Guild Wars Wiki talk:Guidelines

Proposing a guideline
Question: I was thinking GWW could do with something equivilent to WP:BOLD. Now, obviously, I have no objection to writing this up, but I'm a little unclear on whether we have any good place to discuss proposed guidelines before actually proposing them, and the actual policy seems a little unclear on that. Any thoughts? --Ari 17:52, 26 October 2007 (UTC)


 * This is the place for proposals that are just vaugly imagined. Once you have something more concrete, make a draft and use it's talk page.


 * I'd oppose such a guideline BTW. Whilst it is something I try to live by myself, different styles suit different personalities, and I dislike anything that acts to exclude. Backsword 21:45, 26 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I'd say either writing up a draft or simply just start a discussion on the talk page of the "to be" guideline would be best. There isn't really a set way to go about drafting guidelines, since they are quite new here :) As a side note, Backsword, how is a guideline like this excluding? - anja  [[Image:User Anja Astor sig icon.png|talk]] 21:53, 26 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Haha, I was gonna say the same thing about it being a guideline, Anja. :) The point of a BB guideline is basically to encourage newcomers, especially those without any prior wiki experience, to be bold in making obvious changes, such as correcting information they've confirmed as outdated, spelling errors, typos, etc... I've seen a lot of such comments on talkpages that nobody's ever responded to, so I made the changes myself. Seems like a pretty good justification for Be Bold to me. Anyway, thanks for the advice, I will write it up in draft and make a new page soon. --Ari 14:25, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Okay, it's drafted! Guild Wars Wiki:Be bold -- Ari [[Image:User_Ari_sig.jpg]]  (talk) 16:14, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Move proposal
See Guild Wars Wiki talk:Formatting

Guidelines are not policy
And yet too many people want to insist on enforcing them as if they are, despite the existence of "yet such a regulation can easily be changed if any other form of formatting is deemed better by anyone."

It seems that people seem to think that guidelines are something as hard set as policies, even when this is contained in the text on guidelines, and the changes being attempted do not go against the guideline, or even against any established "convention. 42 -  talk  04:53, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Could you provide some examples of this problem? -- [[Image:User Gordon Ecker sig.png]] Gordon Ecker (talk) 10:56, 21 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Check the talk page on Template talk:Norn bounty dialogue, Wyn's comment tagged 17:57, 17 November 2009. There have been others that have used that claim as well, I don't remember where specifically now.  I do not want to accuse someone of it that didn't.  I get baseless claims like this made on a lot of the stuff I suggest.  42 -  talk  04:48, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Guideline against spoiler tags...
The wiki is full of them. A few people started adding them to pages they shouldn't be on and people saw them and continued the work so now the wiki is crawling with spoiler tags. Just look at Category:Spoilers, half of the articles on the wiki have spoiler tags. Spoiler tags are not only redundant, they are disruptive - they are designed to be disruptive.

Originally this tag was used for very finite cases like Undead Prince Rurik or a summary of the plot of the campaign. Now it is used for an NPC who does something in the plot. If they die, if they betray, if they pick their nose someone will put a spoiler tag on the article. This is a wiki. Wiki's have spoilers. Other wikis, such as WoWWiki, don't use spoiler tags like we do because they realise almost everything relating to lore is a spoiler. It doesn't need to be stated that when you read an article about an NPC you are reading about the events in the game that NPC takes part in, whether you have completed them or not.

There are very few cases where a spoiler tag is worthwhile. Thinking about it right now I think Master Togo, Undead Prince Rurik and Goddess of Truth are the big ones. Even these pages would be fine without the tag of redundancy.

I propose we adopt a guideline that accepts that spoilers are a part of documenting the game, we don't need to state that on every single article.

