PathfinderWiki talk:Manual of style

Hrm. Sooooo. This is a huge undertaking. I think we can do it but we should go over a few priorities first.

Do we really need everything outlining all the grammar rules? Same applies for things like currencies, mathematical symbols, etc. Only those items which directly apply to Pathfinder canon are really relevant, and stylistic rules about extremely general stuff might also not be needed.

My suggestion is to take it one section at a time, denoting with <!-- --> tags or in the comments which subsection(s) were edited. Once we have them all covered, we can do overall passes to ensure consistency within the sections and to determine if they're all necessary in the first place. Another way to make it a bit more manageable is to hide sections that we aren't sure of, which will keep the page mostly clean and allow us to fine tune more troublesome sections without holding up the MoS on the whole.

That said, I'm now realizing that we have said a lot of this stuff in the help section, namely in the style guides for individual types of pages. It's a much larger project, but combining and/or streamlining this MoS with those pages should be on the agenda, at least for some point in the future. -- yoda8myhead 02:28, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Our initial run-through of the MoS is complete and specific headers and subheaders have been marked in invisible notes by the chronicler who handled it. I am going to compile in-text discussion into an additional section here for discussion in an easy-to-find location. We should have it all wrapped up in the next day or so. I am also removing the WIP template from the top of the article, as visible signs of the work in progress should no longer exist. -- yoda8myhead 15:17, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Links to specific style guides

The original document links quite a bit to specific style guides on wikipedia, which is understandable since it's from that wiki. Should we also link to these, or should we decide which subpages are most useful and relevant here and recreate them on this site? I like the latter idea, because the last thing I want is to send someone interested in editing this wiki away from the site, though it is more work. -- yoda8myhead 16:54, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Style infobox/navigation bar

The original wikipedia MoS has a nice navigation infobox along the right side of the screen opposite the TOC. I would like to do something similar, as we have set this precedent in many of our Help pages. That said, it's a huge project to create these resources and have them all remain internally consistent. It really needs to be a tightly run project within the wiki. Additioinally, I think we need to distinguish what constitutes style and what belongs in a help page. But that's a different topic, I guess—a product of the scope of this endeavor is the inability to tackle one thing at a time. -- yoda8myhead 16:54, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Shortcuts and other wikipedia templates

There are a number of templates, including shortcuts, that are still included (albeit hidden) in this document. We should assess their usefulness to this project and whether it is worth it for us to adapt them to our needs or if we should just delete them. Part of me feels that we should keep everything as simple as possible and add them in later should the project grow to a size where they would be needed. At that time, we would have enough editors to tackle the extra work, while we don't really have that at the moment. -- yoda8myhead 15:32, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree that we should keep it simple. I didn't realize when I suggested we use the Wikipedia MoS as a starting point that it would be such a huge task. I think we should put this one to bed for the time being. I know the shine has started to wear off for me, and I wouldn't be surprised if you were feelin the same. Like you said, we can always come back and add to it later (once we've had a little holiday from it). --Aeakett 15:44, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Categories: Singular or Plural

It has been suggested that this policy be changed. This section contains suggested changes to this policy. Please discuss the suggested changes here. For further information please see the policy revision process.

It occurred to me today that we have a mixture of singular and and plural categories existing within this project; Category:Races, Category:Humanoids, Category:Gnome, Category:Dwarf, etc. Does anyone else feels it's worthwhile to choose one of the two and add it to the manual of style? I think the greatest task would be changing all of the existing categories to reflect the decided upon method; I'm not too familiar with the capabilities of bots, but wouldn't it be possible to send one of our automated helpers to handle this task? -- Heaven's Agent 19:39, February 20, 2010 (UTC)

It's well within the capability of the bots and the primary task I've had them on since we first unleashed them. As for which of the two we should go with and whether or not we need uniformity, I'll need to think a bit more about it. But whatever we decide, YodaBot can get it done.—yoda8myhead 23:15, February 20, 2010 (UTC)

Upon further reflection, I think it does make sense to standardize the plurality of categories. I prefer the plural, as Category:Elves sounds more logical than Category:Elf. We should consider, however, that changing these will also affect subcategories, so Category:Human/Inhabitants will become Category:Humans/Inhabitants and Category:Dwarf/Settlements will become Category:Dwarves/Settlements, both of which seem a little less intuitive for whatever reason. —yoda8myhead 08:02, February 21, 2010 (UTC)

I prefer plural as well. The subcategories may end up being a tad more difficult to remember in the short term, but ultimately I think it'll make things easier. -- Heaven's Agent 08:26, February 21, 2010 (UTC)

Plurals... definitely. —aeakett 21:34, February 21, 2010 (UTC)

So despite the discussion and decision to go with plurals, we now have a pretty robust category tree using singular naming conventions. How does that affect this still-open discussion of a change of policy from 2 years ago? — Yoda8myhead (talk) 08:24, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

We formally include the change in the Manual of style, make sure new categories conform to the policy decision, and alter existing categories over time. Not ideal, perhaps, but then again going with a singular structure would require alterations as well. And ultimately, consistency in this is needed. -- Heaven's Agent (talk) 16:32, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm in agreement with Heaven's Agent. Now that they're consistent, I'd say that's good enough. If we don't have to do the work, then let's move on to more pressing issues. On the other hand, I'd entertain a good argument to change them, but I think would probably be a pretty hard sell. Unless there is a good argument, I say we fast-track this and get the issue settled. —Aeakett (talk) 22:27, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Hey look... not only is Andrew's writing sub-par, his reading comprehension is sub-par too (<mutter>stupid science education</mutter>). As it turns out, I disagree with Heaven's Agent. Let's just leave the current category structure and make sure the MoS agrees... it just seems like less work. —Aeakett (talk) 22:33, 6 August 2012 (UTC)