Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Projects/Dialogue Pages

Dialogue Pages

The goal of this project is to decide on, document and implement a unified format for /dialogue subpages of both NPCs and Locations. It is deeply related to the Quotes and Dialogues Project and the Living World Project.

Contributors Feel free to add yourself to the list. Kymtastic To-do Let's make this page a more organized, on-going version of this discussion. From there, we will systematically make changes to the /dialogue pages to conform them to the ideas and formatting here. While the "Content" section should be fairly non-controversial, all proposals and issues raised here are encouraged to be discussed on the talk page. Please cite any changes made here so people can easily follow the reasoning/debates found in historical discussions. Please lend your opinion/understanding to this thread regarding ambient scene placement so we can enact a unified format. The loose policy until we get some consensus is to reproduce ambient scenes in full on NPC /dialogue pages only when they occur in a non-instanced open-world setting and to include a forwarder to the relevant Location /dialogue page. We can fix this stopgap format formally in between Seasons Two and Three. That should be a long enough time frame to get some feedback and use the lull in updates to our advantage. Content Location /dialogue A Location /dialogue page is the primary source for housing ambient scenes. While current ambient scenes will always be documented on the Location main page, with the amount of inter-linking going on from NPC /dialogue pages it's become necessary that current scenes also be placed immediately on the Location /dialogue subpage to avoid broken or incorrect forwarding links. Opening Paragraph The opening sentence should follow a similar format on each Location /dialogue page: Ambient scenes at [[main location page]] from various [[Living World]] [[Release|releases]] can be found here. This sentence used to say "previous" instead of "various" but due to archiving considerations below, the above change has been proposed. "Ambient scenes" used to say "Ambient dialogue" but the wording was changed to reflect official voice-over categories. Feel free to discuss the wording on the talk page. NPC /dialogue An NPC /dialogue page primarily houses or forwards to dialogue trees and ambient scenes, though it may also document other historical pieces of character-specific voice-over. As ambient scenes should be stored on Location /dialogue pages, the NPC /dialogue page will forward to the relevant Location /dialogue page section. Similarly, most missions or story steps will house the dialogue trees for characters, so forwards should be implemented (see below). Opening Paragraph Those pages with seasonal archives should begin: {{Archive-box|[[/season 1|Season 1]]}} The opening sentence should follow a similar format on each NPC /dialogue page: Dialogue for [[main npc page]] from the latest [[Living World]] [[release]]s can be found here. Feel free to discuss the wording on the talk page. Forwards For any article forwarding, it is standard practice to use the "main" template: {{main|Hard Boiled#Dialogue}} In this case, it is preferred that the forward link be as specific as possible. It should lead to the section in which the referenced dialogue is documented and not just the generic article/main page. Organization Both NPC and Location /dialogue pages should: Be categorized appropriately ( [[Category:Dialogue subpages]] ). Contain a Table of Contents. {{TOC right}} makes the most sense, as these TOCs may get long, and the right-justified template allows text to flow around to the side. Be organized chronologically, with the oldest release at the top and the newest release at the bottom. For a rough example, see this page based off of an old version of Kasmeer/dialogue. Please note that ideally the ambient scenes here would be forwarded to the appropriate Location /dialogue page and that there may be other inconsistencies with archiving formatting (see below). Use headers with titles of (and linking to) Living World segments. Use subheaders of "Before", "After", "At (Location)", "(Specific Story Step)", "After (Specific Story Step)" if necessary, with links where appropriate. It may be that, with the new highly instanced format of the Living World releases, the need for subheaders is greatly reduced (most headers' primary content would be a single forward). We'll take it by ear until the end of Season Two, at which point we may have to re-evaluate. Unless someone feels passionately; feel free to make unified header style guide suggestions on the talk page. Archiving Certain /dialogue pages are bound to fill up quickly, such as the B-iconics' NPC /dialogue pages. It is therefore becoming necessary to come up with an all encompassing archival plan. It is possible some pages (especially Location /dialogue pages) will not need to be archived or will not have enough content to be comfortably archived by season. Feel free to discuss this issue on the talk page. The main /dialogue page should always contain the current season's dialogues. Once a season has ended and the page is getting long in the tooth, a new /dialogue page is created (see Naming Conventions below) and the season's worth of dialogue is moved to the new page using the "move" tab at the top of articles. This keeps the "history" tab relevant to the actual content of the page versus my sloppy initial test method of copy and pasting to a new page. The primary /dialogue page will start anew with the latest season. Remember to change the "archive-box" template to the "archived" template on pages going from /dialogue to /dialogue/season #. This archival method could eventually phase out the need for a generic /dialogue page on the more high-traffic /dialogue pages, though that would mean updating links on NPC main pages at the start of each season. Food for thought. Archiving seems most pressing on NPC /dialogue pages. As no pages forward to these, implementing a naming convention should be relatively painless. Naming Conventions All /dialogue archive pages should be named according to Season. For example, /dialogue/season 1. If the pages sort wonkily on the category page, we will add a key to the category to sort it properly: [[Category:Dialogue subpages|Kasmeer Meade/dialogue/season 01]]. Thanks to Relyk for the advice on naming/categorizing and to Poke for adding their thoughts! For those pages where archiving by season makes for a very short page, combining multiple seasons on an archive page is perhaps the best option to reduce unnecessary page creation clutter. These multi-season archives should be named after the first season present. For example, if seasons one and two are together and three and four are together, the pages would be "/dialogue/season 1" and "/dialogue/season 3". Be sure to make note of this combination at the top of both the archive page and at the link from the main /dialogue page. This link from the main /dialogue page may not exist in prose because we're utilizing the archive template, so we may have to discuss this more in-depth should the issue actually arise. Formatting All current ambient scenes and dialogue should be on the main NPC or Location page in addition to on their /dialogue subpage (Why?). Each archive page should begin with the archived template (replace "Kasmeer Meade" with the relevant NPC name, obviously): {{archived|Kasmeer Meade/dialogue}}. Despite the label this creates at the top warning against editing, if we make decisions on unified headers or other such formatting changes, feel free to enact them. The opening sentence should read (with obvious changes to "Kasmeer Meade" and the season one references): Dialogue for [[Kasmeer Meade]] from [[Living_World_season_1|Season One]] [[release]]s of the [[Living World]] can be found here. Current dialogue can be found on her [[Kasmeer Meade/dialogue|main dialogue page]]. The last sentence may have been rendered redundant by the "archived" template. Feel free to discuss.