wiki formatting

#1 - Oct. 6, 2012, 6:12 p.m.
Blizzard Post

While the wiki is great and all for info on the game I’ve been noticing formatting inconsistencies, flow issues, and content organizational problems. Here are some examples:

Similar pages should be formatted identically. And objects such as the TOC and images need to flow naturally with the contents of the article. See this page (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chef) for example. The images and TOC combined, form a flow issue leaving a big empty space in the middle of the beginning of the page. And is also inconsistent with the designs of similar pages (the other craft discipline pages) which float the TOC right. Which is designed to allow the article to flow around the TOC. Proper formatting in pages like this would be to have the text flow around the images either on the left, right or top of the images and have the TOC float to the right of all that.

Also there is the flow issues as seen in this page (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Artificer) the TOC is floated to the right as is best for not having to scroll past the TOC to get to the article content however a side effect occurs when the article has a table in and there is insufficient text preceding the table to push the table below the TOC. As a result there is a big gap of blank space between the text and the table associated with the text. The TOCright template has parameters one of which seems to be the solution. But isn’t as far as I have tried to use them to correct the flow problem.

Now take the articles for each dungeon. You can get the links to them from this page (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dungeon). Each dungeon’s page the TOC is inconsistently placed or absent. The use of headings is over done in some of them. But at least is consistent in one regard: the main TOC headings. But again these pages share the same flow problems the other examples show. big blank areas where text should flow around. Also the chart at the bottom of each dungeon’s page links to separate pages for story mode and explorable mode. These separate pages are not needed. The one page for each dungeon with the same major heading order is the proper way to go. Since the Caudecus’s Manor page is the only one not currently filled with content I edited it to use as an example for how to do these pages. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Caudecus%27s_Manor

I haven’t done dungeons yet so I can’t contribute to the details in the pages. But a good start is with what info we already have in the articles. Anyone willing to flesh out and provide more details where needed please help contribute to them.

#4 - Oct. 8, 2012, 2:42 p.m.
Blizzard Post

Hi Jia Shen.4217,

You seem to know all about wikis so I’m not going to discuss it here (it’s an interesting topic but I’m not sure that the forum is here to bring awareness about editing the wikis). I’ll just say that we fully agree that our wikis should be the best source of information and they’re doing fantastically well, thanks to a large and active community of editors.

I can see that some of your comments are valid, but here’s how I would suggest that you approach the problem on our wikis (approach may differ based on wikis, as we now have 4 of those, but there’ll always be someone to help you find the right place to discuss these topics): start discussing it on the discussion pages and if you can’t get any traction there, raise the discussion on the Practices and processes page. You can also talk to one of the Buraucrats or Sysops directly on their talkpage and I’m sure that one of them will be able to discuss it more in detail.

We tend to let the community manage the rules and codes on the wiki by itself. It’s worked for many years and we see no reason to change that. If a lot of people on the wiki agree with you that the need for formatting is increasingly ignored, then you can bring it to me directly (I’m the Community Liaison and here’s my talkpage ) and we can start discussing what could be done about this, a discussion that will obviously involve the whole wiki community.

I’ll close this discussion for now as: 1) this is not the appropriate forum; and 2) this discussion will get more traction on the wiki directly.
Thanks for your work on the wikis!