User talk:Grekulf

Style guidelines

I recommend you read the style guidelines. In particular, your use of capitalization goes against it; capitalization should be restricted to actual proper nouns (E.G., "Germany", but not "Production Line"). ~ Meneth (talk) 16:06, 7 October 2015 (CEST)

I want us to follow the same capitalization rules we use in the games. A keyword/mechanic should have all its words capitalized to make it stand out from regular text. Production Lines should be written like so, and not Production lines. Grekulf (talk) 16:17, 7 October 2015 (CEST)

The standard that's been used so far on all the wikis is that only standard English grammar is to be used.

That is, only actual proper nouns are to be capitalized. So by those standards it'd be "a production line", not "a Production Line", "steel", not "Steel", etc.

In my opinion this makes the text simpler to read as game mechanics won't be misinterpreted as proper nouns. ~ Meneth (talk) 16:18, 7 October 2015 (CEST)

The thing is tho that usually that can make it less clear what is a mechanic/keyword and what is just "narrative" text. For example: "Our population growth has been significantly reduced as a result of recent wars." Is that a narrative text or does it refer to a mechanic? If I instead had written "Our Population Growth has been significantly reduced as a result of recent wars." it makes it more clear that you are talking about a game mechanic with effects, and not about a narrative. Although those are kind of bad examples, I know we had good reasons for adopting that standard in EU4. Grekulf (talk) 16:23, 7 October 2015 (CEST)

In-game, I definitely agree. On the wikis though there is no narrative text; everything describes either the mechanics or how the player can interact with the mechanics. So "the United States has great potential due to its massive amount of Civilian Factories" is just as clear with "civilian factories" uncapitalized. Which is why I don't see much of a reason to use such capitalization on the wikis. ~ Meneth (talk) 16:27, 7 October 2015 (CEST)

I am skeptical, but if you think it is as clear in a wiki-format I'll defer to your judgement in this case. Personally I strongly prefer reading the words capitalized as key words, because then I know that I am reading about a key words when I see the capitalized letters. Grekulf (talk) 16:37, 7 October 2015 (CEST)

Meneth has asked me for my thoughts too, I'm one of the wiki Moderators and have worked extensively on EU3/EU4 and have made several contributions to the others. When reading the wiki if we refer to a mechanic/keyword that is of importance then we have a link at the first instance which instantly highlights it for the reader. We do show some narrative text but only in the form of event/decision/mission descriptions which are in dedicated templates so that point is moot here. I am struggling to think of a case on a wiki where we need narrative text, the event descriptions are quotes, the mechanics/modding guides are pure descriptions leaving only he strategy guides. Given the open nature of PDX games, the guides have to be very loose, and in the case of the population growth then the style guide dictates that it would instead say. In the case of several wars, be wary of a reduction in population with the last word linking to the Population Growth article.

In addition I have to bring up the ease of reading argument, a large number of capitalisations make following a sentence harder. As a number of our readers are not native English speakers we should aim to make the wiki easy to read and understand. I can understand the aim to reduce ambiguity in the wiki which is something Grekulf has alluded to. For that purpose we have dedicated disambiguation pages to enable users to understand what is being described. I am aware that I haven't finalised anything with these comments but its worth thinking about. There are merits both ways, however our most experienced and prolific editors have adapted to the current style and it would be disruptive to change styles across wikis within the network. Especially in the case of user contests which could lead to a user being rewarded on one wiki and penalised on another for typing in the same manner. Dauth (talk) 16:59, 7 October 2015 (CEST)

We have an intention to have the wiki accessable in-game, which may or may not affect users. I'm not sure there is much difference between a narrative text and a descriptive text, however, in terms of making key words more clear. In the example I used above, it may have been better to set the key words in italic or something. Perhaps "Our Population Growth has been significantly reduced as a result of recent wars.". Honestly I don't know if the key word capitalization will cause a disconnect or not, would need to user test that to make sure. The thought of reading Production Lines in-game, and then going to the wiki to read production lines just rubs me the wrong way though, but I may very well be overstating that impression. Grekulf (talk) 17:08, 7 October 2015 (CEST)