If people can't bring themselves to ditch the spoiler tags I propose a middle ground. Pages with "spoilers" (aka any page dealing with story) should be constructed in a way that only essential article information is contained in the introduction. Any spoilers or story content should be then listed chronologically and divided up by a simple, non-disruptive statement of which which campaign or part of Guild Wars it is from. Currently I don't believe the level of content on most of the wiki's articles would justify such a proposal. Most of the spoiler tags are on pages like Etham the Artisan, Ahtok or Ebon Falcons. These pages barely have enough content to have story on them let alone justify a spoiler tag. Please end the madness and bring in a no spoiler tag guideline. 12:32, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I completely agree. People have to expect spoilers, when they browse through articles everywhere. And in fact everything that they don't know is automatically a spoiler (for example a new player starting on Shing Jea doesn't know about Kaineng, so information about Kaineng is a spoiler). It makes no sense to have some articles tagged with an explicit spoiler tag, when everything on the wiki is actually a spoiler. poke | talk 12:43, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The wiki is, by it's nature, a spoiler to the game. It therefore makes no sense to slap a spoiler tag on anything except something like our undead friend. Shadow Runner  16:37, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree, anything except for major major plot lines should not have a spoiler tag. In all, I can only think of maybe 5 or 6 things that need the tag.  -- Lania [[Image:User Lania Elderfire pinkribbon.jpg]] 17:49, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The whole wiki is a spoiler, like Shadow said. Take the Main Page for example. People see spoilers over there already! Everything, the links, the feature article, daily/weekly events and even the current shining blade (omg! spoiler!) theme, leads to a spoiler of some kind.
 * So i highly support of getting rid of the spoiler tags, entirely! - J.P.[[Image:User J.P. sigicon.png| ]] Talk  00:39, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

The overused tag
I'm referring to the tag that is used in, to be honest, too many places. I've gone through a handful or two and removed the obviously unneeded ones, and made some changes while keeping the tag with other pages. But looking through Category:Spoilers, it's rather apparent that the tag is just too oftenly used. So I'd like to discuss one thing here: When should the tag be used, and when shouldn't it? To be precise, I find pages that are not in the main space to be the first thing that the spoiler tag is, to be frank, quite unnecessary to. For instance, it is used in too many to count userspaces, and six talk pages. Some of them discussion current or previous bits that were on the main page of said talk page. I just find that pointless and it clogs up the category. Furthermore, do we really need the spoiler tag on pages like these, or even on list pages (to just link to a few)? For the former, the spoilers are minor to the story and in many cases would either be gotten to from random typing and link following, the use of the Special:Random, or by already knowing what one's looking for and (now this also goes for the later) the article name being just that. Now, I would understand for other spoiler-titled pages, but those are major spoilers. As to the later alone, the lists, wouldn't those just be links to articles with spoilers and not be spoilers in of themselves? And even then, especially so with the cinematic lists, wouldn't the people clicking on the links from that page be wanting the spoilers? In essence, or a tl;dr version, I find that there are too many spoiler tags and I think we can reduce the amount of tags greatly by being reasonable with where we put said tags. -- Konig / talk 09:57, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree in that some spoiler tags are unnecessary, but we can't just delete some of them since most of them are in the userspace. The list ones are rather unneeded since as you said, people would either be wanting the spoilers or the spoiler would be on the page itself. The same goes for the pages you mentioned above where the odds of someone finding the page without knowing of it is rather slim. What would you suggest at this point? Checking for consensus then deleting some of the ones that are definitely unneeded? Shadow Runner  11:13, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * The Dragons Age wiki hides the spoiler text from the casual reader. So, I would propose that things worth hiding (on a particular page) are worth a spoiler tag; anything else shouldn't be tagged.


 * As for user space, we would probably need to look at why peeps use it. A lot of users make incorporate templates that include auto-tagging; this unintentionally puts their user page in a category. A solution would be to offer two sets of templates (for the small subset that need it): one with and one without categories. &mdash; Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 14:47, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Just major plot points, like Kormir becomes a god, the Vizier is the Lich, Rurik dies, The White Mantle are sacrificing the Chosen, Shiro kills Togo, and not stuff like Dehjah is a Djinn who helps you in my opinion. I'd keep the list of missions and primary quests with the tag, though. When I was first playing Guild Wars Prophecies I was having fun going through the game, guessing where I'd be taken next, hoping I'd get to see that place over there, and then I accidentally stumbled across a map that showed the trajectory of the game and I was a bit disappointed. Manifold [[Image:User_Manifold_Neptune.jpg|19px]] 15:14, 21 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Please continue on Guild Wars Wiki talk:Guidelines. poke | talk 16:27, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * someone should put a spoiler alert on this talk...--Bold Baby Undies 03:38, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I didn't see this topic before so I'm moving the discussion here to keep it in one place. -- Konig / talk 04:40, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

