

I thought it best to ask here: I have an extensive CT/MT/T4/GT deadtree library. There are a lot of pictures that would sit nicely in a lot of the pages here - I've got some good Hiver (sic!) ones. However, before I go uploading GIFs of stuff, I'd like to find out if we are actually allowed to put up pictures from inside the books? Gruffty 22:44, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Pictures are almost always covered by copyright. Low resolution images of book covers are usually allowed to illustrate the product in question under fair use. Even if you were to get permission from the book publisher, the use of art in books is usually limited to a single use only, so you would actually need to get permission from the artist. Dcorrin 12:41, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the info Dan. Gruffty 22:40, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguating Worlds

I'm not entirely happy with the double parentheses solution, but the reasons for it are good. And I don't have a better suggestion.

But my real question here is, should we use Sector Map as an official list of unique sector abbreviations when coming up with these disambiguated names? (Are they unique? It looks it, but I haven't studied it in detail.)

And I assume that the base "X (world)" page should always be the disambig page, no matter how well known one of them might be to Traveller players? ...With an exception for Terra (world). --Rindis 17:11, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

No. The sector map abbreviations contain a number of duplicates. (There are three Ba's and four Da's). Some of the sectors use three or four characters in their name (Core and Ley for example). I'll go back through the list and create longer (and unique) abbreviations for the duplicates. Tjoneslo 18:17, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Update. There are enough of these I'd suggest going to a three character abbreviation (except the two word names). Even then there are still duplicates. Tjoneslo 18:22, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Wow, more than I thought. 7 duplicates at three character (Ext, For, Har, Kha, Lis, Tre, Zhi). Tjoneslo 18:49, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Ouch. Yes, this is a little more challenging than I thought. A common practice in abbreviating is to skip non-leading vowels, which should help on most of those. Also, you might consider designating one as 'primary' (closer to Core seems good) which gets the two letter designation, and then the other gets the three letter designation. This policy allows us to accept further names later without upsetting the established scheme because it happens to duplicate an existing 2- or 3-letter abbreviation.

(Is this worth it? I have a feeling we'll end up with something akin to Common (For[nast] 0505) and Common (For[even] 0505) if we don't build this into the scheme to begin with.) --Rindis 19:32, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

First off, I agree with Rindis that we should use X (world) as the disambiguation page.

In looking over the data base, which is nearly complete, the two character abbreviation is sufficient to make each world name unique (at least as far as searching the wiki is concerned).

I initially played with the idea of using a unique two letter code for the sector abbreviation. It became a little too confusing when applied to the 233 sectors in this wiki (not counting possible sector names for the coreward and rim routes).

I tend to believe that using the first two letters of the sector name (or first two capital letters) is intuitive in setting a standard.

We should keep in mind that the duplicate names are an rare exception, not a common occurrence. We can probably get away with the two character sector abbreviation. I think we'd have to come up with a much more radical solution to completely fix the problem. And I'm not sure we want to do that. Tjoneslo 20:25, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

The likelihood of what I outlined is infinitesimal at worst, but assuming that the Traveller universe continues to grow, it could still happen, even if it hasn't yet. However, I am a little concerned with things like "Depot (Da 0326)" and "Depot (Da 3121)", where the names look like there's two Depots in one sector starting with Da (of course, one is in Daibei and the other in Dagudashaag). However, fixing abbreviations is tougher than I thought. Thanks for the effort Tjoneslo! --Rindis 20:44, 13 November 2007 (UTC)