Battlestar Wiki talk:Think Tank/Character Bio Project

Comments on Proposal

As noted in the proposal, many have mixed feelings on the bulleted format used for some central characters before season 3. What suggestions do you have for defining these articles? Any comments on the proposal and ideas it offered? --Spencerian 22:26, 10 March 2007 (CST)

Along with my proposal "admendment" to the BW:SAC guidelines I think this is a good idea. Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 22:43, 10 March 2007 (CST)

Reads as pretty reasonable. The main problem with the bios is that they tend to repeat the episode events verbatim (on some of them, it's almost like they ripped the bullet points from the episode guide and did a copy-and-paste). This proposal does deal with that problem. I may have a few suggestions later on, since I need to sleep on it. ;-) -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 00:35, 11 March 2007 (CST)

Looks good. Personality profiles are potentially more interesting and more informative than chronological lists of actions. For main characters it is really not necessary to just repeat every little thing they do. That's appropriate for some secondary or background characters wehre not much material exists. Instead important story arcs and points can be summarized together and then cited with something like "Episode 11 through Episode 15". But it doesn't need to mention every appearance.
If something is still too long, subpages can be created (like "Laura Roslin/Season 2"). But that would still leave large chunks of texts to read through, which might turn some people off. --Serenity 07:43, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

Right. I tried the subpage idea with William Adama's article (long before we had the think tank) and it didn't take. I concur on suggestions to encapsulate events to keep them both interesting but also brief, not repeating in detail the events of an episode. The problem, as we're probably realizing, is that we contributors will have to step up to be incredibly potent Concision Fairies. I may try Laura Roslin's page in a mock format to show what I have in mind. --Spencerian 09:48, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

Let's each assign ourselves some major bios to rewrite. You can do Roslin, I'll do Thrace. We can meet back in a week or two and pick our favorite aspects of each writer's format, and come up with a unified system. --Peter Farago 10:26, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

Deal. I've already got a mockup done. --Spencerian 17:58, 11 March 2007 (CDT)

I like it. I don't think there's a straight up boilerplate algorithm that can be blindly applied to solve the problem, but I think with the careful edits of people like you, the issue can be resolved. This is only really an issue for a handful of the main characters, really, so at least we're not looking at a problem that is likely to unexpectedly explode exponentially. --Steelviper 15:39, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

Looks very nice in general. But I'm not a fan of that kind of episode citing. I prefer to just know in which episode things happen, so I don't care for it to be hidden behind huge links. The links should point to the things they describe, not to something else. --Serenity 16:18, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

That is my concern as well. Other than that, I rather like it. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 16:38, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

Yeah, I had to make a tradeoff. Roslin is in so many episodes that the episode cites themselves can lengthen a page and make it hard to read. Hidden citing also does what a wiki should do by not spelling everything out by concising. Certain items should be implicitly cited, but for a character bio, the non-chronological recap for a character history may it more logical for deep cite links to work. It may take more getting used to, but it's the character we want to talk about, not the number of episodes (and their names); that's another article, I think. I'm going to "overtweak" this again to see if I can concise it further in hopes of illustrating my point a little more. --Spencerian 08:38, 16 March 2007 (CDT)

You have a point, and too many episode cites are bad too. but personally I just don't care for having to hover the mouse over a link to see what it's really pointing to. Seeing the destination is enough. I don't want to click on it, and I think many other people don't want to either, unless they have a real reason to. And I think half-sentence links look kinda ugly. --Serenity 08:50, 16 March 2007 (CDT)

I could finsh up the {{Cite episode/bsg}} a work off {{cite episode}} to help out... Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 09:13, 16 March 2007 (CDT)

More discussion or vote?

Did we need more discussion on this or can we jump to a formal vote? -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate - Sanctuary Wiki — New} 09:23, 7 June 2007 (CDT)

Re-imagined Series definition: the process of using the FTL engines to make an near-instantaneous apparent faster-than-light transport of a ship from one point in space to another