New tag suggestion
I came up with this for over on the GW2Wiki, since the GoA has sparked a topic of spoilers over there. I figured I'd suggest this same change over here. I suggest we change the current Template:Spoiler to this. It's collapsible and thus allows all spoiler-related content to be hidden from readers. What we simply need to do is to re-organize the content of articles containing spoilers so that the non-spoilers are at the top, and we simply have the spoiler and the stuff dependent on the spoilers within the tag. It would be used as. And it would look like such: If it gets put next to an image, the tag will only expand as far as the text therefore preventing any issues with the tag going under the image or template to the left - which has been an annoyance for many, such as myself, in the past. -- Konig / talk 02:41, 4 August 2010 (UTC) , "The Dragons Age wiki hides the spoiler text from the casual reader. So, I would propose that things worth hiding (on a particular page) are worth a spoiler tag; anything else shouldn't be tagged" , "Just major plot points, like Kormir becomes a god, the Vizier is the Lich, Rurik dies, The White Mantle are sacrificing the Chosen, Shiro kills Togo, and not stuff like Dehjah is a Djinn who helps you in my opinion" . I've seen other requests for an expandable spoiler tag to put the spoilers under, and I made it for GW2W so I figured I'd make it for over here. Those who want the spoilers can click the "Show" button. Those who don't can avoid it.
 * No spoiler tags please! Especially not those that actually hide content. We are here to document the game, and not to be overly protective so that the reader doesn't read something he might came looking for. The discussion above clearly showed that spoiler warnings in general are stupid on a wiki and you come up with an even more restrictive one. I highly disagree. Also per discussions on the community portal regarding hidden content. poke | talk 06:33, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * How I read it, what is stupid is the over use of the spoiler tag. Also that it effectively does nothing to the article. Personally, I am not against the complete removal of the tag, but there are cry babies those who dislike spoilers for whatever reason (the spark of the discussion on GW2W) that want to be warned of the spoilers. This should, as I said above (in the other sections) be used for major spoilers. For instance, the Cataclysm has half the page dependent on two spoilers - one that reveals Khilbron as this guy, and the other that brings up our not-so-friendly ghost Casper Terrick. Such spoiler would go there.
 * To quote some: "I agree, anything except for major major plot lines should not have a spoiler tag"
 * Whether it is liked or not, I don't personally care. -- Konig / talk 08:20, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Let's not fix a problem with a new one :P - J.P.[[Image:User J.P. sigicon.png| ]] Talk  21:04, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * How is hiding main spoilers from people who may not want to know t it creating a problem?--The Emmisary 21:11, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Using spoiler warnings in this wiki is a problem, as you might have noticed. - J.P.[[Image:User J.P. sigicon.png| ]] Talk  21:14, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * How is using spoiler tags a problem? Overusing them is, but using them? Not as far as I know. -- Konig / talk 22:11, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Even using them is. Since we document the game, basicly everything here is a spoiler. - J.P.[[Image:User J.P. sigicon.png| ]] Talk  18:05, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Finding out where a monster is doesn't impact you if your doing the storyline, finding out Saidra dies is. Perhaps you don't know what the spoilers are there for...--The Emmisary 20:20, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Why something has to be story-related to be considered a spoiler? - J.P.[[Image:User J.P. sigicon.png| ]] Talk  20:44, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * A spoiler by nature is something that ruins the flow of how one finds out about something. Therefore, information on stats are not spoilers, but information on the mission events or quest chains are. However, to add spoilers to all of those is what made the spoiler tag an annoyance in the first place. Thus we must pick and choose - differ the small from the big. -- Konig / talk 20:47, 5 August 2010 (UTC)